No, "Marching Morons" [0] from 1951 "predicted all of this". The original short story (which, while I have not been able to find any explicit confirmation, I just can't believe was not a direct inspiration for the movie), doesn't get nearly enough credit in my opinion. I originally encountered as part of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. II, which additionally included "Who Goes there" (Inspiration for "The Thing") and "With Folded Hands" (not the inspiration for anything so far as I know, but really good nonetheless)
The source of the problem was misdiagnosed, though. Idiocracy predicted that idiots would eventually outnumber smart people because the latter are supposedly much more ambivalent about having kids. I don’t think that’s actually true—the “smart” aren’t necessarily having fewer kids than the “idiots.” The real problem is idiots have disproportionate political representation simply because of where they live. That’s especially relevant in the United States, where states with tiny populations have the same number of Senators as states with tens of millions of people.
Also, smart people are often less likely to vote when both options seem bad, whereas people driven by propaganda have no such hesitation and will turn out in droves—a problem Bertrand Russell highlighted quite clearly [1].
We are a republic of 50 states, who are only willing to work together because they are represented. I’ve lived in NY, MO, CA and TX. The cultures and beliefs are different in each, and the people you seem to call “idiots” I have never found to be idiots. They just don’t prioritize nearly the same things you do, and may have radically different values
Agreed. The unbearable smugness of the coastal elites is so pervasive, a person will dismiss “those people” but tie themselves in knots to avoid criticizing even the least the current protected class of the month
Or in the case of America, many people just want others to suffer so that they can feel better about themselves, and are willing to elect a leader who will do that on their behalf, even at their own cost.
They might not be idiots, but I am afraid that many of them are politically illiterate. How else would you explain that Donald Trump became president again?
> Idiocracy predicted that idiots would eventually outnumber smart people because the latter are supposedly much more ambivalent about having kids
To be fair, it was just a funny and easy to explain introduction to the movie's premise. If it was made today it may have had a montage of people outsourcing their thinking skills to AI or something along these lines.
Idiocracy is a fable about our time. Setting his story in the future helps Mike Judge to maintain plausible deniability, but the movie is there to validate your sneaking suspicion that everything is kind of stupid.
There are some confounding factors, like education and income also affecting fertility, and correlated with most measures of intelligence, but that doesn't actually affect the diagnosis - regardless of if intelligence directly lowers fertility, or if the effect is mediated by e.g. education, the net effect is that smarter people have fewer children (in our current environment).
> The real problem is idiots have disproportionate political representation simply because of where they live. That’s especially relevant in the United States
This lets Americans off the hook far too easily. Trump won an absolute majority this time, and the GOP won the house too. For the Senate you will have to do your own research because I’m on mobile, but last time I checked the actual effect (estimated) on Senate outcomes is very modest.
They are. For example, literally nobody should be having kids rn in US, because the next decade is gonna be pretty horrible. But people still are, because they are none the wiser.
Our problems are caused by like 5 guys owning everything, not because stupid people have more kids than smart people. So no, Idiocracy did not predict all of this.
It's possible that stupid people in government have helped lead to the "5 guys owning everything" though. The world we live in is a result of policy choices, not a natural inevitability. And the people we've put in office over the past 50 years have played a large role. If they were being put in office by a population that was getting dumber and dumber every election cycle, that could certainly be a big contributor to the problems in wealth disparity we see today. I'm not saying that's the case, only that the two theories are not mutually exclusive.
Our problem is society never was stable without a permanent surplus. Our problem is adaptions to this endless loop. Look at the world where things have run out, those without shoes murdering those with, the decomlexification alure of stone-age ideologies. We are a damaged, danger to itself species, whose highest hope is to aquire one more stick of high tech dynamite for a endless banton run against the odds.
Now is where we are going atm perfect? No. But at least its a plan. A self repairing asbestos orphanage for retarded firestarters which allows for progress at a realistic pacr is the way forward. Everything else is retardation whorship, in booms and busts, where every "unforseeable" regression eats a little something from civilization. If you couldnt predict trump in the 2000s, your whole model of humanity is wrong and flawed, and shouldn't be anywhere near where futures are planned.
Personally I think the USA's problems go much deeper than some vague sense that rich people are the source of all problems. Compared the whole US economy, they're a drop in the bucket, and they're not the reason that American institutions are dysfunctional; those dysfunctions were present long before Trump took power and Google got rich.
My opinion is that progressive populists don't know how to fix our problems, let alone have they even come close to identifying them, so they just focus on everything as "us vs the elites." You can see this simply by observing that the actual places that are progressive controlled - major blue cities - are the most dysfunctional places in the country. The solution? Wealth taxes that will cover a tiny percent of expenditures for a year or two tops, and no mention of why things are so expensive and slow in the first place, which has almost nothing to do with those rich guys, and have a lot more to do with dumb bureaucratic requirements; irrational procurement processes; capture from groups that sometimes are tied to wealthy interests but also come from the people like unions, neighborhood and environmental organizations; watering down every project by lacking focus on what they're actually meant to solve; procedural issues that allow cynical political actors to selectively interpret and enforce laws; and so on.
I'm sympathetic to the feeling of unfairness, but I want actual solutions, most of which are too boring for the populists on either side to stay focused on.
Whether that is true or not, they have shown they do not care what happens to your child AFTER it is born. Without better morals and education we are doomed to repeat history ad nauseum/ad infinitum.
The full pipeline is be conservative -> realize conservatives are morons -> "both sides are bad" -> claim to be Libertarian -> vote for Trump anyway -> leopards eat your face -> whine that you're getting hurt more than the innocent people you hate and intented to hurt
I watched it around the time it released or may be on dvd. I remember thinking the premise is great but the situations are way too exaggerated for comedy and in some ways the movie tries too hard for laughs. Looking back and comparing with today, I would say he did not exaggerate it enough!! To start, he said the country devolves in 500 years, hardly took 20.
I think if Idiocracy were re-released today about the only thing it would change would be that misinformation would be the major driver at the start. Pretty much everything else holds, including predicting the rise of Crocks.
I've heard this criticism before and I don't that it paints the complete picture. I reckon it's less a commentary on "weeding out" the intellectually and physically disabled but more a commentary on a society and government that makes stupid decisions (brawndo on plants) and rewards anti-intellectualism to the point of it becoming a core component of life in the year 2505.
The society depicted in Idiocracy is the way it is by choice that turns into policy. I highly doubt Mike Judge wants to start culling the population of undesirable traits like birth defects, intellectual disablities, learning disabilities, etc.
> more a commentary on a society and government that makes stupid decisions (brawndo on plants) and rewards anti-intellectualism to the point of it becoming a core component of life
Yes, but in the movie society became that way because the dumb people kept having kids while the smart people didn’t. This wasn’t an uncommon trope in the 1990s and early 2000s. There was a lot of commentary on teenage pregnancies and whatnot before the birth rate collapsed among the lower class.
> I highly doubt Mike Judge wants to start culling the population of undesirable traits like birth defects, intellectual disablities, learning disabilities, etc.
But he (like most people) is probably fine with designer babies and sperm clinics that expressly sell product based on the characteristics of the donor (tall, high IQ, etc). That’s a tidier form of the same thing.
This is the right take to me. I can't say with absolute certainty, but it feels strongly like the eugenics aspects were there more for shock value... perhaps overestimating the public's capacity to recognize the farce.
And so much of it is so obviously absurd. Invokes everything from Gilliam's Brazil to Kids In The Hall.
As others have said, it's a reflection of what we currently are, magnified. Many aspects of which are not as implausible as they once were. That's where the continued buzz it gets comes from, I think.
I do think the eugenics stuff would be avoided if it were to be made today. If that turns out to be how Mike Judge actually thinks, well, I'd be very disappointed and would have to eat some words.
Give it a break folks, self-righteousness doesn't pay, "the idiots" don't await to be converted, assholes don't care for reputation. Look at Back to the Future - in real life Marty is sick and feeble, Doc is just a paltry real estate investor. Biff is the true winner taking all power, real estate, and pretty ladies... and yes he has his own portrait in his own office.
There's no problem with American corporations and a lot of problems with American institutions. That's because corporations are controllable. The decline in governance is not.
Idiocracy was not a prediction. Rather, it was a satire of the present, set in the future, much like Woody Allen's Sleeper. The future setting was merely an excuse to exaggerate the present. This is why Idiocracy appears predictive, because it's actually more related to the present than to the future. It's relatively easy, and indeed predictable, for an exaggeration of 2006 to become closer to reality in 2026. Almost every ridiculous element of the fictional future of the movie was based on the world we already know and knew.
The Simpsons "predicted" a Trump Presidency. Not because Matt Groening is the Kwisatz Haderach but simply because our society was already idiotic, so it was a natural extension of that idiocy. The US elected a B-movie (Bedtime for Bonzo) actor in 1980, so there was certainly precedent to the President.
TM's take is a completely stupid waste of time. It ends with "...[those before us] were as shortsighted as we are, living for now, amassing and consuming as much as possible, and pausing only for a slack-jawed huh-huh at the nearest bloodthirsty infotainment. We’re just not hiding it anymore."
"We predicted this terrible state we're in..., no, we've always been like this."
I mean, who wrote this, and in what state of stupor? Whoever it is, forgot to add the "knuckle-dragging" epithet to make it complete.
It really didn’t, and the entire premise of “Idiocracy as predictor” is a genuinely nasty thing. As it stands birth rate doesn’t seem to primarily correlate with intelligence, but socioeconomic status and education. Painting poor people as stupid breeders who will outcompete the genteel intelligentsia isn’t some new and prophetic idea.
It’s shitty, and using the movie as a canard for that old and tired view is shitty as well.
There is one difference, and it is a very telling difference. In Idiocracy, people openly scorned smart people. They made no pretense of using any kind of logic or scientific method.
What we have now is different. People stopped vaccinating their kids because they actually believed the scientific evidence proved vaccines were dangerous. They can point to endless documents which have the overt form of being an actual research paper, written by people who are actually Ph.D.s from good universities.
You can go online and find endless meta-analysis, written by and endless number of untenured professors, that, say, Masking and social distancing didn't help stop the spread of Covid. Because these endless number of untenured professors need to land research grants and write papers. Sure, a face mask is useless against an airborne disease. Go ahead and sneeze on the salad bar.
If this were really like idiocracy, nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc. They would just make fun of anybody who was smarter than they were, because they sounded "effeminate."
I don't know which style of stupid is worse, but it is a pretty big difference.
'Idiocracy' is a cartoonish movie that has to greatly exaggerate the effects of human natural selection, or else there would be no story. It promoted harmful popular misunderstandings of genetics and it shouldn't be defended as in any way accurate.
>The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number-one videocassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. “Beavis and Butthead” remain popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning—not just of science, but of anything—are avoidable, even undesirable.
-Carl Sagan outsmarting Mike Judge with this passage from The Demon Haunted World (1995)
No, "Marching Morons" [0] from 1951 "predicted all of this". The original short story (which, while I have not been able to find any explicit confirmation, I just can't believe was not a direct inspiration for the movie), doesn't get nearly enough credit in my opinion. I originally encountered as part of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. II, which additionally included "Who Goes there" (Inspiration for "The Thing") and "With Folded Hands" (not the inspiration for anything so far as I know, but really good nonetheless)
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm
(not to say that I agree with the premise of the claim, but I do think that we should be properly crediting our cultural references).
The source of the problem was misdiagnosed, though. Idiocracy predicted that idiots would eventually outnumber smart people because the latter are supposedly much more ambivalent about having kids. I don’t think that’s actually true—the “smart” aren’t necessarily having fewer kids than the “idiots.” The real problem is idiots have disproportionate political representation simply because of where they live. That’s especially relevant in the United States, where states with tiny populations have the same number of Senators as states with tens of millions of people.
Also, smart people are often less likely to vote when both options seem bad, whereas people driven by propaganda have no such hesitation and will turn out in droves—a problem Bertrand Russell highlighted quite clearly [1].
[1]: https://economicsociology.org/2023/11/30/in-the-modern-world...
We are a republic of 50 states, who are only willing to work together because they are represented. I’ve lived in NY, MO, CA and TX. The cultures and beliefs are different in each, and the people you seem to call “idiots” I have never found to be idiots. They just don’t prioritize nearly the same things you do, and may have radically different values
They are at best deeply, deeply misinformed.
Why doesn’t California, the largest state, simply eat the other 49?
Wouldn't it be better to merge back with Mexico?
Can you say more?
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How embarrassing , ain't no way he responds to this.
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Agreed. The unbearable smugness of the coastal elites is so pervasive, a person will dismiss “those people” but tie themselves in knots to avoid criticizing even the least the current protected class of the month
Protected class? You mean the pedophile in chief and his cabal?
don't the coastal elites want single payer healthcare?
doesn't that help everyone?
what am I missing?
“Some people just want to watch the world burn”.
Or in the case of America, many people just want others to suffer so that they can feel better about themselves, and are willing to elect a leader who will do that on their behalf, even at their own cost.
They might not be idiots, but I am afraid that many of them are politically illiterate. How else would you explain that Donald Trump became president again?
> Idiocracy predicted that idiots would eventually outnumber smart people because the latter are supposedly much more ambivalent about having kids
To be fair, it was just a funny and easy to explain introduction to the movie's premise. If it was made today it may have had a montage of people outsourcing their thinking skills to AI or something along these lines.
Idiocracy is a fable about our time. Setting his story in the future helps Mike Judge to maintain plausible deniability, but the movie is there to validate your sneaking suspicion that everything is kind of stupid.
It's also made in the time of W. Bush, when everything was still only a little bit stupid in relative terms.
> the “smart” aren’t necessarily having fewer kids than the “idiots.”
They are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
There are some confounding factors, like education and income also affecting fertility, and correlated with most measures of intelligence, but that doesn't actually affect the diagnosis - regardless of if intelligence directly lowers fertility, or if the effect is mediated by e.g. education, the net effect is that smarter people have fewer children (in our current environment).
> The real problem is idiots have disproportionate political representation simply because of where they live. That’s especially relevant in the United States
This lets Americans off the hook far too easily. Trump won an absolute majority this time, and the GOP won the house too. For the Senate you will have to do your own research because I’m on mobile, but last time I checked the actual effect (estimated) on Senate outcomes is very modest.
They are. For example, literally nobody should be having kids rn in US, because the next decade is gonna be pretty horrible. But people still are, because they are none the wiser.
Our problems are caused by like 5 guys owning everything, not because stupid people have more kids than smart people. So no, Idiocracy did not predict all of this.
It's possible that stupid people in government have helped lead to the "5 guys owning everything" though. The world we live in is a result of policy choices, not a natural inevitability. And the people we've put in office over the past 50 years have played a large role. If they were being put in office by a population that was getting dumber and dumber every election cycle, that could certainly be a big contributor to the problems in wealth disparity we see today. I'm not saying that's the case, only that the two theories are not mutually exclusive.
They're not stupid, they're greedy and shameless.
They are creating a world that is inhospitable to them.
They are stupid.
Our problem is society never was stable without a permanent surplus. Our problem is adaptions to this endless loop. Look at the world where things have run out, those without shoes murdering those with, the decomlexification alure of stone-age ideologies. We are a damaged, danger to itself species, whose highest hope is to aquire one more stick of high tech dynamite for a endless banton run against the odds.
Now is where we are going atm perfect? No. But at least its a plan. A self repairing asbestos orphanage for retarded firestarters which allows for progress at a realistic pacr is the way forward. Everything else is retardation whorship, in booms and busts, where every "unforseeable" regression eats a little something from civilization. If you couldnt predict trump in the 2000s, your whole model of humanity is wrong and flawed, and shouldn't be anywhere near where futures are planned.
That's just, like, your opinion, man.
Personally I think the USA's problems go much deeper than some vague sense that rich people are the source of all problems. Compared the whole US economy, they're a drop in the bucket, and they're not the reason that American institutions are dysfunctional; those dysfunctions were present long before Trump took power and Google got rich.
My opinion is that progressive populists don't know how to fix our problems, let alone have they even come close to identifying them, so they just focus on everything as "us vs the elites." You can see this simply by observing that the actual places that are progressive controlled - major blue cities - are the most dysfunctional places in the country. The solution? Wealth taxes that will cover a tiny percent of expenditures for a year or two tops, and no mention of why things are so expensive and slow in the first place, which has almost nothing to do with those rich guys, and have a lot more to do with dumb bureaucratic requirements; irrational procurement processes; capture from groups that sometimes are tied to wealthy interests but also come from the people like unions, neighborhood and environmental organizations; watering down every project by lacking focus on what they're actually meant to solve; procedural issues that allow cynical political actors to selectively interpret and enforce laws; and so on.
I'm sympathetic to the feeling of unfairness, but I want actual solutions, most of which are too boring for the populists on either side to stay focused on.
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That’s a non sequiter. They are against those things for everyone, which means they are encouraging people of all incomes to have children.
Whether that is true or not, they have shown they do not care what happens to your child AFTER it is born. Without better morals and education we are doomed to repeat history ad nauseum/ad infinitum.
> sequiter
sequitur.
I normally wouldn't insist, but on this particular topic, misspelled Latin is just a little too much for me.
Unless you mean Sequitery of State Marco Woobio.
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You left out the next inevitable steps:
The full pipeline is be conservative -> realize conservatives are morons -> "both sides are bad" -> claim to be Libertarian -> vote for Trump anyway -> leopards eat your face -> whine that you're getting hurt more than the innocent people you hate and intented to hurt
I watched it around the time it released or may be on dvd. I remember thinking the premise is great but the situations are way too exaggerated for comedy and in some ways the movie tries too hard for laughs. Looking back and comparing with today, I would say he did not exaggerate it enough!! To start, he said the country devolves in 500 years, hardly took 20.
https://archive.is/3Y8IF
A lot of what seemed wildly absurdist at the time, seems a lot more realistic these days.
Mike Judge was inspired to make Idiocracy from a trip to Disneyland, having since been I can see the resemblance.
Mr Judge is from Texas
A trip to Buc-ee's would've been great inspo also
Idiocracy's society didn't have a movie about Idiocracy. So, no, we're not in Idiocracy.
I think if Idiocracy were re-released today about the only thing it would change would be that misinformation would be the major driver at the start. Pretty much everything else holds, including predicting the rise of Crocks.
Crocs taking off bc of this movie is probably the craziest fact
It's funny that people cite Idiocracy despite its explicitly eugenicist premise.
I've heard this criticism before and I don't that it paints the complete picture. I reckon it's less a commentary on "weeding out" the intellectually and physically disabled but more a commentary on a society and government that makes stupid decisions (brawndo on plants) and rewards anti-intellectualism to the point of it becoming a core component of life in the year 2505.
The society depicted in Idiocracy is the way it is by choice that turns into policy. I highly doubt Mike Judge wants to start culling the population of undesirable traits like birth defects, intellectual disablities, learning disabilities, etc.
> more a commentary on a society and government that makes stupid decisions (brawndo on plants) and rewards anti-intellectualism to the point of it becoming a core component of life
Yes, but in the movie society became that way because the dumb people kept having kids while the smart people didn’t. This wasn’t an uncommon trope in the 1990s and early 2000s. There was a lot of commentary on teenage pregnancies and whatnot before the birth rate collapsed among the lower class.
> I highly doubt Mike Judge wants to start culling the population of undesirable traits like birth defects, intellectual disablities, learning disabilities, etc.
But he (like most people) is probably fine with designer babies and sperm clinics that expressly sell product based on the characteristics of the donor (tall, high IQ, etc). That’s a tidier form of the same thing.
This is the right take to me. I can't say with absolute certainty, but it feels strongly like the eugenics aspects were there more for shock value... perhaps overestimating the public's capacity to recognize the farce.
And so much of it is so obviously absurd. Invokes everything from Gilliam's Brazil to Kids In The Hall.
As others have said, it's a reflection of what we currently are, magnified. Many aspects of which are not as implausible as they once were. That's where the continued buzz it gets comes from, I think.
I do think the eugenics stuff would be avoided if it were to be made today. If that turns out to be how Mike Judge actually thinks, well, I'd be very disappointed and would have to eat some words.
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'Despite'? I thought the theory of evolution was widely accepted.
Not in America.
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Doesn't even mention crocs
Give it a break folks, self-righteousness doesn't pay, "the idiots" don't await to be converted, assholes don't care for reputation. Look at Back to the Future - in real life Marty is sick and feeble, Doc is just a paltry real estate investor. Biff is the true winner taking all power, real estate, and pretty ladies... and yes he has his own portrait in his own office.
Fake empathic "Hi, Welcome In" is the modern day "Welcome to Costco I love you"
We're not living in idiocracy yet. They knew they were stupid and gave control to the new guy. We're in the prequel, and we're still getting started.
There's no problem with American corporations and a lot of problems with American institutions. That's because corporations are controllable. The decline in governance is not.
We still have another 480 years of this to go.
Idiocracy was not a prediction. Rather, it was a satire of the present, set in the future, much like Woody Allen's Sleeper. The future setting was merely an excuse to exaggerate the present. This is why Idiocracy appears predictive, because it's actually more related to the present than to the future. It's relatively easy, and indeed predictable, for an exaggeration of 2006 to become closer to reality in 2026. Almost every ridiculous element of the fictional future of the movie was based on the world we already know and knew.
The Simpsons "predicted" a Trump Presidency. Not because Matt Groening is the Kwisatz Haderach but simply because our society was already idiotic, so it was a natural extension of that idiocy. The US elected a B-movie (Bedtime for Bonzo) actor in 1980, so there was certainly precedent to the President.
TM's take is a completely stupid waste of time. It ends with "...[those before us] were as shortsighted as we are, living for now, amassing and consuming as much as possible, and pausing only for a slack-jawed huh-huh at the nearest bloodthirsty infotainment. We’re just not hiding it anymore."
"We predicted this terrible state we're in..., no, we've always been like this."
I mean, who wrote this, and in what state of stupor? Whoever it is, forgot to add the "knuckle-dragging" epithet to make it complete.
It really didn’t, and the entire premise of “Idiocracy as predictor” is a genuinely nasty thing. As it stands birth rate doesn’t seem to primarily correlate with intelligence, but socioeconomic status and education. Painting poor people as stupid breeders who will outcompete the genteel intelligentsia isn’t some new and prophetic idea.
It’s shitty, and using the movie as a canard for that old and tired view is shitty as well.
There is one difference, and it is a very telling difference. In Idiocracy, people openly scorned smart people. They made no pretense of using any kind of logic or scientific method.
What we have now is different. People stopped vaccinating their kids because they actually believed the scientific evidence proved vaccines were dangerous. They can point to endless documents which have the overt form of being an actual research paper, written by people who are actually Ph.D.s from good universities.
You can go online and find endless meta-analysis, written by and endless number of untenured professors, that, say, Masking and social distancing didn't help stop the spread of Covid. Because these endless number of untenured professors need to land research grants and write papers. Sure, a face mask is useless against an airborne disease. Go ahead and sneeze on the salad bar.
If this were really like idiocracy, nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc. They would just make fun of anybody who was smarter than they were, because they sounded "effeminate."
I don't know which style of stupid is worse, but it is a pretty big difference.
We’ll give it 50-100 years down this trajectory and we will have arrived there
> nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc.
How do you know they're not too stupid to realize what/the damage they're doing in the first place?
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'Idiocracy' is a cartoonish movie that has to greatly exaggerate the effects of human natural selection, or else there would be no story. It promoted harmful popular misunderstandings of genetics and it shouldn't be defended as in any way accurate.
>The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number-one videocassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. “Beavis and Butthead” remain popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning—not just of science, but of anything—are avoidable, even undesirable.
-Carl Sagan outsmarting Mike Judge with this passage from The Demon Haunted World (1995)