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.
This is the right take to me. I can't say with absolute certainty, but it feels strongly like the eugenics aspects were there more for shock value... perhaps overestimating the public's capacity to recognize the farce.
And so much of it is so obviously absurd. Invokes everything from Gilliam's Brazil to Kids In The Hall.
As others have said, it's a reflection of what we currently are, magnified. Many aspects of which are not as implausible as they once were. That's where the continued buzz it gets comes from, I think.
I do think the eugenics stuff would be avoided if it were to be made today. If that turns out to be how Mike Judge actually thinks, well, I'd be very disappointed and would have to eat some words.
>But he (like most people) is probably fine with designer babies and sperm clinics that expressly sell product based on the characteristics of the donor (tall, high IQ, etc). That’s a tidier form of the same thing.
that is a wild blanket assumption that "most people" "probably" want designer babies, as if a majority of prospective parents are using sperm clinics.
I think you missed the entire point of the film. You know the end speech where Not Sure says something along the lines of "read a book" and "maybe don't put sports drinks on soil and expect it to grow".
The main premise of the second and third acts of the film demonstrates the scientific process. Hypothesize: "water will make plants grow", Experiment: "put water on plants instead of brawndo", analyze data: "the plants are growing". Go figure, after people see the results of the experiment they change their preconceptions!
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.
I was just following the parent's wording. I don't really think they were stupid, or even necessarily greedy and shameless though some no doubt have been. I think mostly it has been ignorance. Likewise the general voting population: I don't think they've gotten dumber, but I do think they've gotten more misinformed. As the saying goes, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble; it's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Never has that been more true in American politics.
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.
"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."
Serious question - what is 'dysfunctional' about 'blue cities' that works better in 'red cities'?
The classic obvious example is cost of living. All of the blue cities have awful zoning and development restrictions that cause them to fail consistently to actually produce new housing that comes even close to demand. The oft repeated success stories are how cities like Houston, despite being not the kind of city I want to live in, are much much more affordable since they actually allow the market to function. Progressives go on and on about how supply and demand doesn't actually apply to them, and how they need to demand 100% affordable housing with absolutely no explanation of how that will pencil out for developers, digging themselves even deeper into the hole.
More examples include how crime has gained San Francisco an image something like the land of the walking dead, where progressive governance treated homelessness and mental addiction as a problem of equity of opportunity - which in the super long run is perhaps true, but doesn't lead to any good short term outcomes. It's only now that some blue city mayors realize that, actually, order might be kinda important.
As well as the inability for these cities to improve their transit systems, so you end up with the NYC MTA being unreliable, filthy, and hopeless to expect anything positive to come out of it. Red cities just sidestepped it by organizing around the car, I don't love it but at least you can get around places instead of relying on the worst transit systems on earth.
American progressives seem to have a hopeless zero-sum mentality, where the only way the common man can experience a better life is at the expense of some rich person, and perhaps that is related to the fact that many live in American cities, for which daily life continually has gotten worse because of how incompetent their governance has been.
I can't really talk though. I just gave up on the USA and moved abroad since it was too hopeless for me.
Another thing that comes to mind – education, this has been covered a lot in the media recently. While lefty progressive cities got rid of standardized testing and basic stuff like phonics education in the name of equity (you get more equality if you just don’t teach your kids anything!), other states like Mississippi are seeing great strides in educational attainment by doing the opposite. I just see a consistent pattern of progressive leaders doing incompetent things.
Healthcare - rather than just assuming that the most maximalist possible universal healthcare strategy is the best solution, actually consider how different healthcare strategies balance the cost of long-term solvency, cost control, speed of service, and so on. For example, I am partial to the Japanese system, which unlike the Canadian system (which has crazy wait times), people pay 30% of costs so they still have skin in the game while the national healthcare system mandates fee schedules for common procedures to control costs. You get fast healthcare with a more sustainable fiscal basis, and less frivolous use of limited healthcare capacity than e.g. a system where there are no copays. The progressive wing seem irrationally tied to whatever Bernie Sanders claims is the best healthcare arrangement.
Housing & transportation - get rid of restrictions that reduce the ability of developers to actually build housing, from zoning restrictions to environmental legislation that is weaponized by NIMBYs to block development, to union labor requirements that send costs of building transit and housing through the roof, to affordable housing requirements that make projects not pencil out. Commercialize areas in and around train stations; I am partial again to the Japanese model where the train companies are literally private real estate companies that develop stations to the maximal extent possible because they make money from it. Progressives seem to think that corporate landlords are the source of all evil when it comes to housing supply and that private transit companies are pure evil, even though it has nothing at all to do with them and the greatest housing and transit successes in the world come from large private developers who are incentivized well.
Also, we should be switching to land value taxes to incentivize efficient use of land, by making vacant lots expensive to hold. I haven't heard a single progressive even mention the idea because they haven't thought about the root causes of poor land use long enough to care. Instead they harp on about wealth taxes that will mostly be evaded, and in the end net out tiny amounts of money that don't affect the economy as a whole.
I can keep going but you already decided that I have no substantive opinions so, idk, enjoy your dysfunctional life.
The full pipeline is be conservative -> realize conservatives are morons -> "both sides are bad" -> claim to be Libertarian -> vote for Trump anyway -> leopards eat your face -> whine that you're getting hurt more than the innocent people you hate and intented to hurt
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.
They most certainly are too stupid. This is a true story. In 1995, a guy named McArther Wheeler was flabbergasted when police picked him up for robbing a bank. He said "But I put the lemon juice on my face!!" He figured that since Lemon juice was used for invisible ink, putting it on his face would make him invisible.
So far, just a story about a dumb guy--but here the story take an epistemologically terrifying turn: He actually did an experiment to prove that it would work. He put Lemon juice on his face, went to the bathroom, and took a selfie. (Since this was 1995, he took a selfie with a polaroid camera.) When he looked at the picture, it just showed a blank mirror.
He was too dumb to know that he had not pointed the camera at the right place.
This is how the anti-vaxers, the anti-covid-ppe crowd are. It's not like they want to ignore the latest results of cutting edge science. It's not even like they don't want to do "research" on the internet. It's that they simply do not know how to tell what is and what is not genuine experimental results. They don't know when they are "hallucinating."
This is not the world that the movie "Idiocracy" presents us with. In idiocracy, everybody is even worse than old McArther Wheeler was. They don't even bother to do any research. Anything they believe is just self-evidently true to them.
(If you really want to freak yourself out, ask yourself how you would be able to tell whether or not you were fooling yourself just as McArther Wheeler did. If you are anti vax or anti Covid PPE, you really should ask yourself that question.)
Idiocracy, just like Seth MacFarlane's American Dad, was about something very, very specific: the political and cultural landscape of post-9/11 America during the George W. Bush administration. Stop trying to retrofit it as a prediction of the present moment. It's not that.
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 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.
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
Agreed. The unbearable smugness of the coastal elites is so pervasive, a person will dismiss “those people” but tie themselves in knots to avoid criticizing even the least the current protected class of the month
Or in the case of America, many people just want others to suffer so that they can feel better about themselves, and are willing to elect a leader who will do that on their behalf, even at their own cost.
They might not be idiots, but I am afraid that many of them are politically illiterate. How else would you explain that Donald Trump became president again?
Idiocracy is a fable about our time. Setting his story in the future helps Mike Judge to maintain plausible deniability, but the movie is there to validate your sneaking suspicion that everything is kind of stupid.
There are some confounding factors, like education and income also affecting fertility, and correlated with most measures of intelligence, but that doesn't actually affect the diagnosis - regardless of if intelligence directly lowers fertility, or if the effect is mediated by e.g. education, the net effect is that smarter people have fewer children (in our current environment).
They are. For example, literally nobody should be having kids rn in US, because the next decade is gonna be pretty horrible. But people still are, because they are none the wiser.
> The real problem is idiots have disproportionate political representation simply because of where they live. That’s especially relevant in the United States
This lets Americans off the hook far too easily. Trump won an absolute majority this time, and the GOP won the house too. For the Senate you will have to do your own research because I’m on mobile, but last time I checked the actual effect (estimated) on Senate outcomes is very modest.
> Idiocracy predicted that idiots would eventually outnumber smart people because the latter are supposedly much more ambivalent about having kids
To be fair, it was just a funny and easy to explain introduction to the movie's premise. If it was made today it may have had a montage of people outsourcing their thinking skills to AI or something among these lines.
Smart people not having kids was just a part of the movie. It also seemed to speak about america, where capitalism/corporations overwhelm common sense.
'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.
>The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number-one videocassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. “Beavis and Butthead” remain popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning—not just of science, but of anything—are avoidable, even undesirable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Give it a break folks, self-righteousness doesn't pay, "the idiots" don't await to be converted. Look at Back to the Future - in real life Marty is sick and feeble, Doc is just a paltry real estate investor. Biff is the true winner taking all power, real estate, and pretty ladies.
I have a theory that democracy will in the not so far future begin to be a disdained form of government, and it will happen because the Internet makes people think, or realize, too many voters are too dumb to be enfranchised in a rational system. While before we could be unaware, now we are painfully aware of the stupidity of the masses, and this can never be unnoticed. It is a plausible continuation that many will come to the conclusion that democracy does not make sense with this constituency. We may see popular calls for partial disenfranchisement or even just outright oligarchy.
The key difference though was that their idiot leadership was also not; malignant, fascist, mean and downright evil.
In fact - they recognized that they had an issue and actually got the "smart person" involved, although they were too dumb to actually follow-through initially... Unlike at least one current regime which has taken great pleasure in decimating and removing anyone with an ounce of brains...
Something that always bothered me: A few smart people and a massive amount of ignorant people has been the standard throughout most of history. It's only relatively recently that society has prioritized educating most/all of the population. So even if Idiocracy was right, wouldn't it just be a return to normal human conditions?
The ancient societies you mentioned, were not anti-intellectual. If anything, they placed too much power in their intellectual elites e.g., monks becoming bureaucrats in Charlemagne's kingdom, scholars becoming mandarin officials in Chinese dynasties.
The US always had an anti-intellectual streak. A common quote was I'd rather be judged by a jury of averages joes than a panel of intellectuals. In 2026, the anti-intellectual and anti-science folks are in charge of US institutions.
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 30.2 ms ] threadThe 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.
And so much of it is so obviously absurd. Invokes everything from Gilliam's Brazil to Kids In The Hall.
As others have said, it's a reflection of what we currently are, magnified. Many aspects of which are not as implausible as they once were. That's where the continued buzz it gets comes from, I think.
I do think the eugenics stuff would be avoided if it were to be made today. If that turns out to be how Mike Judge actually thinks, well, I'd be very disappointed and would have to eat some words.
that is a wild blanket assumption that "most people" "probably" want designer babies, as if a majority of prospective parents are using sperm clinics.
I think you missed the entire point of the film. You know the end speech where Not Sure says something along the lines of "read a book" and "maybe don't put sports drinks on soil and expect it to grow".
The main premise of the second and third acts of the film demonstrates the scientific process. Hypothesize: "water will make plants grow", Experiment: "put water on plants instead of brawndo", analyze data: "the plants are growing". Go figure, after people see the results of the experiment they change their preconceptions!
It's stupidity by choice. Willful ignorance.
They are stupid.
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.
Serious question - what is 'dysfunctional' about 'blue cities' that works better in 'red cities'?
More examples include how crime has gained San Francisco an image something like the land of the walking dead, where progressive governance treated homelessness and mental addiction as a problem of equity of opportunity - which in the super long run is perhaps true, but doesn't lead to any good short term outcomes. It's only now that some blue city mayors realize that, actually, order might be kinda important.
As well as the inability for these cities to improve their transit systems, so you end up with the NYC MTA being unreliable, filthy, and hopeless to expect anything positive to come out of it. Red cities just sidestepped it by organizing around the car, I don't love it but at least you can get around places instead of relying on the worst transit systems on earth.
American progressives seem to have a hopeless zero-sum mentality, where the only way the common man can experience a better life is at the expense of some rich person, and perhaps that is related to the fact that many live in American cities, for which daily life continually has gotten worse because of how incompetent their governance has been.
I can't really talk though. I just gave up on the USA and moved abroad since it was too hopeless for me.
Housing & transportation - get rid of restrictions that reduce the ability of developers to actually build housing, from zoning restrictions to environmental legislation that is weaponized by NIMBYs to block development, to union labor requirements that send costs of building transit and housing through the roof, to affordable housing requirements that make projects not pencil out. Commercialize areas in and around train stations; I am partial again to the Japanese model where the train companies are literally private real estate companies that develop stations to the maximal extent possible because they make money from it. Progressives seem to think that corporate landlords are the source of all evil when it comes to housing supply and that private transit companies are pure evil, even though it has nothing at all to do with them and the greatest housing and transit successes in the world come from large private developers who are incentivized well.
Also, we should be switching to land value taxes to incentivize efficient use of land, by making vacant lots expensive to hold. I haven't heard a single progressive even mention the idea because they haven't thought about the root causes of poor land use long enough to care. Instead they harp on about wealth taxes that will mostly be evaded, and in the end net out tiny amounts of money that don't affect the economy as a whole.
I can keep going but you already decided that I have no substantive opinions so, idk, enjoy your dysfunctional life.
The pipeline is be conservative -> realize conservatives are morons -> "both sides are bad"
All of this is preventable if only people voted Dem in 2024, but apparently voting against a convicted felon is too much to ask.
The full pipeline is be conservative -> realize conservatives are morons -> "both sides are bad" -> claim to be Libertarian -> vote for Trump anyway -> leopards eat your face -> whine that you're getting hurt more than the innocent people you hate and intented to hurt
It’s shitty, and using the movie as a canard for that old and tired view is shitty as well.
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.
How do you know they're not too stupid to realize what/the damage they're doing in the first place?
So far, just a story about a dumb guy--but here the story take an epistemologically terrifying turn: He actually did an experiment to prove that it would work. He put Lemon juice on his face, went to the bathroom, and took a selfie. (Since this was 1995, he took a selfie with a polaroid camera.) When he looked at the picture, it just showed a blank mirror.
He was too dumb to know that he had not pointed the camera at the right place.
This is how the anti-vaxers, the anti-covid-ppe crowd are. It's not like they want to ignore the latest results of cutting edge science. It's not even like they don't want to do "research" on the internet. It's that they simply do not know how to tell what is and what is not genuine experimental results. They don't know when they are "hallucinating."
This is not the world that the movie "Idiocracy" presents us with. In idiocracy, everybody is even worse than old McArther Wheeler was. They don't even bother to do any research. Anything they believe is just self-evidently true to them.
(If you really want to freak yourself out, ask yourself how you would be able to tell whether or not you were fooling yourself just as McArther Wheeler did. If you are anti vax or anti Covid PPE, you really should ask yourself that question.)
[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).
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...
doesn't that help everyone?
what am I missing?
Or in the case of America, many people just want others to suffer so that they can feel better about themselves, and are willing to elect a leader who will do that on their behalf, even at their own cost.
They are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
There are some confounding factors, like education and income also affecting fertility, and correlated with most measures of intelligence, but that doesn't actually affect the diagnosis - regardless of if intelligence directly lowers fertility, or if the effect is mediated by e.g. education, the net effect is that smarter people have fewer children (in our current environment).
This lets Americans off the hook far too easily. Trump won an absolute majority this time, and the GOP won the house too. For the Senate you will have to do your own research because I’m on mobile, but last time I checked the actual effect (estimated) on Senate outcomes is very modest.
You can probably imagine participation and the popular vote would be very different if electoral college votes weren't winner-take-all.
> if all Americans eligible to vote in 2024 had cast ballots, the overall margin in the popular vote likely would not have been much different
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/behind-trump...
To be fair, it was just a funny and easy to explain introduction to the movie's premise. If it was made today it may have had a montage of people outsourcing their thinking skills to AI or something among these lines.
-Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World (1995)
"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.
BTW, I believe the author was painting the visual image of Beavis & Butthead, not a caveman.
It is actually a win-win situation. Government controls the corporations and corporations control the government.
A trip to Buc-ee's would've been great inspo also
No, the level of corruption is just too high for a functioning democracy.
In fact - they recognized that they had an issue and actually got the "smart person" involved, although they were too dumb to actually follow-through initially... Unlike at least one current regime which has taken great pleasure in decimating and removing anyone with an ounce of brains...
The US always had an anti-intellectual streak. A common quote was I'd rather be judged by a jury of averages joes than a panel of intellectuals. In 2026, the anti-intellectual and anti-science folks are in charge of US institutions.