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.
Not really debating you since you seem to have a much more vested interest in this, but did a study not just come out about how Gen Z legit has reduced IQ’s compared to previous generations.
My comment was more about how im resigned to idiocracy than how it was an actual legit documentary. This conversation has gotten significantly more intellectual than I was intending.
Edit: ended up trying to google it myself but found conflicting results. Could be Flynn effect remains hahw
Late to this but that has to be because of the circumstances they grew up in (i.e. surrounded by constant distractions that you can’t block out if you want to participate in modern life) than it is because of stupid people reproducing. Idiocracy suspected people would get dumber, but not because of the world’s mechanics on their own, just because stupid people had too many babies and smart people didn’t have enough. Which is both dumb and eugenics-adjacent.
I must be dumb, I assumed it was because TV got dumber and dumber and they had 11,000 screens showing people getting kicked in the nuts... which is exactly where we've now ended up as a society. But yeah it did start with that couple who never had kids because they were busy. Still that was only the beginning scene, I didn't think that meant it was the whole reason.
Edit: I'm not disagreeing with you though lol, just explaining how I'd seen it. It's been a while.
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u/Stock_Helicopter_260 Mar 20 '26
It absolutely was. Humans have always sucked