The Gods Must Be Crazy

I felt that I wanted to expand upon my earlier post about humanity that stemmed from a discussion about Brave New World.  The Gods Must Be Crazy is a South African cult film released in 1980, that shows the interactions between the Bushmen of Africa, and the South African city dwellers.  The point of the movie is to show the downside of our "civilized" ways, and to show that the bush people are the truly civilized people.  When the city people go on a safari in the Kalahari Desert, they do not know how to survive, or what to do in any circumstance, as they have been bred in a society of greed and safety.  They are so stressed about everything in life, and have huge problems that span from work, to social problems, to problems with greedy people like Guerrillas.  On the other hand, the bush people live a happy life.  They know the land around them, and do not need to build things like bridges and buildings, and do not need to terraform, or go to school for the first half of their lives to figure out how to do these things, they learn about the land around them through day to day experience, and through watching their parents.  They do not have any great worries, and are able to survive off of their own will.  If the city dwellers were left in their position, they would not be as well off.  The first major disturbance in the lives of the Bush people is when a Coca-cola bottle is dropped from a plane into one of their cities, and it ignites the greed of South Africa.  The quest of Xi, a bushman, is to take that bottle to the end of the Earth and throw it off in order to have life go back to normal.  While he goes about this quest, he meets a wide variety of people, and although these people act like they are better than him, and think of him as uncivilized, he is the only person in the movie who is truly civilized and smart, as he is a good person, and knows how to survive.  He also is the only one who understands that materials are not as important as people.  This connects to Brave New World, as it shows that the hunter gather society is truly the way humans are meant to live, and that it is more human to grow up in one of these villages than in a modern town, as we were evolutionarily adapted for one, and the other was created by us and has made us machines for society, and not the humans who have existed for the past 100,000 years, and who still exist today.