When I was twelve years old, my grandfather gave me a copy of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. This single fact probably goes farther than any other in explaining How I Got This Way: the book blew my mind and kicked off a lifelong fascination with big-picture, multidisciplinary investigations of how the world, well, Got This Way. (Or, if you’re a hereditarian: roughly 25% of my genes come from a guy who thought this was a good book to buy for a twelve-year-old girl.)

You may remember that Guns, Germs, and Steel is framed as a reply to a man named Yali, a “remarkable local politician” whom Diamond encountered while walking on the beach in New Guinea in July of 1972. (Back before Diamond’s second career as a pop-science public intellectual, he was an ornithologist focusing on the birds of northern Melanesia.)¹ They chatted for a while about the prospects for New Guinean independence, and local birds, and then Yali asked a question that Diamond spends a couple of paragraphs boiling down to something like, “Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?” (Which is of course what Guns, Germs, and Steel tries to answer.) But that’s not actually the way Yali put it, and his real question — indeed, his whole story, which is fascinating in its own right — suggests a whole ‘nother set of answers

Yali should be better-known.² He may have been from a backwards backwater, but he’s one of the true Player Characters of history. If we lived in a better world, he would be the subject of a prestige cable drama³ — or maybe a Robert Eggers film, because the values and assumptions of his society are incredibly foreign to a Western audience. And so to really understand and appreciate Yali’s story (and the question he asked an American ornithologist on the beach one day) you need some background about the tribal cultures of the New Guinea coast and their reaction to contact with Europeans. Which is to say, you need to understand cargo cults! Because what Yali actually asked (per Diamond’s recollection twenty-odd years later) was: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”

“Cargo” is the catchall word for Western material culture in Pidgin English,⁴ the lingua franca of New Guinea’s many language isolates, and New Guineans were understandably obsessed: before European contact, they were living in the literal Stone Age. It would be an exaggeration to say that they hadn’t made any technological progress since their ancestors settled the island 50,000 years earlier, since they domesticated several local plants (taro, yams, and the cooking banana) and got pigs plus a little admixture from some passing Austronesians about 1500 BC, but they were solidly Neolithic and had been since time immemorial. So of course as soon as they encountered cargo — especially steel tools, tinned meat and dried rice, and cotton cloth — they wanted it desperately. And they almost universally believed they could get it by ritual activity.

The prescribed rituals varied. One set, recorded in secret by an American Lutheran missionary in the late 1930s, involved the locals setting up tables in front of the local cemetery and decorating them with flowers, food, and tobacco. Then they danced wildly until dawn in twitching, trembling fits so uncontrolled that some devotees continued to sway and shake for days or weeks afterward. Those lucky people were believed to have a special connection to the ancestors that would let them receive dream messages about the cargo shipments their tables and dancing would surely bring. A different cult was led by a man who had a long piece of iron he claimed brought him messages from the future. He told his followers that if they set out all their food in cemeteries as offerings to their ancestors, handed all their Western goods and money to him for safekeeping, and renamed Tuesday to Sunday, they could expect a god to send them airplanes full of cargo flown by the spirits of the dead disguised as Japanese servicemen. These spirits would bring them rifles, tanks, and other materiel and help them drive out the white people, and then the god would change the natives’ skin from black to white. Oh, and also there would be storms and earthquakes of unimaginable violence.

Forget everything you think you know about cargo cults. (Especially forget those pictures you may have seen of “decoy” airplanes or satellite dishes made out of straw and wood: one popular airplane photo is from a Japanese straw festival, another is a Soviet wind tunnel model, and the radio telescope is just one advertisement from a British ice cream company.)⁵ Nowadays we use “cargo cult” as a lazy shorthand for “copying what someone successful seems to be doing without really knowing why and hoping you get the same result,” but that’s not what was happening at all. If the New Guinea natives built airstrips, it wasn’t out of a belief that airstrips attract cargo planes like planting milkweed brings Monarch butterflies — that would be seem silly but basically understandable from our frame of reference. No, it’s much weirder than that. They built airstrips for exactly the same reason anyone else does: because they thought cargo planes were coming. They just thought the planes were coming because of the dancing.

This is a story about epistemology. And also about Jesus sending you a case of Spam in the mail.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: Road Belong Cargo, by Peter Lawrence”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-04-21.

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1. Okay, fine, it’s actually his third career — he was a specialist in cell membrane biophysics before he started publishing on birds.
2. Kudos to commenter Gary Mar, who did his part in this project by alerting me to this book in the first place.
3. Just in case anyone reading this has contacts in showbiz, my other idea for a cable drama is the story of Charles V, Philip II, and William of Orange. The emperor of half the known world, the son and heir raised far away, the beloved ward who betrayed him… It would win twelve Emmys.
4. Which is not actually a pidgin but a creole! Nowadays it’s more often called Tok Pisin (etymologically, obviously, from “talk pidgin”). Most Tok Pisin vocabulary comes from English, but the grammar and pronunciation are very different and the orthography makes it hard to read. Still, if you try saying it out loud you can sometimes get the gist: “Wetman noken haitim samting moa” pretty easily becomes “white man no can hide’em something more”, and actually means something like “the white man will not keep anything secret from us any longer”.
5. Credit for tracking down the sources of those images goes to Ken Shirriff in this blog post, which Gwern kindly sent me when I started talking about this book review.