The Cargo Mindset and Our American Empire

We need to learn to let go.

Do you ever get worried when you hear really smart people talking about their plan for a better world? Do you ever get nervous about people with means, with lots of stuff and lots of leverage, devising unique strategies for fixing things like global warming, global hunger, global peace and well, global anything?

I do. When I hear people like Douglas Murray extolling expertise and those like himself who have it, I am reminded of all the authoritarians of our 20th Century and their very detailed plans to fix things. At the center of American culture today I think we have an expertise problem which isn’t really about knowing stuff at all. It’s really about an inability to let go of all you know in favor of all that is good. Our expertise problem is more akin to a hoarding problem which has lots in common with greed. All of this I call The Cargo Mindset. And well, this is an attempt to investigate how all of this might be tearing us apart.

So, let’s start with America and the West. The New World. Let’s start with this Roman, Protestant, scientifically driven, individualist leaning, legacy we call modernity. And let’s start by investigating a very unique New World scientist named Rupert Sheldrake.

Sheldrake is a world renowned PHD in Biology from Cambridge and a guy who has spoken at just about every university that has ever opened its doors for such things. Sheldrake’s work has won him something called “the most spiritually influential living person award”, a weird award that he has won ten years in a row. I’d also like you to know that this world-renowned scholar is so renowned that Google Scholar rates him a 40 on the high H index, and an indomitable 120 on the i10 index of scholarly humans. No, really. It’s true. (And yes, these indices actually exist).

Rupert Sheldrake is very good at science it seems. Sheldrake matters to modern people. But something interesting is going on with Rupert Sheldrake. His honesty has allowed him to take his science down pathways that end in books about angels and spirit-physics. His work has pitted him against such materialists as Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer. This mega-scientist has realized what kind of world The Enlightenment has wrought. Sheldrake is waking up and seeing anew this thing we call modernity.

Dare we say that he is woke?

I’M SO AWAKE!

I tell you all of this because Sheldrake, and his odd but interesting spiritual scientism, can help us understand what I am trying to convey in this article about the cargo mindset and the American empire. First, Sheldrake makes clear in his writing that the Enlightenment has established certain truths by which modern societies operate. He has outlined what modern people believe. Here’s my version of his top ten list of modern foundational truths:

1. Nature is mechanical, predictable.

2. Matter does not have consciousness. You may have painted that rock as a kid, put eyes on it and given it a name, but that was the joke. Rocks are rocks bro.

3. The laws of nature are fixed. Period.

4. The amount of matter and energy in the cosmos is fixed. What entered at the big bang is what exists now and all that will ever exist.

5. Nature is purposeless, it does not have telos.

6. Inheritance is entirely material in nature. You are what your parents gave you as genes and cytoplasm. You have a hunchback because mom had a hunchback. Thanks mom.

7. Memories are stored in your brain. What you remember is a stored material reality dancing about in the form of molecules and atoms and stuff.

8. Your mind is in your brain. Consciousness is circumscribed by a bone called your skull. No brain, no mind.

9. My private psychic thoughts cannot be transmitted to another person unless done so materially, through sound or scribbling or some sort of material transmission. Smart people don’t believe in psychic hocus pocus.

10. Medicine is mechanistic and it's the only kind that works. You know, like the Covid vaccines.

There you have it. The truths we modern people hold dear. The canon of modernity. What you see in this list is the working template for those who know themselves to be enlightened by The Enlightenment.

But wait, many will say, “I’m modern and I don’t believe those things.” To that I’d say: Are you sure? Are you sure that growing up in a scientifically inclined, atheistic leaning secular society, you’ve managed to elude what our culture has been handing you for 300 years? Are you sure you are the chosen one who swims outside the pond in which you were hatched? We’ve imbibed this stuff! It’s in us like oxygen, and yet as Sheldrake points out, we are waking up to a sense that something is off. We are waking up and challenging the materialist canon, and ironically that’s why Sheldrake has created the list. His list is meant to debunk The List. He uses this list these days to point out how poorly we’ve done at aligning our modern scientific beliefs with reality. And for that he got cancelled on Ted X.

But wow, what a list. I think it is the bedrock of the place we call America. The bedrock for the place we call Portland, or Gary, or London or Paris. It’s the bedrock of NASA, and the NSA and the CIA and the DEA and the DOD and all the other alphabet soups you can muster in any given capitol; city, state or federal. These are the Light People truths, and I think all of us, some more, some less, use these “truths” to navigate the world and do so naturally, without thought, faithfully. It is clear, no matter how woke you are on this day in 2025, that these articles of faith have crept into the hearts of westerners from sea to shining sea. Atoms, genes, cytoplasm, Honda’s, quikrete, fingernails, iron ore, dollar dollar bills y'all. Matter matters, and the people who make matter, matter the most.

As CS Lewis says, we humans have always loved magic, and the new magicians are the scientists who give us our stuff.

But here’s the problem, and it’s a very real problem for more than 60% of Americans who claim to live by truths that I’ll call religious in this article: If these materialistic principles have indeed taken root, how are religious people supposed to seek a seemingly immaterial kingdom in a haze of material wealth, a haze that I like to call The Cargo Mindset.

To answer this I bring you a 4th Century philosopher (and canonized saint) St. John Chrysostom.

St. John (Chrysostom means golden tongue in Greek) was a doctor of the Church. He was also famously disagreeable. He sought truth, told truth and lived truthfully. This was how he blazed his way through this world, seeking first the kingdom of God. These kinds of people are not easy to get along with. St. John was such a person.

From his homily On Poverty we find this:

What is it to be rich? To be poor? I say the rich man is not the one who has collected many things but the one who needs few things; and the poor man is not the one who has no material possessions but the one who has many desires for many things…

He goes on regarding matter:,

So if you see someone greedy for many things, you should consider him the poorest of all, even if he has acquired everyone's money. If, on the other hand, you see someone with few things and fewer needs, you should count him the richest of all, even if he has acquired no things.

Things. Stuff. Atoms. Matter. Cargo. St John’s not a big fan. In fact, it’s much worse than that. He says that the more things you acquire the closer you get to diavolos.

Diavolos sounds bad because it is. In the Greek, diavolos is dissolution, or that which comes apart. It is what death looks like. It is what Diablo loves most. And for John Chrysostom, the more stuff you hold on to the closer you are to the demons.

I told you he was disagreeable.

But he’s not done. He says:

The rich man had his ship full of merchandise, and it sailed before the wind. But do not be impressed: this rich man was hastening to shipwreck. Why, you ask? Because the rich man refused to unload his cargo with discretion.

Yikes. For us modern matter loving sons and daughters, the thing we’ve been taught to trust is the very thing that will weigh us down and take us into the dark depths of diavolos. People who love cargo will sink when the storm winds arise. Our cargo invites the dark below, it brings a man closer to destruction. Matter lovers don’t know how to unload their cargo discretely and intentionally, as one might bandage a bleed, or ingest a healing medicine. But Chrysostom is telling us that unloading what we have is medicine. It is the beginning of hospitality. It is the hospital, in fact.

And so think again of Sheldrake’s list. Rupert Sheldrake, a recovering Light Person (a lover of the Enlightenment), tells us that we moderns have ten core beliefs about reality. He tells us that if you look closely those ten things are really just one thing, and that the one thing is that matter is all that matters. Get it while you can. St. John, this very Old World person, tells us that matter only matters when you are able to give it away. Hoard it and you will die. And that makes me think of the great American television show called Hoarders. Have you seen it? May I share if only for a moment?

Hoarders is a show for voyeurs who want to watch what happens when people acquire, accumulate, and refuse to get rid of their stuff. Hoarders are these people. The show tells us the story of what happens when stuff happens for years and years. And what happens is gross. Rats happen, dirt and grime and insects and diavolos and dissolution, that’s what happens. People of all stripes become consumed by the things they collect. The other thing you see on that show is a team of specialists brought in to rescue the hoarders from themselves. And how do these rescue teams go about rescuing the hoarders? You guessed it, by having them give away all of their stuff.

It’s a crazy show but a very apt image of the illness Saint John talks about and the pitfalls of a world taught to value stuff. And just so you know, hoarding is a very western disease. West Africans don’t have hoarder problems. Just saying.

And that brings me to the empire we call America. We are upside down. If Sheldrake and Chrysostom are right, it means that almost everything we’ve been raised to believe about America assists in our demise. Cargo is killing us, and if you don’t believe me go to a party with strangers and just watch people introduce themselves. What is the first question asked of everyone at most get togethers in America?

“What do you do for a living?”

This is our question in the material West, it is our way of knowing who we are. “How do you make your wealth and also, thanks for helping me understand your cargo.” That’s our way to the truth of things. Too cynical? I don’t think so. Other cultures ask different questions, especially those oriented by pre-Enlightenment foundational truths, and none of them are about what you do and what kind of cargo you have. All of these introductory style questions are about your family. In West Africa the Bambara sound like this, “Hello, who is your mother, who is your father, how is your family, what is your last name?” In the Caucuses it sounds that way too. And though none of this is proven science, wherever Sheldrake’s top ten foundational truths show up, so do greetings that turn quickly to questions about stuff.

Yet America, like all things worldly, is waiting and groaning to be redeemed. And redemption is possible. The New World will be redeemed when we re-gift all that we’ve been given. We must give our time, our money, our things and our dreams to our neighbors, and we must give as much of it as we can. That’s how we must live. Max overdrive hospitality. Max overdrive healing.

And human beings can do this. I know. I’ve seen people do it during bloody civil wars in Georgia and Sierra Leone, in tiny villages where people wore socks for shoes in the winter, offering me the finest meal they could muster, even as they went hungry for the week. I have rolled into villages that have eaten the same lunch for months, no variety, and watched as the women took time to make me a delicious soup, special, just for me. I once saw a man give up his bed, at 3am, didn’t even know my name, choosing to sleep on the floor at the foot of his own bed, no blanket, no pillow, just curled up on the dirt so I could sleep on his mattress. He was a Muslim by the way.

How we relate to others in the world must look more and more like a mystical gifting and less and less like a Machiavellian land grab. Earth is stuff too, and we should probably want to control less of the earth, and not more. We can heal by giving things away. I know, all of this sounds very naive. But when you think about how the God of the Christians works, it is anything but naive. It’s just reality. It’s how things are designed. Saving the world with a war, spreading democracy with a coup, turning Gaza into a shopping mall and ending poverty with an app, those are fantasies. Those things are the hallucinations a those who trust in their cargo. The cargo mindset, however, is for losers, and it seems like a good time to let it go and stop trying to build yet another Babylonian tower.

Our stuff is killing us. The American Empire needs to dump its cargo and heal.

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