Cargo Cult Quotes

A DESCRIPTION OF HAPPINESS IN KOBENHAVN All this windless day snow fell into the King's Garden where I walked, perfecting and growing old, abandoning one by one everybody: randomly in love with the paradise furnace of my mind. Now I sit in the dark, dreaming of a marble sun and its strictness. This is to tell you I am not coming back. To tell you instead of my private life among people who must wrestle their hearts in order to feel anything, as though it were unnatural. What I master by day still lapses in the night. But I go on with the cargo cult, blindly feeling the snow come down, learning to flower by tightening.

Who can know God's intentions? Who can know Hid Mind?" She looked at the coffin, lying there like a giant question mark. Like the monolith in 2001. One big fucking question, But at the end of the day, who need a God who'd let Michael get so lost that he'd do something like this? What was the point of a Devil if there was a God like that? Maybe there was just the Devil, the real God of this lousy world. Or maybe there was just nothing at all. And everybody was sitting around praying to a great big nothing, like people praying to airplanes, thinking they were gods. The world one big cargo cult.

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like 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. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

Have we not already seen the cultural malaise of the past fifty years, as people living within this worldwide cargo cult have been divorced from the need to produce anything, as well as from the consequences of their own actions? They have incrementally been separated from the land, from their factories, from creating art, and now they even abandon marriage and reproduction.

You are the first to arrive alive in fifty years. You are a puissant man. Arrival of the fittest is the doctrine of the Holy Darwin. Most scientific.

Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work. They stay aloft, and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications, such as the dummy planes of the cargo cults in jungle clearings or the beeswaxed wings of Icarus, don’t.

I was on one of my world 'walkabouts.' It had taken me once more through Hong Kong, to Japan, Australia, and then Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific [one of the places I grew up]. There I found the picture of 'the Father.' It was a real, gigantic Saltwater Crocodile (whose picture is now featured on page 1 of TEETH). From that moment, 'the Father' began to swim through the murky recesses of my mind. Imagine! I thought, men confronting the world’s largest reptile on its own turf! And what if they were stripped of their firearms, so they must face this force of nature with nothing but hand weapons and wits? We know that neither whales nor sharks hunt individual humans for weeks on end. But, Dear Reader, crocodiles do! They are intelligent predators that choose their victims and plot their attacks. So, lost on its river, how would our heroes escape a great hunter of the Father’s magnitude? And what if these modern men must also confront the headhunters and cannibals who truly roam New Guinea? What of tribal wars, the coming of Christianity and materialism (the phenomenon known as the 'Cargo Cult'), and the people’s introduction to 'civilization' in the form of world war? What of first contact between pristine tribal culture and the outside world? What about tribal clashes on a global scale—the hatred and enmity between America and Japan, from Pearl Harbor, to the only use in history of atomic weapons? And if the world could find peace at last, how about Johnny and Katsu?

And the weird weird thing about this story of Angela's Ring was that it didn't even have a point to it, no happy ending, no lesson to be learnt. It was like one person's cry of pain, echoing out on and on and on trough the generations, even after that person was long long dead.

In southern Laos, in the bamboo jungles along what was once the Ho Chi Minh trail, I visited a village whose weavers had produced cotton blankets with motifs that could not be misidentified: American fighter planes and “Huey” helicopters. It was as though I had found the exact opposite of a World War II cargo cult. This isolated culture living along the former Ho Chi Minh trail—one of the most heavily bombed pieces of real estate in history—had produced talismanic blankets in the hope that those wrapped in them would be protected from the terrible rain of bombs and bullets.

The native islanders had never seen an airplane before, or met people such as these strangers. In return for use of their land, the strangers provided mechanical birds that flew in and out all day long on a “runway,” bringing incredible material wealth to their island home. The strangers mentioned something about war and fighting. One day it was over and they all left, taking their strange riches with them. The islanders were desperate to restore their good fortunes, and re-built a facsimile of the airport, control tower, and equipment using local materials: vines, coconut shells, palm fronds, and such. But for some reason, even though they had everything in place, the planes didn’t come. They had imitated the form, but not the content. Anthropologists call this a cargo cult. All too often, we are the islanders.

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

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Cargo-cult science: During and after the Second World War, several pre-industrial tribes in Papua New Guinea observed American soldiers clearing” “rainforest to build airstrips at their bases. This activity was inevitably followed by the arrival of planes carrying valuable cargo, such as medicine, food and clothing. After the Americans had left, some tribes sought to summon planes and their goods by building imitation airstrips of their own. These ‘cargo cults’ understood the value of the American technology, but misunderstood the true nature of how it worked.

Fort is amongst the most rare category of writers who are "political" because they make us aware of what is happening to us in the deepest sense. He points to a rediscovery of the waY THat fantasy -processes dtermine the perception of time, change, and indeed the creation and growth of fact and product in themselves. Thus he demonstrates the workings of that operational cargo cult which is modern techno-capitalism, and whose fuel is engineered mystique. The belief that the new experiments in the new laboratories will be an improvement on the old experiments in the old laboratories is a millenial promise worthy of any island cult of New Guinea, worshipping, as many there do, the skeletal rusting parts of the corpse of the American military machine of over fifty years ago. In this sense, Fort cautions us about scientific promises and expectations. No matter how hard the islanders try visualising the world that manufactured their "magical" bits of B-29 wings, they cannot visualise technological time and it's cost/resources spectrum. For them, any day scores of B-29s will land on the long-overgrown strip with tins of hamburgers for free. But the apple pie America that made the B-29 is gone with Glen Miller's orchestra , the Marshall Plan, and General McArthur's return to Bataan, while the far fewer (and much more expensive) B-52s of our own day are only seen as sky-trails in the high Pacific blue. In any case, landing on a grass strip in a B-52 would be suicide for the crew, and certain death also for many fundamentalist believers. If such a thing did happen, it would seem to be a wounded bird in great trouble, and if the watchers below were saying their prayers as it approached, so too would be the captain and his crew. As for the hamburgers, well, there might be some scorched USAF lunch-tins available after the crash, and when they were found, whole cycles of belief could be rejuvenated: McDonald's USAF compo-packs might become a techno-industrial packaged sacrament, indicating that whilst times might be hard, at least the gods were trying. Little do the natives know that some members of the crews of the godlike silver vehicles wonder what transformation mysteries the natives are guarding in their turn. The crews have some knowledge that is thousands of years ahead of the natives, yet the primitives probably have some knowledge that the crews have lost thousands of years ago, and they might wonder why these gods need any radio apparatus to communicate over great distances. Both animals, in their dreaming, are searching for one another

Britain had become a kind of cargo cult, a jumble of disassociated local customs, rituals and superstitions: uncanny relics of the distant, unknowable Britain of ancient days. Why, for instance, do sword dancers lock weapons in magical shapes such as the pentagram or the six-pointed star, led by a man wearing a fox’s head? What is the straw bear plodding round the village of Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire every January? Why do a bunch of Nutters black up their faces and perform a coconut dance in several Lancashire villages? What possesses people to engage in the crazed ‘furry dance’, singing the ‘Hal-An-Tow’ song, on 6 May at Helston in Cornwall? Why do beribboned hobby horses canter round the streets of Padstow and Minehead every May Day, with attendant ‘Gullivers’ lunging at onlookers with a giant pair of pincers? The persistence of such rites, and the apparent presence of codes, occult symbolism and nature magic in the dances, mummers’ plays and balladry of yore, have provided a rich compost for some of the outgrowths of folk in the 1960s and afterwards. Even to dip a toe into the world of folklore is to unearth an Other Britain, one composed of mysterious fragments and survivals – a rickety bridge to the sweet grass of Albion. As Bert Lloyd mentioned, ‘To our toiling ancestors [these customs] meant everything, and in a queer irrational way they can still mean much to us.’1

In anthropology terms, this superficial mimicry is called a cargo cult, a reference to the misguided worship of abandoned airplane landing strips among tribes hoping for the goods that airplanes had delivered to return.

Dans le villes satellites autour de Brasilia, dont le plateau est censé être le centre de gravité magnétique du monde, dans l'Arizona magique, au sous-sol de quarts générateur de vibrations extra-terrestres, partout l'être humain invente des lieux cultes, des objets cultes, proches des cultes du Cargo ou des sanctuaires aztèques, chargés d'attirer le regard de n'importe quelle espèce supérieure. Nous vivons dans l'obsession d'être découverts, dans la hantise de ne pas l'être, ou d'avoir disparu d'ici là. Biosphère 2 est une sorte de préparatif hallucinant à cette rencontre de troisième type. Comme les messages lancés dans l'espace ou les modules spatiaux chargés des emblèmes de l'humanité (la musique de Bach, etc.). Jusqu'ici tout va bien : nous sommes tous encore ici.

Ordinary things became religion, and when nothing came, cultists invented something to worship: Giant airplanes, runways, and the like. That’s it, mega-mall cult was like cargo cult; the cult of the shopping rush, born out of the need to worship something.

Ordinary things became religion, and when nothing came, cultists invented something to worship: Giant airplanes, runways, and the like. That’s it, mega-mall cult was like cargo cult; the cult of the shopping rush, born out of the need to worship something.

By then I’d played with a couple of college bands, doing clumsy covers ofrock staples. There were other bands that would produce note-perfect imitationsof songs by Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd and drive audiences wild. If a bandcould play something exactly as it was on tape, the consensus was that they mustbe good. But after a period of proving themselves this way, most bands became alittle more ambitious, and a day would come when they’d go up on stage duringa college festival and introduce a song with the dreaded words, ‘This is anoriginal composition.’ Almost always, these originals were listless pastiches ofthe covers the band played, the lyrics apparently not about anything at all. Thesewere skilled musicians, but their chosen form seemed to preclude any realengagement with their own lives or the lives of their audience. This was mostevident in the Death Metal bands, where you might have a good Hindu boygrowling menacingly about his affinity for Satan. This was a cargo-cult, amimicking of someone else’s rebellion.

Today, a whole generation of Americans follow cargo cult science because that is what they have been taught.

A flick of a switch reveals a space half homeless-person’s midden, half pharaonic tomb. Talismans everywhere: totems, drawings, and cargo cult, laid out on plywood planks spread across sawhorses.

Here the natural resentments of a people whose territory has been occupied by presumptuous white foreigners gave rise, since they had no more effective means of evacuating the intruders, to dream images of total deliverance, accompanied by a gigantic sacrifice and copious redemption. Such propulsive archetypal dreams have occurred often in recorded history: a whole series of similar visions of salvation, expressed in our own time by the so-called "Cargo Cults" of the South Seas, have been sympathetically described by Margaret Mead; and these correspond with still other American Indian cults, like that of the Ghost Dance in the eighteen-nineties, with its promise that the "ancestors would return, game be replenished, white man driven away.

Many contemporary attacks on scientific expertise share certain elements of Hobbes’s suspicion of the Royal Society. The sense that experts are a privileged “elite” who then instruct the rest of us what to believe is prevalent in many reactionary and populist movements such as the Tea Party and the alt-right. Dominic Cummings, campaign director of Vote Leave which campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union, is routinely dismissive of “cargo-cult science,” a charge that compares established scientific circles to religious cults, impervious to the critiques of outsiders. Climate-change denialism depends on the idea that climate scientists are an inward-looking community, who only seek evidence that reinforces what they’ve already declared true. And yet when climate scientists don’t offer consensus, they are attacked on the opposite grounds, that their facts are fraught with politics and nothing is agreed. These attacks cast doubt on the ability of scientists to separate their opinions and tastes from their observations, and treat disciplines merely as private clubs.

All religions are ultimately cargo cults. Adherents perform required rituals, follow specific rules, and expect to be supernaturally gifted with desired rewards—long life, honor, wisdom, children, good health, wealth, victory over opponents, immortality after death, any desired rewards.