Narrator: The years passed, mankind became stupider at a frightening rate. Some had high hopes the genetic engineering would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds and resources where focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections.
Also advertisement, social profiling and of course weapons, weapons, weapons, weapons. Not that this is limited to just capitalism or even necessarily inherent to all incarnations of that particular system.
Idiocracy is such a stupid movie. Worst: People take it seriously. As in: As if it actually had some sort of meaningful or true message (even in satirical form). That’s just sad.
Before someone posts "releveant XKCD,"[2] I'd like to head it off by asking what XKCD thinks is wrong about Idiocracy. Are people with higher IQ really having more kids, unlike the movie says, or is the Flynn Effect[1] pushing IQs up despite people with higher IQ having less kids?
Having kids or not having kids is mostly an issue of:
* Money/class
* Laws and social status
* Time-to-adulthood for your culture
Educated, middle-class people in Western countries have stopped having kids en masse largely because the first and last factors on that last have risen, massively. It now takes large amounts of time and money for educated, middle-class parents to raise a child to their own level (ie: an educated, middle-class adult), and the process has extremely many points of potential failure. It's often not even likely enough to succeed; for instance, if you live somewhere with bad schools or need your entire 20s to establish your own career before you can afford to feed a child.
Minimally feed one? Yes. Feed, clothe and care for them "properly", so that measures of their total health (like for example, their height) wind up in strong greater-than-or-equal correlation with parents who are already decently-off? Takes a bunch of effort.
Food is expensive for a large family with a decent mortgage payment. Also, Remember when you have a family your career mobility drops dramatically. I know I won't have kids until I am 30, without going into debt of course.
Evolution is way to slow to be showing significant effects. The Flynn Effect is mostly a consequence of better nutrition and like increased height it's slowed down a lot in the US. Another long term trend in in reverse is people have stopped living longer in the US and life expectancy is decreasing.
However, poor and uneducated does not mean genetically dumb. People with really low IQ's are far less likely to have kids. Comparing people with sub 60 IQ's with over 140 IQ's the smarter people have more kids.
I've not seen the film, but I would assume it is using the idea of a future "dumb" humanity to satirize current "dumb" humanity.
The fact that lots of people currently believe exactly this theory about societal decline due to the lower classes breeding too much just underlines this.
Come on, it was just a funny movie along the lines of Dumb and Dumber, Harold & Kumar or Fletch.
There was some vague sci-fi mashed up with societal critique, but really this was a pretext to get Gun toting presidents, morons and scantily clad chics on screen with a fish-out-of-water present day man.
Hey, it’s one of my favorite dumb movies. I have no problem with it as a movie.
I have a problem with people saying that it has some sort of profound message. Yeah, it satirizes current-day stupidity pretty well (and I like that) but I do not think it makes any reasonable statements about humanity’s future.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/quotes
Narrator: The years passed, mankind became stupider at a frightening rate. Some had high hopes the genetic engineering would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds and resources where focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections.