It’s an old trope that everyone was somehow so smart and wise right up until my generation, then everyone suddenly got stupid and mean.
Socrates complained that the youth in his day were spoiled by having books to rely on so they didn’t have to memorize things anymore.
Every generation has the same attitude, and humanity somehow keeps on keeping on. Sure we are finding new and different ways to be stupid, but we’re also finding new and different ways to be amazing.
The movie portrays people as mostly being interested in shallow things, such as nudity, sex, entertainment, celebrities.
I think humans are more interested than ever in those things now that we have mobile phones with Facebook and Instagram and tiktok and so on.
Also almost everyone is too tired after work to do something productive with their lives (by system design).
If the TV was bad, the mobile phone is worse. People can’t even sit alone for 5 mins anymore.
These apps also make people very adhd and they can’t focus on anything without needing stimulation. It’s common to no longer be able to watch a movie without wanting to bring up the phone. Or to bring it up in the middle of a conversation.
One could argue it doesn’t make people dumber though… And I guess not. Not dumber, just more unable to be in the moment and feel peaceful.
I don’t know which generation you’re from, but I never got the idea that it was blaming any particular generation. At the time the movie came out it was referring to a generation that didn’t exist yet. They were more commenting on the direction we seemed to be going: the priorities of capitalism, our devaluing of education, and our celebration of ignorance. These were all issues that were systemic starting well before I was born. Which is ironic considering Carl Sagan said the same thing a decade prior, pointing to Beavis and Butthead as an example (Mike Judge made both Idiocracy and Beavis and Butthead).
It’s quite easy to come away from the film with the idea that a general “stupidity” of predominantly poor people is to blame for most of society’s problems. The film even starts by heavily implying poor people breed too much and are stupid, while smart, educated, wealthy people are too smart to have kids because they’ve rationally determined it’s a bad decision in the economy. It then goes on to outright claim this will make humanity, on average, “stupider”.
This is very, very close to eugenecist rhetoric. Eugenecists are all about weeding out “inferior genes” from humanity to increase our iverall “fitness”. So tbh, I may have overstated. If you think the film suggests we need to limit dumb or poor people’s breeding, then you might actually be reading the film right.
What I should really say is I just hate the film’s overall message, whether it’s intentional or not. Which is a shame, because I otherwise like the film and find it quite funny.
Poor?
In idiocracy, it’s portrayed as stupid people out breeding the smart. And implication of them being poor is you own bias. Trashy, yes. Stupid, yes. Poor? That’s on you champ.
I’m sorry that you tainted your own experience of the movie in this way and that you think that the commentary has anything to do with anything other than intelligence. I’m sorry that gave you a very negative outlook on the film.
Sure, call it “my own bias” if you want. It’s called coding. Characters can be coded poor, by giving them accents conventional of poor people, situating them in houses common of poor people, dressing them in ways that stand out as stereotypically poor, etc. And like I said, it might not even be intentional. But coding can happen even unintentionally.
The point seemed to be that society was deliberately creating a large population of low income, poorly educated people being fed the cheapest slop by companies for short term gain, and that society then reaped what it sowed. The population of Idiocracy aren’t the ones being blamed, they’re a result of their environment that was created around them.
