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)
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].
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 values
They might not be idiots, but I am afraid that many of them are politically illiterate. How else would you explain that Donald Trump became president again?
Agreed. The unbearable smugness of the coastal elites is so pervasive, a person will dismiss “those people” but tie themselves in knots to avoid criticizing even the least the current protected class of the month
Or in the case of America, many people just want others to suffer so that they can feel better about themselves, and are willing to elect a leader who will do that on their behalf, even at their own cost.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was just following the parent's wording. I don't really think they were stupid, or even necessarily greedy and shameless though some no doubt have been. I think mostly it has been ignorance. Likewise the general voting population: I don't think they've gotten dumber, but I do think they've gotten more misinformed. As the saying goes, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble; it's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Never has that been more true in American politics.
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.
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.
"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."
Serious question - what is 'dysfunctional' about 'blue cities' that works better in 'red cities'?
The classic obvious example is cost of living. All of the blue cities have awful zoning and development restrictions that cause them to fail consistently to actually produce new housing that comes even close to demand. The oft repeated success stories are how cities like Houston, despite being not the kind of city I want to live in, are much much more affordable since they actually allow the market to function. Progressives go on and on about how supply and demand doesn't actually apply to them, and how they need to demand 100% affordable housing with absolutely no explanation of how that will pencil out for developers, digging themselves even deeper into the hole.
More examples include how crime has gained San Francisco an image something like the land of the walking dead, where progressive governance treated homelessness and mental addiction as a problem of equity of opportunity - which in the super long run is perhaps true, but doesn't lead to any good short term outcomes. It's only now that some blue city mayors realize that, actually, order might be kinda important.
As well as the inability for these cities to maintain and improve their transit systems, usually because they can’t focus on cost and service quality and instead try to make their transit projects be about irrelevant things like income inequality, protecting obsolete jobs, saving random endangered species or whatever, so you end up with the NYC MTA being unreliable, filthy, and hopeless to expect anything positive to come out of it. Red cities just sidestepped it by organizing around the car, I don't love it but at least you can get around places instead of relying on the worst transit systems on earth.
American progressives seem to have a hopeless zero-sum mentality, where the only way the common man can experience a better life is at the expense of some rich person, and perhaps that is related to the fact that many live in American cities, for which daily life continually has gotten worse because of how incompetent their governance has been.
I can't really talk though. I just gave up on the USA and moved abroad since it was too hopeless for me.
Another thing that comes to mind – education, this has been covered a lot in the media recently. While lefty progressive cities got rid of standardized testing and basic stuff like phonics education in the name of equity (you get more equality if you just don’t teach your kids anything!), other states like Mississippi are seeing great strides in educational attainment by doing the opposite. I just see a consistent pattern of progressive leaders doing incompetent things.
Healthcare - rather than just assuming that the most maximalist possible universal healthcare strategy is the best solution, actually consider how different healthcare strategies balance the cost of long-term solvency, cost control, speed and quality of service, and so on. For example, I am partial to the Japanese system, which unlike the Canadian system (which has crazy wait times), people pay 30% of costs so they still have skin in the game while the national healthcare system mandates fee schedules for common procedures to control costs. No blocking access to specialists behind primary care doctors, no banning private insurers. You get fast healthcare with a more sustainable fiscal basis, and less frivolous use of limited healthcare capacity than e.g. a system where there are no copays. The problem there though is that they have not enough supply of doctors (read: US should think about significantly increasing the supply of medical education and reducing the cost of medical training) and too much incentive for churning people through the system extremely quickly (read: US should have pricing not just be flat fee so that you aren't incentivized purely for speed).
The progressive wing seem irrationally tied to whatever Bernie Sanders claims is the best healthcare arrangement, and think that insurers are the source of all problems, when they actually are terrible from a business standpoint, they barely make money, and the cost of healthcare isn't from them but rather from other fundamental issues that have little to do with them. The result of this is that they land on a policy that half of America doesn’t want, and are too stubborn to budge on it, which means the United States will never get a rational healthcare system.
Housing & transportation - get rid of restrictions that reduce the ability of developers to actually build housing, from zoning restrictions to environmental legislation that is weaponized by NIMBYs to block development, to union labor requirements that send costs of building transit and housing through the roof, to affordable housing requirements that make projects not pencil out. Commercialize and densify areas in and around train stations as much as possible, specifically with for-profit developments, not trying to turn prime real estate into low-income enclaves because they hate gentrification more than they like progress (failing to think critically about what would likely happen if a poor and dangerous place became less poor and dangerous, or the people within such a place made some money to have the option of living elsewhere...).
I am partial again to the Japanese model where the available zones are set nationally, the rules for whether or not you get a permit is basically a checklist, if you check all the boxes you can build what you want, it doesn't discriminate on who's doing it, and for transit in particular, the train companies are literally private real estate companies that develop stations to the maximal extent possible because they make money from it. If you've visited Japan, did you think Shibuya felt awful because it was largely developed by Tokyu Corporation? Or that neighborhoods lack character and energy because the architecture is designed by a small handful of mass-manufactured modular home developer companies?
Progressives seem to think that supply and demand doesn't apply to their beloved cities, corporate landlords are the source of all evil when it comes to housing problems, and that private transit companies are not even a possible option because capitalists are greedy (when in reality they're more motivated than any of these activists are to actually do things that affect change on communities). My lived experience tells me that what I consider to be the greatest housing and transit successes in the world often come from large private developers who are incentivized well, because I've been places and observed how they function.
Also, we should be switching to land value taxes to incentivize efficient use of land, by making vacant lots expensive to hold, while also raising huge amounts of money, because the logic is simple enough for a 3 year old to understand - we have a lot of land and it is expensive. I haven't heard a single progressive even mention the idea despite being a great way to tax the wealthy while providing a strong incentive for better outcomes in cities, because they haven't thought about the root causes of why their cities feel like dumpsters long enough to care, and instead want to protect the historic laundromat and parking lot. Instead they harp on about wealth taxes that will mostly be evaded, and in the end net out tiny amounts of money that don't affect the economy as a whole and have no effect on the quality of their communities besides driving out economically ambitious and successful people.
I can keep going. I'm not a Republican, I'd much rather have the moderate Dems who actually think about the causes of issues to win primaries rather than populists who just try to get everyone pissed off (and probably are lying to their constituents anyway once they moderate as soon as the primaries end because they realize how unpopular and irrational their ideas are), but that isn't where the country is going these days. People are more interested in ideological purity tests than they are about substantive argument, in this sense the leftists aren’t any different than the MAGA people. Instead people like you already decided that people like me have no substantive opinions - very in line with the political zeitgeist these days where everyone's angry all the time and can't have rational conversations or learn from anyone else's experiences in the world. So, idk, enjoy your life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the right take to me. I can't say with absolute certainty, but it feels strongly like the eugenics aspects were there more for shock value... perhaps overestimating the public's capacity to recognize the farce.
And so much of it is so obviously absurd. Invokes everything from Gilliam's Brazil to Kids In The Hall.
As others have said, it's a reflection of what we currently are, magnified. Many aspects of which are not as implausible as they once were. That's where the continued buzz it gets comes from, I think.
I do think the eugenics stuff would be avoided if it were to be made today. If that turns out to be how Mike Judge actually thinks, well, I'd be very disappointed and would have to eat some words.
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
Yes, but in the movie society became that way because the dumb people kept having kids while the smart people didn’t. This wasn’t an uncommon trope in the 1990s and early 2000s. There was a lot of commentary on teenage pregnancies and whatnot before the birth rate collapsed among the lower class.
I highly doubt Mike Judge wants to start culling the population of undesirable traits like birth defects, intellectual disablities, learning disabilities, etc.
But he (like most people) is probably fine with designer babies and sperm clinics that expressly sell product based on the characteristics of the donor (tall, high IQ, etc). That’s a tidier form of the same thing.
But he (like most people) is probably fine with designer babies and sperm clinics that expressly sell product based on the characteristics of the donor (tall, high IQ, etc). That’s a tidier form of the same thing.
that is a wild blanket assumption that "most people" "probably" want designer babies, as if a majority of prospective parents are using sperm clinics.
I think you missed the entire point of the film. You know the end speech where Not Sure says something along the lines of "read a book" and "maybe don't put sports drinks on soil and expect it to grow".
The main premise of the second and third acts of the film demonstrates the scientific process. Hypothesize: "water will make plants grow", Experiment: "put water on plants instead of brawndo", analyze data: "the plants are growing". Go figure, after people see the results of the experiment they change their preconceptions!
There's no problem with American corporations and a lot of problems with American institutions. That's because corporations are controllable. The decline in governance is not.
Idiocracy was not a prediction. Rather, it was a satire of the present, set in the future, much like Woody Allen's Sleeper. The future setting was merely an excuse to exaggerate the present. This is why Idiocracy appears predictive, because it's actually more related to the present than to the future. It's relatively easy, and indeed predictable, for an exaggeration of 2006 to become closer to reality in 2026. Almost every ridiculous element of the fictional future of the movie was based on the world we already know and knew.
The Simpsons "predicted" a Trump Presidency. Not because Matt Groening is the Kwisatz Haderach but simply because our society was already idiotic, so it was a natural extension of that idiocy. The US elected a B-movie (Bedtime for Bonzo) actor in 1980, so there was certainly precedent to the President.
I have a theory that democracy will in the not so far future begin to be a disdained form of government, and it will happen because the Internet makes people think, or realize, too many voters are too dumb to be enfranchised in a rational system. While before we could be unaware, now we are painfully aware of the stupidity of the masses, and this can never be unnoticed. It is a plausible continuation that many will come to the conclusion that democracy does not make sense with this constituency. We may see popular calls for partial disenfranchisement or even just outright oligarchy.
The key difference though was that their idiot leadership was also not; malignant, fascist, mean and downright evil.
In fact - they recognized that they had an issue and actually got the "smart person" involved, although they were too dumb to actually follow-through initially... Unlike at least one current regime which has taken great pleasure in decimating and removing anyone with an ounce of brains...
TM's take is a completely stupid waste of time. It ends with "...[those before us] were as shortsighted as we are, living for now, amassing and consuming as much as possible, and pausing only for a slack-jawed huh-huh at the nearest bloodthirsty infotainment. We’re just not hiding it anymore."
"We predicted this terrible state we're in..., no, we've always been like this."
I mean, who wrote this, and in what state of stupor? Whoever it is, forgot to add the "knuckle-dragging" epithet to make it complete.
Something that always bothered me: A few smart people and a massive amount of ignorant people has been the standard throughout most of history. It's only relatively recently that society has prioritized educating most/all of the population. So even if Idiocracy was right, wouldn't it just be a return to normal human conditions?
The ancient societies you mentioned, were not anti-intellectual. If anything, they placed too much power in their intellectual elites e.g., monks becoming bureaucrats in Charlemagne's kingdom, scholars becoming mandarin officials in Chinese dynasties.
The US always had an anti-intellectual streak. A common quote was I'd rather be judged by a jury of averages joes than a panel of intellectuals. In 2026, the anti-intellectual and anti-science folks are in charge of US institutions.
It really didn’t, and the entire premise of “Idiocracy as predictor” is a genuinely nasty thing. As it stands birth rate doesn’t seem to primarily correlate with intelligence, but socioeconomic status and education. Painting poor people as stupid breeders who will outcompete the genteel intelligentsia isn’t some new and prophetic idea.
It’s shitty, and using the movie as a canard for that old and tired view is shitty as well.
There is one difference, and it is a very telling difference. In Idiocracy, people openly scorned smart people. They made no pretense of using any kind of logic or scientific method.
What we have now is different. People stopped vaccinating their kids because they actually believed the scientific evidence proved vaccines were dangerous. They can point to endless documents which have the overt form of being an actual research paper, written by people who are actually Ph.D.s from good universities.
You can go online and find endless meta-analysis, written by and endless number of untenured professors, that, say, Masking and social distancing didn't help stop the spread of Covid. Because these endless number of untenured professors need to land research grants and write papers. Sure, a face mask is useless against an airborne disease. Go ahead and sneeze on the salad bar.
If this were really like idiocracy, nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc. They would just make fun of anybody who was smarter than they were, because they sounded "effeminate."
I don't know which style of stupid is worse, but it is a pretty big difference.
They most certainly are too stupid. This is a true story. In 1995, a guy named McArther Wheeler was flabbergasted when police picked him up for robbing a bank. He said "But I put the lemon juice on my face!!" He figured that since Lemon juice was used for invisible ink, putting it on his face would make him invisible.
So far, just a story about a dumb guy--but here the story take an epistemologically terrifying turn: He actually did an experiment to prove that it would work. He put Lemon juice on his face, went to the bathroom, and took a selfie. (Since this was 1995, he took a selfie with a polaroid camera.) When he looked at the picture, it just showed a blank mirror.
He was too dumb to know that he had not pointed the camera at the right place.
This is how the anti-vaxers, the anti-covid-ppe crowd are. It's not like they want to ignore the latest results of cutting edge science. It's not even like they don't want to do "research" on the internet. It's that they simply do not know how to tell what is and what is not genuine experimental results. They don't know when they are "hallucinating."
This is not the world that the movie "Idiocracy" presents us with. In idiocracy, everybody is even worse than old McArther Wheeler was. They don't even bother to do any research. Anything they believe is just self-evidently true to them.
(If you really want to freak yourself out, ask yourself how you would be able to tell whether or not you were fooling yourself just as McArther Wheeler did. If you are anti vax or anti Covid PPE, you really should ask yourself that question.)
'Idiocracy' is a cartoonish movie that has to greatly exaggerate the effects of human natural selection, or else there would be no story. It promoted harmful popular misunderstandings of genetics and it shouldn't be defended as in any way accurate.
The dumbing down of America 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. As I write, the number-one videocassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. “Beavis and Butthead” remain popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning—not just of science, but of anything—are avoidable, even undesirable.
-Carl Sagan outsmarting Mike Judge with this passage from The Demon Haunted World (1995)
Comments
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).
Wow, that was a grim read. Way darker than the movie.
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...
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 values
They are at best deeply, deeply misinformed.
Why doesn’t California, the largest state, simply eat the other 49?
I’ll make my own California, with blackjack and hookers.
Wouldn't it be better to merge back with Mexico?
I believe the parent was a Futurama reference in jest.
Racism, misogyny, xenophobia etc. indeed are radically different values from most of the "coastal elites" views.
Can you say more?
They might not be idiots, but I am afraid that many of them are politically illiterate. How else would you explain that Donald Trump became president again?
Cheating
Agreed. The unbearable smugness of the coastal elites is so pervasive, a person will dismiss “those people” but tie themselves in knots to avoid criticizing even the least the current protected class of the month
don't the coastal elites want single payer healthcare?
doesn't that help everyone?
what am I missing?
“Some people just want to watch the world burn”.
Or in the case of America, many people just want others to suffer so that they can feel better about themselves, and are willing to elect a leader who will do that on their behalf, even at their own cost.
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.
It's also made in the time of W. Bush, when everything was still only a little bit stupid in relative terms.
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).
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.
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.
You can probably imagine participation and the popular vote would be very different if electoral college votes weren't winner-take-all.
I can imagine a pink elephant too.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/behind-trump...
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.
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.
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.
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.
They're not stupid, they're greedy and shameless.
I was just following the parent's wording. I don't really think they were stupid, or even necessarily greedy and shameless though some no doubt have been. I think mostly it has been ignorance. Likewise the general voting population: I don't think they've gotten dumber, but I do think they've gotten more misinformed. As the saying goes, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble; it's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Never has that been more true in American politics.
They are creating a world that is inhospitable to them.
They are stupid.
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.
Could you expand on this? I don't think I fully understand but the argument you are making sounds interesting.
wtf are you talking about
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.
"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."
Serious question - what is 'dysfunctional' about 'blue cities' that works better in 'red cities'?
The classic obvious example is cost of living. All of the blue cities have awful zoning and development restrictions that cause them to fail consistently to actually produce new housing that comes even close to demand. The oft repeated success stories are how cities like Houston, despite being not the kind of city I want to live in, are much much more affordable since they actually allow the market to function. Progressives go on and on about how supply and demand doesn't actually apply to them, and how they need to demand 100% affordable housing with absolutely no explanation of how that will pencil out for developers, digging themselves even deeper into the hole.
More examples include how crime has gained San Francisco an image something like the land of the walking dead, where progressive governance treated homelessness and mental addiction as a problem of equity of opportunity - which in the super long run is perhaps true, but doesn't lead to any good short term outcomes. It's only now that some blue city mayors realize that, actually, order might be kinda important.
As well as the inability for these cities to maintain and improve their transit systems, usually because they can’t focus on cost and service quality and instead try to make their transit projects be about irrelevant things like income inequality, protecting obsolete jobs, saving random endangered species or whatever, so you end up with the NYC MTA being unreliable, filthy, and hopeless to expect anything positive to come out of it. Red cities just sidestepped it by organizing around the car, I don't love it but at least you can get around places instead of relying on the worst transit systems on earth.
American progressives seem to have a hopeless zero-sum mentality, where the only way the common man can experience a better life is at the expense of some rich person, and perhaps that is related to the fact that many live in American cities, for which daily life continually has gotten worse because of how incompetent their governance has been.
I can't really talk though. I just gave up on the USA and moved abroad since it was too hopeless for me.
Another thing that comes to mind – education, this has been covered a lot in the media recently. While lefty progressive cities got rid of standardized testing and basic stuff like phonics education in the name of equity (you get more equality if you just don’t teach your kids anything!), other states like Mississippi are seeing great strides in educational attainment by doing the opposite. I just see a consistent pattern of progressive leaders doing incompetent things.
Nothing, this person is just making stuff up.
Thanks for dismissing a contrary opinion just because you don't like that I disagree with you.
Name one solution.
Healthcare - rather than just assuming that the most maximalist possible universal healthcare strategy is the best solution, actually consider how different healthcare strategies balance the cost of long-term solvency, cost control, speed and quality of service, and so on. For example, I am partial to the Japanese system, which unlike the Canadian system (which has crazy wait times), people pay 30% of costs so they still have skin in the game while the national healthcare system mandates fee schedules for common procedures to control costs. No blocking access to specialists behind primary care doctors, no banning private insurers. You get fast healthcare with a more sustainable fiscal basis, and less frivolous use of limited healthcare capacity than e.g. a system where there are no copays. The problem there though is that they have not enough supply of doctors (read: US should think about significantly increasing the supply of medical education and reducing the cost of medical training) and too much incentive for churning people through the system extremely quickly (read: US should have pricing not just be flat fee so that you aren't incentivized purely for speed).
The progressive wing seem irrationally tied to whatever Bernie Sanders claims is the best healthcare arrangement, and think that insurers are the source of all problems, when they actually are terrible from a business standpoint, they barely make money, and the cost of healthcare isn't from them but rather from other fundamental issues that have little to do with them. The result of this is that they land on a policy that half of America doesn’t want, and are too stubborn to budge on it, which means the United States will never get a rational healthcare system.
Housing & transportation - get rid of restrictions that reduce the ability of developers to actually build housing, from zoning restrictions to environmental legislation that is weaponized by NIMBYs to block development, to union labor requirements that send costs of building transit and housing through the roof, to affordable housing requirements that make projects not pencil out. Commercialize and densify areas in and around train stations as much as possible, specifically with for-profit developments, not trying to turn prime real estate into low-income enclaves because they hate gentrification more than they like progress (failing to think critically about what would likely happen if a poor and dangerous place became less poor and dangerous, or the people within such a place made some money to have the option of living elsewhere...).
I am partial again to the Japanese model where the available zones are set nationally, the rules for whether or not you get a permit is basically a checklist, if you check all the boxes you can build what you want, it doesn't discriminate on who's doing it, and for transit in particular, the train companies are literally private real estate companies that develop stations to the maximal extent possible because they make money from it. If you've visited Japan, did you think Shibuya felt awful because it was largely developed by Tokyu Corporation? Or that neighborhoods lack character and energy because the architecture is designed by a small handful of mass-manufactured modular home developer companies?
Progressives seem to think that supply and demand doesn't apply to their beloved cities, corporate landlords are the source of all evil when it comes to housing problems, and that private transit companies are not even a possible option because capitalists are greedy (when in reality they're more motivated than any of these activists are to actually do things that affect change on communities). My lived experience tells me that what I consider to be the greatest housing and transit successes in the world often come from large private developers who are incentivized well, because I've been places and observed how they function.
Also, we should be switching to land value taxes to incentivize efficient use of land, by making vacant lots expensive to hold, while also raising huge amounts of money, because the logic is simple enough for a 3 year old to understand - we have a lot of land and it is expensive. I haven't heard a single progressive even mention the idea despite being a great way to tax the wealthy while providing a strong incentive for better outcomes in cities, because they haven't thought about the root causes of why their cities feel like dumpsters long enough to care, and instead want to protect the historic laundromat and parking lot. Instead they harp on about wealth taxes that will mostly be evaded, and in the end net out tiny amounts of money that don't affect the economy as a whole and have no effect on the quality of their communities besides driving out economically ambitious and successful people.
I can keep going. I'm not a Republican, I'd much rather have the moderate Dems who actually think about the causes of issues to win primaries rather than populists who just try to get everyone pissed off (and probably are lying to their constituents anyway once they moderate as soon as the primaries end because they realize how unpopular and irrational their ideas are), but that isn't where the country is going these days. People are more interested in ideological purity tests than they are about substantive argument, in this sense the leftists aren’t any different than the MAGA people. Instead people like you already decided that people like me have no substantive opinions - very in line with the political zeitgeist these days where everyone's angry all the time and can't have rational conversations or learn from anyone else's experiences in the world. So, idk, enjoy your life.
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.
https://archive.is/3Y8IF
A lot of what seemed wildly absurdist at the time, seems a lot more realistic these days.
Mike Judge was inspired to make Idiocracy from a trip to Disneyland, having since been I can see the resemblance.
Mr Judge is from Texas
A trip to Buc-ee's would've been great inspo also
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.
Idiocracy's society didn't have a movie about Idiocracy. So, no, we're not in Idiocracy.
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.
Crocs taking off bc of this movie is probably the craziest fact
It's funny that people cite Idiocracy despite its explicitly eugenicist premise.
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.
This is the right take to me. I can't say with absolute certainty, but it feels strongly like the eugenics aspects were there more for shock value... perhaps overestimating the public's capacity to recognize the farce.
And so much of it is so obviously absurd. Invokes everything from Gilliam's Brazil to Kids In The Hall.
As others have said, it's a reflection of what we currently are, magnified. Many aspects of which are not as implausible as they once were. That's where the continued buzz it gets comes from, I think.
I do think the eugenics stuff would be avoided if it were to be made today. If that turns out to be how Mike Judge actually thinks, well, I'd be very disappointed and would have to eat some words.
Yes, but in the movie society became that way because the dumb people kept having kids while the smart people didn’t. This wasn’t an uncommon trope in the 1990s and early 2000s. There was a lot of commentary on teenage pregnancies and whatnot before the birth rate collapsed among the lower class.
But he (like most people) is probably fine with designer babies and sperm clinics that expressly sell product based on the characteristics of the donor (tall, high IQ, etc). That’s a tidier form of the same thing.
that is a wild blanket assumption that "most people" "probably" want designer babies, as if a majority of prospective parents are using sperm clinics.
I think you missed the entire point of the film. You know the end speech where Not Sure says something along the lines of "read a book" and "maybe don't put sports drinks on soil and expect it to grow".
The main premise of the second and third acts of the film demonstrates the scientific process. Hypothesize: "water will make plants grow", Experiment: "put water on plants instead of brawndo", analyze data: "the plants are growing". Go figure, after people see the results of the experiment they change their preconceptions!
It's stupidity by choice. Willful ignorance.
'Despite'? I thought the theory of evolution was widely accepted.
Not in America.
There's no problem with American corporations and a lot of problems with American institutions. That's because corporations are controllable. The decline in governance is not.
It is actually a win-win situation. Government controls the corporations and corporations control the government.
We're not living in idiocracy yet. They knew they were stupid and gave control to the new guy. We're in the prequel, and we're still getting started.
Idiocracy was not a prediction. Rather, it was a satire of the present, set in the future, much like Woody Allen's Sleeper. The future setting was merely an excuse to exaggerate the present. This is why Idiocracy appears predictive, because it's actually more related to the present than to the future. It's relatively easy, and indeed predictable, for an exaggeration of 2006 to become closer to reality in 2026. Almost every ridiculous element of the fictional future of the movie was based on the world we already know and knew.
The Simpsons "predicted" a Trump Presidency. Not because Matt Groening is the Kwisatz Haderach but simply because our society was already idiotic, so it was a natural extension of that idiocy. The US elected a B-movie (Bedtime for Bonzo) actor in 1980, so there was certainly precedent to the President.
I think of this every time I see something/someone advertising electrolytes!
Doesn't even mention crocs
I have a theory that democracy will in the not so far future begin to be a disdained form of government, and it will happen because the Internet makes people think, or realize, too many voters are too dumb to be enfranchised in a rational system. While before we could be unaware, now we are painfully aware of the stupidity of the masses, and this can never be unnoticed. It is a plausible continuation that many will come to the conclusion that democracy does not make sense with this constituency. We may see popular calls for partial disenfranchisement or even just outright oligarchy.
No, the level of corruption is just too high for a functioning democracy.
The key difference though was that their idiot leadership was also not; malignant, fascist, mean and downright evil.
In fact - they recognized that they had an issue and actually got the "smart person" involved, although they were too dumb to actually follow-through initially... Unlike at least one current regime which has taken great pleasure in decimating and removing anyone with an ounce of brains...
TM's take is a completely stupid waste of time. It ends with "...[those before us] were as shortsighted as we are, living for now, amassing and consuming as much as possible, and pausing only for a slack-jawed huh-huh at the nearest bloodthirsty infotainment. We’re just not hiding it anymore."
"We predicted this terrible state we're in..., no, we've always been like this."
I mean, who wrote this, and in what state of stupor? Whoever it is, forgot to add the "knuckle-dragging" epithet to make it complete.
I write like this. It's probably a Texas thing as my writing is a close approximation to how I talk. That is the writing is meant to be read out-loud.
BTW, I believe the author was painting the visual image of Beavis & Butthead, not a caveman.
Something that always bothered me: A few smart people and a massive amount of ignorant people has been the standard throughout most of history. It's only relatively recently that society has prioritized educating most/all of the population. So even if Idiocracy was right, wouldn't it just be a return to normal human conditions?
The ancient societies you mentioned, were not anti-intellectual. If anything, they placed too much power in their intellectual elites e.g., monks becoming bureaucrats in Charlemagne's kingdom, scholars becoming mandarin officials in Chinese dynasties.
The US always had an anti-intellectual streak. A common quote was I'd rather be judged by a jury of averages joes than a panel of intellectuals. In 2026, the anti-intellectual and anti-science folks are in charge of US institutions.
Fake empathic "Hi, Welcome In" is the modern day "Welcome to Costco I love you"
We still have another 480 years of this to go.
It really didn’t, and the entire premise of “Idiocracy as predictor” is a genuinely nasty thing. As it stands birth rate doesn’t seem to primarily correlate with intelligence, but socioeconomic status and education. Painting poor people as stupid breeders who will outcompete the genteel intelligentsia isn’t some new and prophetic idea.
It’s shitty, and using the movie as a canard for that old and tired view is shitty as well.
There is one difference, and it is a very telling difference. In Idiocracy, people openly scorned smart people. They made no pretense of using any kind of logic or scientific method.
What we have now is different. People stopped vaccinating their kids because they actually believed the scientific evidence proved vaccines were dangerous. They can point to endless documents which have the overt form of being an actual research paper, written by people who are actually Ph.D.s from good universities.
You can go online and find endless meta-analysis, written by and endless number of untenured professors, that, say, Masking and social distancing didn't help stop the spread of Covid. Because these endless number of untenured professors need to land research grants and write papers. Sure, a face mask is useless against an airborne disease. Go ahead and sneeze on the salad bar.
If this were really like idiocracy, nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc. They would just make fun of anybody who was smarter than they were, because they sounded "effeminate."
I don't know which style of stupid is worse, but it is a pretty big difference.
We’ll give it 50-100 years down this trajectory and we will have arrived there
How do you know they're not too stupid to realize what/the damage they're doing in the first place?
They most certainly are too stupid. This is a true story. In 1995, a guy named McArther Wheeler was flabbergasted when police picked him up for robbing a bank. He said "But I put the lemon juice on my face!!" He figured that since Lemon juice was used for invisible ink, putting it on his face would make him invisible.
So far, just a story about a dumb guy--but here the story take an epistemologically terrifying turn: He actually did an experiment to prove that it would work. He put Lemon juice on his face, went to the bathroom, and took a selfie. (Since this was 1995, he took a selfie with a polaroid camera.) When he looked at the picture, it just showed a blank mirror.
He was too dumb to know that he had not pointed the camera at the right place.
This is how the anti-vaxers, the anti-covid-ppe crowd are. It's not like they want to ignore the latest results of cutting edge science. It's not even like they don't want to do "research" on the internet. It's that they simply do not know how to tell what is and what is not genuine experimental results. They don't know when they are "hallucinating."
This is not the world that the movie "Idiocracy" presents us with. In idiocracy, everybody is even worse than old McArther Wheeler was. They don't even bother to do any research. Anything they believe is just self-evidently true to them.
(If you really want to freak yourself out, ask yourself how you would be able to tell whether or not you were fooling yourself just as McArther Wheeler did. If you are anti vax or anti Covid PPE, you really should ask yourself that question.)
'Idiocracy' is a cartoonish movie that has to greatly exaggerate the effects of human natural selection, or else there would be no story. It promoted harmful popular misunderstandings of genetics and it shouldn't be defended as in any way accurate.
-Carl Sagan outsmarting Mike Judge with this passage from The Demon Haunted World (1995)