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.
Then why are the stupid people so violently against birth control, abortion, sex education, and LGBTQ+ rights, and so obsessed with breeding?
Elon Musk’s Breeding Spree Is So Much Wilder Than You Thought.
The billionaire bureaucrat, who wants a “legion-level” of offspring, has reportedly solicited women on X to have his children and pays his kids’ mothers millions to keep quiet.
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 "Call Me Joe" (Inspiration for "The Thing") and "With Folded Hands" (not the inspiration for anything so far as I know, but really good nonetheless)
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.
If this were really like idiocracy, nobody would be justifying their idiotic behavior by referencing fake research papers. They would just make fun of anybody who was smarter than they were.
I don't know which style of stupid is worse, but it is a pretty big difference.
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.
Who?
Then why are the stupid people so violently against birth control, abortion, sex education, and LGBTQ+ rights, and so obsessed with breeding?
Elon Musk’s Breeding Spree Is So Much Wilder Than You Thought. The billionaire bureaucrat, who wants a “legion-level” of offspring, has reportedly solicited women on X to have his children and pays his kids’ mothers millions to keep quiet.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/elon-musks-children-as...
That’s a non sequiter. They are against those things for everyone, which means they are encouraging people of all incomes to have children.
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 "Call Me Joe" (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).
[delayed]
A lot of what seemed wildly absurdist at the time, seems a lot more realistic these days.
It's funny that people cite Idiocracy despite its explicitly eugenicist premise.
https://archive.is/3Y8IF
We still have another 480 years of this to go.
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.
If this were really like idiocracy, nobody would be justifying their idiotic behavior by referencing fake research papers. They would just make fun of anybody who was smarter than they were.
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