this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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Idiocracy usually gets criticized for it's embrace of eugenics. But today I'm going to point out that the future envisioned by the movie is 100% right wing. Not since Red Dawn has a move more closely aligned with reactionary politics.
What's the conflict of the movie? Stupidity. That's the cause of all the problems. Not institutions, not systems. Even corporate greed and mismanagement are down to dumb executives. Because if smart and qualified people were in charge, there would be no problems with corporations. Government? Same story, we just need an average white guy with dictatorial power to come in rescue the DEI hires.
I genuinely don't know where this comes from? Did I miss something in the movie?
Recognizing a trend versus being a proponent of the most horrible to approach it is an Idiocracy level leap in logic. The movie does not endorse eugenics in any way. At most, it displays a caricature of things, like genetics, as movies are apt to do.
Because its premise is that stupid parents exclusively get stupid children, and stupid parents gets more children than intelligent parents. That is how the world ends up as it is in the movie.
But that is of course not how intelligence works. Stupid parents can get intelligent children, otherwise intelligent people would never have existed in the first place.
Of course that doesn't make the movie embrace eugenics. It is just an unimportantfictional premise meant to explain why the world is at it is in the movie.
But intelligence is influenced by genetics. Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.
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Which is nowhere near the 100% which the movie implies.
The movie doesn't imply 100%.
The hypothesis they use is that stupid people have more kids and become the majority. It shows the genetic selection occuring over many generations.
Add in the effects of poverty, poor nutrition, lack of education, then top off with peer pressure and you get close to 100%
Oh hmm. Does it mention genetics? It could be more of a cultural thing.
The way I perceived it, that's exactly what it was. Yeas, the kids of stupid people are stupid but I don't recall it being specified it was genetic. The sequence in the movie just made me think it was upbringing and lack of education.
Stupid people on average will have stupider kids, if their parents believe education to be a prissy intellectual thing for gay liberals and not for good decent hard working people like us.