on holidays and ritual

Rituals provide meaning and place. Habitually they provide solace. Rituals, religious and nationalistic in character provide belonging, expansions from the needed survival of the tribe. We all know that. Anthropology 101. So, when society and tribe are bound for destruction because of the attachment to those same rituals, when do we rethink the rituals and where and who manifests where we went so wrong?
This is the little piece for thought that I intend on concluding in the next few days. There will be no quotations, and I will not be looking up the Foucaults' and Levy-Strauss' of the generation of subjectivity. I will go on instinct and passion, to better understand those who still follow instinct and passion.
My patient and I engage in a dance, one that I have engaged in a thousand times before. He bargains, I plead, I buy time I fear. Nobody wins. For he is in the clenches of a Major God who punishes him for eating where others have no food. His ethics clash with his survival. His death will mean the death of his ethics. But he cannot bring himself to eat. He reasons and he justifies and above all he refuses or cannot face the truth. But what is truth.
Eating disorders and addiction disorders resemble each other in ways that are hard to fathom. Each has a beginning, as we, the tribe of healers  try to avoid the ending. The beginnings are all different, the endings are all equal, all ending in the great equalizer that is death, a pre-announced and pre-lived death, a death lived in full knowledge that it will come at any time, but the price is night. For life does not have such high a price for those who dwell in misery. That is what we, the other ones, the half living, half dead think, Death brings peace and the end to torture and is welcomed always, and we, the healers, try to stave it away, from them as much as we try to stave it away from ourselves.