The above image was done with stable diffusion using the prompt 'a religious ritual of pfizer.'
Humans co-evolved with human religion. Religious rituals were some of the first psychosocial technologies put into use by our species. When compared with all of history, our culture's secularization is a very recent and very strange development. My personal belief is that people are innately religious, and their unconscious religious inclinations have not disappeared. They've merely found expression in secular activities.
Nearly all public discourse sounds religious to me. By that I mean that nearly all of this conversation's participants promote ideas that are grounded more in mythology than in anything rational. And many of our most prominent talking heads are simply religious zealots, whether their religion is Christianity or Pfizerism. The beliefs underlying their views are sometimes contradictory and logically unsound, but they act in accordance with those beliefs no matter what.
Trust in God, they say, and I wonder what world they live in that they think the deity that created it is trustworthy. Trust the science, they say, while in the same breath denying the validity of all scientific findings that call the propaganda they saw on the news into question. This folly comes in many flavors, but its mechanics are relatively universal. And our culture is filled with zealots unconsciously attempting to enact religious rituals that don't produce their desired results, because society isn't structured to deliver such results.
Consider coming of age. In nearly every culture in human history, coming of age was defined by a sacred process wherein a child went through a special ordeal and was subsequently recognized as an adult by the community. This general process is deeply embedded in our collective psyche. Nearly every child unconsciously expects this process to occur, and when it doesn't, many attempt to make it happen by going through special ordeals of their own devising.
No matter what happens in these special ordeals, the person undertaking them is never subsequently recognized as an adult by the community. How could they be? Even adults are not treated as adults in our system. We may be sovereign beings, but our sovereignty is denied by our control regime as a matter of course. The overall effect of this is a large population of adults who are perpetually trapped in adolescence.
We add fluoride to drinking water knowing it reduces IQ. We add glyphosate to the food knowing it impairs cognition. We use toxic chemicals everywhere knowing they disrupt hormones, which negatively impacts clear thinking. So does the insufficient sleep that about 1 in 3 adults get.
In 2000, 1 in 150 kids had autism. By 2020, that figure was 1 in 36. As autism rates have gone up, mental health has been deteriorating quickly. About 80% of the population can now expect be hospitalized or prescribed medication for a mental health condition at some point, and the medical system usually makes matters worse because it creates new socioeconomic difficulties.
In a society of cognitively impaired perpetual adolescents plagued with mental illness, there may not be much hope for considered, rational discourse leading to solutions for the many problems we face. If we want to get to a place where such discourse is even possible, we first need a great deal of healing. The physical dimension of this is obvious. But the psychological dimension is just as important and easier to approach.
Along with coming of age, there's another ritual embedded deep in our psyches. This is the ritual of death and rebirth, which we all experience countless times in countless moments of transformation. Traditional religions all encourage transformation in various ways. What would it take for culture as a whole to be positively reborn?
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