A meaningless ritual works as an unambiguous signal of authentic membership.

Evidence

There is no safe, stable haven within easy reach. … The ritual alone bestows an ephemeral certainty. Once again, precisely because it is intrinsically meaningless, it can only be described, neither interpreted nor, above all, misinterpreted. It is unambiguous, an act which cannot be denied or distorted by the participants. It is a clear sign establishing one’s entitlement to participate in both the production of authentic protection and its legitimate consumption. The ritual erects a fragile barrier against the ever-present possibility of counterfeiting; it limits the number of legitimate protectors, making them identifiable to one another, and confers authenticity in a world which otherwise relentlessly undermines it. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 405

Categorization

• XREF: This is a textbook instance of signaling theory — a costly, arbitrary ritual serving as a coordination and authentication device, exactly the kind of commitment mechanism the reader is tracking across Gambetta, Milgrom, and Schelling. — connects to: Ritual power depends on meaninglessness, not personal significance — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 270
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that meaninglessness itself is what makes the ritual reliable (it cannot be ‘misinterpreted’) is a genuinely dense, counterintuitive insight about how arbitrary conventions solve authentication problems.