8.4 Why are your walls covered in pictures of parachutes? asked Tapio when he popped his head into my office one day. It’s to do with the Project, I told him; its overall … configuration. Oh yes? he said in his robotic voice. Yes, I repeated: there are all these strands, and they converge; and there’s an overarching roof — or, let’s say, membrane, skin — above them. And, I continued, warming to my theme, what powers the whole thing isn’t some internal engine, since it doesn’t have one, but rather the way its structure, due to the way it’s, you know, structured, generates kinetic energy as everything around it — in this case, the air — passes through it. I see, said Tapio; and he stared intently at the pictures and the words, the lines conjoining them, for a long time, his own mind whirring as its gears engaged with these. The main thing is, I told him, that (unlike a windmill) a parachute functions not in a fixed location but rather in transit from a point A (the aeroplane) to a point B (the assigned landing-spot on the ground); although these two points are in fact anathema — or, at least, exterior — to its own operation as a parachute: once the ground-target is attained, the parachute stops playing its role, just as, prior to the jump, it remains undeployed. Well, I continued, same thing with the Project: it has to be conceived of as in a perpetual state of passage, not arrival — not at, but between. Tapio nodded sagely as I made all this up. Was I lying to him? As I spoke, I didn’t even know.
8.5 Le Dupe. At one point in Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss recounts his meeting with a tribe who don’t know what writing is. This tribe’s chief, wanting to maintain his elevated status, takes up one of Lévi-Strauss’s pads and starts to scribble on it, figuring that his subjects won’t know the difference: he can con them into thinking that he’s versed in this activity. I’d often think about this episode as I compiled my dossiers for clients. I also thought, while interrogating my informants, of a later part of Tristes Tropiques, in which the subject of duping crops up once more. Having encountered endless tribes who aren’t “strange” enough — tribes who, once decoded, lose all their mystique — my hero finally alights, far up some river, on a tribe so fucking strange he can’t make head or tail of them. This exasperates him too: incomprehensible is no better than banal — it’s just its flip-side. But maybe, just maybe, he reasons, somewhere in between these two extremes — in between understanding so completely that an object’s robbed of its allure (on the one hand), and (on the other one) not understanding anything at all — there might be some “ambiguous instances” in which the balance is just right. These instances, he tells us, would be godsends; they’d provide us with the very reasons, or excuses, for our own existence. But wouldn’t these instances, too (he asks), be cons? Who’s the real dupe of the confusion sown by observations which are carried just far enough to reach the border-line of the intelligible, only to be stopped short there? It’s as though he, Lévi-Strauss himself, were now playing the role of the phony, hand-chancing, pen-wielding chief. Will his own subordinates, he wonders — his readers, that is — be taken in? Or is he (we, he writes, nous) — are we the dupe ourselves, tricked into a situation in which we’ll never be satisfied until we’ve dissipated what he calls a residue that keeps our vanity, and us, ticking along?
8.6 Vanuatans have another trademark custom: the Cargo Cult. Unlike Tower Plunging, which dates back centuries, this one has very recent origins. When, during World War Two, the US Army commandeered sections of their island for the war-effort against Japan, they built airstrips. Big cargo planes landed on these, from which not only military hardware but also more mundane objects large and small — cookers, fridges, tinned food and the whole inventory of goods and appliances that supported the Americans’ extended presence there — were unloaded. The natives watched the ground crews bring these metal beasts to heel by waving ping-pong bats at them; watched them disgorge, with the help of forklifts and pneumatic platforms, their great stomachs’ bounty; watched the spinning radar beacons conjure more and more of them from empty skies; heard, wafting from open control-tower windows, transmissions swimming in a sea of static. For them, all these things appeared to be elaborate rituals, ones whose outcomes were both concrete and desirable. Who wouldn’t want a fridge in a tropical climate, or tinned food where foraging and hunting are arduous? When the war ended, the Americans decamped: dismantled all their masts and runways, packed up their fridges, washing machines, record-players and radios, and disappeared into the sky from which they’d first materialized. The Vanuatans, suddenly bereft of all the benefits of Western gadgetry, took consolation in the fact that they had learnt the rites: like anthropologists, they’d studied the bat-waving routines, learnt the choreography of military salutation, noted down the chains of tower-to-pilot scripture, and so on. They had the sequences, the code. Over the following months, and years, and decades, they laid new matted strips down, constructed beacons and antenna-topped control towers, ping-pong bats and forklift trucks alike from balsa and bamboo. And, rotating, waving and generally manipulating these, they enacted, or re-enacted, all the ceremonies that had caused the bounty-laden planes to appear in the first place. If we do it enough, their logic went, the planes will come again. Perhaps not now, or next week, or next month — but one day, they will come.
8.7 The anthropologists who first reported on these cargo cultists treated them with a mixture of amusement and derision. Special chuckles were reserved for the ceremonial name, or title, that was given to the emissary who (it was hoped) would be the first one to return, and whose appearance would herald the onset of a new age of material prosperity: John Frumm. The name, the ethnographers had ascertained through interviewing older islanders, was derived from that of one of the regular cargo handlers or bat-wavers during the golden era of the occupation, who identified himself as simply John from America—a name the Vanuatans, in their patois, had contracted to John Frumm. But when a second wave of ethnographers came to the island, and revisited, in the light of the new research they conducted there, the first wave’s studies, they criticized the colonialist arrogance of their predecessors. More than that: speaking of motes and beams, they urged humility. For hadn’t the West also been awaiting a re-arrival from the skies, and not just for fifty years? Didn’t we, too, have our own, Nazarene John Frumm? They were, of course, correct. Nor was this Messianism confined to Christians. It strikes me that our entire social organism — its economy, its social policy, its civil order — that these don’t implode, hurling us all into a wild abyss of plunder, rape and burning, is down to their being reined in, held in alignment, by a yoking to this notion of the Future; and humanity, its gaze fixed on this apparition hovering just over the horizon, is thus herded along the requisite channels, its anarchic inclinations kept in check. Certainly, each brief the Company worked on, every pitch we made, involved an invocation of, a genuflection to, the Future: explaining how social media will become the new press-baronage, or suburbia the new town centre, or how emerging economies would bypass the analogue to plunge straight into the post-digital phase — using the Future to confer the seal of truth on these scenarios and assertions, making them absolute and objective simply by placing them within this Future: that’s how we won contracts. Everything, as Peyman said, may be a fiction — but the Future is the biggest shaggy-dog story of all.