Collectivism & Individualism, part six

Picture of a traditional
Congolese apparel

Why are rituals important?
Tuesday – November 11, 2025

The ritual and the tradition carries the cultural meaning, heritage, and future of the tribe, an anthropologically distinct people, and more than that the ritual is a connection to the past and really a bridge between the living, the contemporaries, the pats, the ancestors, and the divine, the creator and in many western contexts the ritual is misunderstood as something that savages engages in to excite themselves in the moment, often with the auxiliary thrill of drugs and/or alcohol, but nothing could possibly be further from the truth: rituals are really what makes humanity essentially humanity in any time and even modern men engage in ritualistic behavior such as voting in democracies, or other civil responsibility, but modern rituals are often crucially tied somehow to the individual and his particulars and that really makes the modern ritual disconnected from humanity. See, the point of rituals is to be human; it is to exist as a whole, a collective because you are you in that context. In the modern world men have been disconnected from their tribe, and really from their particular and peculiar and as a result no real modern man knows of community in the healthy and sacred sense of community, but because even the serpent and the beast still need community they instead indulge in a form of identity fraud that stems from their own fundamental lack of identity. After all, who can be said to be of anything in a world where everyone is treated essentially as the same? This tension will only grow larger and larger during this our era of the Kali Yuga and I predict that it could even be the case that humanity will fall into complete disarray as a result of a form of self derealization prompted and promoted by this sense of lack and void. There's a Ubuntu saying: "I am because we are" and that's a very poignant and profound insight even though those words are simple, because in the end it is not possible to just be anyone in this world; you are you because you can and could only be you, there was no-one and nothing else that you could be. But in the modern world of the materialistic order you are expected to throw away this heritage, this meaning, those peculiarities and qualities that truly made you unique, yet you are also expected to be unique in your own and lonely individuality. Indeed, individualism has to be the least unique mode of being in the modern world; the individual is merely another brick in the wall. Of course, individualism is or at least used to be in and of itself a trait and a quality of a particular culture, but with the inception of the western world as the cultural center of the whole world this mode of being has been imposed on the entire world: what used to be the parochialism of Englishmen is now expected to be followed by everyone on Earth, even the most distant and anthropologically disparate tribe should embrace this mode of being or they are thought of as backwards, rearguard, and primitive. Indeed, this new mode of being was seldom adopted voluntarily by men, it was imposed on them violently through a process of colonization, aggression, and genocide, yet the white and essentially liberal world is often thought of as the most merciful iteration of imperialism, and while that may or may not be true, it's clear that the western world and the fundamental justification for the western world, that the tribe should be dispersed in the name of profit and the multiplication ever greater quantities, is fundamentally corrupt and truly evil. What does this have to do with liberation? Liberation of what? Indeed, it can also be shown and has been shown that the destruction of belonging and really ritual as belonging has had nothing but a profoundly detrimental and adverse effect on the mental health of modern men. It's clear from history that men live for the tribe and the sacred values that the tribe represents, but all of that has been uprooted in the modern world and now man shall suffer, rightfully and I can assure you that suffering of this kind is in keeping with the loving nature of the creators divinely inspired and rightful vengeance. Corruption will always lead to death, and just as well. I also believe that this so-called rationality of modern man has obfuscated the sacred way of knowing that all men possessed in the past and that has been lost but that I also believe can and must be recovered.

    Ancient ways of knowing should guide the man who seeks the light and I believe that the ritual can help spark that insight and that passion within men that are open to the sacred and the profound. I also believe that when humans engage in ritual they become a part of the tribe, they truly transform into the object, the political object from a modern and materialistic point of view, and I believe that when a man acts not as the individual but as the object he becomes truly part of his tribe and when he acts as a part, a member of something eternal and sustained, he becomes connected not only with all of humanity but with the creation itself. Indeed, to be a member of the ritual is to walk among everyone who lives, everyone who has lived, and everyone who will live, it is the paramount way of embracing the wisdom of the hidden and the mystical. Without ritual you can't really be said to be truly human in that essentially spiritual sense or way. Yes, you may be human in flesh, but without the sacred and without the connection with the sacred, you only exist as a particle, a plankton floating in an ocean of nihilistic and meaningless chaos and you are only governed by the will of the current. I believe as well that the Voodoo (Vodun) traditions of western Africa, the pepper coast, in particular encompass the meaning of both tribe and ritual and while some modern liberals will claim that they respect this mode of being, do notice that their assumption always is the same: these people, the Yoruba, the Tata Somba, the Tofanu, the Fon, etc, should at some distant point become integrated into the western and atomized fashion and that even while they claim to respect these people and their peculiarities they never expect to, or assume, that they should become more like the people's of western Africa, but again that the people of western Africa should and will become more like them. Indeed, there has been much talk of respecting the traditions of "minorities" in the west, but again, the assumption is always the same: they should become essentially white. I am not trying to make any arguments that override the will of the creator or indeed of the individual, and after all I believe in a fairly deterministic world but one has to wonder if these people, the white liberals, truly believe in their own empty platitudes?

    Ritual is as important as food for most people or at least this used to be the case but today people claim to be above the ritual and other people claim to suffer from mental illness such as autism or ADHD. Whatever the excuse, I don't expect most of these people, the inhabitants of the material domain, to survive past the close of the Kali Yuga, but that is also a topic for another time.

Reginald Drax – November 11, 2025.