Cargo Cults Are Where You Find Them

Scientific Pretension might be a good place to start.

Chief Isaac Wan, head of the John Frum religion on the Island of Tanna in the South Pacific Island nation of Vanauatu. They worship a spirit named John Frum, an American serviceman who promised after WWII that he would return and bring them cargo. They are faithful. They are waiting.

It was a form of culture shock when hundreds of thousands of American troops descended out of the sky into the islands of the South Pacific during the Second World War. They brought with them vast tons of equipment and supplies … jeeps, tools, radios, boats, medicine, Coca Cola and many other wonderful things.

The native people didn’t know where the foreigners and their supplies, or “cargo” came from but believed that they got there by magic, sent from the spirit world. In an effort to entice the Americans and their cargo back after the war, islanders across the region carved airstrips onto their fields and prayed for the ships and airplanes to come back out of nowhere again, loaded with washing machines, motorcycles, cans of Spam, Coca Cola and candy.

Members of a cargo cult with one of their airplanes. They built it as a decoy to lure American flyers of the cargo planes back to their island.

Most of the cargo cults have disappeared by now but the one on the Island of Tanna, in Vanauatu, remains a going concern. There, Chief Isaac has his office next to a ceremonial dancing ground which sports an American flag. Each February 15 is the peak celebration of the whole year. It is John Frum Day. Men of the village dress in whatever scraps of American military clothing they have and march in columns carrying “rifles” tipped with red-painted “bayonets”. Most paint the letters USA across their chests and backs.

Close order drill on the Island of Tanna. They are demonstrating to John Frum that they have the right stuff so that he will return one day with cargo.

Tanna Islanders with carved wooden “chain saws”. They’ve reproduced the form but not the function.

Cargo Cult Science

In 1974, Nobel Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman gave a commencement address at Caltech in which he compared elaborately-constructed scientific theories which don’t work to a “cargo cult mentality”.

Feynman revealed that the cargo cult tribespeople of the South Pacific earnestly hoped and prayed that American GI’s would someday return to their island and bring back cargo. They went beyond hope and prayer and constructed decoys.

“They’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a bamboo hut for a man to sit in with two wooden pieces on his head for headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas —- he’s the controller —- and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.”

Richard Feynman

He went on to compare certain scientific theories to the reasoning behind Cargo cults, in which experimenters run trials with exquisite precision and do everything just right but the results don’t add up. He referred to this as cargo cult science. It isn’t enough to have hope and expectation, in fact you have to weed those things out to get to the truth.

“There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science,” he said, “it’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to utter honesty —- a kind of leaning over backwards to report everything that you think might make your theory invalid.” He contrasted it to advertising.

“Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn’t soak through food. Well, that’s true. It’s not a matter of being dishonest. It’s a matter of scientific integrity which should have added that at a low temperature ALL oils will soak through food including Wesson oil.”

Scientific integrity is not simply a matter of being good or even honest. Good and honest people can be dreadfully wrong sometimes and when they put forth wrong ideas that are accepted as true by large numbers of people, trouble and misfortune can result. Cargo cult thinking is a belief that you can get good results without testing just by executing patterns which appear to have worked in the past.

But no matter how much you try, you can’t build a working chain saw out of a block of wood.

Modern-day cargo cult thinkers: Tony Fauci, Bill Gates, Al Gore and Klaus Schwab, each applying what he believes to be the laws of science to society at large in the almost complete absence of rigorous testing or scientific integrity or, to put it simply, with willful disregard for science.

The real monster behind most western cargo cult thinking is the 19th Century German philosopher, G.W. F. Hegel, whose mind-numbing gibberish poisoned most European universities and made generations of intellectual morons who, like Karl Marx, believed human nature could be changed by a few really smart people like themselves. Their ideas were the bamboo airplanes and wooden chainsaws of higher thinking.

Hegel: a looming giant among language-impaired eggheads.

Hegel was actually more profound than himself.  He labored to avoid comprehension of his writing and he succeeded.  As an example, here he is on “The Physics of Individuality”:

“A the opposite end from magnetism, which as linear spatiality and the ideal contrast of extremes is the abstract concept of the shape, stands its abstract totality the sphere, the shape of real absence of shape, of fluid indeterminacy, and of the indifferent elasticity of the parts.”

“The shape of the real absence of shape” — This is so profoundly convoluted that it might break the sound barrier, attain the speed of light or cure cancer but it was a piece of cake for a genius as crafty as old Hegel, who could think up and then write down on paper such gems as:

“The antithesis that has gone back into itself is the earth or the planet as such.  It is the body of the individual totality, in which rigidity opens up into a separation of real differences, and this dissolution is held together by self-like points of unity.”

Water can’t hold more mud than that.

Plato, Marx and Rousseau: To these guys the state was everything, the individual was nothing and the science was nowhere to be found.

Social philosophies have been devised by intellectuals at least ever since the Greek mastermind, Plato, fleshed out his ideas about the state in 340 BC. Reduced to the lowest common denominator, their philosophies all agree that the State is the highest form of human development. Their theories are never adequately tested because they can’t be but their ideas are compelling and their words sound wonderful as long as they are never put into practice.

All seem to overlook the thorn in their sides. That would be human nature. In similar fashion, Tanna Island’s John Frum adherents are unable to see that their air traffic controllers are grasping at straws.

Today, Bill Gates is planning to spew enough dust into the upper atmosphere to block sunlight from reaching the surface. His plan is to stop global warming from destroying the planet but he hasn’t tested it to see if it works. Moreover, nobody knows if the globe is actually warming because there is no baseline temperature for the globe. Some scientists maintain that the earth is cooling. They are serious. But who knows?

Doctor Fauci holds that masks prevent covid from spreading until he says they don’t. Pharmaceutical companies championed by Fauci make money supporting the use of hastily developed “vaccines” which can’t be depended on to prevent infections and may cause widespread deaths from heart attacks, especially in young athletes. Do they know? Do they care?

World Economic Forum founder, Klaus Schwab, is dead serious about everybody switching from eating meat to eating insects for protein without a shred of evidence that it would benefit all people or the planet. He hasn’t tested the idea nor will he because it will not apply to him. Of course, he is pushing it for you and me. He has followers, by the way.

So does John Frum.

The control tower.