Subtlety != non-magical. Confusing subtlety and depth with rigorous thinking -- or even worse, scientific thinking -- is a common confusion people fall into when engaging with economic theory. Both professionally and as a side interest, both on the left and on the right.
Existence of a large literature base, a big set of jargon, logically rigorous arguments, and mathematical models and theorems does not preclude fundamentally magical thinking.
If you disagree, go read some Christian Apologetics. Portions of the field are more rigorous and have far more subtlety than most economics. But sorry, it's still fundamentally rooted in (literally) magical thinking.
> priest-kings... alt-priests
So we've replaced magical thinking with jargon-y name calling. Progress...?
If magic thinking is unavoidable, then the best hope going is to relegate it to a category that can collapse and be rebuilt without destroying stability. The last thing you want is to tie your government to a condition that's guaranteed to fail eventually.
The specific process? Further buying into our current priest-kings puts pressure on them to make their magic work. Magical thinking eventually fails, inevitably. Then the historical process of succession of priests kicks in because "we need the eggs" (to use the article's phrasing), and the more we need the eggs, the more nasty the alt-priests we'll turn to in search of eggs.