Secular ideologies need quasi-religious rituals to resist collapse.

Evidence

By contrast, fully reasoned social contracts operating on mutualistic principles that regulate individual interests to share costs and benefits of cooperation can be more liable to collapse: with awareness that more advantageous distributions of risks and rewards may be available down the line, then (by backward induction) defection is always justifiable and possible. Thus, even ostensibly secular national ideologies and transnational movements usually contain important quasi-religious rituals and beliefs (Anderson 1991): from sacred ceremonies, anthems, and flags (Carter et al. 2011), to postulations that Providence or Nature make people equal and endow them with inalienable rights and liberties — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 275

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — the ritual/sacred underpinnings that bind groups echo the stabilizing function of sacrifice in stratified societies.
• XREF: Plausibly connects to the reader’s Big God / partner-choice framework from Baumard et al., and to Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’. — connects to: Secular welfare states displaced religion by replicating its cooperative functions; Similar groups need sharper ritual distinctions than very different ones; Preserving religious feeling requires abandoning religious forms — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 865 (+3 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The backward-induction argument for why purely rational contracts collapse encapsulates a deep tension between game-theoretic rationality and the affective glue of sacred ritual that deserves sustained thought.

Related

• Purely rational groups collapse more easily than ones bound by sacred values (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Secular welfare states displaced religion by replicating its cooperative functions #corroborates (0.80)
• Religious cues harness situational power where secular institutions are absent #corroborates (0.80)
• Similar groups need sharper ritual distinctions than very different ones #expands (0.75)
• Strong secular institutions substitute for and undermine belief in God #corroborates (0.75)
• Preserving religious feeling requires abandoning religious forms #qualifies (0.72) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 865
• Traditional societies and structures can collapse under external pressures #expands (0.70)