In Idiocracy, it is posited that certain social factors cause dysgenic pressure in American society: (1) Compared to ages past, the less intelligent have fewer opportunities to remove themselves from the gene pool. (2) There are certain social/cultural/economic disincentives to the more intelligent reproducing.
But, each of these would apply only in the fully industrialized countries; there would be no such dysgenic pressure in the Third World. Which, presumably, would therefore eventually come to dominate the world. But there’s no sign in the movie that that his happened – in fact, there’s no sign or mention, not even by the voice-over, that the world outside America (not the U.S. – Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho is the “President of America”) exists 500 years from now. And what about the genetic effects of immigration to America from countries where no dysgenic pressure is present?
It seems pretty obvious to me that since all other people who are not Americans want to be Americans, then they would have easily fallen in step with the decay of the civilization.
I assumed that, at some point between the present day, and the events of the movie, the global standard of living more-or-less evened out. There wasn’t a “third world” any more. Everyone, every where, had an essentially Western standard of living, which allowed for a global intellectual decline.
Alternate theory: the society shown in the film clearly relies on a huge degree of mechanization. For example, when Brawndo loses the contract to “water” all the crops in America, the computer automatically lays off most of the population of the country. Or, the girlfriend of the doctor, who is viewed as retarded by the standards of a nation of idiots, is a pilot. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t actually fly the plane, just sits in the cockpit while the computer handles all the work. Possibly, before America declined, some automated technology was implemented that sealed the borders of the country completely, without the need of human supervision. Immigrants and invaders alike are kept out by this system, allowing America to disintegrate in its own little bottle, while the rest of the world moved on.
Alternate theory #2: everyone outside North America is dead.
Alternate theory #3 that’s not really related to the OP’s question, but I feel like talking about it anyway: it seems unlikely to me (even by the internal standards of the film) that smart people would be completely bred out of existence. I can see them becoming a smaller and smaller group, and more and more insulated as the differences between the intellectual elites and the idiot masses grew sharper. The elites would become more and more focused on the upkeep of the machinery that runs society, and more and more disdainful of the society itself, outside their “ivory tower.” By the events of the movie, the people who actually run America operate entirely behind the scenes, allowing the commoners their brainless TV shows and hideous mismash of reality TV and government, so long as their control of the technological levers remains secure. Give it another 10,000 years, and the elites are living underground entirely, still running the machines, and only coming out late at night, to harvest the surface dwellers for their stew pots. That’s right: I’m saying that Idiocracy and The Time Machine share the same fictional reality.
Right. But, if there were a secret cabal of smart people running things, they’d have intervened as soon as Joe passed that prison IQ test thing, wouldn’t they? Society was on the verge of dying if they couldn’t find someone smart enough to figure out what was wrong with the crops. If a “smart” cabal were running things, they’d have fixed the crop problem, or the cabal was actively trying to wipe out America, and would have stopped Joe before he got too close to the prez and all that.
I just figure the ability to build cool stuff doesn’t automatically exclude the ability of people to be idiots.
Not necessarily. They could simply be indifferent to the fate of the proto-Eloi. If they all die in a famine, fine. If they all live for another five hundred years, also fine. They don’t care one way or the other.
Alternatively, they could be anticipating a massive die-off, but not in a hurry for it to happen. It’s pretty obvious that the society we see in Idiocracy is ultimately doomed. Joe may have staved off one famine, but with people that stupid, it’s only a matter of time before they find some other way to commit self-inflicted democide. Joe is, at best, a band-aid on the problem. He’s not really all that smart himself: he can provide solutions to problems based on common knowledge of the 21st century, but he’s not likely to innovate anything new. He’s just not that bright or well-educated. And while his kids are probably going to be about as smart as he is, his grandkids are pretty much screwed. They’ll either be half-idiot themselves, or they’ll be inbred. His great-grandkids will be three quarters idiot, or even more inbred. Inside of four or five generations, Joe’s descendants will be indistinguishable from the morons who make up the rest of the population. At best, Joe has staved off the end of society by a century or so. Probably less, because the next catastrophe is likely to require a much more complicated solution than “Stop spraying Gatorade on the crops.” Our hypothesized proto-Morlocks may want the proto-Eloi to die off to a more sustainable level, but could be perfectly content to wait a few extra decades for it to happen.
Or, if we assume that the evolutionary forces that led to the society of dumbfucks we saw in the movie works both ways, our secret cabal might be so intelligent that they can’t tell the difference between Joe and the rest of America. From their vantage point, even Joe is appallingly stupid.
The absence of anything outside the U.S. is very common in futuristic movies, especially dystopian ones. My favorite in this sense is Demolition Man, in which apparently nothing exists outside of L.A.
Pretty much, yeah. The beginning exposition definitely makes the case time and time again, father does dumb things, but his genetic capability is saved by doctors, so he can have a son, who’s so dumb he has to be restrained, when the doctor’s try to save his genetic capability – “Get you hands off my JUNK.” (Or he says something like that)
Speculation runs that that’s one of the reasons the studio wouldn’t promote or release the movie widely. If people had really noticed the movie, they’d have to answer the whole eugenic question the movie posits. As an aside, the movie GATTACA was supposed to end with the text mentioning some contemporary people with mild genetic problems, among them then-President Bill Clintion. Test audiences didn’t like that bit. Just a little too real, I guess.
If you’re trying to figure out some way that the film could actually make sense, you might as well give up. The average I.Q. is not going down. If anything, it’s going up: