Cargo Cults and the Disorganization of America

Social forms decay. This truism often elicits sweeping historical narratives that resurrect ancient names and obscure metaphysical disputes, while ignoring the most relevant social units—the organizations we interact with on a regular basis.

Many of today’s most powerful organizations, from nonprofits to corporations, have been insulated from the immediate repercussions of decay by monetary policy, or the financialization of the economy. This results in the proliferation of unproductive organizations that look healthy from the outside. The first Boeing 737 MAX crash happened in October 2018, and no one mentioned it on the company’s Q4 earnings call. In March of 2019, Boeing achieved an all-time high stock valuation, then two weeks later every civil aviation authority worldwide grounded the 737 MAX. Professionals who work in decayed organizations learn the habits of decline and then spread them into new organizations like a disease. Jeff McNery, the CEO who oversaw the development of the 737 MAX, worked at Procter & Gamble, McKinsey, and General Electric prior to joining Boeing. The modern professional differs from the “organization man” of the past in how frequently he switches jobs and organizations, enabling more rapid contagion.

Americans are funneled into bureaucratic organizations as students, employees, citizens, or consumers, and this process both sorts and shapes us, resulting in the elevation of particular character traits and cultural trends, as I’ve previously written in these pages.¹ These characteristics are further formed by whether the sorting organization is in a state of ascent, or decay. Many cultural and political concerns are connected to the unique characteristics of decomposing organizations. Without vir­tue, monarchy decays into tyranny, aristocracy decays to oligarchy, democracy decays to mob rule, and the organization decays into the cargo cult.

The term “cargo cult” originated after World War II to describe a pattern of behavior found among indigenous tribes on Pacific islands. During the war, military airfields were quickly created on remote islands and then abandoned. The inhabitants continued to try and summon planes filled with cargo by recreating structures that looked like airfields. These activities often transformed into a type of religious ritual. Stripped of all sense-making context, the word cargo took on magical meaning. It is easy to think of these cults as a historical curiosity, but they represent a recurring pattern of thinking, and a difficult problem that Americans must solve.

Cargo cult thinking can be described in two overlapping ways. First, it is the confusion caused by mistaking the process, input, or symbol with the goal, output, or referent. Second, it is when part of a system is mistaken with the entirety of the system. Almost all modern organizations operate with the same efficiency best practices, such as establishing repeatable processes, a formal system of advancement, and the division of labor. These practices work, but they also contain within them the tendency toward cargo cult thinking.

This observation has been made before. Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir Technologies, wrote a blog post titled “Cargo Cult Companies” in 2024. Likewise, the 1992 book Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay by academic Howard Schwartz enlisted the image of the cargo cult to describe NASA prior to the Challenger disaster. In Schwartz’s telling, the promise of space exploration inspired such romantic notions of optimism that it undermined the type of serious engineering culture needed to be successful. NASA developed a Disneyland culture that caused its management to plod away from reality. One account of the Challenger mission described how the crew were picked as “symbols of NASA’s commitment to carry America’s cultural rainbow to the stars.” Boeing executives echoed similar sentiments in the years leading up to the 737 MAX catastrophe. In a separate essay on the subject, Schwartz argued that the steps of corporate decay are “the institutionalization of fiction” and “personnel changes in parallel with the institutionalization of the fiction.”²

Schwartz believed that already in the 1990s American industry had become “incapable of competing with foreign enterprises,” and argued that finance played an outsized role in decay. “Finance, rather than operations, offers the greater narcissistic possibilities. . . . Operations, the productive process, tends to temper grandiosity. . . . Not so with finance. I suggest that the financial worldview can be understood as a kind of latter-day Pythagoreanism in which the world is seen as mere instantiation of number, and as imposing no bounds on the imagination’s flights.” The same year this was written, economist Michael Boskin said, “Potato chips, computer chips, what’s the difference? A hundred dollars of one or a hundred dollars of the other is still a hundred dollars.” Two years later, China devalued its exchange rate.

Critics of liberalism often argue that liberals take credit for the fruits of non-liberal societies and then use that to justify the advancement of ideas that erode the social capital necessary to produce those benefits. “End of History” liberalism was a type of institutionalized fiction that allowed liberals to downplay or forget that the global financial system was dependent on China. Recent concern over America’s inability to make warships, and specifically, the lack of a workforce with the necessary skills, is only the most visible and undeniable example of a much larger and pervasive problem. In the aggregate, the problem of the cargo cult organization is the problem of systematically teaching society counterproductive habits and eroding the general know-how of the average American.

This may help explain the strange feeling of unreality that pervades so much of American life and may also help explain why suddenly every organization is called an institution.

Organization and the Birth of Bureaucracy

Most conversations about how mass organizations impact culture and politics revolve around the term “institution,” but the overuse of the word causes more confusion than clarity. The concept of an institution has severe limitations, and the surging popularity of the word is often a way to hide from more uncomfortable conversations. Few seem to notice that the word has two definitions that refer to discrete phenomena. The first definition refers to a significant practice within a society, like family, marriage, or religion. The second refers to an established organization of public importance, like a bank. In colloquial use, the distinction is not acknowledged, and the two definitions are combined into a single expansive category. Here are a few items that are packaged together in the category institution: your marriage, the CDC, your church, BlackRock, the Constitution, the state, the rule of law, political accountability itself, and DraftKings. The word functions to launder legitimacy from civilizational pillars to the political whims of any organization that employs more than five people. The problem with enlisting word games to mask a legitimacy crisis is that it has no effect on the general population and only serves to confuse public intellectuals. A political order can be legitimized through tradition, or through rational-legal means, but when an order founded on the latter becomes irrational and at odds with the spirit of the law, a pivot to tradition requires more sophistication than just spamming public discourse with magic words. Referring to any enterprise that wields political power as an institution leads to a common trap.

When “our institutions” behave irrationally, irresponsibly, or illegitimately, political commentators always try to identify the outside forces that have corrupted the organization. In Revolt of the Public, for example, Martin Gurri argued that the internet destabilizes institutions by creating an adversarial relationship between those who work inside them and the outside public. Many others, like Chris Rufo, have written about the intellectual genealogy of modern leftism, and how it “marched through the institutions.” A more urgent version of this hypothesis is the “competency crisis,” or the idea that “changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent.³

These accounts all contain truth; however, they obscure the possibility of a classic horror movie cliché. Perhaps the call is coming from inside the house.

Common organizational practices often generate a culture of neuroticism, cynicism, and generalized lassitude. “Institutional knowledge” or “institutional memory” refers to the idea that an organization’s collective processes, experiences, and information act as a force multiplier that raises up the individual. Stripped of jargon, organizations have traditions that inculcate habits. Institutional knowledge can, therefore, be something negative as well as positive. Organizations can develop unhelpful traditions and teach bad habits. At Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater, a culture built around “principles” resulted in employees monitoring each other’s bathroom habits. Though extreme, this example is indicative of a common phenomenon. Attention to the internal dynamics of organizations helps explain why so many develop a cargo cult culture.

The word “organizations” is almost too vague to be a helpful category. The Power of Organizations, an introduction to organizational theory written by Heather Haverman, defines organizations as “bounded collections of people and material, financial, and informational resources” that have common goals they pursue over an extended period. Both the FDA and Amazon are organizations, and the word does not refer to specifically public or private entities. It is also clarifying to note that organizations are political units in and of themselves, and that those who navigate to the top are often a type of politician—and usually better at politics than the aspiring podcast hosts in congress. Employees in an organization have incentives that are often invisible to those outside, and therefore rational behavior at the individual level leads to what looks like irrationalism at the organizational level. Outsiders see for-profit businesses hiring legions to perform fake jobs, but internally directors need to demonstrate that they can lead a large team to get promoted to vice president. The primary tool used to align individual and organizational incentives is bureaucracy.

The word “bureaucracy” has such strong connotations that it can be misleading. The word popularly refers to something negative, and to something related to the state. Yet bureaucracy is not a synonym for government. Washington, D.C., is filled with conservative nonprofits dedicated to abolishing state bureaucracy that are themselves bureaucracies. It also does not refer to inefficiency. Organizations that use Agile, Lean Six Sigma, Jira, Confluence, or any formal administrative process to divide work, share information, and coordinate are all practicing bureaucracy. Max Weber used the word to refer to the most rational way of running an organization, and bureaucratization was therefore an inevitability. Bureaucracies have features such as authority hierarchies, formal administrative rules, the division of labor, and formal means of hiring. The principles of bureaucracy originated in the military and then migrated to the state and finally to business. A large percentage of the American middle class performs jobs that are strictly bureaucratic in nature. A clear justification for bureaucracy can be found in an unlikely place.

In Federalist no. 10, James Madison argued that the constitutional system had to be created because “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm” of government. Bureaucracy is inevitable because it mitigates variance in personnel quality. Chipotle doesn’t hire master burrito-makers; they create a system that anyone can run. Ultimately, bureaucracy is a product of scale, and almost every Fortune 100 company is extremely bureaucratic. Employees at large technology companies spend their days filling out Excel sheets about tech tickets about Asana tickets about sprint plans. If anything, the digital era can be seen as the migration of bureaucracy into interpersonal space, and the modern corporation is a place where people use the most sophisticated communications technology in human history to talk to people who are sitting five feet away. Despite being all around us and being the dominant paradigm for how we organize ourselves, the word bureaucracy is only ever used negatively. Anything described as bureaucratic is bad. This points to an important truth.

The inherent danger of all bureaucratic organizations is the tendency to make the process the goal. Processes are established in order to achieve an outcome in an efficient and repeatable manner, but over time, the process becomes a proxy for the outcome, and the completion of the process is confused with achieving the outcome. This is a common and well-known problem. In 2017, Jeff Bezos wrote a letter to Amazon shareholders about organizational decay, and he warned employees to remember that “the process isn’t the thing.” The book On the Psychology of Military Incompetence by Norman Dixon discusses the exact same phenomenon in the context of military drills that began as an attempt to achieve an end but slowly became the end. A RAND Corporation report on the decision-making failures of the Afghanistan war, concluded that “with no clear definition of success, bureaucratic inertia took hold, extending the conflict and enabling focus on mechanical details of its execution rather than its ultimate intent.”⁴ This tendency can have more devastating impacts when combined with major organizational processes, such as formal advancement.

Cargo Cult Leaders

As cargo cult thinking takes root within organizations, the leadership selection mechanisms get warped, and those who rise through the ranks may be proficient at the process and not the thing. This is best exemplified by a recurring pattern in military history: peacetime generals get fired when war breaks out. It turns out that rising through the ranks of a military does not perfectly correlate to competence in war. Dixon’s On the Psychology of Military Incompetence is helpful once again. Dixon argues that the generals who presided over the most spectacular military failures in British history all fit a personality pattern. Certain personality traits allowed these generals to pass through various selection filters but also made them poor battlefield leaders. In the language of evolution, selection filters can produce maladaptations. Many of the traits Dixon identified were specific to the unique nature of militaries, and their relationship to violence, but two larger lessons can be abstracted and applied to most hierarchical organizations.

A structured hierarchy promises the possibility of rising through the ranks and will therefore attract motivated people; there is a difference, however, between those motivated by the need for achievement and those who are motivated by the fear of failure. Those motivated by the need for achievement are fueled by the desire for professional excellence, or a genuine love for some particular domain. Those motivated by a fear of failure are driven by the desire to protect their self-esteem and, according to Dixon, their “achievement-motivation is pathological in origin.” Social opinion weighs heavily on how these people view success, and therefore they are less likely to contradict or disagree with those who outrank them. When these people are elevated to leadership positions, they exhibit a peculiar relationship to risk-taking.

Leaders motivated by a fear of failure may prefer to lose with the crowd than take a risk, but they might also display a bombastic version of risk-taking. Dixon writes, “the person who fears failure prefers tasks that are either very easy or very difficult. If they are easy he is unlikely to fail; if they are very difficult then the disgrace attaching will be small, for no one really expected him to win.” Dixon argued that certain military disasters could be explained as a general’s attempt to spare his ego by asking his men to take on impossible tasks. The superficial trappings of bold leadership can be used in service of a more fundamental aversion to risk. WeWork was a real estate business with a flawed business model, but the leaders insisted it was a technology company that would change the world. The more the nature of the business became clear, the more it pursued messianic ventures, launching WeGrow, which was supposed to bring in a new era of education, and WeLive, which would usher in utopian communal living. An organization led by those who are motivated by a fear of failure might have a conformist culture where everyone is encouraged to follow the crowd and trends, while simultaneously hyping up “moonshot” projects and various promises to “reimagine the world.”

The second lesson from Dixon’s book is that the process of rising through the ranks might paradoxically strip a person of the most important leadership virtues. Since 2020, our society has dropped most pretenses about merit, and openly selects based on race, sex, or TikTok-inspired micro-sexualities. For example, in a 2020 interview with Bloomberg, the CEO of Citigroup publicly bragged about the “ugly truth” that the bank hires based on race or sex; in 2024 it “remains the only firm in the KBW Bank Index that trades below its tangible book value.”⁵ From a practical political standpoint, it is often better to remain silent than critique meritocracy at a time when few believe in it. Yet isn’t it curious that the postwar meritocratic system failed so quickly?

The SAT was adopted at scale around 1950, and in 2020 prestigious universities dropped it in a fit of ideological mania. Seventy years is nothing. John Alden arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620, John Adams joined the Continental Congress in 1774, and this same family remained a pillar of the American ruling class until Henry Adams died in 1918. The pre-meritocratic ruling class weathered multiple crises for almost three hundred years. A system that is defined as “rule by the capable” was incapable of lasting more than a single lifetime. Why?

British military history provides a hint. Military officers used to come from a class raised from birth to be “gentlemen,” and when the army democratized it sought to just mass produce this ideal. The goal was to have the best of both worlds. The officer ranks would be open to all, and the military would train them in the spartan morality of responsibility and “guts.” The opposite happened. Dixon writes that the officers became more feudal in nature, more elitist toward the enlisted men, and more prone to embarrassing displays of self-aggrandizement. “It seemed that all that remained of his training in the mind of each recipient was a faulty syllogism: Officers are gentlemen; I am an officer; therefore I am a gentleman.” Dixon’s faulty syllogism echoes both Christopher Lasch’s observation that American meritocrats have the vices of an aristocracy without its virtues, and Jeff Bezos’s warning about the process being mistaken for the goal. People come to believe in the process, in the sorting machine, and then become insecure when they rise themselves and realize they do not live up to this fantasy. In a book about the decline and dysfunction of General Motors, John DeLorean wrote that a manager “promoted by the system is insecure” because he knows he was promoted for reasons other than perfect competency.⁶ The problem with moralistic critiques of meritocracy is that they often rest on the premise that the sorting machine works, that it is even possible to create a machine that selects for capable rulers. Instead, everywhere you look you find a version of Dixon’s syllogism.

Consider job title inflation. A 2023 Business Insider article reports that “since 2019, employers have tripled their use of the word ‘lead’ in early-career tech jobs, upped their use of ‘principal’ by 57 percent, and cut their use of the word ‘junior’ by half.”⁷ In 2022, accounting firm Ernst and Young promoted a record 1,033 associates to the title of “partner,” but first they stripped the position of its traditional definition as someone who has equity.⁸ This also became a feature at many law firms, where “shareholding partners” enjoy much higher status and pay than “non-shareholding partners.” There are legitimate reasons why an organization would inflate job titles. Smaller organizations inflate titles to attract high-level talent, and larger organizations, such as banks, inflate the titles of client-facing jobs to increase customer confidence. Nevertheless, job titles today operate under the logic of performance art, and everyone knows they’re fake, yet they persist precisely because everyone is committed to the scam.

The mass production of the title “founder” is an interesting example. Most entrepreneurs, or business owners, do not call themselves founders, and the title is only used in a certain segment of the economy. When the public hears the title, they think of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg because it only ever makes sense in retrospect, after someone has founded an empire. Yet entrepreneurs who exist as extensions of the venture capital ecosystem insist upon referring to themselves as founders. In Max Weber’s time, entrepreneurs began calling themselves the “first official” of a corporation to mirror how the leader of the new bureaucratic state referred to himself as “first servant.” For Weber, this signaled that bureaucracy had moved from the state into the private sector. Today’s use of the word founder signals something similar. Entrepreneurship itself has become bureaucratized, and there is now a cargo cult version of an entrepreneur, whose primary motivation seems to be to attain the title of “founder.” If the business sells business-to-business software-as-a-service, it’s described as “harnessing the power of AI to reimagine paperweights,” burns through $3 million a week, and its end goal is getting acquired by a slightly larger business that does the exact same thing, then the person running things is concerned with being called a founder, and talking about founders, and generally repeating the word founder until you have to back away.

Aristotle argued that leadership requires a unique level of practical wisdom, and therefore the virtuous ruler always exercises a wider range of virtues than the average person. Ruling is then expansive and unknown. Translated into corporate-speak, ruling is always a white-space endeavor. War may be unique in its ability to dispense with all convention, but the problem of peacetime generals may be the problem of all systems of formal advancement. Any attempt to create a “sorting machine” is an attempt to narrow the list of virtues necessary for leadership. But a leader is, by definition, the person who decides what to do at those moments when established processes and paths cannot be followed. Decaying or declining organizations produce a maladaptive elite, and as this scales it becomes clear that the cargo cult aristocrat mistakes a form of primitive superstition with expertise.

Breaking the Spell

Cargo cult thinking becomes more interesting when connected to the theoretical insights of French philosopher Jacques Ellul. In The Technological Society, he argued that Western nations stopped believing in any value other than efficiency, and all human activity was transformed by a myopic rationalism. Ellul called this form of rationalism “technique.” He wrote that technique “does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end;” rather, it is “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute effi­ciency . . . in every field of human activity.” Bureaucracy is technique applied to the organization of people. Ellul thought that technique first appeared in primitive societies as a belief in magic.

The spell requires steps to be repeated without change: toe of frog cannot be added before eye of newt. Perhaps the tendency of organizations to descend into cargo cult thinking is connected to something foundational. Perhaps certain types of rationalism contain a latent form of irrationalism. This is just a little too cute and clever to embrace wholeheartedly, but it might help explain some of the most egregious forms of cargo cult thinking in our culture. Rather than a path toward a more enlightened society, the rise of big data has created a class of primitive people who “freaking love science” and treat the word “data” as a sacred symbol imbued with magical and moral connotations.

The cargo cult organization mass produces a personality type that uses “data” to flee from reality. In the 1950s, William Whyte’s Organization Man discussed the culture of scientism within mass organizations, and in our age this tendency has accelerated and created a stunted and juvenile orientation to the world. Millennials were taught statistics 101 platitudes about “data versus anecdotes” and responded by setting up a mental model where reality does not exist outside of a spreadsheet. There was an entire genre of entertainment about using “data” to “debunk” common sense in favor of the counterintuitive, as exemplified by the cynical TruTV program Adam Ruins Everything. The term “vibecession” became popular among the commentariat over the past four years as a term of art for devaluing the public’s negative perceptions of the economy. The data looks good; therefore, everyone is wrong. A curious person might ask how it could be that so many people are so wrong about their daily prospects. It turned out that the Bureau of Labor and Statistics is a decayed organization, and its 2023 job data was so incorrect that it required the largest downward revision in over fifteen years. In a shocking turn of events, the New York City mayor’s office found that the vibecession also extended to crime. Just like with the economy, everyone’s perception about their day-in-day-out life is wrong, and based on misinformation, feelings, or simply a lack of appreciation for Excel graphs. If a New Yorker witnesses a meth-smoking psycho scream at subway passengers, they can rest assured that the crime data is down, and there is an entirely different spreadsheet to track these mere quality of life issues. In the era of big data, once obscure critiques of scientism have become practical problems for management.

Jeff Bezos has a saying that draws attention to our society’s cargo cult relationship to data: “When the data and the anecdote disagree, the anecdote is usually right. There’s something wrong in the way you’re measuring it.” This sounds almost sacrilegious to the professional class, but it’s just obvious practical wisdom. If the customer tells you that something is broken, you better investigate it before you dismiss the concern. The larger the data set, the more difficult it is to create measurements that can track every possibility. In a functioning organization, executives use data to inform curiosity and concern. In a cargo cult organization, “the data” is at best a stalking horse used to mask inertia, and at worst it is treated as a type of magic totem delivered by strange gods. On Face the Nation, Anthony Fauci famously responded to criticisms of his executive decision that “If you’re attacking me, you’re really attacking science.” One does not have to rely on metaphor or hyperbole to see how the dawn of artificial intelligence is ushering in a new era of cults.

There is no single solution to the problem of cargo cult organizations that is satisfying. Larger societal policies like divorcing white collar work from the college system would probably be most impactful over time. But there are three management developments that could signal future paths.

Amazon is an interesting use case for “reform” approaches to organizational decay because it has tried to build a culture explicitly oriented toward preventing decay. Amazon’s entire corporate schtick revolves around preventing “Day Two,” or “sleepwalking into oblivion.” If Amazon decays, it will help answer whether the problems of bureaucracy can be solved through mechanized means, or whether this only results in “the committee to reduce unnecessary committees.”

Palantir’s “flat structure” offers a more unconventional attempt to fight organizational decay, and its success potentially offers a way to alleviate the “rising through the ranks” phenomenon. In a blog post about the internal culture at Palantir, a former employee wrote about the flat structure of the company. “Everyone had the ‘forward deployed engineer’ title, more or less, and apart from that there were five or six Directors and the CEO.” However, the same blog post also described the result of this “no titles” culture as a place where “fiefdoms” developed. “People came in and out of fashion very quickly. . . . Because everyone had the same title, you had to gauge influence through other means, and those were things like ‘who seems really tight with this Director right now’ . . . somebody would be very influential for awhile, then mysteriously disappear.” The positive aspect of bureaucracy is that it creates an elaborate form of manners designed to mitigate unpleasant or unproductive “palace intrigue” politics. The more that an organization lessens bureaucratic processes or titles the more it may increase political dynamics.

Paul Graham’s essay “Founder Mode” represents the most radical departure from standard organizational practices, and the most likely to result in unproductive politics. In 2024, Graham summarized a speech given by the AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky. Both men called on entrepreneurs to eschew common organizational practices and take a hands-on approach to running a business. The essential point is that organizational inertia develops as soon as an organization scales, and leaders must personally fight against it. Successful entrepreneurs who scale their companies find that the conventional wisdom on how to run an organization is wrong. Managers, as opposed to founders, are told to hire top people, leave them to run their area of the organization, and to never get involved with details or “micro-manage.” Graham writes that many entrepreneurs find this means “hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.” Entrepreneurs discover the Cargo Cult aristocrat phenomenon, or as Graham says “c-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world.” The new consensus view of entrepreneurs is that American business practices amount to value-extracting performance art. Graham’s essay is a call to arms for business owners to reject standard bureaucratic practices and be change agents.

It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at how Graham frames “Founder Mode” as a grand discovery of new modes and orders. Just wait until Silicon Valley hears about Napoleon. It’s also easy to see how this could become a new institutionalized fiction to justify small-souled tyrants. “I’m not a socially maladjusted dork who can’t retain employees without relying on visa sponsorship; I’m in my founder mode era.” However, it is still interesting because it is a rejection of the idea that organizations are a type of machine that can be run perfectly without human agency. Organizations are neither clockwork machines nor “snake pits” where striving bureaucrats simply flatter superiors. The most charitable and optimistic reading of founder mode is that it represents the rediscovery of virtue. It is a practical demonstration of how claims of procedure or rationalism can themselves become elements of an institutionalized fiction that obscures the role of charisma. This dynamic is at play at every layer of an organization, and it is not just founders or CEOs who can push for change.

Today one must be an optimist if only to avoid becoming a cliché. Organizational decay may look like a subspecies of the never-ending conversations on decadence, and the decline of our civilization. But if one squints, it is a source of hope. Reorganizations are a daily occurrence, and the solution to all inertia is energy.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 1 (Spring 2025): 228–40.

Notes