Canada Cargo-Cults America, On A Ten Year Delay

Just when I thought there was nothing more for me to say about Canada, something came up. It nearly perfectly illustrates two things that I’ve been pondering about with regards to Canada. First, that Canada follows every American trend, but with an approximately ten year delay. And the second, is that when they do, they cargo-cult it.

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First, an aside on cargo-culting. The term “Cargo Cult” was used in a very high profile essay by greatest scientist of all time, Richard Feynman. Pulling from that essay:

In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

I have no idea if this is an actual thing that happened, or just a racist generalization from almost a hundred years ago. But it’s an extremely useful example of an important concept: the idea of following the form of something without understanding it’s nature, and not achieving the correct outcomes.

This is everywhere in society, and despite the framing enticing us to judge people who think this way as ‘stupid’, it’s actually quite evolutionarily adaptive. No person has the ability to understand everything. There’s not enough time to learn it, and their brains aren’t physically big enough to hold it. People must necessarily use shortcuts, simplifications, heuristics, etc., to deal with the infinite complexity of the world. Now, if you don’t understand something, but that guy does, then “do what that guy does” is a pretty reasonable shortcut.

But as things get more complex, this heuristic starts to fail. When things are simple, mimicry is very effective. When I go to my gym, I don’t know anything about fitness science. But I see that the trainers are swole AF, and they clearly know what they’re doing, so I just watch them lift, and mimic it. It works.

(Well, +/- the shockingly large number of people in my gym doing TRT. My gym has a strategic partnership with a mail-order testosterone clinic and even did the work to let us pay with HSAs. 🤣 But this doesn’t refute my argument; I just mimicked that too)

But as a thing, or a system, or an organization, gets more complicated, there accumulates more and more details that are not Legible¹ to an outsider. And so, when someone attempts to mimic something complex, they fail to properly mimic the things they can’t see.

For a somewhat contrived example, consider a Canadian who has finally realized that the only way to save his country is the Fourth Box. Of course, all handguns, and all semi-automatic weapons, are illegal in Canada now, so he’s a little SOL. However, he’s something of a garage hacker, and figures he can manufacture a gun in his home.

So, he downloads the CAD files for AR-15 parts, and 3d prints them. They are identical in dimensions to a real firearm. It should work, right?

He takes it out to some Crown land to shoot at targets. He loads a round. He pulls the trigger. A few hours later, an ambalamps siren is heard, three days later his parents are sobbing at their doorstep in front of some cops, and three weeks later I’m laughing at that retard on Brandon Herrera’s next episode of Dumb Ways To Die

You see, he cargo-culted the gun. Sure, the parts were within micron tolerances of each other. Except for one small problem: he made it out of plastic; plastic is not even going to try to contain 50,000 PSI, and vents it into his face. Just like this. But he didn’t have his dad nearby to render emergency aid, so he died. Because he cargo-culted the gun. He copied it as best as one could, but he didn’t understand its function, and didn’t see a critical element: that the weight and material strength of the the materials used to build the weapon are important.

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Before the main event, what exactly do I mean by “Canadians Cargo-Cult America”? My absolutely favourite example of this was a very hilarious moment where the former governor of the state of Canada had some untoward pictures leaked to the public

I know this is the ultimate in Internet Pedantry, but it really bothers me how people treat “brownface” and “blackface as the same thing. They really are not.

Canadians, constantly inundated with racial politics from American social media, are mimicking US racial dynamics. But they have no actual understanding of them. In this case, the conventional explanation for why blackface is offensive, is because of the existence of minstrel shows in history, staged plays where white actors would dress up as extremely offensive racial stereotypes of black people in order to mock and belittle them. The explanation goes, this was such a painful moment in US history, that black people suffer emotional harm when they see modern references to it, because of the historical connection.

For the sake of argument, let’s take this conventional narrative at face value. I immediately notice a problem: Canada never did that. The cultural connotation of 19th century racist stereotypes does not exist organically in Canada. Therefore, blackface cannot be racist, in Canada, because it doesn’t carry the same negative meaning.

Canadians, cargo-culting America, know that blackface is supposed to be bad, and so they get mad at it and treat it like it’s bad. But they do not understand the complex cultural connotations that make it bad, so nobody really feels it. Nobody really means it. And so it doesn’t get tractions.

Sure enough, if an American politician did that, his career would be over and he might get murdered. If Justin Trudeau does that, three days later, whoever is Gen Z’s Rick Mercer is joking about it. Because the Canadian activists were only cargo-culting outrage, it didn’t stick.

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I could go on and on forever about how many things that Canadians are stupid about, and blindly (fail to) mimic America on. I’m pretty convinced it’s not possible for a purely Canadian tech startup to ever actually succeed, for these reasons, for example. But there is one incident in particular that I want to discuss, that is rather personal to me.

In short, someone very close to me has decided, for reasons I can only begin to speculate about, to attempt to ‘cancel²’ some other people very close to me, using the most basic bitch of tactics. Out of respect for these peoples’ privacy, I will not be saying what is actually said, but suffice it to say that this person is dutifully complying with the orders he received from COMINTERN in the 1930s³

The victims of this event are understandably extremely upset at it, but as I was talking to them about it, my gut reaction was to roll my eyes.

I probably don’t need to explain why to anyone who is reading this blog, but essentially: I lived in California for most of the 2010s. Everyone accuses everyone else of these things, all the time, with zero evidence. I have been publicly accused of this multiple times. On three separate occasions, there were literal conspiracies of people trying to get me fired by spreading rumours like this (they never got me, hah).

In the social context in which I live, accusing people of being Secret Hitlers has been so dramatically overused, that nobody even cares anymore. Sometimes, in person, in real life, face to face, when there’s some current outrage about fascism or whatever, I will say this, even to liberals: “Well, the fascists I know don’t think that”, and it doesn’t even faze them when I casually drop that I have friends who self-identify as fascists⁴

Here in America, we’ve already had ten years of this bullshit, and I can tell, at least in Austin, that nobody believes it anymore. Nobody gives even one single solitary shit about being called a Nazi. Nobody takes it seriously at all. And so my first gut reaction was “Jesus Christ, have you leafs not yet figured out that all of this is bullshit? Stop watching the fucking news”.

And yet, the speaker, the victim, and all of the witnesses, seem to be taking it very seriously. I’ve alluded to the explanation for why (hint: it’s the title of the article): every person involved in this interaction, is a Canadian citizen who lives in Canada. And Canada is ten years behind the United States

Ten years ago, when this kind of insanity was threatening my life on a regular basis, everyone back home (as well as, tbh, most of the Americans outside of California) said this was absurd and insane, that nobody takes it seriously, and that I should stop being neurotic and hysterical about what a handful of retards think.

Ten years later, the woke moral panic in America is very obviously coming to a close, and now every single person in Canada is acting like 2014 Californians. Because Canada Cargo-Cults America, On A Ten-Year Delay.

This is infinitely fascinating to me, because we live in a world with the internet. For the low low price of 30 seconds of time and zero dollars of cost, you can get direct primary source information about literally everything that is happening in America, at any level of granularity you want. Growing up as an autistic outcast whose only friend was my ‘puter, I always dreamed of a world where the internet would make information free, and we’d all be better off for it. Now I live in that world, and yet, misunderstandings still abound.

Smart Canadians would use this amazing power of Googling stuff to understand that the US has just finished going through it, recognize what it was, recognize the dynamics of it, recognize where it ends up, learn some important life lessons, and then just skip the bullshit part. Instead, Canada in 2025 is more Californian than California was in 2012.

This looks EXACTLY like Sunnyvale, c. 2017

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But the other half of my thesis remains undemonstrated. Where is the cargo cult? This, I confess, is a quite a bit more subjective, more opinion that fact, but I swear I’m going somewhere

One thing I eventually reasoned out while living in California, is that exactly zero of the woke outrage is real. For a crass example, consider how mad people get when you call someone a nigg-

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I just got a call from my lawyer. He’s advised me that 13% of Americans don’t understand the use-mention dichotomy, and that I should play it safe writing this blog post. The editorial staff apologizes for this inconvenience.

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To focus the example a little bit more, consider how mad liberal Californians get when you call someone the n-word. I don’t think there is any person in California who actually is offended at being called that⁵. I don’t think anyone is actually hurt by this. It’s just a fucking word, after all.

No, I think the more parsimonious explanation is that, for complex cultural reasons I’m not going to get into here, American people have instead internalized that “you can’t say that word”. And this prompts an extreme amount of performative outrage when people hear it. Not because anyone is actually hurt by it. But because the small minority of sociopaths out there have learned that you can legally murder someone as long as they said that word first, and they’re sociopaths; murdering people gets them hard. Not to mention all of the obvious financial incentives.

Yes, I am going to stake out the extremely controversial (note: not sarcasm) position that “nobody in America (who matters) actually gives a shit about any of this; they’re all just using it as an excuse to be cruel”.

Well, my experience back in Canada last month has led me to a rather shocking conclusion: I think Canadians missed the memo about how this is all just a power trip, and they actually believe the woke retardation. In other words, they’re cargo-culting American outrage culture, without understanding how and why it exists. And the end result is that a bunch of people in the only Canadian city to ever be invaded by Nazis during World War II believe that half of their neighbours are actual fascists who will come to their house and shoot them in the head someday. It’s absolute insanity.

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And that’s the 1267382671th Fundamental Difference between America and Canada. In Canada, if someone accuses you of being German, everyone actually believes it. In America, people are so burnt out on false accusations of that, that some of them are starting to think maybe the 20th century history books aren’t entirely accurate.

1. “Legibility” is an extremely important concept that I will cover in the future, but if you want to get a head start, Scott Alexander wrote about it before he turned into a cucked communist.

2. This is another future article, but I absolutely loathe the euphemism “cancelled” to refer to the victims of hate mobs. It sounds so bland and minor. I could have people stalk me, and phone every company I work for and lie and tell them I dropped a hard r, and they fire me, and I can never work again, and I starve to death in poverty under a bridge, and the current term for what is essentially my indirect murder is “cancellation”. Fuck this gay Orwellian doublespeak.

3. I couldn’t easily find a suitable source to link to, but if you know, you know. If you don’t, it’s the order where the communists told everyone to accuse all their enemies of being fascists.

4. Hilariously, at the moment the only one I haven’t lost touch with is an extremely black man from Nigeria.

5. To be clear, I don’t think anyone is offended merely by hearing the magic word. I think people are legitimately offended by that word all the time, when it’s deployed in a context to offend them. But if I eg. scrawl that word on a table at the cafe, and later someone sees it, I don’t believe that that actually hurts anyone, and everyone who says they’re offended is lying to power trip over you.