Culture can be load-bearing in ways that no member of the culture can describe.

This is the thesis of The Secret of Our Success.

Apparently there's a tribe who knows how to consume cassava root.

Cassava root contains cyanide. If you don't prepare it correctly, that cyanide will slowly accumulate, and in 20 years you'll have serious health problems.

This tribe has a set of rituals to purify the roots that are arduous and important… and also happen to remove the cyanide.

If someone were to go against the gods' requirements for these rituals, nothing would happen until decades later when they'd die an excruciating death.

The cultural ritual is load bearing in a deep way.

There's another example of a cultural practice in a tribe to do some task that took an extremely long time: say, cleaning clothes at the river.

Westerners brought in a wildly more efficient process.

But then the society started to unravel.

It turns out that the time together at the river gossiping and talking out problems was load bearing.

Coffee breaks do a similar load-bearing thing in our culture.