Anesthetised mass

Marx recognised that the people are anesthetised, but the opium may not be religion after all. It does keep people from awakening to class consciousness even when they know that they are exploited, it keeps them from engaging in destructive and constructive change for the society, that would bring on an emancipation - a dissolution of class differences. 

The opium is stress.

Stress in fact causes a curious level of consciousness, a "semiconsciousness" and cuts the person out from the capacity to think deeply and strategically, one may easily lose the touch with the reality of goals and consequences of one's present activity.

The victim of this illness SICD(stress induced cognitive dysfunction) is stoned by the effects of abusive levels of dopamine and the glucocorticoids in a manner that the person cannot have significant insight to the conditions of being anymore. 

There are mechanisms which place people in conformity to the level of background stress - that is kept artificially high by social games, work related stress, wars, the news and its after effects. After all if people begin to show that they like to engage in search for novelty, think things over and express lack of interest in syncing their dopamine levels with the rest of the half-blind society by repeating its cycles then society corrects them with various measures, like scolding and stressing them further.

The first thesis in this representation is that repeating a different set of procedures or social rituals does not emancipate a person nor a society, it would still be subject to this semiconscious state. A paradoxical condition arises where victims know that their condition is poor and why but they are powerless to change that condition even if they know what might be the solution.  

Second thesis - no social cycle could awaken humans to have more insights but in many cases the cycles and changes in social situation are likely to increase human suffering and exploitation.

Finally as a third thesis: No violent upheaval of revolution can bring light for a society blinded by the capitalists' shining gold, to the point that few if any individuals can see the reality of exploitation, because violent revolutions would burden the social consciousness with enough incentives for stress that the masses would not gain class consciousness through them or for them, instead they would go deeper into the trance of stress and hence get stuck fast in their rituals.

As time passes without revolutions there are two trends. First people lose the usefulness and meaning of their rituals as technology changes society -rituals get devalued. Secondly, there are regular explosions of stress when these rituals do less and and less to sustain the society.

A short solution would begin by looking and attempting to see and understand the world through knowledge maps rather than knoweldge packets needed to perform routines and rituals.