'Idiocracy' Predicted All of This

furyofantares

https://archive.is/3Y8IF

rayiner

It's funny that people cite Idiocracy despite its explicitly eugenicist premise.

mikeaskew4

We still have another 480 years of this to go.

stanleykm

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.

EA-3167

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.

rhelz

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.

MostlyStable

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).

pogopop77

A lot of what seemed wildly absurdist at the time, seems a lot more realistic these days.

hammeiam

Doesn't even mention crocs

jmward01

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.

shubhamjain

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...

skybrian

'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.

mc32

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.

lapcat

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.

yalogin

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.

zahrevsky

Idiocracy's society didn't have a movie about Idiocracy. So, no, we're not in Idiocracy.

anon291

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.

cjbgkagh

Mike Judge was inspired to make Idiocracy from a trip to Disneyland, having since been I can see the resemblance.

nunez

Fake empathic "Hi, Welcome In" is the modern day "Welcome to Costco I love you"