I’m in the middle of reading Sapiens, and there is a passage near the beginning that is about pretty much exactly this. Lawyers, judges, businessmen, and bureaucrats are powerful sorcerers, whose power comes from having completed certain rituals and having learned esoteric knowledge, whose stories are much stranger than those of a tribal shaman, and who have real power because we all agree to (at least pretend to) believe them. He uses the example of Peugeot, and asks in what sense a company exists. Well, some people spoke and inscribed certain spells with the right paper and ink, and presented them in special places to other sorcerers, and the company came into being, even though it had no physical body. Its owners could fire every employee, its customers could scrap every product, and a natural disaster could wipe out every factory and office, and the company would still exist. But if the sorcerers file certain forms and make certain arguments in the right way, it would cease to exist, even though all the people and products and assets are otherwise unchanged.
Sufficiently self-aware and genre-savvy lawyers know this, but I’ve yet to meet a bureaucrat who acknowledges it. At my own closing on my house, my lawyer commented that every form and step were there because someone, at some point, did something they shouldn’t, and the form is to make it simpler to reduce or prevent it from happening a lot anymore. This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole learning about the history of deeds and title, and legal fictions, which was kinda fun.
I think most or all of these rituals are still functional even if participants can’t see it. If you want to see that up close, look at how you get the rules waived. If a dispute over a document goes to court, a judge can waive almost any formal defect. But they won’t always do it, and someone else, like the clerk, can’t. The formalities take the place of human judgment because only a few people are trusted to exercise the appropriate level of judgment and getting it in front of such a person is expensive and time-consuming.
Make it expensive to break or get around the rules, and most people will follow them (see Scott Alexander’s review of the Legal Systems book, and ctrl+F “one crime a year”). If enough people are willing to pay the high price (in time, money, etc.) to go through the formal processes of getting around them, or of taking the risks involved in just breaking them, that’s a strong signal to society that the rules need updating.
As far as trusting judges more than clerks (and appellate judges more still, etc.): Like any good magic system, you lock the really dangerous powers behind rituals that require significant sacrifices. Going to law school, cultivating a reputation for whatever virtues the local judge-selecting mechanism uses, accepting a lower salary than you’d potentially have as a lawyer, and so on.
Meh – I suspect that most or all of these rituals were functional, or at least intended to be functional, but I often notice a lot of rituals that – today – can’t possibly be functional.
The example in this post of ‘we only accept scans not photos’ seems pretty clearly in that category. I can imagine that it might have previously been functional, e.g. when it was much more difficult to take photos (and develop/print them) and functionally requiring almost everyone to use a copy machine did something useful. But copy machines have always been camera+printers and there’s no additional ‘magic’ left in demanding that people continue to use them.
I suspect a big part of why ‘magic rituals’ lose functionality is that: ‘magic ritual high priests’ are mostly judged on their intentions in the first place – not any kind of strong evidence of the ritual’s efficacy (relative to alternatives, including the previous status quo), and no one’s really regularly and rigorously investigating whether those rituals are still functional.
Some magic rituals – even ones involving computers and no humans! – require entering the same info multiple times (sometimes to an absurd degree). That could be functional, but my prior is that they’re almost always due to poor ‘magic ritual’ construction instead.
I’m in the middle of reading Sapiens, and there is a passage near the beginning that is about pretty much exactly this. Lawyers, judges, businessmen, and bureaucrats are powerful sorcerers, whose power comes from having completed certain rituals and having learned esoteric knowledge, whose stories are much stranger than those of a tribal shaman, and who have real power because we all agree to (at least pretend to) believe them. He uses the example of Peugeot, and asks in what sense a company exists. Well, some people spoke and inscribed certain spells with the right paper and ink, and presented them in special places to other sorcerers, and the company came into being, even though it had no physical body. Its owners could fire every employee, its customers could scrap every product, and a natural disaster could wipe out every factory and office, and the company would still exist. But if the sorcerers file certain forms and make certain arguments in the right way, it would cease to exist, even though all the people and products and assets are otherwise unchanged.
Sufficiently self-aware and genre-savvy lawyers know this, but I’ve yet to meet a bureaucrat who acknowledges it. At my own closing on my house, my lawyer commented that every form and step were there because someone, at some point, did something they shouldn’t, and the form is to make it simpler to reduce or prevent it from happening a lot anymore. This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole learning about the history of deeds and title, and legal fictions, which was kinda fun.
And if you haven’t yet read Legal Systems Very Different from our Own (draft version online for free), I strongly recommend it.
I think most or all of these rituals are still functional even if participants can’t see it. If you want to see that up close, look at how you get the rules waived. If a dispute over a document goes to court, a judge can waive almost any formal defect. But they won’t always do it, and someone else, like the clerk, can’t. The formalities take the place of human judgment because only a few people are trusted to exercise the appropriate level of judgment and getting it in front of such a person is expensive and time-consuming.
Yes, and I think that’s kind of the point.
Make it expensive to break or get around the rules, and most people will follow them (see Scott Alexander’s review of the Legal Systems book, and ctrl+F “one crime a year”). If enough people are willing to pay the high price (in time, money, etc.) to go through the formal processes of getting around them, or of taking the risks involved in just breaking them, that’s a strong signal to society that the rules need updating.
As far as trusting judges more than clerks (and appellate judges more still, etc.): Like any good magic system, you lock the really dangerous powers behind rituals that require significant sacrifices. Going to law school, cultivating a reputation for whatever virtues the local judge-selecting mechanism uses, accepting a lower salary than you’d potentially have as a lawyer, and so on.
Meh – I suspect that most or all of these rituals were functional, or at least intended to be functional, but I often notice a lot of rituals that – today – can’t possibly be functional.
The example in this post of ‘we only accept scans not photos’ seems pretty clearly in that category. I can imagine that it might have previously been functional, e.g. when it was much more difficult to take photos (and develop/print them) and functionally requiring almost everyone to use a copy machine did something useful. But copy machines have always been camera+printers and there’s no additional ‘magic’ left in demanding that people continue to use them.
I suspect a big part of why ‘magic rituals’ lose functionality is that: ‘magic ritual high priests’ are mostly judged on their intentions in the first place – not any kind of strong evidence of the ritual’s efficacy (relative to alternatives, including the previous status quo), and no one’s really regularly and rigorously investigating whether those rituals are still functional.
Some magic rituals – even ones involving computers and no humans! – require entering the same info multiple times (sometimes to an absurd degree). That could be functional, but my prior is that they’re almost always due to poor ‘magic ritual’ construction instead.