Idiocracy - your thoughts?

Cafe Society
21

Not to over analyze a movie that wasn’t intended to be analyzed…

Oh hell, of course I want to over analyze it! That’s what we’re here for!

So, in this glorious future, all the means of production are automated. Machinery needs little servicing. Even the planes not only fly themselves, but need minimal maintenance. Not completely foolproof as we see the plane crashing. Was that “pilot error” (some moron spilled brawndo on the controls), or a part failure, or lack of enough jet fuel in the tanks? No one will ever know. Because there’s no such thing as competent NTSB investigators in the world.

The food production is probably all automated. With GPS controlled tractors and harvesters, we’re halfway there now. There may be some supervisor farmers who are smarter than the average moron, just by necessity or by living in the country and watching the plants grow, but not by a lot.

But some things still need manual input, like the food machines. Some moron drives a truck and dumps boxes or bags of food into the machines. But since there’s no food, there’s nothing to deliver. So all the workers think “hey this is great!” and do nothing all day collecting a paycheck just the same. Later they complain there’s no food, but they never make the connection.

So, anything automated like deliveries to stores, manufacturing of most items, keeps going on, and will long after the famine kills everyone. The farm machines “know” there’s nothing to do, so they sit. The supervisor farmers just sit around waiting for something to happen, not knowing when or why, but nothing does. Maybe a spark of something in the back of their brains says “hey, last year at this time, the plants were a foot high by now”, but before they can draw a conclusion, it’s time for “Ow My Balls!” on TV.

22

My guess as to whether there were any smart people? I think there were at one time, those are the ones that automated everything. But the smart people either dithered over having children, or were nerdballs that were still too socially inept to mate with the stupids or even each other.

23

No need for incarceration when criminals are routinely rehabilitated every weekend, to the approval of larger society. Hard to say whether I’d prefer to meet my end by malevolent hands, vs just being “Lennied” by someone who really didn’t have a plan.

24

I haven’t seen the movie but I am aware of it and what it’s about.

Assuming that there were still smart people around, I’d expect that as the majority becomes sufficiently dumb, the ability for the smarties to take advantage of them grows. While not all will, you’d expect that some of the smarties would take advantage, forming harems and sex clubs.

In the end, you’ll have smarties who are being prolific in spreading their genes, bringing the ratio back towards the middle.

We see today, for example, people like Musk with 10 babies and a plethora of sugarbabies trying to hit up guys in tech.

Idiocracy assumes that smart people are always smart. That just ain’t so.

25

That’s more or less what happens in The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

But the premise of that movie was to imagine various futures. The Eloi/Morlocks is one such future, many millenia hence.

This movie is titled Idiocracy. It’s written from the point of trying to justify this world of idiots existing. I agree that an Eloi-Morlocks outcome is far more likely, that at some point the stupidity of the vast majority of people would be exploited by someone even semi-smart, but apparently that never happens in this universe.

26

That sounds like a reverse tautology. Or a no true scottsman fallacy. :slight_smile:
Smart people are always smart. Unless they’re not.

In context of the movie, the smart or at least “relatively smarter” people seem to have died off or been absorbed into the soup of idiots, and this seems to be a relatively recent thing. The trash pile might be several hundred years old, but the failure of the basic functions of civilization (lack of food, failure of technology with no one to design/fix it) must be recent. Even idiots will complain when planes start crashing on a daily basis. As someone on the board posted, President Camacho may not be smart, but he is competent enough to find the smart person to fix things. He is capable at least of realizing he needs help.

27

I think the premise is that no matter how stupid people get, the stupids will outbreed the smarts. Even if everyone gets dumber, the smarts keep enabling the stupids and the stupids retain the feral ability to outbreed. The smarts never turn on the stupids for any reason.

28

My thought is that the water/Brawndo crisis must have only occurred within the last season or two at most of farming. Potassium and Sodium salts would accumulate very quickly and make the soil infertile. The means of production and industry must still be there in some function for the Brawndo conversion to have happened, and for it to get reversed by our average hero, though like a previous poster noted they are all likely only a season away from a famine collapse.

29

The thing, if you ignore the premise and the facts that it is satire, is the circumstances are sadly realistic and self supporting to a large degree.

The problem isn’t just the idiocy of the population, for example, as brought up earlier, Comacho isn’t particularly stupid, but -IS- profoundly ignorant. The collapse of society has been ongoing for a while apparently, and the automated infrastructure isn’t perfect (very possibly due to human ‘input’ as well) - but that would apply to any infrastructure related to the preservation and distribution of knowledge as well.

Combine that with the (apparently still lingering) cultural assumptions that smart people are uncool that seems to still be a thing in that society, and anyone who is actually still ‘smart’ (in terms of analytical ability or however else you judge it) is going to be so culturally and educationally crippled as to be nearly indistinguishable from someone who we would consider seriously developmentally challenged.

And yeah, we’re waaaaaay overanalyzing it, isn’t it fun?

30

Or that the popular conception of smart is incorrect.

For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll say that there’s “smart” like you can do technical things well and then there’s “smart” like you can resist your natural urges and not act on your instincts.

If you look at a group of doctors, engineers, etc. and see some fat, out of shape ones then that’s an indication that these are different smarts. Likewise, if you see a group of bodybuilders who are able to pummel their body and subject themselves to starvation diets for extended periods, but couldn’t do any complex math to save their life, then that further indicates that the two smarts are unrelated. Idiocracy treats them as the same but they are really unrelated and independent of one another.

31

I’ve only seen the movie once, and that was a long time ago.

I always thought the stupid wasn’t due to stupid people outbreeding the smart people, but similar to what was going on in the plants. The cumulative effects of pollution and poor nutrition left everyone stupid. If babies are getting Brawndo instead of breast milk or formula, then the babies grow up to be stupid.

The people in the Idiocracy world have a range of intelligence, just like we do now, but their most intelligent were less intelligent than our average person.

32

The outbreeding is explicitly stated and illustrated in the movie. The movie is careful to illustrate this using white people. Now it’s interesting that the USA is reproducing at less than replacement level now, other countries are producing more of the world’s population. Calling people from other countries, other races stupid was not something the movie was aiming to do. So in that case the movie is not really true to the times of 2023.

There are a couple of other facets touched on in the movie. Part of it is that technology means that people don’t know how to do anything and never learn. That part I think is holding true.

The third facet is the dominance of lowbrow culture, and that this culture will cow smarter people into accepting it. I think this has deviated since the film was made. Many people embrace nerd culture and I think the influence of any sort of lowbrow culture has waned, not gotten stronger, since the film was made. A film like this today would make note of Trump but also the increased hostility and separation between the two camps. It’s a dated element that wouldn’t be played the same way today.

33

It’s important to keep in mind that, like all science fiction, Idiocracy isn’t actually about the future. It’s set in the future, but it’s about the present. Any explanation the film gives about why people are stupid in the future is just a literary device, because the whole point is that people are stupid right now.

34

I love Idiocracy, but I saw that movie, too; it was called Don’t Look Up.

35

You obviously have not seen TikTok.

36

I tend to agree that humanity isn’t getting measurably “dumber”. It’s just that social media lets us all now be aware of the dumb people that were always there.

And we call some of them “influencers”.

37

Demolition Man’s dystopian future seems entirely contained within Califorina. I always wondered if folks in Nevada or Oregon were looking over the state border in disbelief, then going on with their lives. There’s not a frame of that movie that bears up under critical thought, but it’s a fun diversion.

38

It’s very on point to feel you’ve lived in the most enlightened era the world has ever seen RIGHT NOW. Not ten years before your coming of age, not a decade after your coming of age. Nope. During your teenage years, whenever they were, also happened to be Civilization at it’s peak. Everyone agrees.

Socrates said this, pretty sure.

39

Finally someone who got the point of the movie. It’s not about eugenics or the future at all, it’s a warning about the stupidity of people now. This movie was made back in 2006, well before a disturbing amount of it has come to pass more recently.

40

I don’t see how it is “dystopian”. In some ways, it’s better than what we have now. On the one hand, you can’t swear, which is a fucking injustice to the concept of free speech, motherfuckers. On the other, it would be nice to have no grafitti. Either way, people that we see seem happy. I’m not sure we can tell, from what we see on screen. I think the world is better off with Simon Phoenix (and maybe John Spartan) locked away.