The Logic of Rituals - Future IQ

6,329 views Wait, is this logic right? • Jan 23, 2026

Slog Reference: The Power of Rituals

Description

For most of us, the word ritual instantly points to religion. Something sacred, inherited, and rarely questioned. You either follow rituals because you were taught to or you reject them entirely, believing that thinking people shouldn’t need them. Both reactions miss something important.

Look closely at your own life. The way your day begins. That first cup of tea or coffee. The same route you walk when you’re stressed. The weekly call that somehow keeps a relationship alive. None of this is religious and yet it brings structure, calm, and predictability. These are rituals too. Quiet, secular ones that shape how you think and feel without asking for your belief.

This episode explores what rituals really are: repeated actions loaded with meaning that slowly influence behavior, identity, and emotions. We look at how personal rituals reduce anxiety, automate good habits, and give stability during chaos and why shared rituals create trust, cooperation, and a sense of “we” in groups.

But power cuts both ways. The very mechanism that builds habits and bonds can also be weaponized. When rituals become compulsory, sacred, and unquestionable, they stop being tools and start becoming instruments of control. History, politics, and even workplaces are full of examples where rituals are used to test obedience, suppress dissent, and fuse identity so tightly with a group that independent thought feels like betrayal.
Rituals aren’t dangerous because they’re irrational. They’re dangerous because they work. And once you understand how they work, you gain a rare advantage: the ability to design good rituals for yourself while recognizing and resisting the bad ones when they’re used against you.

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Videos you may like / referenced in today’s episode:
Chesterton’s Fence Explained: https://youtu.be/LYdXruXmlnghttps://youtu.be/LYdXruXmlng
The Randomness of Science: https://youtu.be/uNhT2hRtqUU
Sacredness Is Not What You Think It Is: https://youtu.be/6AgQqkckH8I
You’re in a Cult. You Just Don’t Know It Yet: https://youtu.be/eEfmHpstjSg
Networking Can Fix Your Career: https://youtu.be/4zMQOzR3jcE

Books referenced in this video:

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Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS
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Source / References:
https://smritiweb.com/navin/philosophy/a-rational-approach-to-thinking-about-god-religion-spirituality
https://academic.oup.com/book/3810
https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/jschroeder/Publications/Hobson%20et%20al%20Psychology%20of%20Rituals.pdf
Book: https://www.amazon.in/Ritual-Perspectives-Dimensions-Catherine-Bell/dp/0199735107
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_religiosity
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11576810/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23666518/
https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Rituals%20OBHDP_5cbc5848-ef4d-4192-a320-68d30169763c.pdf

#futureiq #ritual #rituals #religion #sacredness

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:40 Are rituals Chesterton's Fenses?
02:10 Sacrifice is also sacred
04:11 Features of Rituals
06:10 Coherence is not necessary
06:55 The personal psychological Effect
07:36 Placebo Effect of Rituals
08:52 Cognitive science of Religion
11:06 Rituals are not always Religious
13:27 Habit Rituals
15:17 Rituals To Improve Social Life
16:50 Secular Rituals
18:04 Rituals Are Weaponisable
20:30 Rituals For personal, Professional Life
22:18 Summary of The Power Of Rituals

Related Slog Matches

The Power of Rituals

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65.00

Transcript

- Rituals are powerful instruments and most people have a very poor understanding of the power of rituals. Rituals like bhajans and prayers and touching feet and lighting the those rituals those and there are much more and people don't understand them. For example, you think they are dumb and you don't realize the power of those rituals and the people who follow them follow them without understanding the real reasons for the rituals. Okay. See, I am I'm an atheist. So I never really understood the concept of religion rituals anyway.

0m 34s But I also think that these are chested and fences that never really got evaluated. Okay. So let's evaluate them, right? Let me take an example of community prayers, right? Temples have artis, churches have mass, masjids have ass, right? Yeah. Which which actually fascinates me because as an atheist, I don't believe there is anyone listening to those prayers or even answering them. Correct? Because you are thinking about this wrong. Okay? You have to separate the claimed reason for these rituals from the effect that the ritual has. Right?

1m 10s The claimed reason is that if you pray to God, God is going to listen to your prayers and give you what you want or at the very least God will think of you as a good person and all of that, right? But that is not the point. The real question to ask is people who pray how do they behave right? So not very good most of the times but go on. You think so because you listen to the news which just brings you news about the worst of those kinds right you need to stop listening to the news instead if you just think about the broad mass of humanity and when they pray. Okay.

1m 48s Research shows for example that shared rituals cause group bonding right like bajan dancing etc. This results in increased trust increased willingness to cooperate increased willingness to sacrifice for members of the group. Right? And this has been proven in multiple lab and field studies. Even the sacrifice Yes. For example, a study of nine real world rituals. Okay. What they found was that the more sacred the ritual, the more people who took part in that ritual voluntary gave up more of their own money for the group. Right.

2m 27s And you're saying for the group, not like donations and all of that. Yeah. For for the members of that group who participated in the ritual together, right? Interesting. And this is especially extra true if the rituals involve physical movements, right? So this is like bajan dancing and so on. Wow. And why is this so important? Because we have talked about the fact that coordination or failure to coordinate is one of the biggest problems facing humanity. And rituals which allow you to increase cooperation, increase sacrifice are what drives large scale coordination, right?

3m 05s Yeah. It's a pretty straight through line of logic from here to there. So, makes sense. Yeah. For example, humans would not have survived the African savana if they had not learned to work together. Right? And rituals really help with that. Right? People know that if you have performed rituals together, you know that you are going to perform together when needed at the time of the hunt. And conversely, people who are not performing the ritual get kicked out of the group knowing that you know these are troublemakers. Let's just best avoid them. Right?

3m 40s Correct. Another thing about rituals is that this is a costly signal that to just go through the ritual is effort, right? You put time in it. Sometimes you put money in it and all of that is a clear way of paying your dues to say that I am a part of this group. It's a price of membership. It's a price of membership and then it strengthens the group, the community. You very clearly know this person is part of my group and that person isn't. Right. Correct.

4m 10s So let's understand though what is a ritual, right? What are the important features of a ritual? Okay. Okay. So first of all, a ritual is repeated behavior. Right. Okay. With spiritual significance attached to it, right? Right. Because as soon as you do that, two things happen, right? One is that it forces you to socialize with your tribe. I mean you have to go and you know participate in the ritual together. A lot of research shows that the people you feel close to, right, emotionally are the people that you spend more time with physically, right? Physical closeness just directly connects into emotional closeness. True. And second thing is that performing that ritual repeatedly it again and again and again

5m 00s tells you and reinforces to you that you belong to this group and it reinforces for the group also that you belong to the group. Right? So that is the second thing. Third is that believing in the stated reason of the ritual is not necessary. Okay. But again, research has shown that if you keep performing a ritual even though you don't believe it. Okay? The reason you do that is because you are afraid of being kicked out of the group. Right? This is the group conformance thing. Sure.

5m 33s But our brain has a need for sincerity. Right? So if you keep performing a ritual again and again, after a while your brain starts believing in that. Okay. This is your red conning. Yeah. But this is your system one brain. Okay. Your system two brain, the logical brain might still think you don't believe in this but system one believes in it. So there are a whole bunch of people who are like oh I don't believe in prayer but they will feel bad if they don't pray or you know they will feel bad if you disrespect God or something like that.

6m 09s Interesting. The fourth thing about ritual is that coherence is not necessary. Right? Like if you have five different rituals that some of them can be contradictory. Point is that your system one brain is involved and system one brain doesn't care about things being coherent. Right? It doesn't care about consistency. Okay. System one system two brain is the one that wants logic and it's like oh that is exactly opposite of this and all of that. Yeah. System one doesn't care. So just some bunch of rituals whether they are contradictive or not is good enough.

6m 43s Right. Okay. Okay. This explains how rituals come to be in public settings. But there are still people who follow religious rituals on their own by themselves at home. Right? So that brings me to the second big effect of rituals. Right? The first one was that increases group bonding. Correct? The second one is the personal psychological effect of rituals on a person. Okay. Okay. So imagine a person who is praying. it reduces their anxiety. Research shows that performing rituals reduces cortisol levels in the body. Okay. So actual the stress hormone reduces.

7m 25s This also provides you an illusion of control. I mean you know you prayed and you prayed properly and you think okay now I'm going to do well in the exam. Right? Okay. It is an important placebo effect. Okay. That you prayed to God and you got better. you will get better because your brain has told you that oh you're going to get better because you prayed to God right okay um it also has an anchoring effect right that if like there is chaos something bad is going on having a ritual to follow gives you something to like hold on to right so this is extra true in terms of grief and loss right having a bunch of rituals to

8m 10s follow gives you something to do. It takes your mind away from the grief that you are feeling. Right? And this is the reason why there are all kinds of rituals in all cultures about things to do after somebody has died for example. Right? So for 12 days there is like a list of things that Hindus end up having to do and that keeps you busy so that you don't focus too much on your loss. And then on the 13th day there is a ritual like a big thing which marks a transition that okay grieving period is over now it is time to move on and get back to work. Right?

8m 46s H as in the public grieving period is over. You can still continue to grieve privately but uh the 13th day thing that you spoke about. It's not a repeated behavior like you were talking about earlier. It's only in cases in special cases which is the case of death um or a marriage ceremony for example. Yeah. So would you count those as rituals still? Yes. Okay. So that's a great question, right? Harvey White House, an Oxford professor is the founder of the concept of cognitive science of religion. Okay.

9m 20s And he talks about two types of rituals, right? The first one that we have talked about so far, he calls them doctrinal and these are repeated low inensity behaviors, right? So uh you do something basic again and again and again and again and the idea is that this has to scale to large communities. Okay, this repeatedly reinforces which group you belong to and it promotes trust. It promotes cooperation but it does not do a very good job of promoting self-sacrifice. Okay, there is a different kind of ritual which is imagistic.

9m 57s Okay. And that is like a rare intense memorable highly emotional highly memorable ritual that you do once or small number of times. And it marks a transition from one phase to another. Right? It is clearly telling you that before this you used to be X, now you are Y. Right? Before this you were a single person and you could do whatever you wanted. Now you are married and there is a certain set of behaviors you have to stick to. Right? Yeah. Now you have to get back to regular life, right?

10m 34s So these kinds of things uh these are intended to make your brain change over into thinking of yourself differently and it also signals to the rest of the community that this person used to be X now this person is Y. Right? So that's the purpose of the second kind of ritual transition. Yeah. But sadly I'm an atheist or thankfully I'm an atheist. So even if these rituals are useful in the way you have described them I will never be able to see those effects for myself.

11m 05s The biggest mistake people make is thinking of rituals as religious. Okay rituals are not religious. In fact most rituals are secular. Okay but let me give examples. So, personal rituals, your morning coffee, tea, right? Bedtime routines, evening walk at the same time and place, weekly calls to your parents or grandparents, anniversary, going to the same restaurant every year, a game night, a date night, a movie night, uh, right? All of these are rituals. Okay? I I I want to oppose him but I know he's right because I'm mentally going through the four properties of rituals that he explained earlier in the religious context and all of them are applicable to this not just that but this the power of this

11m 57s rituals you can use for your benefit right so we are big fans of atomic habits here right atomic habits points out how you can use rituals for self self-improvement and habit formation, right? So, you can have a pregame ritual for good habits, right? So that uh you know before you exercise you do this, this this and this and that puts you in the mood for exercising. Correct? Yeah. And suddenly Sachin Tendulkar putting on his left pad first starts making sense in a whole different way because it was not just superstition. It was probably the beginning of a ritual, right? And the ritual what it does is that it tells your system one brain that stop thinking of all the other things.

12m 42s Stop thinking of your financial trouble. Stop thinking of what's going to happen in the evening and so on. Focus on this one task. That's the purpose of that ritual. Right. Yeah. Another thing you can do with rituals is that you can create new habits by extending rituals. Right. So you have one habit that you follow every day. You want to start a new habit. So what you do is you attach the new habit to the end of the first habit. Habit stacking. So habit stacking. The point is that after X I will do Y. Right? So this is already a ritual. Adding one step to that ritual is easy to become a new ritual. And now you have added a new

13m 22s habit to yourself. Right. Yeah. And what another thing that this achieves is that it reduces decision fat fatigue. Right. So if you are like you know for my exercise I will always go to the same place I will always do the same thing is much easier than having to think what exercise should I do today right so the less you have to think before a habit the much better it is because then your brain is freed up right I I can use that uh in a lot of places in my personal life especially for people who live with ADHD uh these are actually touted as examples of uh you know ways to improve your life by

14m 07s converting things that you find difficult to start through task inertia as rituals that you gently fall into. And yeah another thing is that you can change your inside by changing the outside. Remember I talked about how you don't have to believe in the ritual but you just keep doing it and you start believing it. Yeah. The same thing applies to habits also right. So again atomic habit points out that create rituals based on the type of person you want to be even though you don't believe you are say runner right but create rituals around running and you run a little bit but you have the shoes and you have the trackpads and you get join the running group and

14m 50s there's a running WhatsApp group and all of that right after a while your brain starts thinking of yourself as a runner and then you will find running much more easy right slowly you will become an actual runner, right? I did this with my badminton uh uh attempt at playing badminton every day and for a while I really thought I was a badminton player until my group dropped out and suddenly I'm not a badminton player anymore. I need to find something solo. So another way in which you have rituals in your life, right? It's not just these personal rituals, right?

15m 25s Small group rituals, right? A weekly brunch with my classmates, a monthly talk over beer series in the same place, same time every weekday, right? Yearly vacations together with a certain group, good morning messages that WhatsApp uncles send on WhatsApp groups, right? We talked about this. It's a good thing. Do not get angry. Check out our episode on this. companies, daily stand-up meetings in companies, all hands, town hall meetings, office birthday rituals, all of these are secular rituals but which bring groups together. Right? Right. How to use this? You can design rituals to improve your social life. Right? You create friend groups that meet for, you know, regularly uh or goes on a family vacation every year

16m 14s or plays badminton every day. Initially it'll seem forced but as we talked about earlier it will become more and more natural and then once it becomes a ritual it just becomes so easy. This even works with groups of two right a marriage succeeds with rituals. Okay because just love isn't enough until there are rituals showing the love. Okay. Naven love guru in the house. Please pay attention and please implement these in your marriage because he is right. Just love isn't enough. You need to have rituals.

16m 48s So third kind of ritual I just want to give examples of uh secular rituals, right? So there are transition rituals that we talked about are there in secular situations also right? So passing out ceremony at NDA, right? Graduation, military boot camps, uh right? ragging and a specific day which is end of ragging or you know some corporate extreme workshops firew walking off sites and all of these are intended to be memorable experience which bring an entire group together. Again there is research showing that if a bunch of executives did fire walking together then they work together much uh better right they will literally walk through fire to achieve their target. The same thing applies not just to small groups but to

17m 36s large groups also. Right? Singing the national anthem is a ritual intended to drive patriotism and a feeling of country. Right? Cricket stadium chants, chants in political rallies, right? marching in the military and pretty much a lot of other military behavior is use of power of rituals to bring groups together and to help them sacrifice for that big group. Yeah. And even before you went there, my mind was already thinking all of this seems so easily weaponizable. Yes. I uh wonder what happens if somebody manages to weaponize them.

18m 14s Oh yeah. Yeah, rituals get weaponized all the time, right? Rituals become sacred. We did an entire separate episode on sacredness and how sacredness can be weaponized and rituals is one of the important parts there, right? Because forced rituals become a way of enforcing group conformity, right? Compulsory rituals are used to enforce obedience, right? to check which people are pliable and which people are going to be obedient. Right. You use it to pre-reject troublemakers. Yeah. Right. I mean you don't want a troublemaker at the time of a crisis.

18m 54s You want to get rid of the troublemakers early early. Right. At in peace time. And the purpose of these enforced rituals is to fuse your identity with the identity of the group. So that whatever the group thinks is what you think. And like you don't have any independent thought anymore or very few. Right? So we discussed this in club membership and group conformance. But ritualizing it takes it like a few steps beyond right because in group conformance you were doing it because you don't want to be kicked out of the group. But once it becomes a ritual and once it becomes sacred you don't even want to go against the group. Right?

19m 36s Because you have started believing it. You started off by doing it without believing but like we discussed you start believing it. And if all of that sound cultish congratulations you have just discovered that you are indeed in a cult. An important thing I want to point out is that you know these bad uses of rituals weaponizing it's only a small part right most of the rituals in the world are actually good rituals they are driving cooperation they're making people happy they're bringing groups together right so learn to use good rituals that's what I would say yeah and not just the religious rituals or the secular rituals both of them have good rituals in them that can be used

20m 23s uh harmless ones yes but no when the line crosses from good to harmful and eventually bad you know when we discuss any new concept what I always try and do is I try and map them to four areas of my life personal professional social and socopolitical increasing circles of groups and people and whatnot so the way you've described these secular rituals I can already see them implementing in my own life in my personal life I can use these rituals for self-developments for atomic habits to sort of get a grip on ADHD uh for calming confidence reducing your stress correct improving focus right basically recruit your system one into helping your system two correct and in my professional life

21m 14s I am tying these back to the episode we did on networking and how having a ritual to just reach ach out to people you know say hi hello not necessarily for work or jobs or whatever just to reach out to them if I make that into a ritual it'll help me in my professional life yeah and I mean in professional life for education also you can use rituals to increase your learning yeah yeah exactly and then uh on social we've already discussed how setting up uh weekend uh group things with friends can help uh as a ritual to for better bonding between friends or even in marriage just having a ritual for every anniversary or every sun every fourth

21m 57s Sunday of the month or third Sunday of the month can also be a nice ritual. Yeah. In sociopolitical again we've discussed that there are many many ways of establishing rituals for your socopolitical behavior which is basically how you behave within social and political circles combined. Yeah. I mean, see, the bad guys really understand and use rituals well, but we need to do a better job of using good rituals, right? We fight the bad rituals with good rituals and continued performance of good rituals makes it easier for others to respond and find your good tribe, right? So, I think this is a good summary. Understand the power of rituals and learn to fight bad rituals with good rituals and use

22m 43s rituals to improve your personal and social situation. When we started this episode and you started talking about religious rituals like prayers and budons and all of that, I was a little worried. Has Naven suddenly taken a left turn into whatever or a right turn into whatever? And as we went along and when he made that sudden turn is when I realized that there is always first principles behind everything that he talks about and there is always a framework derived from those first principles that you can apply to your own life and make it 1% better maybe 10% better maybe 100% better you tell us how much better in the comments or in our WhatsApp group QR code on your screen

23m 27s link in the description Sriant Naven Future IQ, we've lined up the episode he spoke about understanding sacredness. Do go check that out. This and that episode together will give you some very interesting insights.