It makes me really sad to realize Mike Judge was only wrong about one thing in Idiocracy... that it would take 400 years for us to get there...because here we are, not even 20 years later.
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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Idiocracy is a cute movie that I enjoy. I'm disturbed however by the popular notion that it's prophetic or a documentary considering it's central premise (that people are breeding wrong, and if unchecked society will collapse) is also the central premise of eugenics and a pillar of Nazi ideology.
People who think evolution works like it is portrayed in that movie have done infinitely more harm to society and scientific literacy than creationists.
There was no eugenics in that movie. Eugenics implies a directed, forced outcome.
It wasn't eugenics. It was just that dumb or uneducated people and poorer people have more kids. Those kids are also more likely to be poorly educated and also have more kids, while educated and more intelligent people tend to have fewer children and have children starting at a later point in life.
There's no Hitler eugenics here. Poor people live in poor areas with a poorer education system, which leads to more people with low educations.
Hitler thought Germans were simply better than anyone else at everything.
It's also wrong about history. Throughout human history, the poor have had many, many more children than the wealthy. They needed the extra hands to do the manual labor of occupations like farming.
It wasn't about genetics, IQ is polygenic, and really not inheritable because of that.
It was about memetic inheritance, the people who would have raised curious and motivated kids, didn't.
And the ones who didn't give a shit but liked boning and hated condoms had a bunch of kids they just sat in front of a TV.
It's been a while, but I don't think they blamed genetics directly, they just didn't spell it out in detail and people who didn't know what they meant have apparently latched onto what you said?
At least one other person in this thread anyways, which is weird, I've never seen this claim before. Is it a tiktok thing?
It's not completely wrong, especially since humans long left the checks and balances of natural selection. The thing that was ultimately bad about eugenics was how the Nazis enforced this onto the general public through selective breeding programs and viewing everyone else as genetically inferior. But saying that genetics and hereditary traits aren't a thing is just as anti-scientific. In case of the movie it was not just about genetics though, especially since intelligence is just partially based on genetics. It was also about smart people not having kids and consequently failing to do better parenting than the morons that decided to have kids. Some people may escape the cycle of a family that is not good for them, but a lot of them will just carry on the same behavior that they learned from their parents.
You could just as easily make a case that's about "nurture" more than "nature". Stupid and negligent people will make bad parents regardless of genetics.
That's a very sympathetic reading. I'd suggest watching the opening of the film which very clearly frames the story in terms of "evolution," "breeding," "genetics," and "intelligence."
True, but it's only about eugenics if you think that intelligence is a primarily hereditary trait rather than a learned one.
Agreed. The Idiocracy==eugenics concept seems to be localized entirely to the internet, and seems to be paraded around by those that understand neither literature, nor how human genetics actually work. Evident by how they glaze over the remaining 80% of the opening sequence that's about the juxtaposition between American idealism, and the reality of what American culture actually promotes and produces.
It also shows the "intelligent" couple as having fertility issues, while Cleetus the Slackjawed yokel has a hundred children.
Because they prioritised their work, which is extremely common.
It is harder for older couples to have children.
I said this same thing almost verbatim a few days ago and got downvoted to hell lol. Idiocracy is fine. It's okay. Some of the punchlines are pretty dated. But reddit incels love it because they think it validates their thoughts on eugenics.