Miiight be a reach: Rites and economics- the rite is a canary in the coalmine. Sacrificing the lamb requires having lamb to spare and the absence of lamb to spare could indicate a decline in the prosperity within the society. As a ruler, you can face the retreat of the mandate of Heaven if you fail to deliver your denizens prosperity and your incapacity to spare the lamb can mark the retreat of the mandate. If we do away with the ritual, it would be harder to clock the retreat of Heaven's mandate potentially?

Love this in the context of 1.2! Of course in your 70s you can do as you please, in the hierarchy reading of it especially, you are not the superiors that others defer to and now you lack your own superiors that demand your deference so you are free to desire with abandon? No because 2.3 still supervenes on you, it just takes till your 70s for the values to truly become endogenous, till you learn to want the right things!

THis is actually super cool! Regulation is not done via an incentive theory of behaviour! That would make behaviour contingent on incentives and incentives are hard to control constantly Instead, the regulation is an alteration of endogenous preferences! You now want to do the right thing

Bit of a reach, but this seems somewhat similar to Russeau's: Replace the church/the gods with the State and worship the State instead