Today's column refers to and distills, some themes I've been exploring for a number of years.Our politics revolves around a societal rejection of modernity and its challenges. That modernity is the central crisis of our national experience, isn't my idea, it's Randy David's. See this summary of our political behavior from notes I took of one of his talks, and see this exploration of modernity in the last seven paragraphs of one of his presentations.I have been writing off and on on modernity and our political system since 2007, such as in this entry, Paradox of Modernity, from the defunct blog John Nery and I alternatingly wrote back in the day. I took up this theme in 2014 in this article for Rogue Magazine: The unbearable burden of being. And again in 2015-2016 for the elections. First here: The Presidency and the Crisis of Modernity and then here: What’s at stake: A Modernizing Nation, or a Never-Never Land?As for Cargo Cults, I first explored this in 2008, in trying to understand the curious lack of ambition I noticed in some of our more succesful countrymen: A lack of ambition, a Cargo Cult culture, and gaming the system.And then again in 2017 exploring one subset of the Marcos political base, essentially the Marcosian Cargo Cult Believers: Manna from Marcos.