During World War II, islanders built fake airstrips to summon planes that never returned. Today, we do something eerily similar - in startups, governments, and even science. This is the story of why we keep copying the ritual, while forgetting the reason it worked.
Welcome to Plain Sight by Wyzr, where we bring hidden patterns into plain sight. Every week, we explore stories and ideas that help us understand why we are the way we are.
Cargo Cults: Why the Planes Don’t Land Anymore
In 1945, as World War II came to an end, American forces withdrew from dozens of remote Pacific islands. For years, soldiers had built airstrips, flown in supplies, and interacted with local islanders who watched with awe as cargo planes dropped from the sky bearing food, medicine, radios, and tools.
When the troops left, the planes stopped coming.
But for many of the islanders, the logic seemed obvious. The planes had arrived when certain rituals were followed: flags were raised, men stood in formation, people spoke into metal boxes and waved glowing sticks. So they began to recreate the ritual.
They carved wooden headphones. They built air traffic control towers out of bamboo. They lit fires along makeshift runways and marched in formation, mimicking the soldiers they had once seen - all in the hope that the planes, and the cargo, would return.
Ofcourse, they never did.
Anthropologists came to call these efforts “cargo cults” - a phrase that now lives on as metaphor. A haunting one.
Because even today, long after the bamboo towers rotted, the cargo cult mindset is alive and well. We just dress it up with better design, throw in some VC funding, and call it culture.
Spend time in certain startup offices and you’ll see what I mean. The ping pong table is there, of course. So is the exposed brick, the neon sign with a motivational quote, the kombucha tap. There are standups every morning, an internal wiki, a founder who swears by atomic habits.
It all looks like innovation.
But scratch beneath the surface, and you’ll often find something hollow. No risk-taking. No deep work. No real intellectual independence. Just the aesthetics of creativity wrapped around the anxiety of conformity.
The rituals are in place. But the planes don’t land.
You’ll see this pattern repeated in the public sector too - especially in large-scale government programs where surface reform outruns structural change.
Take India’s push for digitisation in governance. Many departments now proudly display QR codes, mobile apps, and online portals. But in too many cases, these are just shiny new interfaces wrapped around the same old dysfunction. A salaried employee tries to withdraw their lifelong PF savings from the EPFO website - and after navigating multiple logins, broken links, and cryptic error messages, is ultimately told to submit physical forms at the regional office, which may or may not accept them based on arbitrary documentation rules.
The website might exist, and the form may be digital, but the overall experience still feels like the same old bureaucratic maze, just with a fresher coat of paint.
Or consider Swachh Bharat’s early years: lakhs of toilets built in rural areas, but many went unused because there was no parallel investment in behavioural change, water supply, or sanitation education. The infrastructure arrived. The outcomes didn’t.
It’s the bamboo runway, repainted with tricolour stripes.
This isn’t a problem of intelligence or intent. It’s a problem of imitation. And it’s deeply human.
We are wired to mimic what looks successful - especially when we don’t fully understand how that success came to be. Mimicry is efficient. It reduces uncertainty. It tells us: if it worked for them, maybe it’ll work for us.
But when you copy someone’s outcomes without grasping the structure that produced them, you get a cargo cult. A beautifully built runway that leads nowhere.
Physicist Richard Feynman famously coined the term “cargo cult science” to describe researchers who follow the surface rituals of science - the peer reviews, the published papers - without embracing its spirit of skepticism, falsifiability, and openness to being wrong. He warned that we are often seduced by the appearance of rigor, while missing the deeper humility that makes discovery possible.
You see echoes of this mindset even in places like modern astrology. It borrows the language of science - cycles, charts, calculations - and wraps itself in the aura of precision. But beneath the surface, there’s no testable model, no falsifiability, no mechanism to explain how or why any of it should work. It’s a cargo cult of the cosmos: mimicking the structure of astronomy, without its grounding in evidence. And yet, its appeal persists - not because it explains, but because it comforts. It gives us the feeling of understanding, without the burden of investigation.
And that warning applies just as much today - not just in science, but in business, governance, culture, even personal growth.
We copy Amazon’s working-backwards process, but not its obsession with the customer. We mimic Apple’s design, but not its decades of relentless iteration. We adopt the morning routines of high performers, but skip the years of discipline that made those routines meaningful.
We are building control towers out of bamboo, hoping they’ll summon transformation.
But the truth is, those planes came not because of rituals, but because of systems. Because of values. Because of years of first-principles thinking, uncomfortable experimentation, and slow, compounding trust in process.
That’s the part we often skip. Because it’s invisible. Because it’s hard.
So here’s a question worth pondering:
In your own work or life, what rituals have you kept, long after forgetting why they worked? What beautifully constructed runways are you maintaining - hoping the cargo will come?
Write to us. We’d love to hear your stories of imitation, transformation, and the moment you realized the plane wasn’t coming. We’ll feature the most compelling responses in a future edition.
What we’re reading this week
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
A bold and mind-expanding argument that true progress comes not from ritual or habit, but from explanations - deep, testable, falsifiable understanding. If you’ve ever wondered why some cultures unlock progress and others stall, this book will challenge and inspire you.
Hope you enjoyed this edition of Plain Sight.
If you did, do share it with a friend who might be busy painting their runway.
Until next week,
Utkarsh
