Idiocracy usually gets criticized for it’s embrace of eugenics. But today I’m going to point out that the future envisioned by the movie is 100% right wing. Not since Red Dawn has a move more closely aligned with reactionary politics.
What’s the conflict of the movie? Stupidity. That’s the cause of all the problems. Not institutions, not systems. Even corporate greed and mismanagement are down to dumb executives. Because if smart and qualified people were in charge, there would be no problems with corporations. Government? Same story, we just need an average white guy with dictatorial power to come in rescue the DEI hires.
embrace of eugenics
I genuinely don’t know where this comes from? Did I miss something in the movie?
Recognizing a trend versus being a proponent of the most horrible to approach it is an Idiocracy level leap in logic. The movie does not endorse eugenics in any way. At most, it displays a caricature of things, like genetics, as movies are apt to do.
Because its premise is that stupid parents exclusively get stupid children, and stupid parents gets more children than intelligent parents. That is how the world ends up as it is in the movie.
But that is of course not how intelligence works. Stupid parents can get intelligent children, otherwise intelligent people would never have existed in the first place.
Of course that doesn’t make the movie embrace eugenics. It is just an unimportantfictional premise meant to explain why the world is at it is in the movie.
Oh hmm. Does it mention genetics? It could be more of a cultural thing.
But that is of course not how intelligence works.
But intelligence is influenced by genetics. Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.
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Which is nowhere near the 100% which the movie implies.
The movie doesn’t imply 100%.
The hypothesis they use is that stupid people have more kids and become the majority. It shows the genetic selection occuring over many generations.
Would anyone here prefer the current administration over President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho?
Camacho actually wanted to solve the country’s problems.
I wish.
In Idiocracy the public wanted the smart people in charge, President Camacho even stepped aside when he knew he was unqualified compared to Joe.
In whatever the hell this is, the public demonizes intelligence.Carl Sagan, in 1995:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance
Isaac Asimov in 1980:
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
President Comacho tried to help the country. He didn’t actively work against it.
Posts like this are pure cope. Idiocracy was better than the actively malicious government we have now.
