From long-time PFS member Jayant Bhandari, who spoke at PFS 2024 on “Understanding India”: Jayant Bhandari, “The Third World’s Cargo-Cult Modernity,” LewRockwell.com (Nov. 2, 2026).

The Third World’s Cargo-Cult Modernity

November 2, 2026

For most of my life, I have watched the Third World supposedly emerge. Roads seemed to improve, universities multiplied, incomes rose, smartphones appeared, elections became more elaborate, and Western technology penetrated ever more deeply. The euphemism “emerging markets” came into use, carrying within it the assumption that eventual emergence was somehow baked into the cake.

Yet modernization and civilization are not the same process.

The mistake is easy to make because civilization is most visible through its products. We see the airport, the university, the constitution, and the skyscraper. We assume that acquiring these things means acquiring the civilization that produced them. This assumption becomes particularly seductive if we regard human beings as blank slates and imagine that installing civilizational software in the Third World is merely a matter of education and the transplantation of Western institutions.

A society can import the machinery of modernity without developing the habits of mind that made modernity possible: truthfulness, causal reasoning, conscience, self-command, trust, honor, morality, and the ability to subordinate immediate advantage to principle.

The result is cargo-cult modernity. The visible objects and rituals of an advanced civilization are reproduced in the expectation that the benefits will follow. Such a society sees the object, not the process; the result, not the discipline; the symbol, not the civilization that produced it. Yet the underlying psyche remains largely untouched—or deteriorates. Instead of transforming the society, the imported machinery is gradually adapted to it, amplifying tribalism, might-makes-right, amorality, and irrationality—the uncivilized core of the Third World.

Then the roads begin to wash away—or perhaps they had always been washing away while attention remained fixed on headline-grabbing new construction. Universities become centers of political activism, superstition, and indoctrination rather than learning. Institutions become increasingly predatory. Elections produce worse and worse politicians. One begins to realize that there was no inner structure capable of sustaining the imported forms of Western civilization.

The modern façade had merely put lipstick on the pig.

The apparent ascent therefore contains its own reversal. Material prosperity may enable greater indulgence, disorder, and self-destruction; technology may give older instincts greater reach and efficiency. Modernization itself becomes a kind of Penrose staircase. One seems always to be climbing, yet somehow returns to the same level.

India exemplifies this pattern. Investment conferences and financial magazines have for decades presented it as a country on the cusp of rapid growth and transformation. Yet somehow it remains perpetually on the cusp. The promised transformation is always about to arrive; all the good things are always in the future.

Those making such forecasts rarely stop to ask why the earlier promises failed. If they did, they might be forced toward a far more disturbing conclusion: that what is missing is not capital, technology, infrastructure, or opportunity, but the civilizational core required to make growth cumulative and sustainable.

This is hardly a marginal problem. Roughly two-thirds of humanity lives in the Third World, and that proportion is rising.

The problem becomes visible long before one reaches the level of governments, universities, or grand development projects. It appears in the smallest transactions of everyday life—in speech, promises, and claims about reality. A society’s relationship with truth can be seen in something as simple as whether a man can say, “I do not know.”

Ask for directions in India when you are lost, and you quickly learn that the problem is not merely ignorance. A man may confidently point you down a road he knows nothing about. He gains nothing from the lie. You lose time, fuel, and patience, but he has escaped the tiny embarrassment of admitting ignorance. Speech has not been used to connect with reality. It has been used to preserve face for a few seconds.

Such small lies reveal something enormous: truth has no independent standing. About a year after moving to the UK, I had an epiphany: people were telling the truth for its own sake. It had taken me that long even to recognize what I was seeing because I had no mental framework for it. Recognizing it was only the beginning. Reengineering my own psyche would take decades, with almost every small change producing its own period of mental disorientation.

Language itself can reveal how differently truth is understood. Consider the expression “white lie.” In English, it means a small falsehood told to spare someone embarrassment or hurt. Hindi rendered the expression literally as safed jhooth, yet it came to mean the opposite: a blatant, transparent lie. The words traveled; the moral distinction behind them did not.

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