The Cargo Cult of "Hard Work"

The term "cargo cult" has been used to refer to "complexes of ritual" among indigenous peoples of the southwestern Pacific intended to bring material goods from the skies--with a stereotyped version of this an extremely isolated people who had had no contact with the modern world happening to see a cargo plane drop some package, finding goods in it which are perhaps useful or at least fascinating, and then performing rituals intended to make the plane come back and drop more of those goods upon them.

I will pass no judgment on whether the writing about "cargo cults" was or was not good social science that provided an accurate representation of what went on in the societies it described. However, the idea that people go about comparable behavior--engaging in acts whose leading to material gain can only seem based on "magical thinking"--seems well-evidentiated in the modern world. Thus is it ever with the self-help quackery, and the fascination with the minutiae of the behavior of the "successful," invariably bound up with a spirit of emulation.

"That guy on the cover of Forbes drinks five Cokes a day? I'd better start doing that right now!" thinks a certain kind of idiot. And so does it also go with the rhetoric of "hard work." Whatever else one may say about the importance of such work popular parlance, and especially the exhortations to the young or simply the dissatisfied to advance themselves, invariably use those two little words in a magical, non-rational way rather than as part of any sort of rational explanation of how value might be created, or, the different and not entirely synonymous thing they really care about, how individuals have become rich.