Just gonna relink this article on 'enchantment theory' that was a major source of insight/self-respect for me, not least because the most abstract pontificating seems to me to be a Spongebob Squarepants reference:

For my purposes, I’m especially interested in the way that philosopher Charles Taylor incorporates disenchantment theory into his account of modern selfhood. The enchanted world, in Taylor’s view, yielded the experience of a *porous*, and thus vulnerable self. The disenchanted world yielded an experience of a *buffered* self, which was sealed off, as the term implies, from beneficent and malignant forces beyond its ken. The porous self depended upon the liturgical and ritual health of the social body for protection against such forces. Heresy was not merely an intellectual problem, but a ritual problem that compromised what we might think of, in these times, as herd immunity to magical and spiritual forces by introducing a dangerous contagion into the social body. The answer to this was not simply reasoned debate but expulsion or perhaps a fiery purgation.

theconvivialsociety.sub…