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Please Help Reverse This
(i.imgur.com)
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Idioctacy isn't about how stupid society has become, it's literally justifying Eugenics.
It's a 90 minute film. You are taking issue with the first 2 minutes.
Also, eugenics involves unnatural control and sterilisation. It sounds like you have a problem with intelligence being inherited.
The whole premise of the film in the first two minutes states "smart people aren't having kids while dumb people are" and the result of that in the film is a society of morons (who, also, somehow have automation and high technology, which requires, you know, some amount of intelligence). There's not really any other way one can take the film other than "we need to make smart people have lots of babies and prevent dumb people from not having kids lest we end up with a society full of morons" which is, by definition, "unnatural control and sterilization" (eugenics).
I mean saying "you take issue with the first two minutes" is a little like when a racist makes a racist claim and then you say "ok, what do you think should be done about it" they just say "I'm just sayin'" because they don't want to actually say the thing out loud. If you make a satire which uses as the premise that "smart people don't have kids, while dumb people have lots of kids" and then depicts a future that is degenerate, full of stupid people doing stupid things for stupid reasons, it's hard not to take that as advocating for eugenics on some level by saying "we need to make smart people have lots of kids and prevent dumb people from having too many kids."
Literally, from the wikipedia page, here's the ending: "Joe discovers the time machine was an amusement ride, a detail Frito was aware of. Joe becomes president and marries Rita, with whom he has three children. Frito becomes vice president and has 32 children, all stated to be "the dumbest kids ever to walk the earth" in contrast to Joe and Rita’s children, who are "the three smartest kids in the world."
The two people from "the before times when everyone was smarter" have three of the smartest kids around and the dumb guy has 32 of the dumbest kids around. It's not being subtle, this isn't even something you would find in high school English for close reading. It's literally saying "smart people have few kids and dumb people have lots of kids and this is bad and will result in a degenerate society that we must avoid. Hell, for a film making this claim, it's not even written that well. It's more "what if Cleetus from the Simpsons ruled the world" than "what if the global IQ dropped because smart people didn't have four kids a piece". Does make fun of Anti-intellectualism? Sure. Does it do it in a way that actually points to the problem? No! It blames breeding rather than the actual reason for all the anti intellectualism.
The reason for all the anti-intellectualism and stupid bullshit in the world right now isn't because smart people aren't shitting out kids at a rate of knots. It's because of right wing authoritarian people, who themselves have at least some brains, manipulating the public discourse for their own selfish aims. Cases in point:
If I were to summarize the it all, it's not that stupid people are in charge, it's smart evil people using anti-intelectualism to get their way. To drive it home, during the Brexit campaign, the former Education secretary, Michael Gove, when someone someone was interviewing him and challenging him on brexit, stating that every single economist was saying Brexit was a bad idea, Michael Gove said "people are sick and tired of experts". That's the issue here: we're being told not to actually listen to people who know what they are saying and listen to right wing ideologues who are either benefiting from this or being paid by people who are. And again, Michael Gove isn't a dumb person, he's an Oxford graduate, he's just a really fucking horrible person who, amongst other things, despite being Scottish himself, made a televised diatribe where he claimed Scottish people were poor morons who didn't deserve self determination.
And I know that's a lot of text, but sometimes you have to go into detail. So here's the tl;dr:
You are trying to shoehorn too many of your pet subjects into a 2 minute premise. If you are not controlling breading, you are not practising eugenics.
But I thank you for making me look closer. It turns out the film does have a scientific foundation.
The relationship between fertility and intelligence has been investigated in many demographic studies. There is evidence that, on a population level, measures of intelligence such as educational attainment and literacy are negatively correlated with fertility rate in some contexts.
Wealth too