'Idiocracy' Predicted All of This(texasmonthly.com) |
'Idiocracy' Predicted All of This(texasmonthly.com) |
-Carl Sagan outsmarting Mike Judge with this passage from The Demon Haunted World (1995)
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm
(not to say that I agree with the premise of the claim, but I do think that we should be properly crediting our cultural references).
Also, smart people are often less likely to vote when both options seem bad, whereas people driven by propaganda have no such hesitation and will turn out in droves—a problem Bertrand Russell highlighted quite clearly [1].
[1]: https://economicsociology.org/2023/11/30/in-the-modern-world...
They are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
There are some confounding factors, like education and income also affecting fertility, and correlated with most measures of intelligence, but that doesn't actually affect the diagnosis - regardless of if intelligence directly lowers fertility, or if the effect is mediated by e.g. education, the net effect is that smarter people have fewer children (in our current environment).
To be fair, it was just a funny and easy to explain introduction to the movie's premise. If it was made today it may have had a montage of people outsourcing their thinking skills to AI or something along these lines.
This lets Americans off the hook far too easily. Trump won an absolute majority this time, and the GOP won the house too. For the Senate you will have to do your own research because I’m on mobile, but last time I checked the actual effect (estimated) on Senate outcomes is very modest.
You can probably imagine participation and the popular vote would be very different if electoral college votes weren't winner-take-all.
A trip to Buc-ee's would've been great inspo also
The society depicted in Idiocracy is the way it is by choice that turns into policy. I highly doubt Mike Judge wants to start culling the population of undesirable traits like birth defects, intellectual disablities, learning disabilities, etc.
And so much of it is so obviously absurd. Invokes everything from Gilliam's Brazil to Kids In The Hall.
As others have said, it's a reflection of what we currently are, magnified. Many aspects of which are not as implausible as they once were. That's where the continued buzz it gets comes from, I think.
I do think the eugenics stuff would be avoided if it were to be made today. If that turns out to be how Mike Judge actually thinks, well, I'd be very disappointed and would have to eat some words.
Yes, but in the movie society became that way because the dumb people kept having kids while the smart people didn’t. This wasn’t an uncommon trope in the 1990s and early 2000s. There was a lot of commentary on teenage pregnancies and whatnot before the birth rate collapsed among the lower class.
> I highly doubt Mike Judge wants to start culling the population of undesirable traits like birth defects, intellectual disablities, learning disabilities, etc.
But he (like most people) is probably fine with designer babies and sperm clinics that expressly sell product based on the characteristics of the donor (tall, high IQ, etc). That’s a tidier form of the same thing.
It is actually a win-win situation. Government controls the corporations and corporations control the government.
The Simpsons "predicted" a Trump Presidency. Not because Matt Groening is the Kwisatz Haderach but simply because our society was already idiotic, so it was a natural extension of that idiocy. The US elected a B-movie (Bedtime for Bonzo) actor in 1980, so there was certainly precedent to the President.
No, the level of corruption is just too high for a functioning democracy.
In fact - they recognized that they had an issue and actually got the "smart person" involved, although they were too dumb to actually follow-through initially... Unlike at least one current regime which has taken great pleasure in decimating and removing anyone with an ounce of brains...
"We predicted this terrible state we're in..., no, we've always been like this."
I mean, who wrote this, and in what state of stupor? Whoever it is, forgot to add the "knuckle-dragging" epithet to make it complete.
BTW, I believe the author was painting the visual image of Beavis & Butthead, not a caveman.
The US always had an anti-intellectual streak. A common quote was I'd rather be judged by a jury of averages joes than a panel of intellectuals. In 2026, the anti-intellectual and anti-science folks are in charge of US institutions.
It’s shitty, and using the movie as a canard for that old and tired view is shitty as well.
What we have now is different. People stopped vaccinating their kids because they actually believed the scientific evidence proved vaccines were dangerous. They can point to endless documents which have the overt form of being an actual research paper, written by people who are actually Ph.D.s from good universities.
You can go online and find endless meta-analysis, written by and endless number of untenured professors, that, say, Masking and social distancing didn't help stop the spread of Covid. Because these endless number of untenured professors need to land research grants and write papers. Sure, a face mask is useless against an airborne disease. Go ahead and sneeze on the salad bar.
If this were really like idiocracy, nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc. They would just make fun of anybody who was smarter than they were, because they sounded "effeminate."
I don't know which style of stupid is worse, but it is a pretty big difference.
Now is where we are going atm perfect? No. But at least its a plan. A self repairing asbestos orphanage for retarded firestarters which allows for progress at a realistic pacr is the way forward. Everything else is retardation whorship, in booms and busts, where every "unforseeable" regression eats a little something from civilization. If you couldnt predict trump in the 2000s, your whole model of humanity is wrong and flawed, and shouldn't be anywhere near where futures are planned.
Personally I think the USA's problems go much deeper than some vague sense that rich people are the source of all problems. Compared the whole US economy, they're a drop in the bucket, and they're not the reason that American institutions are dysfunctional; those dysfunctions were present long before Trump took power and Google got rich.
My opinion is that progressive populists don't know how to fix our problems, let alone have they even come close to identifying them, so they just focus on everything as "us vs the elites." You can see this simply by observing that the actual places that are progressive controlled - major blue cities - are the most dysfunctional places in the country. The solution? Wealth taxes that will cover a tiny percent of expenditures for a year or two tops, and no mention of why things are so expensive and slow in the first place, which has almost nothing to do with those rich guys, and have a lot more to do with dumb bureaucratic requirements; irrational procurement processes; capture from groups that sometimes are tied to wealthy interests but also come from the people like unions, neighborhood and environmental organizations; watering down every project by lacking focus on what they're actually meant to solve; procedural issues that allow cynical political actors to selectively interpret and enforce laws; and so on.
I'm sympathetic to the feeling of unfairness, but I want actual solutions, most of which are too boring for the populists on either side to stay focused on.
Serious question - what is 'dysfunctional' about 'blue cities' that works better in 'red cities'?
How do you know they're not too stupid to realize what/the damage they're doing in the first place?
So far, just a story about a dumb guy--but here the story take an epistemologically terrifying turn: He actually did an experiment to prove that it would work. He put Lemon juice on his face, went to the bathroom, and took a selfie. (Since this was 1995, he took a selfie with a polaroid camera.) When he looked at the picture, it just showed a blank mirror.
He was too dumb to know that he had not pointed the camera at the right place.
This is how the anti-vaxers, the anti-covid-ppe crowd are. It's not like they want to ignore the latest results of cutting edge science. It's not even like they don't want to do "research" on the internet. It's that they simply do not know how to tell what is and what is not genuine experimental results. They don't know when they are "hallucinating."
This is not the world that the movie "Idiocracy" presents us with. In idiocracy, everybody is even worse than old McArther Wheeler was. They don't even bother to do any research. Anything they believe is just self-evidently true to them.
(If you really want to freak yourself out, ask yourself how you would be able to tell whether or not you were fooling yourself just as McArther Wheeler did. If you are anti vax or anti Covid PPE, you really should ask yourself that question.)
> if all Americans eligible to vote in 2024 had cast ballots, the overall margin in the popular vote likely would not have been much different
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/behind-trump...
that is a wild blanket assumption that "most people" "probably" want designer babies, as if a majority of prospective parents are using sperm clinics.
I think you missed the entire point of the film. You know the end speech where Not Sure says something along the lines of "read a book" and "maybe don't put sports drinks on soil and expect it to grow".
The main premise of the second and third acts of the film demonstrates the scientific process. Hypothesize: "water will make plants grow", Experiment: "put water on plants instead of brawndo", analyze data: "the plants are growing". Go figure, after people see the results of the experiment they change their preconceptions!
It's stupidity by choice. Willful ignorance.
They are stupid.
doesn't that help everyone?
what am I missing?
Or in the case of America, many people just want others to suffer so that they can feel better about themselves, and are willing to elect a leader who will do that on their behalf, even at their own cost.