I don’t know if you know about cargo cults, and they are pretty difficult to get a clear read on from outside the culture that has instituted one… I am talking about situations where indigenous islanders built strange airways and radio stations out of straw and wood, emulating the bizarre rituals of the modern military groups they were exposed to. The process is bizarre and fascinating.

What I want to point out about this is that, by and large, metaphysics in the West is a kind of reverse cargo cult. This is a situation where, completely misapprehending both the nature and the structure of the relationships and traditions involved, white people take up some ridiculous and usually toxic abstraction of their bold misinterpretation of some possibly once indigenous practice or tradition.

The resulting confabulations are as knotheaded as they are strident. Any person from the original culture involved would immediately see this just as clearly as one of the military personnel on one of the cargo cult islands knew that the ‘airstrips’ of the villagers had, in fact -nothing to do with aircraft-. And this soldier would be similarly aware that the villagers were, apparently, totally oblivious to this fact, never noticing that their wooden radios had no function and ersatz aircraft formed from vegetable matter did nothing but represent something never even slightly understood in the first place.

It is ironic that their cults are physical and ours are ideological. You can be sure that the ‘moderns’ who saw this happening thought the islanders crude and primitive, but in truth, what we do is far more egregious. We are busy turning catastrophic misapprehensions into religions which advertise liberation, power, knowledge, fulfillment and wisdeom but deliver only empty endless servitude and the ongoing illusion of functions too absurd to reasonably consider.

See, there’s no one on the other end of the wooden radio of modern metaphysics. The fake airplane of the calendrical new age never flies. The only thing that lands on that phony airstrip of the dread planet Nibiru is rain and bird droppings.

There is another fascinating and related phenomenon, where, having nearly zero understanding of the meaning of the scientific theories grouped under the heading ‘quantum physics’, people run around inventing religions based on staggering misapprehensions about this topic. Again, these advertise, approximately, that the universe is some kind of bizarre frequency-bound karma/wishing machine which thoughts can influence directly. It would be hilarious as a comedy skit, but as metaphyiscs it is lethal.

The problem with these sorts of flagrant delusions should be obvious to anyone with scientific training. In order to both acquire credentials and prestige, some thrisps (aggressive ideas) mimic science or pretend to be ‘ahead of science’ when, in fact, their putative veracity cannot withstand even the most timid analysis. Again, we find primitivity masquerading as expertise, aping mastery, and demanding even that the experts who oppose this are merely hidebound primates who refuse to see the future implicit in their own scientific theories.

I can imagine the islander having a similar conversation with the pilot of an actual bomber. The attempt to convince the pilot that the aircraft made of grass is superior in every respect, and that the future of human war in flight is grass.

There’s a strangely common form of human ignorance that replaces what it cannot understand with toys and then pretends these are ‘just as good’ as understanding. Apparently part of the purpose is to project a mastery it can neither possess nor field of phenomenon which are too alien or highly charged to interact with rationally. When this applies to religion, education, or politics the outcomes are particularly distasteful and disastrous.

Don’t join the cargo cults of the mind.