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The Gods Must Be Crazy
1980 · Film · 109 min
Directed by Jamie Uys
A Coca-Cola bottle dropped from an airplane raises havoc among a normally peaceful tribe of African bushmen who believe it to be a utensil of the gods.
6 positive9 neutralfrom 15 commenters
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18 comments on Hacker News
Pre-education is swinging too far in the opposite direction for your own argument. Jacobus Uys the guy who wrote The Gods Must Be Crazy was sixty when the film came out in 1980. He watched the entire shift from the machine age to the nuclear age to the information age. His required childhood education in the 1920s and 1930s would've been six to eight years with highschool as optional. His parents who were children in the 1890s likely would've had education be entirely optional. He lived through the change from school being a privilege to being required and watched as it grew from six to eight to twelve years. The film itself is literally about the dichotomy between a post-agrarian tribe and nuclear age civilians and how less than a century separated most of the world from being one before they became the other. He wasn't reaching back to some pre-modern past, he was commenting on the rapid expansive changes he had seen during his own lifetime.
There’s a movie about this called The Gods Must Be Crazy. Highly recommended.
We’ve optimized some problems at the expense of others. It is not necessarily obvious that the trade offs are a net positive.
I’m not sure a net positive strategy even if these society level dynamics were amenable to central planning or management which they pretty clearly are not, would be possible.
Ultimately we’re bound by thermodynamics. We as individuals are capable of finite energy output, that constraint aggregates and emerges at a societal level, it doesn’t disappear.
We have optimized pathways to access food, the food is full of pesticides, refined carbs, and burns oil into the atmosphere for every foot it’s moved, microplastics from the packaging is in our blood (cf NIH). We have access to medicine, we have stress and food that makes us sick. We have access to clean water, we have pharmaceuticals in our water supplies.
Unfortunately if you have a family the calculus makes contemplating the alternative sort of a non starter. A great movie about that is Moquito Coast.
Isn’t that The Gods Must Be Crazy?
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0080801/
Yes, often. Sometimes I'll look at a throwaway item of packaging, and imagine all the engineering and design, material science and raw materials needed to construct a "single use" item such as a plastic bottle.
What seems of no value to us would have been amazing to someone from the past. What is thrown away today could be considered a priceless artifact in 2000 years (well, maybe.)
I'm reminded of that film, "The Gods Must Be Crazy!" If you haven't seen it, it's well worth a look.
Spoiler > A discarded glass cola bottle is found by a tribesman who discovers it has many abilities: it can hold water, it can crush grains, it is a weapon, it can start fires (lens effect), and it is even a musical instrument, by blowing into it.
To the tribesman it's an artifact sent by the gods. To the outside world, it's just a glass bottle that's been thrown away.
That old movie you're talking about... Is that The Gods Must Be Crazy?
i prefer the phrase "anti-apocalyptic." Because by designing an energy efficient laptop/phone, less lithium/capacitor resources are manufactured and everyone can have one, unlike that single coke bottle in that 80s movie, "The Gods Must Be Crazy"
Have you seen the movie "The Gods Must be Crazy"? I don't know if they're a good example but the !Kung seemed to live an idyllic life of ecological and social harmony.
If you want to see what hunter-gatherers are like the first part of the movie "The Gods Must be Crazy" is worth watching. The !Kung also live in the Kalahari. They are desperately poor in material wealth from the modern POV, yet they don't know it. They are incredibly happy (also from the modern POV.)
It's a great movie, well worth watching.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Must_Be_Crazy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C7%83Kung_people
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My question is, How do we get from here to there?
Not how to become hunter-gatherers (there's not enough land for 8,000,000,000+ people to live in the old way) but rather how do we organize ourselves to only have to work ~15 hours a week and still enjoy life?
Bucky Fuller thought that what he called "Design Science Revolution" was a viable path:
> Fuller advocated the design science revolution as an alternative to politics, seeking to optimize planetary resources for the benefit of 100% of humanity. He coined the term synergetics to explain how design science could create rich returns, such as how "energy income" could be harvested from the environment. His main premise was that nature's existing and omnipotent order must be allowed to guide human designs, if they are to survive and thrive as a species.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_science_revolution
We have the technology now, but the social and political will seems missing to me.
It is. And you’re in it!
Has anybody seen the movie: “The Gods Must Be Crazy”?
Maybe. I'm no anthropologist. Most of what I know about the lives of hunter-gatherers comes from watching "The Gods Must Be Crazy". The !Kung family seemed pretty happy (before the bottle fell into their lives... but I don't want to spoil it. It's a great movie.)
I think it's clear though that the ordering of QoL goes roughly:
Wealthy City/Farm > Hunter-Gatherer > Poor City/Farm
So for about a million years most people had it pretty good, then for about ten thousand years most people had it pretty bad, and then the last hundred years or so many people have gone from bad to good conditions, but many still endure pretty bad conditions.
If we could somehow compare the subjective quality of life of the people of Sentinel Island and the people of Manhattan Island I suspect that the least happy Sentinelese folks would be happier than the least happy New Yorkers.
Who knows, perhaps an alien threw out a cosmic cigarette butt and its discovery by us completely brings us into disarray, like the villagers in the movie 'The Gods must be crazy'.
> You're being pedantic. You can melt down that coin and sell the silver or use it for a myriad of industrial purposes.
Assuming the culture you are in has the means to reach those temperatures. A silver coin may be no more than a shiny trinket to those cultures that do not have that (level of) technology.
(I am reminded of the Coca-Cola bottle in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy.)
> The dollar is worthless without the American government and American economy backing it.
Experience with past currencies suggests the use of coinage can outlive the original creator, and even for completely different purposes (in the case of physical objects):
* https://journals.openedition.org/histoiremesure/886
The people in the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy" were ahead on this :)
In re: the San†, it's not exactly an anthropological study but the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy"‡ shows a life of relative happiness despite what seems like abject poverty. They don't know they are poor, and so it doesn't bother them. They have problems, but in their world all their problems are people-sized, if that makes sense. In contrast, our modern civilization seems Brutalist (as in the architectural style.)
Their way of life is stable, "A set of tools almost identical to that used by the modern San and dating to 42,000 BCE was discovered at Border Cave in KwaZulu-Natal in 2012."†
†https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people
‡https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Must_Be_Crazy
The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980) was a hit South African movie about a tribe of Kalahari Bushmen, and the consequences when an empty coke bottle thrown from a plane lands in their village, causing all kinds of problems. For the first time, something there's only one of, a tool everyone wants, private property, envy, possessiveness etc. Highly recommended.
I imagine Sir David Attenborough would basically just cite the intro of "The Gods Must Be Crazy" movie, casually explaining how humans technological progress is futile in regards of happiness. That text seems to holds up to present day.
When I read about them long time ago, they reminded me of those tribes in the movies "The Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" and "The Gods must be crazy."
Those tribes always consider outsiders to be a threat.
I wonder what theories might Sentinelese have formulated about the world. When they see and hear loud voices of planes. Or distant light on the night sea. What do they conclude?
like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoisan_languages I only remember it from the movie 'The Gods Must be Crazy' that took place among Bushman Tribes