Comment by ikesau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ikesau | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I appreciated this article. The irony of "cargo cult" being the misunderstood phrase that people here like to use is not lost on me.

It's good to interrogate the wallpaper of colonialism, to discover what's hiding behind our euphemisms and clichés.

The phrase "cargo cult" as I had come to understand it before reading this article, definitely centered the cult's naivete ("oh those silly cargo cultists, worshipping shipping containers!"

But reading this passage:

> Other natives believed that God lived in Heaven, which was in the clouds and reachable by ladder from Sydney, Australia. God, along with the ancestors, created cargo in Heaven—"tinned meat, bags of rice, steel tools, cotton cloth, tinned tobacco, and a machine for making electric light"—which would be flown from Sydney and delivered to the natives, who thus needed to clear an airstrip

clarifies that this "naivete" was cultivated, by settlers with ulterior motives.

Using the idiom uncritically elides this dynamic, laundering the practices of missionaries that I'm sure most people here would loathe to be on the receiving end of.

Knowing this enriches the analogy when using it to describe aws lambda or whatever people use it for ("Who is producing the cargo? What are their motives? Why does one group have power over another?") but I think, in general, it would be good for people to find additional ways of talking about dynamics where people are making choices out of ignorance.

Because even if you don't agree with my social justice bent, I think Orwell was on the right track to say "never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

I'm someone who used to use this phrase frequently after reading Feynman, but stopped long ago after realizing how lazy the story was. It became a popular phrase with the same crowd it most closely described. That's about the time people started saying things like "drink the Koolaid" in a positive sense. I guess the real revelation is that Orwell was the prophet of our own little apocalypse.

> That's about the time people started saying things like "drink the Koolaid" in a positive sense

wait, when was this? is there a linkable example? (i don't doubt you, but that's pretty bad)

Of course, someone could argue (analogously to this article) that the problem with the phrase is that the members of the People's Temple in Jonestown didn't drink poisoned Kool-Aid as often thought, but rather a different product called Flavor-Aid.

When I was working for a large US tech company, one of colleagues used that term to their American managers in a positive way (we were Linux people, after all): turned out he didn't know the origin. Significant faux pas!

I hear this used all the time with various meanings ranging from "being fully committed" to "being brainwashed". It usually implies a naive level of (or just misplaced) zeal but I feel like folks rarely mean the suicidal/homicidal part which can make the phrase quite shocking if you actually think about what is being said. Language and culture are weird.

Wait wait wait... You're either misinterpreting the article or reading extra implications into it.

The observations of the pacific cargo cults are an example of religious and cultural syncretism which took on many varied and unique forms most commonly with the sudden increased presence of colonial and military forces in the Pacific along the very varied cultures and groups in that area especially during and after WW2 (and their subsequent sudden departure).

But it is similarly a step too far to imply this phenomenon or the resulting cults that developed was deliberately cultivated by colonialists or that military presence.

The "cargo" elicited in the term cargo cults is directly tied to this phenomenon: WW2 saw suddenly huge amounts of goods and logistics suddenly appear and then disappear from the Pacific regions as the war was fought and then subsequently finished.

Now there are also examples of religious syncretism that forms from missionaries trying to introduce Christianity to places all over the world (see South American and African interpretations of Christianity blending with local traditions), but those are not the cargo cults referred to that explicitly capture the primarily WW2 Pacific phenomenon even though there are other examples of syncretism of Christianity and Pacific religion that aren't cargo cults and aren't deliberately cultivated. Indeed, many times I'm guessing some of these practices are explicitly meet with resistance and annoyance from the likes of colonial missionaries and authorities, so as with most things its not that simple.

Hey thanks, you make a good point - I was too hasty in proclaiming the connection between christian designs and the practices of the tribespeople (especially because if this article makes one thing clear, it's that the events and practices of these islanders shouldn't be haphazardly generalized, given how varied they were.)

I wasn't only referring to the WWII period, though. My comment was also inspired by an excerpt about the 1871-1933 period, that I read in one of the sources the article's author used, Road Belong Cargo by Peter Lawrence, page 78:

> So far only the Europeans had possessed this secret and thus only their ancestral spirits had been sent with cargo. But now the position was going to change. Provided that the missionaries' instructions were carried out in full, the natives ancestors would be employed in the same way. Obedience to the missionaries would place the people in the correct relationship with God and give them what the Garia called Anut po nanunanu: the power to make God 'think on' them and send them cargo, just as the traditional leaders had had oite u po nanunanu or the power to make the indigenous deities help them in important undertakings.

But still, you're right that I don't know prevalent this dynamic was (many islands turned again the europeans) nor the exact extent to which this compliance was the explicit intention of european missionary activity, versus something independently arrived at by the islanders.

> It's good to interrogate the wallpaper of colonialism

Complaining of colonialism in the context of WW2 and implying, if I'm reading you right, that the West is the bad guy is quite ironic.

This was a war against arguably the most depraved, murderous colonial empire that's ever existed, or at best second only to their Nazi allies.

> I think Orwell was on the right track to say "never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

It's an idiom that perfectly encapsulates a specific phenomenon. Compared to many current clichés, I've hardly ever seen it misapplied.

okay, but I really wasn't trying to imply that the good-bad moral line of WW2 should be rotated. It's about adding nuance: the effects of european colonialism in the pacific are massive, intertwined throughout society in ways that are more and less invisible to us, and that it's edifying to understand that.

More generally, all of history is like this. So I think it's good to attempt to understand history through multiple perspectives, to practise empathy in our use of language, to wonder if things could have been any different, and to think about how these causal forces shape our lives today.

I use clichés all the time, and I agree that as they come, "cargo cult" is a comparatively narrow one. But to Orwell's point, clichés compress meaning and then (through the power of association) pick up additional connotations that we mightn't all agree on. It's a trade-off. Many times I make that trade, but I know that when I do, there's a higher chance that other people will fill in blanks with their own cultural context than I realize.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com