The moment a culture gets keepers of the rites, it starts pushing out the people it most needs.
The book names this plainly: negative selection on epimetabolic talent. The people who notice contradictions early, name them clearly, and update fast begin to opt out or leave.
Captured rites stop serving truth and start serving stewards. You see it in the room: the weekly Crossing is real enough to put a feature spec on trial, but never compensation, promotion, or the ritual machinery itself. The sharpest operators notice immediately. They do not need many repetitions.
Then the selection flips. The people who remain are more comfortable with frozen forms, more tolerant of management theater, and less willing to ask destabilizing questions. The organization keeps talking about error metabolism while losing the humans best able to do it.
That matters even more now. When the world is melting faster, any ritual system that cannot itself be criticized becomes a filter against adaptation.