The 2005 film Idiocracy premiered to little fanfare and horrible reviews from critics. Financially the movie was a failure with revenue of $445,000 in the United States.
Years later the film Idiocracy has become a cult classic and the word idiocracy has become part of our cultural lexicon.
After an army experiment gone wrong (due to corruption), the two human subjects travel to a society set 500 years into the future and find that humanity has become stupider at a frightening rate.
Language had deteriorated to the point where most things had to be automated including medicine.
The top film in this society is called… Ass.
This masterpiece is literally people staring at a behind for 2 hours laughing uproariously as the behind passes gas. The top TV show is “Ow my Balls!” where the host endures pain to his nether regions for an hour as the audience sits captivated while eating their tub of butter.
Corporations rule the day and have complete control of people’s lives! Starbucks not only sells coffee but also functions as a brothel. Carl’s Jr plays a role in Child Protective Services and also sponsors the Presidential administration.
The fictional Brawndo corporation bought the FDA and the FCC to do and say whatever they want. Brawndo’s big contribution to society is eliminating the threatening and unhealthy substance called…water. In Idiocracy, water is for the toilet and not consumption so even plants are hydrated with Brawndo (similar to Gatorade) because they have electrolytes!
As a result, the plants don’t grow, there’s a dust bowl, and of course, everything spirals downward from there. The corporate messaging that everyone repeats is “Brawndo has electrolytes”. Thus, Brawndo has replaced water as the hydration drink of choice for everyone…because Brawndo has electrolytes.
Let’s move on to politics!
Idiocracy has elected the former pro wrestler and porn star, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho! He is vulgar, crass, and has the fervor of a preacher during his profanity-laced messages to the nation complete with a machine gun. He promised his citizens that every problem will be solved by next week!! He even hires his stepbrother to be part of his cabinet.
President Camacho’s administration is brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
Sigh.
Idiocracy is a warning.
“I never expected #idiocracy to become a documentary,” tweetedscreenwriter Etan Cohen in an apparent jab at the 2016 presidential race.
The film Idiocracy is set 500 years in the future. Ten years after the movie came out in 2016, during the most surreal election of our lifetimes, the movie creators said they didn’t expect the movie to become a documentary.
In my opinion, the movie has created its own special brand of the documentary: Horror Documentary.
While Idiocracy was supposed to be satire, it is actually a warning. Unfortunately, it appears the dumbing down of America occurred right under our noses and at an alarming rate.
How did this happen? How did it happen so quickly?
Idiocracy happens when a society is bent on amusing itself to death, infantilizes its citizens, and relies on technology to do all of its thinking.
Amusing ourselves to death
Amusing ourselves to Death by Neil Postman warned that Americans were getting sillier by the moment, and by eventually turning everything into an entertainment spectacle we would dumb ourselves down to our own detriment.
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” ― Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Postman wrote Amusing ourselves to Death in the 1980’s. I have wondered more than once what he would have thought of our modern-day society and how accurately he predicted what would happen.
Something is wrong when we look to athletes and entertainers to solve our society’s complicated problems and marginalize economists, scientists, and those who live the reality every day.
Social Justice has now become its own branch of entertainment. Many people who sign these content deals on the backs of social problems aren’t interested in social change. They’re interested in producing content to get paid.
Infantilizing Citizens
The book Coddling of the American Mind talks about the 3 Great Untruths promoted on College Campuses.
- What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. Avoid Hard Topics and Avoid Hard Things
- Always Trust your Feelings
- Life is all about Us vs. Them
These issues aren’t just problems on College Campuses. These are major issues in American Life. Yet, we avoid challenging our beliefs and assumptions. We don’t want to discuss complicated and hard issues and utilize critical thinking.
Instead, we want easy answers to our problems. We want politicians like President Camacho, who will tell us everything will easily be fixed with a Hollywood ending by next week.
In the midst of an international public health l crisis, I never imagined that I would hear a public official say that she “felt” like we were headed toward “impending doom.” I couldn’t believe my ears.
Since when did a Public Health official rely on “feelings” when addressing the public. This is immature and unprofessional. Her “feelings” were wrong to make matters worse because the data went in the exact opposite direction. It’s this sort of slow erosion that people may not notice but point to a major problem with our society being led by feelings instead of facts.
This is not the way of an intelligent nation. I cannot imagine President Roosevelt getting on the airwaves during World War 2 announcing, “I feel we are headed toward impending doom.”
We cannot even have intelligent discourse anymore because if the Red Team likes it, then the Blue Team has to hate it. If the Blue Team likes it, then the Red Team has to hate it. This is how children behave, not mature adults. I have avoided posting on Facebook because people are so shallow and childish that they cannot comprehend anything except their side winning.
It’s embarrassing the lengths that people will go to defend “their side” even when it is absolute foolishness!
Technology doing all of our thinking for us
My phone died recently, and I was completely lost. I realized that I didn’t know most people’s telephone numbers. I forgot about meetings and I felt like I was completely at a loss.
This worried me.
Technology does so much of our thinking for us, and I do think it impacts our brains. There are many warnings for younger people to
We can’t point to one single cause of the rapid decline of intelligence in our nation, but I think that technology, the infantilization of citizens, and amusing ourselves to death have led to this erosion.
There is hope
While we all acknowledge that times appear bleak, I believe there is hope because we are aware and many are dissatisfied with the status quo that’s being presented to us.
This is the opposite of a complacent nation.
If the majority were complacent to just sit in front of the television eating their Tub of Butter watching someone being hit in the nether regions, then I would think that the situation is more hopeless.
The fact that we have so much partisan bickering is a sign of hope because BOTH sides recognize something is terribly wrong. If each side agreed that everything was good and we were all being lulled to sleep because everything was okay, then I would be more concerned we were lemmings being led right off the cliff.
The nation as a whole is dissatisfied with our current state
One of the biggest obstacles to success is complacency and being too comfortable. Why change anything when life is good. The nation as a whole is not good right now and we all know it.
When I talk to my friends on different sides of the political spectrum, everyone agrees that something needs to change.
Most of us think it’s the other side that needs to change but I think the entire leadership structure needs to change along with the systems that clearly are no longer working for the twenty-first century and a more technologically advanced diverse populace than we had even 50 years ago.
Idiocracy was made in 2005 and in 16 years we have witnessed a rapid decline in this country that is alarming.
I admit that I didn’t laugh much during Idiocracy like I probably would have in 2005 because I felt like I’ve seen several scenes in this movie actually play out in real life.
Yet I thought, “Well we still have a ways to go before we all just give up and grab the tub of butter to sit in front of the TV”.
I am hopeful for change because I do not want to live through the sequel.
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