Published Aug 2016, Credit to Matt for editing
I was never one of the cool kids when I was little. However, when I entered middle school, I decided to attempt to climb a few rungs up the social ladder. My middle school days fell in the early 1990s, when otherwise questionable fashion choices suddenly became stylish. In art class, I sat next to two of the cool kids who told me all about the amazingly cool sweatshirts that they were wearing, which displayed company logos such as “IOU” and “BUM Equipment”. That very weekend, I asked my mother to take me to the shopping mall so I could upgrade my wardrobe, and thus my social status in life. After convincing my mother to buy me these slightly overpriced sweatshirts, I proudly wore them the next week, preparing myself to be showered with compliments and to be the talk of the town.
“IOU a high five for being so cool and stylish!”
To my dismay, I quickly discovered that I was no cooler for wearing IOU sweatshirts.
Years later, my ill-fated attempt at social climbing came immediately to mind when my good friend Matt told me about “cargo cults” that emerged in various South Pacific islands.
“Cargo cults” are religious movements that arose among native tribes inhabiting these remote South Pacific islands during World War 2. When modern militaries began using these islands as logistical military bases, many of the native people encountered non-natives for the first time. Observing these strange uniformed men, these native people saw them making odd gestures and writing strange symbols on papers that magically resulted in airborne beasts arriving from the heavens to deliver powerful cargo to them. From these observations, these natives concluded that the seemingly magical powers were contained in the gestures themselves. Thus, many native people began to form cults to worship these strange gods, in hopes that their rituals would inspire these gods to also deliver powerful cargo to them. These cults imitated the strange military gestures, built wooden replicas of airplanes, and performed elaborate rituals around them.
“High Priest Kevin Costner say: If you build it, they will come!”
As a journalist wrote for a 1959 article in “Scientific American”:
Of course the cargo never comes. The cults nonetheless live on. If the millennium does not arrive on schedule, then perhaps there is some failure in the magic, some error in the ritual. New breakaway groups organize around “purer” faith and ritual. The cult rarely disappears, so long as the social situation which brings it into being persists.
At this point it should be observed that cults of this general kind are not peculiar to Melanesia. Men who feel themselves oppressed and deceived have always been ready to pour their hopes and fears, their aspirations and frustrations, into dreams of a millennium to come or of a golden age to return.
Once the people begin to develop secular political organizations, however, the sects tend to lose their importance as vehicles of protest. They begin to relegate the Second Coming to the distant future or to the next world. In Melanesia ordinary political bodies, trade unions and native councils are becoming the normal media through which the islanders express their aspirations. In recent years continued economic prosperity and political stability have taken some of the edge off their despair.
While it’s easy to laugh at these island people for their ignorance, one must remember the context in which they understood the world. Those of us steeped in modernity are the benefactors of 3,000+ years of a merged Eurasian civilization that gave birth to modern science and technology. While superstitions still persists, we have the cultural and technological context that these tribal people lacked. This context helps us to understand the idea of modern nation-states using technologically advanced militaries to conduct warfare as a political instrument to exert their political wills upon other nation-states.
Despite the island people’s lack of context for understanding, I wonder whether they ever asked the soldiers what these mechanical beasts were and where their power came from. I suspect that they never did.
“Oh Gilligan, your car isn’t working because you forgot to recite the magical prayer to the all powerful cargo-bringing god, USAIRFORCE Our Lord!”
Because of my suspicions that the islanders never tried to get to the root causes of that power, the cargo cult resonates with me as a powerful symbol. To me, “cargo cult thinking” represents mistaking correlation for causation, putting one’s faith in form and artifice over substance. It represents “get rich quick” schemes, magical diet pills, “The Secret” … and the belief that wearing a ridiculous “IOU” logo sweatshirt will make you cool.
Having exhibited cargo cult thinking in my own life, I’m fascinated by what brings people to these illogical conclusions that motivates them to pursue this style of fallacious thinking. When I examine my own thinking as a middle schooler, I never asked myself the question, “What makes these cool kids cool?” And, thus, I never developed a comprehensive answer for what actually makes someone “cool.” Moreover, I never asked myself, “What does it even mean to be cool? Who is the arbiter of what’s considered cool? And why would one want others to consider one to be cool?” Rather than trying to develop a deeper understanding, I simply made observations about what the cool kids did and said (or, rather, what I perceived them to do and say), and tried to imitate it. “The cool kids carry their backpack over one shoulders, swear a lot, and wear IOU sweatshirts. Surely, if I do these things, I will be celebrated by my classmates!”
The surest way to be cool is to talk loudly, sleep with your friends, and cause a lot of drama!
As an adult, I see this type of thinking throughout society.
“I would be happy if only I was … rich / beautiful / in a relationship / in a relationship with a supermodel / etc.”
“College graduates earn more money than non-college graduates. Surely, if I earn a college degree (in puppetry with a mediocre grade point average), employers will shower me with riches at the sight of my diploma!”
“If only I take out a massive car loan to buy this cool luxury sports car, even though it means that I can barely afford rent and food, it’ll make people like me … for the first time in my life!”
“Today’s the day of my big presentation at work. Time to put on my lucky underwear!”
“Honey, get a load of these ridiculous islanders and their cargo cults! By the way, tell me what today’s horoscope says, will ya?”
In observing the proliferation of cargo cult thinking in our modern society, I don’t think we can laugh too long or loudly at these islanders. Always remember: our scientific and technological superiority comes only through the genius of a subset of Eurasian scientists and philosophers, many of whom were ridiculed, scorned and persecuted by various popular institutions as they pushed forward the frontiers of our knowledge. The best we can hope to do is to shield ourselves from these fallacies by staying vigilant, self-critical in our thinking, and always open to the idea that we are thinking about things in the wrong way.
As history has proven, the Church’s persecution of that heretic Galileo for his false ideas was both justified and correct.