In Idiocracy, do you believe there exists, somewhere, reasonably-intelligent people in large numbers that still make society happen? Like, my first thought is there must be because Airplanes, TVs, and monster trucks don’t just design & build themselves, so surely there must still be some quick-witted meatbrains roaming the hellscape. But then, maybe the entire means of production from mining to distribution, has been handed over to AI and automation. So by the time the movie is set, we’re effectively at the mercy of the machines. Just like in terminator. I always knew Idiocracy was dark, but I think it just got a little worse for me.
Well, the stories they stole everything from, Cyril Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons and The Little Black Bag had a minority of reasonably intelligent people who keep society running.
This was always my read, although, appropriately dumb intelligent emulation rather than any true sense of the word. While @RealityChuck’s version makes more sense, I doubt it was the case as the situation regarding dust bowls and incipient famine seems like it would have been a quick fix for the hidden cabal to address.
Of course, the whole thing being a satire of who and what we are in the USA means I don’t take any of it seriously. After all, even if I can make the case that it is correct for trends for those of us living in the USA, I suspect things would be quite different outside the states.
Or maybe, it’s more like Escape from New York, in that as the US descended into imbecility, all the other nations forced their idjits to emigrate and walled us off… Hmmmm…
Yeah, The Marching Morons described a world that (mostly) worked thanks to the intelligent minority, whereas Idiocracy depicts a world gone to Hell in a handbasket.
P.S.: I would love for someone to make the sequel Idiocracy 2: Darwin’s Revenge, in which the dysgenic trend is reversed by deliberately creating lots and lots of ways for really stupid people to accidently kill themselves and their children. Like for example putting up billboards of provocatively dressed large-breasted women on dangerously narrow and curved mountain roads. Or putting rat poison and baby formula in nearly identical containers on adjacent shelves.
You know, there is a zombie apocalypse series (biological zombies infected with something similar to rabies) where the low intelligence critters are attracted to any loud noise and lights.
The survivors (among other things) rig up shipping containers with sirens and flashing lights, inside of which are generator powered large grinders.
@Lumpy’s comments brought that to mind horribly. 
Care to name it? It sounds fun.
Since this movie is pretty much pro-eugenics, I wouldn’t think too hard about it. 
No problem, although that particular event is a bit later in the series.
It’s John Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series. Books 1-4 are the “main” story, with some additional anthologies and then later books involving alternate characters (although related) happening concurrent with the first couple of books.
It’s military / survivalist PA fiction, and while Ringo has a predilection to conservative philosophy that doesn’t endear him to me in his other fiction ( - deletes sidebar about The Last Centurion being 180 degrees off in it’s political assumptions for a major plague - ) it’s a fun read despite that and more plausible (barely) than most in the genre.
First book is Under A Graveyard Sky.
There are other, earlier elements where they take advantage of the Zeds lack of critical thinking ability of course, and the pros and cons of that.
It’s a very funny movie, but there’s no evidence that humans are getting dumber, biologically speaking, in the real world.
Never were, haven’t thought in those terms since middle childhood.
We only think we as individuals think thoughts separately from each other. Mostly we do not; mostly each of us critiques ideas, concepts, memes, etc by using yet other ideas, concepts etc that we acquired from each other as our analytical tools. Not that we’re mindless brainless puppets (we aren’t) but believing that individuals are autonomously deciding things and thinking things independently is like a neuron believing it is a brain.
This is easier to see once you realize how many of the things under discussion have been under discussion for generations. It’s the species (or the culture at least) mulling things over, via us as individuals, and gradually clarifying its thoughts on the topic.
This is entirely true of the leaders, content creators, designers, innovators, etc who “make things happen”
No, but I am seeing evidence that a lot of them are no longer ashamed of, or even take pride in, being less educated. They are being told that uninformed opinion is as equally valid as facts, or even that uninformed opinion is better than fact if enough people believe it.
It’s a documentary.
Then why cant I find those Starbux at Costco! 
It’s eugenics, and it’s bull shit. Once you realize that, it’s impossible to find humor in it.
In reply to the OP, I always thought there were no smart people left. Society was just running on inertia. That’s why the food machines would take your money but not give any food. Because 1) there was no food but 2) there was no one to notice. Everything is automated, and on automatic.
The world of Idiocracy is in its last stages. If not for Joe Average, there would be a massive famine of never before seen proportions, killing 90+% of the population within a year.
And they’d all be too stupid to notice.
But remind me again how they started “watering” the plants with Gatorade (electrolytes: it’s what the plants crave)? That suggests some level of human meddling at some point in the intermediate past that precipitated the pending collapse. Like, things were 99.999% automated, and it’s that remaining .001 that’s left room for the system to fail and allow humanity to kill itself off.
Oh yeah. Good question.
Fanwank: That was active meddling by someone that thought he was smart. The system would have kept using water, but some bozo deliberately overrode the system. Probably at the request of some bozo at Brawndo.
Otherwise, yea.
My thought was that Gatorade sales were dipping for some reason, and some adwank came up with the slogan to get the product going again.
That’s my take. If there were any smart folks left, they either learned to blend in or they were imprisoned or killed by the idiots. Either way they wouldn’t have been in a position to change anything.
No, in the movie the security measures were laughably inept. Also, while stupid, the idiots weren’t particularly malevolent. They would have been too stupid to run a prison or keep anyone locked up.