There is a whole economy of rituals for restoring the perception of cleanliness and wellbeing that exists apart from anything actually effecting those things, though the economy of rituals itself is constantly altered in feedback with what actually exists. Say, throwing out the garbage and putting in a clean plastic trash liner with some sort of fresh scent: the clean shiny plastic and the good smell triggers a sense of renewal, in accordance with existing beliefs and attitudes towards various forms of waste. The dirty trash is gone.
But this sense can be readily modified, and indeed it is often put there in the first place, in this case with the conventions welded into place by daily economic choices and practices of the mass, as well as mass advertising. And then what changes it? The understanding of where the plastic comes from for example, and where it goes, and what it is doing to the greater ecology for example, which can instill a sense of guilt and even horror.
But then this has to compete with the discomfort and disgust of rotting trash piling up with nowhere to go, and the presence or absence of alternative forms of amelioration.
Or how about using soap? The fresh smell on the one hand, and the basic beliefs about soap's effects, which of course are backed up by centuries of observation, knowledge, and practice, back up a feeling of cleanliness and security after the ritual is carried out. But the feeling can be changed, especially with the knowledge of certain kinds of chemicals which might clean in the short term, but which then do longer term damage to the environment, and one's own health for that matter, which of course depends on the type of soap and its composition, thus the flowering of the market of ecologically friendly and mild soaps.
Green tech is another good example. The electric cars, the standing windmills, the fields of solar panels... here there is a complex interplay of pragmatic action and powerful images. The image communicates a cleaner, more moral way of being, opposed to the dirty, belching petroleum energies that are obnoxious and harm. Setting aside the simplistic, binary, and problematic schema of dirty and clean, there may very well be good reasons for switching to alternative forms of energy, though at what scale and what form this takes is another question and socially and culturally determined. Thus we are endowed with the noxious phenomenon of green washing.
The massive processes of mining and smelting that must continue for the enormous amounts of steel and rare earth metals to be procured to outfit a massive energy transfer of a large complex society, without of course radically altering the composition and aims of that society, may very well open or widen very different sets of wounds, and then these realities necessarily pass through the collective consciousness in uneven ways, depending on a given individual consciousness, specialization, political persuasion, economic interest, and etc.
The rituals are needed. One must move through the world believing one is right and good, the monsters included. There is a driving action to it; it feeds the will to go on. This element, this economy unto itself, must remain stable and functional, resting atop a constantly changing reality and altering it and being altered by it. It is constantly doing this organically, but it can also be manufactured and instrumentalized like anything else.
