Cargo Culture

awaiting the manna delivery god

Now California Wants to Force You to Ride the Magical Mystery Train

STEPHEN GREEN | 4:00 PM ON MAY 23, 2024

It takes a special kind of stupid to mandate electric vehicles that many people can't afford, charged on a power grid that can't support them. But beyond even that, it takes a special kind of magical thinking to mandate electric trains that haven't been invented.

Welcome to California, the land of magical thinking.

By law, "all new passenger cars, trucks, and SUVs sold in California will be zero-emission vehicles [ZEV] by 2035." ZEVs include EVs, hydrogen-powered vehicles, and plug-in hybrids (but not regular hybrids). If Sacramento gets its way, starting in 2030, freight trains will have to meet the same strict standards.

While it escaped my attention at the time, in November the California Air Resources Board (CARB) issued new regulations "that would require all freight trains to be in a zero-emission configuration by 2035. By 2030, the rule mandates that diesel locomotives that are 23 years or older be retired, even though a locomotive can have a useful life of 39 years or longer."

Passenger trains will have to go full ZEV by 2030 and freight trains by 2035. The problem is that nobody makes a ZEV freight train. It also seems unlikely to be a good idea, but stick a pin in that thought because I'll come back to it momentarily.

The closest thing to CARB's new standard is a battery-electric locomotive made by a firm called Wabtec. But it's only a demonstration engine at this point; it only reduces fuel use by 11% because it has to be used in tandem with traditional diesel engines, and therefore still doesn't satisfy CARB.

>>>>

If there's one thing diesel does very well, it's generate absurd amounts of towing power. Want to pull a hundred cars of freight? Diesel. Need to deliver a semi's worth of unassembled IKEA furniture? Diesel. Towing your 26-foot camping trailer up the mountains? Diesel.

Batteries suck for towing. The additional mass drains them far more rapidly than regular driving does. I can't imagine how many locomotives worth of batteries it would take to pull the massive coal trains I see moving along the Front Range, but most of the ones I see already use four or five diesel engines.

So either California is going to require the most ridiculous number of (non-existent) electric locomotive engines, or they're going to have to electrify their entire network of train tracks. I don't even know if that's possible. But I am laughing at the thought of what would happen when the train hits the Nevada state line and the power runs out.

What can account for seemingly educated people enacting mandates that defy logic, physics, experience and common sense? Why do they demand the impossible, and grow so furious when they’re denied it?

I suggest that they see the amazing wealth and prosperity of the western world and covet it, but have no idea how that wealth was produced, and no knowledge of how to make their own, so they’ve invented an imaginary cornucopia that, upon proper appeal and appeasement of Mother Gia, will magically reward them with earthly and spiritual delights. Or perhaps it’s the opposite; certainly at least some of them see prosperity as wicked, and reject it for both themselves and the world, and seek to destroy it. Either way, a form of religion is involved, and with religion comes ritual.

The article below explains cargo cults as “ a crude attempt to make sense of the world”, and isn’t that what we’re seeing today? Having discarded everything that used to comprise western culture: religion; science; literature, they’ve been left adrift, and need a replacement for what humans have previously used to explain their world. They’ve settled, at least for now, for magic.

Sapiens.org What Cargo Cult Rituals Reveal About Human Nature

When Indigenous communities throughout the area had their first encounters with colonial forces, they marveled at the material abundance the foreigners brought with them. During World War II, when many Melanesians worked for U.S. and Australian military forces, they observed soldiers who never seemed to engage in any productive activities, such as fishing, hunting, working the land, or crafting anything. All they did was march up and down, raise flags, chant anthems, and signal toward the sky.

And when they did that, metal birds appeared and dropped all kinds of goods for them. The Indigenous observers concluded that the strange rituals were causing the cargo to arrive.

With the end of the war, the military bases were abandoned and the goods ceased to arrive. To get the cargo to return, local chiefs began organizing ceremonies that mimicked the rituals of the troops. Soon, elaborate myths and theologies developed around those rituals. Surely, the cargo must have been a gift from the gods—their own ancestors. After all, who else could be capable of producing such wealth? The foreigners had merely discovered the rituals that unlocked these treasures.

These remarkable religious movements became known outside of Melanesia as “cargo cults.” The term first appeared in print in an Australian news magazine in 1945 and was soon adopted by many anthropologists. Others in the field raised objections over the term, pointing to its Western-centric origin and pejorative connotations.

Ethnographers stressed that these movements were about much more than just material goods. They saw them as revitalization movements, acts of resistance against colonial intervention and missionization. By the middle of the 20th century, Indigenous communities throughout the area had experienced more than a century of European and later Australian, Japanese, and U.S. colonial and military interventions. These intruders had taken control of their land and coaxed or forced them into slave labor. Missionaries had also established a kind of moral police that punished those who practiced traditional customs not in accordance with Christianity. Within that context, ethnographers argued, cargo cults had emerged as a way for local leaders to consolidate their power, relieve social stress, and/or unite communities under a proto-nationalist ideology or a demand for political autonomy.

But the emergence of cargo cults also reveals something else: the universal human need for ritual. Examined from this perspective, the practices of Melanesians may begin to look more familiar to those of us living in other parts of the world.

✽

EARLY ANTHROPOLOGISTS SAW RITUAL as a crude attempt to make sense of the world. They often disparagingly described Indigenous beliefs and practices as “prelogical,” like those of young children. The assumption was that one day these groups of people would “grow up” and shed their backward ideas. Ironically, however, in reporting on what they saw as “primitive” or exotic, anthropologists often unwittingly described the behaviors of people in their own societies—revealing some truths about human nature in general.

Research shows that humans have intuitive expectations about ritual efficacy that operate unconsciously. From early childhood, we are drawn to ritualization. Young children are obsessed with routines and patterns, are keen on imitating others, and appear to believe that ritual actions have causal effects. For instance, studies have found that preschoolers think birthday parties cause other children to grow older.

Adults, too, have similar intuitions, even if they don’t realize it. In a study conducted in the U.S., my colleagues and I showed people videos of basketball players shooting free throws. In half of those videos, a player performed a pre-shot ritual like spinning or tapping the ball. In the other half, we switched the camera angle to show the same shots without the ritualized parts. After the ball left the player’s hands, each video stopped, and participants were asked to predict the outcome of the shot. As it turned out, they expected the same shots to be more successful when they were ritualized.

Why would we have such expectations if a ritual doesn’t actually cause cargo to fall from the sky or make our free throws more accurate? This question has bemused social scientists for a long time. But while ritual, by definition, does not have a direct causal outcome, this does not mean it has no function at all.

On the contrary, as I explore in my new book, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, rituals play key roles across human societies, helping their members soothe their anxieties, connect, and maintain social order.

✽

MELANESIAN CARGO CULTS FLARED up during times of crisis. When colonists started arriving in the area in the 17th century, Melanesians saw their ways of life upended. The invaders imposed changes that devalued their customs and norms, and colonists’ military strength left them feeling powerless to react. Faced with the pressures of modernization and capitalism, their traditional exchange systems, based on barter and gifting, now seemed obsolete. And while previously self-sufficient, they suddenly felt relative deprivation compared to the foreigners’ opulent lifestyles. It was against this backdrop that cargo cults emerged. And indeed, such movements occurred more commonly in those areas that faced greater encroachment from the colonizers.

This reflects a broader pattern: People are more prone to turn to ritual in stressful contexts such as war, illness, or natural catastrophes.

Indeed, experiments show that ritual can be an effective coping mechanism. For example, in research conducted with Hindu women in Mauritius, my colleagues and I found that performing prayers at a temple helped the women reduce stress (both subjective and physiological) caused by contemplating natural disasters. Likewise, cargo cult rituals may have helped Melanesians cope with the uncertainty of their rapidly changing conditions. They also served crucial social functions. By bringing Indigenous people together to enact them, these rituals forged a sense of common identity and helped create a collective conscience.

Of course, nothing in these rituals will save us from starving, but westerners, especially Americans, are grievously obese anyway, so where’s the harm?