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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: To clarify, I am not arguing that poor people are genetically outbreeding smart people. Musk is both one of the few guys who own everything and one of the stupid, violent people destroying civilization. His DOGE rampage dismantled USAID programs whose loss is projected to cause 14 million preventable deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under five. Apparently children matter to him only when he supplied the sperm and paid their mothers to keep quiet.
His own trans daughter, Vivian Wilson, is smarter and more articulate than he is. Because he cannot shame or control her, he responds by publicly abusing, misgendering, deadnaming, and attempting to humiliate her. So much for the theory that wealth, prolific reproduction, intelligence, and moral authority naturally travel together.
The oligarchy and the idiocracy are not competing explanations.
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 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
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.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
[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).
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.
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...
Edit: To clarify, I am not arguing that poor people are genetically outbreeding smart people. Musk is both one of the few guys who own everything and one of the stupid, violent people destroying civilization. His DOGE rampage dismantled USAID programs whose loss is projected to cause 14 million preventable deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under five. Apparently children matter to him only when he supplied the sperm and paid their mothers to keep quiet.
His own trans daughter, Vivian Wilson, is smarter and more articulate than he is. Because he cannot shame or control her, he responds by publicly abusing, misgendering, deadnaming, and attempting to humiliate her. So much for the theory that wealth, prolific reproduction, intelligence, and moral authority naturally travel together.
The oligarchy and the idiocracy are not competing explanations.
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...
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.
"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’s shitty, and using the movie as a canard for that old and tired view is shitty as well.
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 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.
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.
How do you know they're not too stupid to realize what/the damage they're doing in the first place?