Written by Say, you grew up in an remote civilization far away from modern industry and technology. Far away from people and foreign thought.
Say, you were born in the middle of the African savannah. The land is flat. Very little in the way of mountains or hills.
You wake up in the morning to the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. It appears on one side of your village and disappears on the other.
Due to your observations, you assume the world is flat and a void exists at lands’ end. Not an illogical or irrational assumption, all things considered. There is no outside influence to suggest otherwise.
Your hypothesis is not unfounded, and it turns into a belief.
The Gods Must Be Crazy
This plays into the plot of the 1980 South African comedy, The Gods Must Be Crazy.
In the film, a pilot flying over the plains of South Africa tosses an empty Coke bottle out the window.
When a bushman happens upon the shiny object, he believes the gods sent it to him. After all, it did fall right out of the sky.
Oblivious to modern civilization, the bushman’s tribe experiments with the Coke bottle, using it for a variety of daily tasks – in lieu of a grinding stone, for instance.
The traditional community sees the shiny discarded Coke bottle as a prized trophy, being that there’s only one on Earth (or so they think).
Due to the strife caused by the villagers fighting over this bottle, the tribal elders believe it best to return this gift to the gods in order to maintain peace.
A bushman is tasked with walking to the end of the Earth to toss the Coke bottle into the void.
Those of us who live in the modern world – who know that the world is round and Coke bottles are everywhere – likely find this whole idea laughable.
If someone from a Western culture carried a Coke bottle across an entire continent on foot in order to dispose of it over the edge, we’d consider him crazy, irrational, unreasonable.
But to say the same about these bushmen, we’d be wrong.
Walk in the Steps of the Bushmen
Take yourself out of your own cultural baobab for a moment and place yourself in that of these bushmen.
Were they unreasonable in their thinking or did their actions align with their beliefs?
Their actions were rational and justified within their ideology.
Bottles like this don’t exist in their world. A flat world must have edges, so thinking you can discard a bottle off the edge makes perfect sense.
The point is: a person acts logically within his cultural rationale if his actions/behavior is in accordance with his beliefs.
We’ll follow this logic next week.
Success Across Cultures 