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- It's funny that people cite Idiocracy despite its explicitly eugenicist premise.by rayiner
- 'Despite'? I thought the theory of evolution was widely accepted.
- I've heard this criticism before and I don't that it paints the complete picture. I reckon it's less a commentary on "weeding out" the intellectually and physically disabled but more a commentary on a society and government that makes stupid decisions (brawndo on plants) and rewards anti-intellectualism to the point of it becoming a core component of life in the year 2505.
The society depicted in Idiocracy is the way it is by choice that turns into policy. I highly doubt Mike Judge wants to start culling the population of undesirable traits like birth defects, intellectual disablities, learning disabilities, etc.
by rc5150 - I think if Idiocracy were re-released today about the only thing it would change would be that misinformation would be the major driver at the start. Pretty much everything else holds, including predicting the rise of Crocks.by jmward01
- Crocs taking off bc of this movie is probably the craziest factby nunez
- Idiocracy's society didn't have a movie about Idiocracy. So, no, we're not in Idiocracy.by zahrevsky
- Give it a break folks, self-righteousness doesn't pay, "the idiots" don't await to be converted, assholes don't care for reputation. Look at Back to the Future - in real life Marty is sick and feeble, Doc is just a paltry real estate investor. Biff is the true winner taking all power, real estate, and pretty ladies... and yes he has his own portrait in his own office.
- Mike Judge was inspired to make Idiocracy from a trip to Disneyland, having since been I can see the resemblance.by cjbgkagh
- Mr Judge is from Texas
A trip to Buc-ee's would've been great inspo also
by nunez - A lot of what seemed wildly absurdist at the time, seems a lot more realistic these days.by pogopop77
- I watched it around the time it released or may be on dvd. I remember thinking the premise is great but the situations are way too exaggerated for comedy and in some ways the movie tries too hard for laughs. Looking back and comparing with today, I would say he did not exaggerate it enough!! To start, he said the country devolves in 500 years, hardly took 20.by yalogin
- Our problems are caused by like 5 guys owning everything, not because stupid people have more kids than smart people. So no, Idiocracy did not predict all of this.by stanleykm
- That's just, like, your opinion, man.
Personally I think the USA's problems go much deeper than some vague sense that rich people are the source of all problems. Compared the whole US economy, they're a drop in the bucket, and they're not the reason that American institutions are dysfunctional; those dysfunctions were present long before Trump took power and Google got rich.
My opinion is that progressive populists don't know how to fix our problems, let alone have they even come close to identifying them, so they just focus on everything as "us vs the elites." You can see this simply by observing that the actual places that are progressive controlled - major blue cities - are the most dysfunctional places in the country. The solution? Wealth taxes that will cover a tiny percent of expenditures for a year or two tops, and no mention of why things are so expensive and slow in the first place, which has almost nothing to do with those rich guys, and have a lot more to do with dumb bureaucratic requirements; irrational procurement processes; capture from groups that sometimes are tied to wealthy interests but also come from the people like unions, neighborhood and environmental organizations; watering down every project by lacking focus on what they're actually meant to solve; procedural issues that allow cynical political actors to selectively interpret and enforce laws; and so on.
I'm sympathetic to the feeling of unfairness, but I want actual solutions, most of which are too boring for the populists on either side to stay focused on.
by presentation - Our problem is society never was stable without a permanent surplus. Our problem is adaptions to this endless loop. Look at the world where things have run out, those without shoes murdering those with, the decomlexification alure of stone-age ideologies. We are a damaged, danger to itself species, whose highest hope is to aquire one more stick of high tech dynamite for a endless banton run against the odds.
Now is where we are going atm perfect? No. But at least its a plan. A self repairing asbestos orphanage for retarded firestarters which allows for progress at a realistic pacr is the way forward. Everything else is retardation whorship, in booms and busts, where every "unforseeable" regression eats a little something from civilization. If you couldnt predict trump in the 2000s, your whole model of humanity is wrong and flawed, and shouldn't be anywhere near where futures are planned.
by xaxbxcxdxe - It's possible that stupid people in government have helped lead to the "5 guys owning everything" though. The world we live in is a result of policy choices, not a natural inevitability. And the people we've put in office over the past 50 years have played a large role. If they were being put in office by a population that was getting dumber and dumber every election cycle, that could certainly be a big contributor to the problems in wealth disparity we see today. I'm not saying that's the case, only that the two theories are not mutually exclusive.by vannevar
- The source of the problem was misdiagnosed, though. Idiocracy predicted that idiots would eventually outnumber smart people because the latter are supposedly much more ambivalent about having kids. I don’t think that’s actually true—the “smart” aren’t necessarily having fewer kids than the “idiots.” The real problem is idiots have disproportionate political representation simply because of where they live. That’s especially relevant in the United States, where states with tiny populations have the same number of Senators as states with tens of millions of people.
Also, smart people are often less likely to vote when both options seem bad, whereas people driven by propaganda have no such hesitation and will turn out in droves—a problem Bertrand Russell highlighted quite clearly [1].
[1]: https://economicsociology.org/2023/11/30/in-the-modern-world...
by shubhamjain - They are. For example, literally nobody should be having kids rn in US, because the next decade is gonna be pretty horrible. But people still are, because they are none the wiser.by ActorNightly
- Smart people not having kids was just a part of the movie. It also seemed to speak about america, where capitalism/corporations overwhelm common sense.by m463
- > The real problem is idiots have disproportionate political representation simply because of where they live. That’s especially relevant in the United States
This lets Americans off the hook far too easily. Trump won an absolute majority this time, and the GOP won the house too. For the Senate you will have to do your own research because I’m on mobile, but last time I checked the actual effect (estimated) on Senate outcomes is very modest.
by petesergeant - > Idiocracy predicted that idiots would eventually outnumber smart people because the latter are supposedly much more ambivalent about having kids
To be fair, it was just a funny and easy to explain introduction to the movie's premise. If it was made today it may have had a montage of people outsourcing their thinking skills to AI or something along these lines.
by seba_dos1 - > the “smart” aren’t necessarily having fewer kids than the “idiots.”
They are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
There are some confounding factors, like education and income also affecting fertility, and correlated with most measures of intelligence, but that doesn't actually affect the diagnosis - regardless of if intelligence directly lowers fertility, or if the effect is mediated by e.g. education, the net effect is that smarter people have fewer children (in our current environment).
- Idiocracy is a fable about our time. Setting his story in the future helps Mike Judge to maintain plausible deniability, but the movie is there to validate your sneaking suspicion that everything is kind of stupid.by Fricken
- We are a republic of 50 states, who are only willing to work together because they are represented. I’ve lived in NY, MO, CA and TX. The cultures and beliefs are different in each, and the people you seem to call “idiots” I have never found to be idiots. They just don’t prioritize nearly the same things you do, and may have radically different valuesby jdross
- No, "Marching Morons" [0] from 1951 "predicted all of this". The original short story (which, while I have not been able to find any explicit confirmation, I just can't believe was not a direct inspiration for the movie), doesn't get nearly enough credit in my opinion. I originally encountered as part of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. II, which additionally included "Who Goes there" (Inspiration for "The Thing") and "With Folded Hands" (not the inspiration for anything so far as I know, but really good nonetheless)
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm
(not to say that I agree with the premise of the claim, but I do think that we should be properly crediting our cultural references).
by MostlyStable - Wow, that was a grim read. Way darker than the movie.by 0x000xca0xfe