That’s not true at all.
In Idiocracy, the president and his cabinet put their smartest people (well, person) in charge with zero pushback and listened to and trusted expert opinion. When a policy failed (Brawndo went out of business and took the economy with it), there was swift punishment for those directly responsible, and when policy succeeded (crops were growing), they quickly pivoted and elevated those responsible. In Idiocracy, the most competent people were put in charge.
What we have is MUCH worse; people stupid and short-sighted enough to destroy everything in the name of ego and greed, and just smart enough to be successful in their destruction of our societies, governments and planet.
I would much rather be in Idiocracy if I’m being honest. At least those people were trying their best; can’t fault them for that.
Even president Kamacho steped down for a smarter person. Idiocracy is way optimistic than what we have today.
You guys are getting handjobs in Starbucks?
I feel like that your problem, USA, isn’t that many of you are idiots.
I mean, many are, just like how we have idiots in other countries. The bigger issue is that many of these idiots in the USA are also evil.
… and in positions of power.
No, it didn’t. Funny movie, but applied to real life it’s just “smart person” eugenics, and forcing today’s issues into the lens of this movie oversimplifies them to the point of actual harm.
Really, actual harm? How so?
Technocracy is not the solution. A society needs other values. We can’t take for granted that the smartest people share the interest of others.
For instance the Nazis who found a very efficient final solution to their logistics problem, because their values were shit.
All true, but imo the movie doesn’t make an argument for a technocracy.
My read is that the movie is mostly critical of the US system, including capitalism, hyper-masculinity, hyper-consumerism and identity politics.
The movie doesn’t even star ‘smart’ people or elites because they all went extinct. And the reason they went extinct is because the system directed them into a rat-race of career succes and material wealth that ultimately led to an evolutionary dead end.
The movie actually ends with average people assuming responsibility for government, raising families and working together to improve the lives of the people.
As a few have already said in here, President Camacho saw a problem and actively tried to find the smartest person on the planet to fix the problem.
We’re a couple of years past comparing our current situation to Idiocracy. That ship has already sailed. We’re so fucked that the basic premise of Idiocracy appears quaint at this point.
“Haha people got stupider” is so much better than “people got stupider and are filled with hate, malice, greed, and selfishness”
Stupid is to Idiocracy as malice is to real life.
I mean, there’s plenty of stupid to go around in this hellhole we’ve created, but that isn’t what’s driving humanity into the dirt. Our issue is that humans are fucking evil, and we’d crank up our neighbor’s suffering for a quick buck.
Idiocracy is a utopia compared to the future we’re spiraling into.
At least Camacho cared about the people and wanted them to have food.
Mystery beef anyone?
Camacho had good intentions. He tried to surround himself with the best people. He listened to the advice of those people and put it into action. He wasn’t the ideal president, but he’s way ahead of the thing we’ve got in the oval office right now.
He step aside when someone that actually can do stuff appear. Trump want unlimited power like Palpatine.
Trump has said before that he, as president, has to do everything himself. What he doesn’t realize is that his statement is the same as admitting that he’s completely incompetent as a leader. He either doesn’t have the ability to hire talent, or he is incapable of using talent.
It’s no surprise that he’s bankrupted most of his businesses. No competent businessperson would put a person with Trump’s attitude in charge of anything, even a lemonade stand. People like Trump are so incompetent that they’d run literally any business, or in this case, government, into the ground, given enough time.
But I’d rather be living in the world of Idiocracy.
“Ow my balls” isn’t a downgrade in tv entertainment these days.
President Camacho put the smartest person he could find in charge! Utopia compared to what’s going on in the USA now.
Every time I hear someone repeat “Idiocracy was a documentary” what I hear is “Brawndo’s got what plants crave.” Mostly because of the number of times I’ve heard it but I guess also because it feels like a part of concentrated apathy? I’m probably just irrationally sick of the phrase, but the frequency and mindlessness of it being said seems kinda hypocritical.
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
