James Cameron’s Avatar is a very well-crafted film that exemplifies one of the darkest aspects of human nature; greed. The basic plot of the movie is that an ex-marine is sent to a far off world to work for a corporation mining a rare and valuable resource called unobtainium. However, the planet is inhabited by a primitive alien species that happens to live right on top of the largest deposit of unobtainium in the entire planet, and despite numerous attempts at negotiation, they refuse to cooperate. So what does the corporation do? They declare the aliens hostile savages, and burn their homes to the ground. One would certainly like to think that this is a very extreme and unlikely scenario, and that real people couldn’t possibly be that cruel.
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One scenario would be when the Spanish invaded America. They sailed to “The New World” (America) to find riches, and when they got there they did almost exactly what the corporation in Avatar did, except instead of aliens they encountered the Mayans, and instead of unobtainium they were after gold. Another example would be when Europeans settled North America. In that scenario the “unobtainium” was land, and the “aliens” where the Native Americans, and the Europeans ended up slowly forcing the natives out of their homes until they were left with virtually nothing. On top of that, in both scenario’s they used the same excuse to justify their cause as the corporation in Avatar, they declared the natives savages, an inferior race that didn’t deserve to be treated …show more content…
The answer is simple; humans are greedy, and it’s almost impossible for people, especially groups of people, to resist trying to accumulate wealth and power. For example, people living in Canada are very well off and have a lot of luxuries others can’t afford, and if everyone in Canada stop purchasing luxuries and instead donated to people in other less fortunate countries, they could do a lot of good. But people won’t do that because it is hard for people to give up wealth, even to help another person. Everyone wants to be well off, even at the cost of others, that’s just part of human
One scenario would be when the Spanish invaded America. They sailed to “The New World” (America) to find riches, and when they got there they did almost exactly what the corporation in Avatar did, except instead of aliens they encountered the Mayans, and instead of unobtainium they were after gold. Another example would be when Europeans settled North America. In that scenario the “unobtainium” was land, and the “aliens” where the Native Americans, and the Europeans ended up slowly forcing the natives out of their homes until they were left with virtually nothing. On top of that, in both scenario’s they used the same excuse to justify their cause as the corporation in Avatar, they declared the natives savages, an inferior race that didn’t deserve to be treated …show more content…
The answer is simple; humans are greedy, and it’s almost impossible for people, especially groups of people, to resist trying to accumulate wealth and power. For example, people living in Canada are very well off and have a lot of luxuries others can’t afford, and if everyone in Canada stop purchasing luxuries and instead donated to people in other less fortunate countries, they could do a lot of good. But people won’t do that because it is hard for people to give up wealth, even to help another person. Everyone wants to be well off, even at the cost of others, that’s just part of human