The Cargo Cult Mentality Behind “White Privilege”

Many of us are familiar with the metaphor of the “cargo cult.” The term itself was coined by the famous physicist Richard Feynman (who, ironically, didn’t actually use the term the way he had described it) in a speech he gave about transparency and integrity in science.  Briefly, the phenomenon of the cargo cult was observed in the South Pacific during World War II. Pacific Islanders would observe the Americans building runways and control towers, and soon after airplanes full of supplies would land and disgorge their contents of goodies.  The islanders would build their own bamboo mockups – runways, towers, even bamboo headsets for the “controllers” – expecting that planes full of food and medicines would come to them as well. Of course, none ever did.

Ultimately, cargo cults rested on a form of magical thinking, on the failure to understand the fundamental reasons for why a phenomenon was taking place.  This led to a miscomprehension about how one could obtained the desired benefits. It’s essentially a crude form of philosophical nominalism, where the form and appearance exist without grasping any of the underlying fundamental reality.

In many ways, the current progressive obsession with “white privilege” is essentially the same kind of thinking. For progs and professional PoCs, white “privilege” – access to the benefits of high civilisation obtained through high trust civil society, philosophy, science, technology, and all the rest – is just something that happened, something which white people lucked into without any merit or ability on their part.  It could just as easily have happened to anyone else, hence it’s “unfair” that whites get all the benefits of what their ancestors laboured to build.

The cargo cult aspect is essentially what the leftist appropriation of Western history and the invasion of our societies is about – because anyone could have done the West, anyone can keep the West going.  White, western Europeans and Anglos aren’t really necessary and since people (like runways and bamboo control towers) seem superficially similar, they can be considered interchangeable so that more pliable replacement populations can be brought in to keep the lights on while yet going along with the globalist program.

Yet, as western nations continue to import low-IQ third worlders, they will not be able to maintain the level of civilisation that they have hithertofore achieved. Cultures and civilisations require more than the presence of warm bodies.

An excellent example of this is found in the decolonialisation of Africa and other parts of the third world. It showed that you can build the infrastructure of western material civilisation and fill it with the spirit of western law and religion, but you can’t maintain it without Euros or Anglos. When the westerners departed, the streets and sewers and airports were left, but the “mental infrastructure” needed to purvey these resources into genuine societal success were lacking. Further, one of the most drastic lasting effects was to “brain drain” these countries, making them even less likely to succeed as societies by stealing away their relatively rarer resources of high-IQ individuals who can make societies function well.

The progressive obsession with viewing human beings as blank slates – free of all interference from genetics or inherited culture – is a fundamentally flawed way of understanding humanity.  Equally mistaken is the civic nationalism – often entertained by classical liberals and other notional conservatives – which suggests that by merely granting a piece of paper to someone from a radically different cultural or genetic group, you can turn that person into a good American citizen (or one of another western nation).

You can’t, however, and experience proves this.  In practically every case of immigration from the third world, the immigrants retain significant elements of their birth cultures and tend towards forming ethnic enclaves.  They distort their adopted societies by demanding (either directly or indirectly) that concessions be made to them, rather than conforming to their new homes.  They bring with them old tribal animosities from their homelands which create unnecessary frictions in their new societies.  If nothing else, the door left open to progressives to demand accommodation for immigrants through multiculturalism drastically warps the laws and customs of their host countries and allows for “entryism” at a national level.

Civic nationalism is the very quintessence of the nominalism that underlies this cargo cult mentality: we’ll take a non-westerner, give him a piece of paper that says he’s a citizen, and pretend that he becomes one of us merely by naming him as such.  Propositional citizenship (and by extension, nationhood) of this type is wishful thinking at its most destructive.

It’s completely cargo cult.  It’s the societal equivalent of building the bamboo tower and the bamboo headsets and thinking to use them to call down airplanes full of newly-minted good citizens truly devoted to the total and complete advancement of our societies.  No airplanes full of these people ever come, nor ever will.  At best, you may get some economic mercenaries who want to leech off of western wealth and prosperity, while hating the white westerners whose cultures and ancestors made it all possible.

Societal success is not something that “just happens.” Western nations were successful because they were filled with western peoples – peoples who combined unique religious, cultural, genetic, and linguistic characteristics into patterns that allowed them to build high civilisation.  To the extent that there is a “privilege” involved in all of this, it is one that can’t simply be transferred to others wholesale by progressives seeking to appropriate the external functions while dispensing with the fundamental materials that built the success which progressives and professional PoCs envy so much. Their cargo cult is doomed to failure, but threatens to destroy high civilisation while doing so.  Let us do whatever is necessary to see that this does not happen.