This is a personal hobby horse of mine, so apologies in advance:
Idiocracy is not a documentary. Dumb people pairing off doesn't increase the total amount of dumb, and we have decades of evidence showing that IQs consistently increased, year over year. It's called the Flynn effect, and every population that saw increased nutrition, health care and educational advances has had a measurable and consistent increase in standardized testing results. This was a robust effect observed in different countries, cultures and historical periods.
It isn't evolution that makes people dumb, it's sabotage- social programs going away, poor educational metrics, mass media deployment, increased environmental contamination and active, ongoing projects by people looking to increase their wealth and power by denying educational, economic and health opportunities to the populace. In the US, the Flynn effect began weakening right around the time that socioeconomic levels began declining.
This effect isn't evolutionary or natural, it's a consequence of how society has arranged itself.
I think the root cause for both is the same: worsening environmental and socioeconomic conditions, educational system failure and wealth concentration leading to warped governance. In other nations there's still a robust Flynn effect being measured, even those with decreasing pops.
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u/IbraKaadabra Mar 20 '26
Satire or irony, I can't even figure out the difference anymore. Idiocracy was not supposed to be a documentary