Themes Of God Must Be Crazy

Decent Essays
Happiness Changed As Societies Developed The story of “God Must Be Crazy” is set back to 1980 in Botswana and South Africa. There are three separate stories -- the journey of a male Bushman Xi, the romance between a scientist and a teacher and the revolt cause by a band of terrorist that drove the story line of the movie. From my point of view the movie has two groups of people representing spiritual wealth -- the Bushmen who live in the Kalahari Desert and material wealth -- the city dwellers that live 200 miles away. By comparing their different lifestyles and different social values, we can conclude that the measure of happiness changes as human society developed. We can see that, during different periods of human history, societies’ …show more content…
They lived peaceful with each other and everybody is selfless. However, in the movie, the Bushmen broke into arguments by a mere glass bottle that they had never seen before. This is due to the glass bottle as being the best thing the Bushmen had ever seen. Thus, everyone wanted to have it since this one glass bottle cannot be shared among them. From this occurrence, we see that the Bushmen started to have a sense of accumulating wealth for themselves, which could have both positive and negative influences on any society. When individuals began to accumulate private property, urban cities and civilizations emerged as a result of agriculture surplus. On the other hand, social distinction and conflict between different cultures would also appear. In the movie, the Bushmen reject the change in harmony and they decided to return the glass bottle to …show more content…
Therefore, as we enter the Neolithic period, the value of happiness became more complicated than the previous Paleolithic period because the accumulation of personal wealth had resulted in social distinctions, which affect the sense of satisfaction that is needed in feeling happy. For example, higher social classes, obtained by having more wealth, were more privileged and enjoy more benefits than the people of lower class. Therefore, the people of lower class would be drove to achieve more and more and could not be satisfied and be happy until they achieved

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