Dimitris Xygalatas > Quotes

“Rituals are central to virtually all of our social institutions. Think of a judge waving a gavel or a new president taking an oath of office," he writes. They are held by militaries, governments and corporations, in initiation ceremonies, parades, and costly displays of commitment. They are used by athletes who always wear the same socks in important games, and by gamblers who kiss the dice or cling on to lucky charms when the stakes are high.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“We spontaneously engage in ritualized behaviors when we face stressful and uncertain situations, and we intuitively expect those ritualized actions to have an effect.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“Stress is a survival mechanism that serves an obvious evolutionary function. When we are anxious, our autonomic nervous system releases a cascade of chemicals (stress hormones), which give our body instructions on how to prepare to face danger. Our heart beats faster to pump more blood to the muscles, and our breathing becomes heavier to provide us with more oxygen. Muscles tense up to protect us from injury and to facilitate fighting or running. Sweating helps cool the body down. Our attention increases, and our reflexes become sharper, keeping us alert. Stress acts as motivation, helping us to focus on our goals and rise to meet our challenges, whether those involve studying for an exam, flying a fighter jet or scoring that match-winning goal. In short, stress serves a purpose. The problem, however, is that beyond certain threshold stress ceases to be useful.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“...one consequence of this cognitive architecture is that when our predictive potential is limited –that is, when there is high uncertainty- we experience anxiety. Our predictive brain does not like unpredictability. This is where ritual comes in.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“Ceremony is a primordial part of human nature, one that helps us connect, find meaning and discover who we are: we are the ritual species.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“Rituals are highly structured. They require rigidity (they must always be performed the –correct- way), repetition (the same actions performed again and again) and redundancy (they can go on for a long time). In other words, they are predictable. This predictability imposes order on the chaos of everyday life, which provides us with a sense of control over uncontrollable situations.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“Costly rituals help communities grow stronger, and this can have major implications for their long-term survival and prosperity.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“Ritual practices such as fire-walking, snake-handling or bodily mutilation pose significant dangers to their practitioners, including physical harm, infection and, in extreme cases, even death. It is precisely thanks to these costs that rituals are able to function as reliable signals.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“The logic behind these initiations provides an efficient solution to a pressing cooperation dilemma: in order for a group to survive, it must rely on the loyalty of its members.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“Evolutionary analyses suggest that stress is not what it used to be. For most of human history our ancestors lived in physical and social environment that were very different from what most of us experience today. Life in those environments imposed a set of selection pressures that shaped our species’ genome and behavior, leading to the evolution of anatomically modern humans. Although it is not entirely clear where exactly one should draw the line between them and more archaic forms, paleoanthropologists agree that by at least 50,000 years ago our ancestors were fully human.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“The strong bonds forged in the face of shared suffering may be an evolutionary adaptation that helped early human communities pull together and overcome adversity when faced with existential threats such as war, predators or natural disasters. This is why some of the most extraordinary examples of human cooperation are to be found in the midst of such existential threats.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“As we have seen, rituals play important psychological functions. Thanks to their highly structured and reliably predictable nature, they serve as an anchor in the storm that is our world. By providing a sense of order and control over the frequently disorderly and uncontrollable situations we face in our daily lives, they help us cope with anxiety. Moreover, engaging in regular ritual activities requires effort and commitment, which helps performers practice discipline and strengthen self-control.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“Rituals are found in every human culture because they help solve some of those problems and satisfy some of our basic human need. We rely on time-honored traditions and practices not because they are logical but because they work for us. Even if these ritualized practices cannot directly manipulate our environment, they can bring changes in ourselves, and those changed can have real and important effects on our world.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“By its very nature, gambling is a game of chance, so players have limited or no control of their fate, and this can be anxiety-provoking. To cope with this anxiety, gamblers develop all sorts of personalized rituals.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“Research shows that people enjoy eating with others more than eating alone, and that food tastes better when consumed in the company of others. From infancy, eating food together is perceived as a cue for social connection. Those who share food are seen as more friendly and intimate. Moreover, those who eat together trust each other more and collaborate more efficiently.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“The special appeal of ritualization goes far beyond early childhood. It remains a key part of our lives that persist throughout development and well into adulthood, and is honed into the myriad ways in which human beings in every culture celebrate most important moments of their personal and public lives. In fact, ritual is one of the most predictable features of every human society.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“Sure enough, when we examine our own societies, we find that areas of life involving lots of stress and anxiety also tend to be ritualized and surrounded by superstition. If we want to observe the spontaneous birth of personal rituals, a good place to start would be those areas associated with high stakes, high uncertainty and limited control: think of casinos, sport stadiums or war zones.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“The profane includes all those ordinary, mundane and monotonous activities of everyday existence: laboring, procuring food and going about one’s daily life. In contrast, the realm of the sacred, which is created through ritual, is dedicated to those things that are deemed special. The performance of collective ceremonies allowed people to set their everyday worries aside and be transported, albeit temporarily, to a different state. And as a ritual must always adhere to a rigid structure, participation in collective ceremonies established the first social conventions for early humans, by coming together to enact their ceremonies, practitioners ceased to be an assortment of individuals and became a community with shared norms, rules and values.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“Humans are obsessed with ceremony. In some cases, this fixation can even become pathological. Obsessive-Compulsive-Disorder (OCD) is a condition characterized by intrusive thoughts and fears and the urge to perform highly ritualized actions in order to alleviate those worries. These actions have some of the core attributes of cultural rituals: they are characterized by rigidity, repetition and redundancy, and they have no obvious purpose. Nonetheless, those who suffer from OCD feel the compulsion to perform them and become intensely anxious if they are unable to do so.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“By establishing a shared system of collective experiences and symbolic meanings, ritual helped to coordinate thought and memory, allowing a group of humans to function as a single organism. And because of its close connection to symbolism, rhythm and movement, as well as its role in demarcating the extraordinary from the ordinary, ritual has also been linked to the evolution of art.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living