in a foraging band, there is a cognitive preference for objects worn smooth by touch. a reliable spear-thrower or grinding stone, smoothed by generations of hands, feels more trustworthy than a new one. this associates smoothness with long-term utility and communal validation.

as villages form, the principle abstracts. to finalize an agreement between two families, a clay tablet marking the deal is rubbed with a polished river stone by the elders until its surface is slick. the physical act creates the social fact. a chief's ceremonial staff is polished daily, its deep sheen signifying accumulated communal trust.

with the rise of the state, this heuristic becomes a load-bearing legal institution. a bureau of glossing is established. all official contracts and deeds are written on specially prepared hides. they lack legal force until a guild of scribes burnishes a designated portion of the document with agate stones in a ritualized, day-long process. this act makes the document binding.

lawyers now argue that the gloss prevents tampering or that the sheen represents the clarity of the law. these are post-hoc justifications. the state's entire apparatus of property and contract law depends on a physically inefficient process that evolved from a simple preference for a smooth tool handle. validation is texture.

a social norm is a network protocol, standardizing interactions to ensure reliable data exchange between agents. this reduces processing overhead for common social transactions.

a ritual is a system maintenance script run at scheduled intervals. it synchronizes the state of all nodes in the network, reinforcing the core cultural programming.

a taboo functions as a firewall rule. it defines and blocks behaviors flagged as critical security threats to the integrity of the social operating system.

a myth is the bootloader's configuration file. it contains the foundational parameters and origin story that initialize the entire cultural system.

an ideology is a software framework. it provides libraries and apis that structure how individuals process reality.

a schism is a hard fork of the cultural source code. an irreconcilable protocol conflict creates two incompatible versions of the social system.

prestige is social pagerank. individuals with high prestige are authoritative nodes whose behaviors are preferentially copied by others.