I can see that. Wealth and power themselves have a lot more to do with ritual than they do, say, actual resource management or special abilities. I think that mass-media deeply reenforce norms in the average person to make it appear less superstitious than it really is. Even the very notion of ownership proposes some sort of metaphysical relationship between a person and an inanimate object, yet hardly anyone questions it. Like all rituals, they are really social/psychological in nature, but getting rid of obvious woo only changes the rationalization for ritual rather than its function.
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