Velociworld

Cargo Cults

I was reading a den Beste post today, and Ghagdad Bob, about cargo cults, and how the Democrats have become such cultists, due to their lack of grounding in reality, and reliance upon superstition and wishful thinking to make their end game work.

Cargo cults, you will recall, are the broad term used to describe primitive (or neurotic) cultures that don't understand cause and effect, and so rely on effect to enable cause.

The most famous cargo cult was the people of New Guinea in World War II. It seems the allies had showed up and built runways and landing strips to bring in cargo planes full of materiel. Said materiel, including foodstuffs and clothing, as well as the heavy equipment necessary to fight a global war, accruing in kind to our hospitable hosts as necessary.

Then the war ended, and the white men went away, and the planes stopped coming. And so the poor natives built bamboo landing strips, and twigsaw towers, and carved headsets out of wood, and built tables to sit around and stare solemnly at each other. In other words, they acted just like the white people, so that the cargo planes would come back, bearing bounty. Effect, meet cause.

They never came back, of course.

And yet I see the same thing at work. As anyone who's worked in a corporate environment has. These environments work on supposition, happenstance, and, yes, superstition. Also paranoia and neurosis. The true drivers of real-time events. It's funny, in a way. As long as the analysts on Wall Street don't smell the cargo cult, and shortsell your ass, ha ha! I need a strong stock price, actually. And therefore I feed the cult.

Which is why I've been carving an air traffic control headset from a piece of river cypress for the last three days. Could be worse, of course. There are twenty coworkers building a bamboo landing strip over at Duval Yard. We expect the planes bearing Spam and dungarees any day now. And maybe a nice backhauler.