Idiocracy/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The movie asserts that "smarter" people will have less children compared to dumber people

  • But civilization has been around for 7,000 years. Is the movie trying to tell me that the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians were so unbelievably intelligent that they make Ozymandias look like a Down's Syndrome patient, or is it saying that for some incomprehensible reason stupid people are now deciding to screw like bunnies? And speaking of which, the author misinterpreted a piece of Truth in Television: That people with less income and education tend to have more children than everyone else. But "uneducated" =/= "stupid". There's probably a slight correlation, but it's possible to be bright yet dirt-poor and uneducated, just like it's possible to have a PhD and the wits of a lightly sautéed tomato. See the Country Mouse and Absent-Minded Professor tropes.
    • The first line mentions that the turn of the 21st century was "a turning point". As in, only then did stupid people start having more kids than smart people, because being smart wasn't necessary anymore. As for the dumb vs. uneducated thing, well, it's simplified so that the plot will work.
      • Except that the poor and less educated have ALWAYS had more kids than the rich and educated. Farmers used to have tons of kids because you need a lot of help to run a farm and most of them would die anyway. The amount of dumb peasants versus educated aristocracy hasn't really changed over time. In fact, with public schooling there are probably less dumb and undereducated peasants than there have ever been. And even then, you can be poor and smart. With lack of schools it will be harder to build on our current knowledge database, but if society really does regress there's going to be someone around to start rediscovering stuff. How do you think we found all this knowledge out in the first place?
      • That's not actually true. Population studies of England in the 16th and 17th centuries showed that everyone had lots of children, but that the rich had more. There was extensive downward social mobility as the upper class seeded the middle class which seeded the lower class. Farmers mostly sent their children to the cities to die of endemic/epidemic diseases.
      • The 20th century is the first in human history to have reliable birth control. In no other era have people been able to easily control the size of their families. Hence, people who are thoughtful, careful and responsible reduce the number of children they have, while people who don't think ahead produce children whenever they have sex. Also, education is more broadly available than it has been historically, meaning the intelligent are more likely to become educated (not always, but more often than in ancient times.)
        • Which is sort of true - people with higher levels of education tend to have less children. But again, being uneducated is not stupidity. Hell, "stupidity" is an incredibly vague term, anyways.
      • Until recently, though the dumb had a lot of children, the smart also had a lot of children but more of the dumb kids died. Now (via the movie's logic) we're in a culture that protects the Too Dumb to Live from themselves, and to some degrees embraces their culture and values.
        • Absolutely: Just look for those people who bully the geek and like the stuff of popular culture (like everyone likes Paris Hilton just because she is beautiful even though she is a bit stupid).
      • Just to summarize: The 20th century was a turning point, where natural selection, which favored the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, began to favor different things (Idiots). With no natural enemies and humanity moving from predatory to herd-like state (remember, predators employ tactics like ambush and teamwork to bring down prey, while herds generally tend to just eat, sleep, fuck and run away), nature simply began to reward those who fucked more. And since intelligent people tend to be wiser and employ birth control methods for their own benefit, the idiots began to reproduce more, until everyone became idiots.
        • and this is 100% Truth In Movies; just look at warning labels on various products sometime.
          • It's the fault of the fucking lawsuits.
        • To be accurate, natural selection has always favored those with higher reproductive success and not necessarily if they were stronger, smarter, faster, etc. It just so happened that those who were stronger, smarter, and faster tended to provide better support for their children to grow up and propagate their own genes. Yes, yes, this carries implications of Social Darwinism.
          • Also the movie does not explicitly state that the "dumbing down" of humanity is entirely the fault of genetics; there was also a strong societal trend towards a shallow, materialistic lifestyle. Sure there are still smart people around but as the movie implied, their talents went towards making money (ie penile extension drugs, automating Carl's Jr., and running megacorporations) than fixing the world's problems. After all they may have brains but like the rest of society they'd rather have cash and a good time than worry about the mess they are in. Its just that by the time the events of the movie rolls around, they are in such a minority and so acclimatized to their own society that the smart ones just don't try to be smart anymore.
    • The movie exaggerates the general trend for the sake of humor.
      • Actually, there is no trend. Since the I.Q. is an average of all intelligence. So it has to be reset every couple years to keep it at the average. And every time, the standards are set higher. Ergo, people are actually getting smarter on average.
      • See: above. This movie, if it's trying to make a political point at ALL, is making a very lighthearted and easy one. It's a comedy, not a serious statement about the future of mankind. Relax.
      • Except that Mike Judge isn't above sacrificing realism for the sake of making a point. The irrigation subplot is a perfect example; it's impossible to bounce back from decades of salting the Earth with sports drinks in a matter of days, but the movie goes ahead and does it so that we can see Joe save the world. Never mind that the same effect could have been achieved using a pot of clean dirt (they weren't spraying Brawndo on everything, after all, just the land they were trying to grow things in) and a seed. Similar problems exist with Office Space, but that's another IJBM entirely. In fact, I'll be right back...
      • "Ergo, people are actually getting smarter on average." Nevertheless, the logic of Idiocracy that "predicts" the opposite trend seems to make sense. So what's it failing to account for? (Kinda like looking at a "proof" that 0=1 and trying to find the invalid step.)
  • Perhaps the lack of intelligence is just a side effect of the real problem: a lack of people giving a shit. As society degrades attributes like problem solving, thoughtfulness, logic, rationality, and a desire to be proactive in fighting future problems are all undervalued (considered "faggy" in the parlance of 2505), so kids don't grow up to value those attributes. This causes no one to be interested in either educating themselves or fixing the various obvious problems (the drought, the trash mountains, the leaking nuclear facility...)


Who built the Dildozer and the Ass Master?

  • I can see the people of the future thinking something like that would be cool and trying to slap the parts together, but not actually building something that works.
    • If you're going to start worrying about that, see also: every other societal system and engineering work that apparently has been done / is still being done since the world done got all stupid.
      • Most of the things we see are automated systems that could have been invented long ago, and now just need workers to push their buttons. Maybe the Dildozer and Assmaster were invented by the last few smart people, to sell to the growing market of the dumb.
        • But who maintains those automated systems? Who repairs them when they break down or glitch out? For that matter, who flies the planes that can clearly be seen flying overhead?
          • Nobody maintains them or repairs them. That's the cause of most of the problems that the people of the future were facing.
          • Basically. It's why the CEO of the sports drinks company was panicking, the company had long ago set up contingency protocols for a massive drop in stock market price, predicting no one would know what to do in such an event... and no one knew how to stop it.
          • Even so, how is President Camacho smart enough to ride a motorcycle? If motorcycles are anything like cars (not that I have any reason to believe they are, but whatever), then operating the clutch is not an intuitive operation. Even an automatic transmission seems like it would be beyond them. Plus, the bike would be pretty much useless without maintenance; eventually you'd have to change the oil.
            • He was the smartest person on Earth before Joe and Rita came along. It's probably a skill that's passed from generation to generation, along with the cycle, and now he's the last guy on Earth who know how to use and repair it.


Brawndo is not what Plants crave

  • So the people of the future have been "watering" their crops with Brawndo for decades, or at least a very long time. Some problems with that:
    • They've essentially been salting the earth for all that time (electrolytes being a form of salt, after all), yet Joe manages to undo the damage in only a few days by making them switch to water. What the hell? I seriously doubt it would take that little time for the earth to recover. Would it have been so hard to have him take a pot of dirt from somewhere else—they weren't watering everything with Brawndo, after all, just the land they were trying to grow things out of—and plant a seed in that?
      • "Salting the earth" is a metaphor. Besides, rainwater would get rid of most of it fairly quick.
        • "Salting the earth is a metaphor". ....No, it isn't. It was a real practice in Ancient Times, just not always for the reasons most people think.
    • Presumably the people of the future have been surviving off of Carl's Jr. machines since the crops died. How does everyone not have scurvy and other massive vitamin-deficiency problems? If they're getting their veggies from the burgers (tomatoes, etc.), where the hell are they getting those from?
    • I know they're idiots, but seriously, no one noticed that the crops died around the time they started using Brawndo instead of water? Are they so stupid that they can't even comprehend simple cause-and-effect? I'd think if they were, they would have died out a long time ago.
    • There is throughout the film an implication that some sort of other aspect of society - be it smarter people or robots or whatever - have been acting as indulgent caretakers until very recently. The movie makes more sense if you forget about this and realize it's supposed to be satire of our current societal trends.
      • Which, again, are not any actual trends as explained closer to the top of the page as well as in this classic comic strip. One cannot overstate the importance of seeing through the extremely attractive illusion that other people, seen from a distance, are stupid.
      • The societal trends are that there are a lot of fucking stupid people behaving stupidly and wallowing in their stupid, stupid filth. Always have been. Never won't be. Do you not recognize the idea of exaggeration as comedy?
      • Exaggeration yes. Deliberate falsehood no. First of all, the existence of lots of stupid people is not a "trend" in the first place. A trend is a general direction of development. The fact that stupid people always have and always will exist is no more a trend than the fact that rocks always have and always will exist. Okay, you've established that those things exist. And your point in making this observation was...? Second, satire is the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices. But the thing is, in order for the satire to be valid, the vices being criticized must be absolutely true. If the societal vice you are criticizing does not really exist, you aren't making a satire, you're just lying. Or at best, misrepresenting the truth. Either way, the social criticism you were trying to make is invalidated because the thing you were criticizing isn't real. The fact is, even if it were true that uneducated people are out-breeding the educated (and I'm not convinced it is) society is not getting dumber as a result. No evidence has yet arisen for an overall drop or even a plateau in world/nationwide intelligence levels. It's an elitist myth based on an elitist fallacy.
        • The "idiocy" the movie criticizes is obviously consumerism, empty societal values, simplistic life goals and the overvaluation of money and sex. Material pursuits over intellectual ones. And this is clearly a trend in our society.
          • No, no it isn't. If that were the real message of the movie then there would be no need for all the "people are getting stupider" nonsense the movie tries to push on us. A satire of consumerism, empty societal values, simplistic life goals, and the overvaluation of money would be a very different movie (and a more interesting one in my opinion, but YMMV).
          • What it is, however, is a satire of those elements of modern society Mike Judge considers stupid and idiotic. That's it. We can go back and forth on whether this society is actually coming to pass, but whether it is or not isn't really the point (or at least it isn't the entire point); the point is simply for Judge to highlight the elements of society he thinks are ridiculous, idiotic and unpleasant by blowing them up to form an entire society based around them, and the 'dumb people are outbreeding smart people' thing is simply a plot device to justify the world he's creating. It's a device that's been done in fiction since Thomas Moore wrote Utopia; whether Judge actually believes that there is a potential for this to happen, I don't know (but I doubt it), but he's no more making an actual prophecy than George Orwell was actually prophecizing that by 1984 the entire world would be a totalitarian hellhole. What both are doing is just using the future settings of their works as a tool to enable their satires of contemporary society and to demonstrate on a large scale why the things they think are bad about their society are very very bad indeed, especially if they get out of control. The viewer may disagree with the things that Judge is choosing to satirize, but then, it's his satire, not theirs; if they want to satirize something else, they can write their own. As for not being true, while it might not be the case that society is trending towards getting dumber, there certainly are a lot of very stupid things and very stupid people in modern society.
    • Something else to break your brain on. How the hell are they getting purified water for their toilets that Joe uses to water the plants? 2505 society sure as hell doesn't seem competent enough to realize the difference between clean(no salt) water and seawater they'd probably get it from(which considering the garbage problem, would probably be pretty nasty already)


Unfortunate Implications about stupid people's names

  • Why do so many stupid people in the future have Hispanic names? Think about it: Camacho, Pendejo (yes, I know what "pendejo" means)--even the announcer at Monday Night Rehabilitation has a Hispanic accent. It was probably just Mike Judge being pragmatic about immigration trends, but that's sure as hell not how it comes off. The fact that the hero is a white guy just makes it worse.
    • This movie is so rife with Unfortunate Implications that pointing them out is like pointing out a drop of water in the ocean.
      • Hector Camacho was a boxer. Frito Bandito was a corn chip mascot. Who gives a fuck.
    • There weren't any Asians! They all left and formed a smart nation.


Miscellaneous

  • In the stinger, we see "Subject 3" (Upgrayedd) climbing out of a capsule. "Subject 3" went to jail around the same time Collins did. So how did "Subject 3" a) obtain the capsule and ancillary items and b) know how to use it? (He didn't come across as smart enough to do it himself.)
    • Rule of Funny. It's to show just how determined he is.
    • He and Collins were obviously great friends, and prostitution is not exactly a life sentance, so perhaps Collins helped him build/find another capsule to get to the future. It would explain why his opened up a little later than the other two, after all (Perhaps it was offset by a few years, but not to the exact day?)
  • When Upgrayedd gets out of the capsule, he puts his hat on backwards. It just bugs me.
    • Me too.
      • Heh, I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed. I think that The Stinger implies that unlike Joe and Rita, Upgrayedd will fit in the future just fine, and the backwards hat is a part of that. Did I kill the joke?
      • Well, he is a forefather to a huge chunk of the American of population. What's really going to bake your noodle is the amount of ancestor incest that he's about to unleash.
      • I just figured it was a part of the pimpin' style that I wasn't familiar with.
  • At Joe's rehabilitation the national anthem is played by several dozen guitar players. While they do play with relatively little skill, it is still really difficult to learn the guitar (I know from experience). With the short attention spans of everyone, I find it doubtful that anyone would have the devotion to practice an instrument for hours and hours. People don't seem smart enough to know how to tune their guitars. Since they clearly don't understand cause and effect, the very concept of "place fingers over frets to make sound" would probably confuse them. I always thought the joke would have worked a hell of a lot better has they been playing Guitar Hero instead of actual instruments.
    • Playing the guitar looks cool and it gets you laid. They'd put forth the effort.
    • Guitar Hero had yet to be released during filming.
  • Am I the only one who thought Beef Supreme may be smarter than everyone else? In his brief appearance, he seemed to be acting stupid rather than being stupid like everyone else. He teases at the audience but clearly knows where Joe is from the get go. Maybe it was that he had no speaking lines but he honestly struck me as a Man Behind the Man: Someone who was secretly smart and used his position to keep control of the society.
    • If you've read the book you'd know that he actually becomes President after Joe.
  • How the fuck did Clevon plow that many bitches despite being a fat stupid redneck? Same goes for Jr.

Hat Guy: New Theory: Stupid people reproduce more because the alternative is sleeping with YOU.

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Idiocracy/Headscratchers?oldid=1434011"