People are not more stupid than before. They are just more ignorant, bigoted, lazy, and scared. And this is not an accidental outcome.
Nooo! It’s because stupid people have too much sex and smart people don’t breed enough! Probably part of the gay agenda! /s
Pleeeeaase don’t think about the fact that this movie is kind of basically supporting pushing eugenics… It’s totally a political commentary about how bad Republicans are, and definitely not actually propagating hardcore Randian Libertarian ideals in its insistence that certain types of people are just inherently, genetically, more suited to rule over others.
It isn’t supporting any sort of selective breeding program at all, in fact it’s the exact opposite: it’s saying that all people should be raising kids to avoid a situation where the culture nosedives to the lowest common denominator. The supporting characters start coming around towards the end of the movie because they are not inherently stupid, just brainwashed.
It does have one anti-capitalist theme (the megacorp buying the FDA), so, I don’t know, if it’s exactly Randian, per se.
People are definitely not more bigoted and ignorant. They just feel it’s now safer to express their bigotry.
Between the lead fuel, plastics, and possibly other issues not yet proven to be an issue like food colorings and preservatives, we may actually be dumber today than 150 years ago.
We just have access to more platforms to share our opinions and people have access to more sources of information to reinforce their bad opinions.
During the Spanish flu people were fighting against preventive measures, the anti Vax movement existed in the late 1800s (example for those who read French https://www.ledevoir.com/societe/634164/la-grogne-contre-les-vaccins-et-les-mesures-sanitaires-des-le-xixe-siecle ), there’s always been people supporting fascists and so on…
You vastly underestimate the amount of smoke (both pollution and intentional) and lead and toxic dyes and alcohol and cocaine and heroin that people consumed 150 years ago. Not to mention the rampant disease.
When you realize that Idiocracy is way better than where we’re headed.
The pseudoscience behind it is straight from eugenics.
Despite that, its depiction of an ignorant society unaware of the technology supporting it was incredibly prophetic. If we ignore the “dumb people reproducing” bit, we can see it as a warning about how an uneducated society is detrimental for everyone.
I mean, we have flat earthers, for fuck’s sake.
The problem is it’s also a society without users and abusers. It’s just a story about dumb people.
But the reason society seems to be trending stupider isn’t because we’re naturally focusing on shunning intelligence… it’s because the rich and powerful are using their influence to put that idea in our heads. They want a stupider, and more malleable, society to manipulate.
That is the biggest problem we’re facing right now. And ignoring the root cause basically means you’re pushing a boulder up a steep hill, just for it to roll back down again.
Eugenics (by some definitions) doesn’t even have to be unethical if you turn left off of “state-enforced sterilization highway” and on to “provide the opportunity to let people optimise their children’s genome street”. It is basically transhumanism at that point. Probably still some problems there, but at least its not coercive, and its also already possible today. Equality of access to polygenetic screening I say!
That is the thing.
Idiocracy is a universe where intelligence is shunned. Being smart is a bad thing and reading books can get you beaten up. It is basically anti-intelligence.
While in our universe we have more of a pseudoscience problem. People who want to be smart, it is revered. But they fall for pseudo-intelligence. (Flatearthers, anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, …)
If there was a movies circlejerk community on lemmy, this would be the top of all time post.
on the internet*.
And then you have people jumping in saying IDIOCRACY EUGENICS only to eventually get curbstomped again despite arguing against one of the most tongue-in-cheek movies ever made…
The anti-circle jerk has finally come back around though so that’s nice.
We are now in the Handmaid’s Tale