As I said in my OP, that’s completely and utterly irrelevant. Regardless of what the movie is “really” about and what it “really” thinks, there are plenty of people all over the place, especially online, who use its plot at face value to make judgments about real people, real events, and real society.
I’m afraid I’m not sure what the relevance here is, unless either of you DO actually believe in eugenics (which I’m guessing you don’t).
What do you mean by “believe in eugenics”? Believe it exists? Believe it should be practiced? And in what form?
In the context of preventing an Idiocracy-style dumbing down of the population, it could mean any action or policy which encourages, or at least doesn’t discourage, smart people to reproduce, and/or which discourages, or at least doesn’t encourage, dumb people to reproduce. Certainly at least some of the ways of accomplishing this are morally objectionable; but are there any that aren’t?
My wife and I actually saw the film in the theater, in one of the half-dozen places where it played for a week.
Nature or nurture? Stupid people having stupid kids due to genetic predisposition or stupid people having stupid kids due to raising them in a terrible environment? Or both?
All I know is that people bright enough to consider the impact of bringing a child into the world have fewer children, while people who do not have more. Exhibit #1 - my very stupid but fruitful cousins. I am not expecting any of their crotch fruit to go on to win the Nobel prize.
My point was that the whole bit about smart people selecting against themselves wasn’t part of the central premise of the story-- It was just a device to set up the context that was used to present the premise. The premise was not “people in the future will be stupid, because of X, Y, and Z”, it was “people are stupid”.
Personally, I don’t see it. Why isn’t it “stupid people make for stupid kids who make for stupid people, so we should do what we can to make sure they don’t breed, for the good of our future”? I think that’s a lot more likely than just generalized “humanity is kinda dumb.” The people who say “we’re living in an Idiocracy world right now” certainly don’t see it the way you do.
OP before I answer your question you have to answer this first: you have a bucket containing 2 gallons and another bucket containing 7 gallons. How many buckets do you have?
Who is taking lessons from this movie and directly applying them to real life? You’re thinking about this too hard.
Anyone who says anything like “this country is getting more like Idiocracy every day” when addressing a trend, election, or whatever is doing so, IMO. Surely you’ve seen plenty of that around the Internet?
Oh, and Loach? Two. 
(Yeah, yeah, it was a joke; I just felt like being [a] smart[ass].)
I think everyone here is forgetting the other half of the equation: Idiocracy’s society exists not just because of the supposed dysgenic effect of stupid people, but because this coincided with enough technological development that there is no longer a reason for stupid people to be removed from the gene pool.
Remember the hospital scene, where there’s a machine that will diagnose you (as long as you get the probes in the right orifices) and the tattoo machine, which handles unique identification for every citizen, and the fact that when Brawndo sales plunged in the wake of the rediscovery of water, it was a computer which made the business decision to engage in mass layoffs.
If anything, Idiocracy is an indictment of technology which enables the stupid, not the stupid.
I have seen plenty of that, and I read the subtext as “wow people are dumb” and not “Idiocracy has literal value outside of being a satire about dumb people.”
So yeah, you’re still thinking about this too hard.
Yeah, pretty much this. If think that that’s tantamount to advocating for eugenics I say you’re nuts.
You don’t have to believe in eugenics (as in, intentionally manipulating the gene pool) in order to acknowledge that the current state of society does seem to be selecting for stupid people to breed more prolifically than smart people.
I’ll own it: I honestly do believe that modern society has created a situation in which smart people are having less children and stupid people are having more children.
While it is controversial right now, some people DO believe that the “Flynn effect” of rising IQs over time has come to an end.
Here is my belief:
As a general trend (yes, there are exceptions of course) I do believe that it is true that more intelligent people tend to pursue more education and more specialized training. As a consequence of their prolonged education/training period, the intelligent tend to delay childbearing or in some cases choose not to have kids at all. I do feel that the intelligent are less likely to want to have kids because of a) the demands of their career/education b) simply finding intellectual pursuits more satisfying than childrearing or c) reflecting on the environmental costs of overpopulation and other such more abstract issues than just “I want a baby, so I’m gonna have one!”.
I honestly do suspect that stupid people, lacking the capacity for a rewarding intellectual life, are probably more likely to turn to having kids to give them some meaning/reward in life than someone who is intelligent enough to complete the education requirements to become a cancer researcher or astronaut. Not everyone can become a neurosurgeon, but just about everyone can have a kid and most people (even many very bad parents) do love their kids. So why not have a kid, if you don’t have anything else going for you in life and it never even occurs to you to worry about the bad consequences of having kids such as overpopulation or personal financial costs?
Intelligent people might also be more willing to question the peer pressure in society about things like “There’s something wrong with a woman who doesn’t want kids” that all childfree people know exists out there. Mainstream society also seems to reward and celebrate a certain level of stupidity nowadays, and you could argue that makes it harder for bright people to find mates (then potentially breed) than they would in a society where intelligent people were regarded as sexy/cool/desirable.
While I would not say that everyone who has an accidental pregnancy is stupid, I do believe that stupid people tend to have more accidental pregnancies because they struggle with comprehending instructions for how to use contraception and also with anticipating the consequences of not using contraception.
There are a huge number of accidental pregnancies that occur simply because people did not bother to use contraception every time they had sex or they used it incorrectly - in fact, that is the most common reason for accidental pregnancy if you look at the statistics. The unlucky people who used the pill right but it just didn’t work are the exception, NOT the rule.
Acknowledging all these things does not mean that one has to accept that this problem is a) serious enough to require intervention and b) that intervention should be done coercively.
lavenderviolet, if you’re going to change this thread from a discussion of Idiocracy to a discussion of the Flynn Effect, you should ask for it to be moved from Cafe Society to Great Debates.
Personally, I don’t think it’s “thinking too hard” to think that people who say that are saying “there are too many stupid people, and something should be done about it.”
What if the “something” is a vague support for public education and freely available birth control? Is that too evil?
You fail to grasp that people can enjoy and invoke a satirical story which heightens certain aspects of society to gross hyperbole, because they observe the underlying real issues without believing the hyperbole literally. It’s not morally disgusting to be a bit concerned that careless people who make bad decisions tend to have more children than thoughtful, prudent people, or to feel that some aspects of society are getting too dumbed-down for comfort. It in no way follows that you want to forcibly sterilize “the feeble-minded” or breed a race of genetically superior Ubermenschen.
Don’t blame me, I voted for Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.
Considering the vast clouds of smug (to borrow a South Park phrase - and to prove that yes, I know what satire is) that usually accompany the kinds of comments I was mentioning, I seriously doubt it.
Sure, they could be making thoughtful commentary on the state of society, but frankly, I’m more inclined to believe, based on what I read, that they’re not.
Am I allowed to think both that:
Society is getting increasingly stupid and coddled.
Forced eugenics is sick and evil.
Because I don’t see the connection the OP is making. It is like saying do you wish your adult children would stop being drug smoking lay abouts? Well then you must want them executed.
?