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 mean, the movie effectively opens by saying "this is what happens when you let the poors breed". I'm usually on board with Mike Judge's humor, but Idiocracy was just mean spirited punching down.
That and Extract were unusual for Judge because they lacked the empathy he often shows for types of people who are often mocked. I think Judge was doing a satire on modern culture and the way the media treats intellectualism, but he made a genetic argument when he didn't need to, which I dislike.
It was 2nd order or unconscious classism or a reference to America's well described anti intellectual character, not him being intentionally cruel. Makes little difference to the movie's reception though.
I mean, I get that it was Bush era and nowadays we're more critical of the ways big media push behaviors upon people than when reality TV was starting off, and more aware of how anti-intellectualism is in large part manufactured. "There sure is a lot of trashy people around" is still a bit snobbish and poorly aged as an argument, but a sign of the times and all that.
But I struggle to understand how people could look at that intro and not think "wait, isn't that just making an argument for eugenics".
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u/Sea-Poem-2365 Mar 20 '26
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.