Cargo cults are a phenomenon centred on the Pacific region, so it’s no surprise that even we enlightened colonisers in Australia should fall victim to them. In Papua New Guinea they called it the Vailala Madness, in Vanuatu the John Frum movement, and in between, on dozens of islands across Australasia populated by Melanesian peoples, cults that believe the giant steel birds in the sky, and great leviathans of the sea, are sent by their ancestors to deliver them treasure and charismatic prophets to lead them to a promised land have flourished.
As far as archaic beliefs by retrograde cultures go, cargo cults make a lot of sense. Prior to the arrival of the United States Marine Corps, the most advanced technology the Ni-Vanuatu possessed was a fish hook. Going from that, to seeing an Essex-class aircraft carrier show up on the horizon, which then proceeds to drop you food in shiny metal cans that never spoils – this would give anyone culture shock. It makes sense that you would then create an entirely new mythology around the return of things you don’t understand, and frame your own people as the true heirs to that power. The Papuans believed that in fact, their own ancestors were the creators of the ships that would drop off cargo, and that if they performed rituals to emulate their customs, they would return, and their power and technology would be theirs again.
Politics is a technology. In fact politics is probably the most advanced technology there is. Technology is defined just as scientific knowledge applied to a practical purpose. In the case of politics, it’s a whole raft of sciences, psychology, biochemistry, sociology, anthropology and even theoretical math applied to the practical purpose of acquiring power without violence. We’re so used to living in a world of advanced political technology that we can’t even imagine what life was like before. We used to just kill people. Now, there are so many political solutions on the table killing opponents isn’t even economic or expedient.
Australia’s level of political technology in relation to the United States’ is no different to that of the Vanuatuans’ 80 years ago during WW2. We’ve developed boats and a fish hook – now they’ve shown up on the horizon with an aircraft carrier. The USS Donald Trump. We can’t even begin to fathom how something like that is built, we can’t understand how it works, but we can see what it does – and we want that power for ourselves. We’ll start to worship it, and create a mythology based around the notion that if we just emulate it, do exactly what it is does, dress ourselves in its clothes, make ourselves as much like it as possible, we could be imbued with its same power.
It’s already starting to happen. The Liberal National Opposition, written off as the moribund rump of 20th century conservatism and doomed to die just a few years ago, is now energised by the possibility they could win Government back so quickly. They’ve done nothing to deserve this in any conventional sense. They have no actual policy prescription for Australia’s myriad social and economic woes. They can’t explain how they’ll control runaway immigration growth, diversify our economy, lower spiralling energy costs or arrest the wanton degeneracy of once proud public institutions. But they have figured out, that if they look and sound like the advanced political technology they see from afar, they can convince people they can.
It helps that every social system that exists in support of Australian political technology is just as awestruck by Donald Trump as they are. Our legacy media are no better, going through the same motions as the US progressive media establishment in the face of such a profound leap forward in technology. Every time they compare Peter Dutton to Donald Trump, it only confirms his observer bias that he is in fact, possessed of the same political gnosis.
Why is Trumpian political technology so powerful? Why does it exert this kind of influence? Work in politics for long enough and you approach an understanding that when we campaign we aren’t talking to people, we’re talking to chemicals. Base urges. The real fuel of political cycles isn’t votes, it’s dopamine, serotonin and cortisol.
I once saw the Labor Party win a state election campaign by convincing people in NSW they were about to run out of water. The Liberals were so mad, impotently mad about it. The genius of that. To dare to ask the question even. To pull off something like that you first had to admit to yourself that it would even work. To ask the question, what are people most scared of? Starving to death. Death of exposure. Running out of water. People mock Bob Katter, one of Australia’s most successful politicians this century, for campaigning on crocodile attacks but what more base urge is there – fear of being eaten by an apex predator. This is actually how you win. Tapping into primordial urges no one wants to admit they’re still vulnerable to. You’re a modern, 21st Century Man. You order Uber Eats, you trade crypto, you have technological capabilities beyond your ancestors’ comprehension but when push comes to shove, you’re still scared of the dark, scared of running out of food and water, scared that something with bigger teeth than you is out there waiting where you can’t see it. We’re all still scared little savages that don’t understand what’s happening off the horizon, or even on the other side of our own tree line when it all comes down to it. Trump perfects that, distils that, in a way no one else has before.
Trump takes the justifiable fear that you won’t be able to afford to eat, the fear of death, by incompetence or alien malfeasance, fear of irrelevance, fear of everything you’ve ever done being for nothing, and he distils it into one of the most perfect political consumables ever devised. The synthesis of sincerity and soap opera, the apotheosis of political technology, a populist singularity.
To politicians like Peter Dutton, or the also rans of the establishment Australian Right, it’s the equivalent of a tribesman seeing that aircraft carrier crest the horizon. It inspires awe, and existential dread.
Take, for example, the Liberals’ recent announcement of cuts to Australia’s bloated public service. Putting aside the fact that within hours of the announcement by Dutton three other senior ministers had completely contradicted the details of the policy, that he’s even doing it demonstrates how deep the cargo cult has its hooks into him. Australia’s government works nothing like America’s. It isn’t even possible in any viable way to say, freeze the hiring of new Australian Public Service staff, or sack any of the ones already there. To do something even approaching what Trump has via vested executive authority would require nothing short of a revolution in how the Commonwealth executive actually functions, and it would unquestionably be challenged in the High Court. Every executive, of every Australian Government since 1901 has ruminated on reining in the power of the entrenched Canberra bureaucratic elite and they’ve all given up because the task is simply too expensive and too time consuming to entertain. Smart governments have simply diverted the energy of Canberra’s establishment bureaucracy toward more worthwhile ends while limiting its growth.
But the cargo cult is where smart goes to die. “DEI”, they chant. “We’re fighting DEI”. They don’t know why. They don’t even know what is stands for. They’ve seen it said by the sky people so they say it too. DEI. Dei. Literally Dei, Latin for Gods. The Australian political establishment is fighting Gods they don’t understand.
On some level, they probably know that simply repeating Trump’s rhetoric won’t physically manifest it, in the way the Vanuatuans knew that carving wooden headphones and traffic control towers wouldn’t manifest another cargo plane. But they do it anyway, shocked so immeasurably by what they can’t comprehend that they can’t control their reaction to it. Papua’s Vailala Madness was not only a social but a physiological phenomenon, the afflicted spoke in nonsensical tongues and thrashed their bodies around with nervous energy, “Iki Haveva”, in the indigenous tongue, “belly don’t know” in pidgin. A cultural shock so great it shakes the body into spasm.
There was a cargo cult amongst the Sioux as well, in response to the great westward expansion into the American frontier, they called it the Ghost Dance, a term coined by a Paiute prophet named Wovoka, who believed the American’s great trains would bring their dead ancestors back too, if only the faithful would dance around a fire for long enough. Perhaps it’s something ingrained in the Homo Sapien hindbrain, the urge to thrash about blindly when confronted with the reality of technology beyond our comprehension. There is extant footage of the Sioux Ghost Dance in the American’s Library of Congress, meaning that, ironically, some of the earliest recorded footage that exists of the Sioux is of them performing a ritual that was already a bastardisation of their pre-settlement culture. That’s the essence of what we’re seeing from our political leadership now. A dissonant, jerking dance of a dying culture, trying to appease Gods they don’t understand, and summon technology they can’t comprehend.
Any rational, objective assessment would conclude the Australian Right’s cargo dance is illogical. But logic is for advanced political culture, we’re still at the cutting out hearts to appease angry Gods stage. The dancing around the fire stage.
Logic doesn’t apply to cargo cults. Cargo cults manifest their way around reality, like scar tissue growing around the wound left behind by a profound cultural shockwave. “They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound,” says the hero at the end of the journey up the river. “Are my methods unsound?” asks Kurtz. “I don’t see… any method at all.”
We’re at the end of the river now, where savage tribes worship dark alien Gods, prophesying the return of chosen ones. Australia’s neighbours in the Indo-Pacific spent centuries worshipping deities far darker and esoteric than the white mind can comprehend, yet there’s something altogether more terrifying about what happened to them in the 1930s, when they started worshipping us. That’s what we confront now, in the waning days of Australian politics. You’re not going to be thrown into a volcano to appease a dark, foreign deity – you’re being sacrificed to a twisted reflection of yourself from the future.
On a long enough timeframe, in a vacuum, maybe we would have developed Trump on our own, just as the Ni-Vauatuans may have developed metallurgy, the wheel, mass systems of social organisation, volunteer armies, Republicanism, combustion engines. They could have made aircraft carriers on their own, give or take 200-300 years. How many years would it have taken us to even develop beyond simple progressive/conservative dichotomies to the point where Trump occurs, how many years would it have even taken us to develop something for a reactionary movement to emerge against? We’ll never know. The cargo cult is all a culture’s possible futures collapsed into one immutable present, one without agency, without control, the political Ghost Dance, the belly-don’t know.
The interesting thing about cargo cults is unlike other millenarian cults, is they actually work. The only reason we know about the Papuan Vailala Madness or the Vanuatuan cult of John Frum – is that we came back and brought our cargo with us. So maybe there’s something too it. Maybe if you pray hard enough, dance in the circle long enough, we really will get Donald Trump.
John Macgowan has been described by the News Corp press as a “colourful political identity” and by the progressive independent media as “a drug dealer and possible spy”. After working for the Liberal Party of Australia for 20 years he started a consulting business where he has represented some of Australia’s most popularly acclaimed accused rapists, war criminals, and corrupt property developers. He describes his ideology as “utterly insane and incomprehensible” and his political influences are Jonathan Bowden and Nick Land. He lives in Sydney. You can read his unhinged political commentary on @john_macgowan on X.
