Boxes That Move on Their Own
A few days ago I saw a curious GIF.
In it, a clerk is sitting in a small shop. Everything looks normal until, suddenly, a piece of cardboard on the floor starts moving on its own.
The man jumps.
For a moment it looks impossible.
As if something invisible were pushing it.
But then the explanation appears: a cat hiding behind it.
And I thought that maybe this is how many beliefs begin.
Not because people are naive, but because this is how the human mind works.
When we see an effect without understanding its cause, we fill the gap with an explanation.
Sometimes we get it right.
Sometimes we don't.
Anthropologists have been studying this for a long time, but there are few examples as fascinating as the so-called cargo cults of the South Pacific.
One of the best known is the John Frum movement, on the island of Tanna, in Vanuatu.
During World War II, American troops arrived on those remote islands loaded with things that must have looked impossible to the local inhabitants: planes, radios, medicine, canned food, clothing, tools.
The cargo arrived, literally, from the sky.
But they didn't see the world behind it.
They didn't see factories.
They didn't see supply chains.
They didn't see ships.
They didn't see oil, steel, logistics, or all the industrial machinery that made that miracle possible.
They only saw the result.
And when the war ended and the soldiers left, the cargo stopped arriving.
So they did something deeply human.
They tried to reproduce what they had seen.
They built landing strips out of wood.
Improvised control towers.
Fake radios made of bamboo.
They marched in makeshift uniforms.
Not as mockery.
As ritual.
The idea was simple: if they repeated the actions correctly, the cargo would return.
It's easy to laugh at that.
But I think doing so would be missing the point.
Cargo cults aren't evidence of stupidity.
They're evidence of something far more universal.
When we don't understand the cause of a phenomenon, we tend to invent one.
A piece of cardboard moving without seeing the cat.
A storm before meteorology.
A disease before germ theory.
An eclipse before astronomy.
A voice before psychology.
What each person believes is, in the end, their own business.
But history reminds us that many certainties are built on incomplete information.
We all build explanations around boxes that move on their own.
Some people simply never find the cause.
The brain does exactly this when it invents reasons for choices we never consciously made, something I explore in the mind's press secretary.
The temptation to explain the unexplainable with the supernatural is centuries old, as I found reading a book on witchcraft from 1584.
And we keep filling those gaps with ever more convincing fictions, an idea I work through in this is my 42.
📬 Enjoyed this article?
Subscribe for the stuff that doesn't make it onto the blog — half-finished ideas, what I'm reading and listening to, behind-the-scenes notes, and the occasional rabbit hole. No spam, just things worth your time.