The first major aspect of the modern Cargo Cult is money.
Barter, which had the advantage of knowing the good or service you were receiving existed, was limited by substantial flaws. You had to have something the other person wanted, the other person needed to want your product and timing mattered. Barter economies, if they exceeded a local village, required complex multilateral trades to get products and services you wanted.
We got around this by creating money.
Over time, the commodity we used to trade changed to resolve competing use problems. Salt, beads, gems and gold coins were common.
Then we reached a point where we discovered that carrying commodities was cumbersome. We would store gold in third party vaults, called banks, and the banks would issue scrip for claims on the gold. People realized they could trade in the scrip instead of the gold. This is the origin of paper money.
While not bad in and of itself, banks realized that people generally didn’t ask to look in the vault or ask for their gold. So unscrupulous bankers, frequently backed by the State itself, would produce claim scrip for gold that didn’t exist. The bank could now receive value from the productive economy without producing anything in return.
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