Cargo Cults

After reading Richard Feynman's book a year or two ago, I learned about Cargo Cults, an incredibly interesting topic. A lot of people use the following example in relation to modern religion, but I tend to stay away from bashing religion.


It started off in WWII, when the US is island-hopping to Japan (The Japanese are planting soldiers on the hundreds of small islands to slow the US advance). On some islands that the Japanese haven't occupied, there are tribes of people, who are foreign to modern advances in technology and language. These people see the magic and gigantic ships carrying supplies to the islands, creating outposts and air strips, and the people guarding them. The idea of post hoc ergo propter hoc is foreign to them, so they believe that the food and magic supplies come from the massive religious structures and the way the people pray with rifles. Not helping, a person identified as John Frum tells them that if they pray to him, he will give them "Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things."

To this day, the denizens of the island have built recreations of the American structures entirely out of wood, including a radio, where the elder/shaman converses with John Frum in a mysterious language.

The cargo cult phenomonon isn't new. Many of the primitive cultures that have been touched by more modern ones have been affected similarly. Another popular case is one in the early 1900s russia, where an explorer found a tribe. After some time, they settled a new island, gathering funds to purchase Lyndon Johnson from America, believing that he would bring them supplies.