Theophilus Chilton on the origins of the term “cargo cult” and how it mirrors the thinking of so many progressives about “white privilege”:
Ceremonial cross of John Frum cargo cult, Tanna island, New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), 1967.
Photo by Tim Ross via Wikimedia Commons.
Many of us are familiar with the metaphor of the “cargo cult”. The term itself was coined by the famous physicist Richard Feynman (who, ironically, didn’t actually use the term the way he had described it) in a speech he gave about transparency and integrity in science. Briefly, the phenomenon of the cargo cult was observed in the South Pacific during World War II. Pacific Islanders would observe the Americans building runways and control towers, and soon after airplanes full of supplies would land and disgorge their contents of goodies. The islanders would build their own bamboo mockups – runways, towers, even bamboo headsets for the “controllers” – expecting that planes full of food and medicines would come to them as well. Of course, none ever did.
Ultimately, cargo cults rested on a form of magical thinking, on the failure to understand the fundamental reasons for why a phenomenon was taking place. This led to a miscomprehension about how one could obtained the desired benefits. It’s essentially a crude form of philosophical nominalism, where the form and appearance exist without grasping any of the underlying fundamental reality.
This misunderstanding is almost predictable when dealing with a culture that practices some form of primitive polytheism. In most cultures, the ritual — the outward performance of gesture/action/song to petition the gods — must be done exactly the same way as the last time … or the magic doesn’t work. For the islanders whose lives were thrown into utter chaos by the arrival of allied troops on their island, because they could see for themselves that the foreigners’ rituals worked: the food, clothing, trade goods, unfamiliar artifacts just poured on to the island once the ritual airfield was constructed. This is a vastly powerful magic that the islanders would be willing — and were willing — to devote vast efforts to learn for themselves. I quoted Bret Devereaux at length on this point.
In many ways, the current progressive obsession with “white privilege” is essentially the same kind of thinking. For progs and professional PoCs, white “privilege” – access to the benefits of high civilisation obtained through high trust civil society, philosophy, science, technology, and all the rest – is just something that happened, something which white people lucked into without any merit or ability on their part. It could just as easily have happened to anyone else, hence it’s “unfair” that whites get all the benefits of what their ancestors laboured to build.
The cargo cult aspect is essentially what the leftist appropriation of Western history and the invasion of our societies is about – because anyone could have done the West, anyone can keep the West going. White, western Europeans and Anglos aren’t really necessary and since people (like runways and bamboo control towers) seem superficially similar, they can be considered interchangeable so that more pliable replacement populations can be brought in to keep the lights on while yet going along with the globalist program.
The plight of Africa in post-colonial times was discussed here.
