You hear it so often because it’s an apt over the top depiction of what’s been happening since the beginning of the nation. Every generation dealt with absolute fucking morons gaining power and doing horrific, dumb shit, and devolving into base instincts and bread and circuses while ignoring experts, even mocking and considering them an undesirable class. Mike Judge wasn’t predicting the future, he was using a man out of water trope in the way of a time traveler to point out the absurdity of the conversion of public servants into showmen with an evangelical and side show circus flair, and the dumbing down of the average citizen as our institutions adopted more and more thoughtless technology while deriding and undermining professions and professionals that had to have actual expertise and somewhat relied on apprenticeship traditions to continue the lineage of advanced and critical knowledge.
But we are those idiots as a culture, so people mistook his message as one of simple absurdity that happened to become more true in the future from the point at which it was written and released.
People can’t focus on a tv anymore and scroll their phones, can’t discern expert based information from blatantly absurd disinformation, people have seemingly gone feral in public interactions, trust in the CDC plummeted among Democrats (dropping to 34%), while rising among Republicans (reaching 67%), so it is more complex than “most of that isn’t true”. Crime has nearly consistently gone down, but we’ve almost entirely lost 3rd spaces, so socialization critical to development has been lost or has dwindled more and more for each successive generation. Teachers report having less control over their students, less productive conversations with their students parents, more hostility and distrust from both. Social media algorithms have been tuned to push above all other opinions that are the most divisive and least backed by evidence or expert opinion. That leads to real issues in leadership and a draining of resources and highly skilled workers that are lost due to avoidable attacks on systems caused by disinformation on said networks.
Developed nations have seen a slowing or halting of the Flynn affect (increasing intelligence), and several have reverse, which means they are in fact become less intelligent.
“For most of the 20th century, human IQ scores rose steadily across the globe. Researchers called this upward trend the Flynn Effect.
Recent studies show that this progress has stopped or reversed in countries like Norway, Denmark, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. This new downturn is called the Reverse Flynn Effect. Standard tests show drops in logic, vocabulary, and math problem-solving.”
I will not be shocked to find this reverse effect is happening in ALL red states, and rural areas of America in general, but the reversal has been masked by flawed testing and held up by metropolitan areas that are still seeing a traditional Flynn effect in place.
So it is true, and it’s always been this way, it’s just that it happens faster now, and we all hear about it faster.
So they’ve actually done science on this, and while your vibes are vibing, actual data shows that average IQ goes up by about 3 points for every decade. This is known as the Flynn effect, and is partly why the IQ scale constantly has to be adjusted.
Idiocracy’s entire plot is driven by the idea that average IQ goes down over time, which just isn’t true in the real world.
You can tell that to yourself all you want, but you’d be wrong. The average republican voter is more comfortable than the average democratic voter. Specifically, a key constituency of non-college educated small business owners who make upper middle class incomes make up the republican base.
You hear it so often because it’s an apt over the top depiction of what’s been happening since the beginning of the nation. Every generation dealt with absolute fucking morons gaining power and doing horrific, dumb shit, and devolving into base instincts and bread and circuses while ignoring experts, even mocking and considering them an undesirable class. Mike Judge wasn’t predicting the future, he was using a man out of water trope in the way of a time traveler to point out the absurdity of the conversion of public servants into showmen with an evangelical and side show circus flair, and the dumbing down of the average citizen as our institutions adopted more and more thoughtless technology while deriding and undermining professions and professionals that had to have actual expertise and somewhat relied on apprenticeship traditions to continue the lineage of advanced and critical knowledge.
But we are those idiots as a culture, so people mistook his message as one of simple absurdity that happened to become more true in the future from the point at which it was written and released.
Except most of that isn’t true and the average citizen has been getting consistently smarter every generation.
People can’t focus on a tv anymore and scroll their phones, can’t discern expert based information from blatantly absurd disinformation, people have seemingly gone feral in public interactions, trust in the CDC plummeted among Democrats (dropping to 34%), while rising among Republicans (reaching 67%), so it is more complex than “most of that isn’t true”. Crime has nearly consistently gone down, but we’ve almost entirely lost 3rd spaces, so socialization critical to development has been lost or has dwindled more and more for each successive generation. Teachers report having less control over their students, less productive conversations with their students parents, more hostility and distrust from both. Social media algorithms have been tuned to push above all other opinions that are the most divisive and least backed by evidence or expert opinion. That leads to real issues in leadership and a draining of resources and highly skilled workers that are lost due to avoidable attacks on systems caused by disinformation on said networks.
Developed nations have seen a slowing or halting of the Flynn affect (increasing intelligence), and several have reverse, which means they are in fact become less intelligent.
“For most of the 20th century, human IQ scores rose steadily across the globe. Researchers called this upward trend the Flynn Effect.
Recent studies show that this progress has stopped or reversed in countries like Norway, Denmark, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. This new downturn is called the Reverse Flynn Effect. Standard tests show drops in logic, vocabulary, and math problem-solving.”
I will not be shocked to find this reverse effect is happening in ALL red states, and rural areas of America in general, but the reversal has been masked by flawed testing and held up by metropolitan areas that are still seeing a traditional Flynn effect in place.
So it is true, and it’s always been this way, it’s just that it happens faster now, and we all hear about it faster.
So they’ve actually done science on this, and while your vibes are vibing, actual data shows that average IQ goes up by about 3 points for every decade. This is known as the Flynn effect, and is partly why the IQ scale constantly has to be adjusted.
Idiocracy’s entire plot is driven by the idea that average IQ goes down over time, which just isn’t true in the real world.
you might be proving their point since they discussed the flynn effect, and then the reverse flynn effect
but. iirc, there are issues with using iq as a measure of intelligence anyway
Then who’s voting for Trump?
People that generally make more money than you?
Nah, the average Trump voter doesn’t make that much. They’re just dumb, or racist enough to make them do dumb things.
You can tell that to yourself all you want, but you’d be wrong. The average republican voter is more comfortable than the average democratic voter. Specifically, a key constituency of non-college educated small business owners who make upper middle class incomes make up the republican base.
https://www.moneydigest.com/1902948/average-income-of-donald-trump-supporters/
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/personal-finance/average-income-republican-vs-democrat/
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship-by-family-income-home-ownership-union-membership-and-veteran-status/
https://web.stanford.edu/~neilm/sbos.pdf