Every time I hear someone repeat “Idiocracy was a documentary” what I hear is “Brawndo’s got what plants crave.” Mostly because of the number of times I’ve heard it but I guess also because it feels like a part of concentrated apathy? I’m probably just irrationally sick of the phrase, but the frequency and mindlessness of it being said seems kinda hypocritical.
You hear it so often because it’s an apt over the top depiction of what’s been happening since the beginning of the nation. Every generation dealt with absolute fucking morons gaining power and doing horrific, dumb shit, and devolving into base instincts and bread and circuses while ignoring experts, even mocking and considering them an undesirable class. Mike Judge wasn’t predicting the future, he was using a man out of water trope in the way of a time traveler to point out the absurdity of the conversion of public servants into showmen with an evangelical and side show circus flair, and the dumbing down of the average citizen as our institutions adopted more and more thoughtless technology while deriding and undermining professions and professionals that had to have actual expertise and somewhat relied on apprenticeship traditions to continue the lineage of advanced and critical knowledge.
But we are those idiots as a culture, so people mistook his message as one of simple absurdity that happened to become more true in the future from the point at which it was written and released.
Except most of that isn’t true and the average citizen has been getting consistently smarter every generation.
People can’t focus on a tv anymore and scroll their phones, can’t discern expert based information from blatantly absurd disinformation, people have seemingly gone feral in public interactions, trust in the CDC plummeted among Democrats (dropping to 34%), while rising among Republicans (reaching 67%), so it is more complex than “most of that isn’t true”. Crime has nearly consistently gone down, but we’ve almost entirely lost 3rd spaces, so socialization critical to development has been lost or has dwindled more and more for each successive generation. Teachers report having less control over their students, less productive conversations with their students parents, more hostility and distrust from both. Social media algorithms have been tuned to push above all other opinions that are the most divisive and least backed by evidence or expert opinion. That leads to real issues in leadership and a draining of resources and highly skilled workers that are lost due to avoidable attacks on systems caused by disinformation on said networks.
Developed nations have seen a slowing or halting of the Flynn affect (increasing intelligence), and several have reverse, which means they are in fact become less intelligent.
“For most of the 20th century, human IQ scores rose steadily across the globe. Researchers called this upward trend the Flynn Effect.
Recent studies show that this progress has stopped or reversed in countries like Norway, Denmark, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. This new downturn is called the Reverse Flynn Effect. Standard tests show drops in logic, vocabulary, and math problem-solving.”
I will not be shocked to find this reverse effect is happening in ALL red states, and rural areas of America in general, but the reversal has been masked by flawed testing and held up by metropolitan areas that are still seeing a traditional Flynn effect in place.
So it is true, and it’s always been this way, it’s just that it happens faster now, and we all hear about it faster.
So they’ve actually done science on this, and while your vibes are vibing, actual data shows that average IQ goes up by about 3 points for every decade. This is known as the Flynn effect, and is partly why the IQ scale constantly has to be adjusted.
Idiocracy’s entire plot is driven by the idea that average IQ goes down over time, which just isn’t true in the real world.
you might be proving their point since they discussed the flynn effect, and then the reverse flynn effect
but. iirc, there are issues with using iq as a measure of intelligence anyway
Then who’s voting for Trump?
People that generally make more money than you?
Nah, the average Trump voter doesn’t make that much. They’re just dumb, or racist enough to make them do dumb things.
You can tell that to yourself all you want, but you’d be wrong. The average republican voter is more comfortable than the average democratic voter. Specifically, a key constituency of non-college educated small business owners who make upper middle class incomes make up the republican base.
https://www.moneydigest.com/1902948/average-income-of-donald-trump-supporters/
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/personal-finance/average-income-republican-vs-democrat/
Average is skewed by Musk and the likes. Compare the medians.
as our institutions adopted more and more thoughtless technology
Crypto, NFT, and now AI… much for capricious uses.
As a few have already said in here, President Camacho saw a problem and actively tried to find the smartest person on the planet to fix the problem.
We’re a couple of years past comparing our current situation to Idiocracy. That ship has already sailed. We’re so fucked that the basic premise of Idiocracy appears quaint at this point.
“Haha people got stupider” is so much better than “people got stupider and are filled with hate, malice, greed, and selfishness”
I still can’t believe that half the Potus’s voters STILL think his family hasn’t used his position to enrich themselves. The population is stunted where they might as well be in Idiocracy.
That’s like 10% of the population. Usually the bottom 10 percentile are that dumb. Why are you surprised?
Idiocracy,
They will vote maga again,
They abuse children
Can people stop promoting the “truth” of this pro rich sexist eugenicist slop.
That’s not true at all.
In Idiocracy, the president and his cabinet put their smartest people (well, person) in charge with zero pushback and listened to and trusted expert opinion. When a policy failed (Brawndo went out of business and took the economy with it), there was swift punishment for those directly responsible, and when policy succeeded (crops were growing), they quickly pivoted and elevated those responsible. In Idiocracy, the most competent people were put in charge.
What we have is MUCH worse; people stupid and short-sighted enough to destroy everything in the name of ego and greed, and just smart enough to be successful in their destruction of our societies, governments and planet.
I would much rather be in Idiocracy if I’m being honest. At least those people were trying their best; can’t fault them for that.
Without talking about the eugenics hidden under the hood of that movie…
There aren’t any eugenics under the hood of Idiocracy. You’re thinking about genetics.
Eugenics is the idea that we should breed human beings intentionally, which is never proposed or discussed in the film.
Even president Kamacho steped down for a smarter person. Idiocracy is way optimistic than what we have today.
That’s not how you get to idiocracy though.
Yeah, we don’t have anti-intellectualism. Where people laugh at you for reading books.
We have pseudo-intelligence. Where people think they have more knowledge than experts. It is why flat-eathers, anti-vaxxers, climate-change deniers, and other science deniers are so full of themselves.
Low IQ people shouldn’t breed and I believe this 100% at this point
No one should breed. Cheers! - From a Misanthropic Anti-Natalist that sees his own species as literal monsters.
I really don’t get how people with this take… exist long enough to express it (it’s an awkward idea to word). At that point it would seem to me that the next “logical” goal would be to take yourself and as many others out as you could. Unless you count yourself securely among the monsters and don’t care about your own monstrosity, which begs the question why you would feel strongly enough about it to label yourself this way or care that others are monstrous.
It just feels from the outside like a circular logic trap with only two “outs”: either everybody sucks except for you (elitist as all hell), or what I said earlier.
considering you can bump your score by like 20 percentiles by practicing before an iq test i don’t think that’s a useful metric.
People who care about IQ don’t get laid, which is really handy because they shouldn’t breed.
Maybe we could ALL use a little pause on the breeding for a mo lol. While the movie does open on the premise that “dumb people having more kids than smart people is what caused this world”, I really don’t think that ends up being the point of the film. It’s pretty obvious that unrestrained corporations, popularity politics, and entertainment that relies on cheap sex and violence are the actual villains of the film, not the poor idiots caught in the web of all that.
Ah yes, eugenics, famously a position that has proven helpful in the past. /s
What’s an IQ, where does it come from, who decides what it is, and why is it important?
It actually changes all the time. It uses mostly questions and time constraints that someone with little education can accurately take and the median score of 100 is adjusted based on the average of recent (ish) people who have taken the tests.
It does only test specific things of “intelligence” and isn’t all encompassing. Hypothetically speaking, Mozart would be considered a genius in regards to music, even if he would have scored an 80 on an IQ test, because what an IQ tests checks has fuck all to do with music composition and wouldn’t tell you a thing about it.
IQ is just a data point.
Its whatever I say it is to get rid of people who annoy me
Honestly, same. Someone asks me what my IQ is, or however it comes up in conversation, and I say it’s ninety-six. I actually have no idea what the real answer is, or if it’s an idea worth chasing, but ninety-six is right on the small side of average that it just stalls that discussion out, and then we can talk about more interesting things, like turtles.
Lmao okay smooth brain. I tested in the 99th percentile on my last test. I wasnt even at my peak cognitive powers and I wasnt mentally challenged at all.
Smooth as an egg! :D
Go the other way. “IT’S OVER 9000!”
Terrible opinion but people are ignoring that this is what the movie says. The movie sucks because of this.
Yes! People keep on thinking that they’re so smart by saying “see, idiocracy was riiiight” when the movie basically tries to say that stupidity is hereditary, and that dumb people (understand: the sub-race) need to be eradicated through eugenics.
That is such a nazi stance, and there’s a gigantic amount of morons that don’t see it and keep on screaming “idiocracyyyyy” anytime they can.
You’re about halfway down the slippery slope there, friend.
We all stand somewhere on the slope.
fftt… and I’m all like “yo, you gotta be shittin’ me…” but check this out man…
Predicted or inspired.
Funny seeing Beavis and Butthead mentioned given the thread we’re in
Predicted.
Blaming today’s polical landscape on a movie would be, ironically, idiotic. We’ve been hearing in this direction for more than 20 years.
I’d say inspired, just like how all the current tech dystopia we’re heading toward is inspired by the cautionary nature of all those dystopian movies. People in power learn all the wrong lessons.
No, it didn’t. Funny movie, but applied to real life it’s just “smart person” eugenics, and forcing today’s issues into the lens of this movie oversimplifies them to the point of actual harm.
Really, actual harm? How so?
Technocracy is not the solution. A society needs other values. We can’t take for granted that the smartest people share the interest of others.
For instance the Nazis who found a very efficient final solution to their logistics problem, because their values were shit.
All true, but imo the movie doesn’t make an argument for a technocracy.
My read is that the movie is mostly critical of the US system, including capitalism, hyper-masculinity, hyper-consumerism and identity politics.
The movie doesn’t even star ‘smart’ people or elites because they all went extinct. And the reason they went extinct is because the system directed them into a rat-race of career succes and material wealth that ultimately led to an evolutionary dead end.
The movie actually ends with average people assuming responsibility for government, raising families and working together to improve the lives of the people.
But I’d rather be living in the world of Idiocracy.
In that world they listened to the smart person and did what he said eventually, even though it was inconvenient for them. So they’re kind of doing better than us in that way.
Exactly!
Ugh, they tried to murder him on television for fun
“Ow my balls” isn’t a downgrade in tv entertainment these days.
President Camacho put the smartest person he could find in charge! Utopia compared to what’s going on in the USA now.
Exactly.
Reading this in a Starbucks is not lost on me.
I trust your are enjoying a “gentleman’s latte”?
I can’t believe you like handjobs too.
It might be more precise to say that both the movie and the president are merely natural consequences of the human nature Judge is so famous for astutely observing
As inescapable as the divine right of kings, they cry. This is not human nature, this is capitalism applying pressures and running the gambit.
eating and excreting have all collapsed into a singularity of the human condition.
Did this article’s author just say we eat shit? 🥺
You guys are getting handjobs in Starbucks?
are you not?
I love Starbucks.
I feel like that your problem, USA, isn’t that many of you are idiots.
I mean, many are, just like how we have idiots in other countries. The bigger issue is that many of these idiots in the USA are also evil.
I haven’t seen idiocracy in a long time, but di they show anything but the US in that movie? Maybe the reat of the world blossoms, because the USA got completely sealed off from tye rest of the world.
It’s about 30%. Roughly the same number of people that voted for Trump.
But we see a slide toward fascism all over the world. I think the biggest reason for this is long covid. It’s literally caused harm to people’s brains and limited their ability to think critically
No need to grasp at straws. Wealth inequality is at the highest it has been in many generations.
I think part of it as well is the concentration of wealth to the richest of the rich everywhere, and tech oligarchs doing technofascist things
It definitely started before that. The real reason is the stage of capitalism that we’re in.
Capitalism functions relatively well when there’s actual development that needs to occur. But in developed economies, there simply isn’t as much room to grow. This is known as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
Enshittification, the focus on extracting more profit from consumers for the same product, rather than improving the product or broadening the market, is a symptom of having reached the point of development that the profit motive is no longer actually encouraging growth or development.
At that point, there are two paths a society can go down. One is to remove the vestigial profit motive through nationalization of developed industries. The other is to create artificial growth by defining an out-group and seizing their stuff to continue feeding into the machine, and when they run out of stuff to steal, you keep shrinking the in-group and repeating, until eventually you just run into the same problem again. These two paths are generally known as socialism and fascism.
People turn to fascism not because of brain damage, but because they perceive it as being in their best interest, economically and otherwise. In some cases, it may even be true, at least in the short term.
In any case, they’re able to see that the existing system is not working for them, which is why socialism is becoming more popular as well. But the ruling class will generally prefer fascism over socialism, so it is an uphill battle.
Turns out a society built on egocentrism doesn’t work well long term.
… and in positions of power.
