I have a friend who is a good person overall but really buys into the “real life is becoming Idiocracy” bit. I was frustrated, because I’m not the best real-time arguer so I don’t think I did a good job of expressing why the movie is disgusting trash.
I attempted to talk about how it blames people instead of systems, and how it’s an awful eugenics narrative. But we quickly got into a rabbit hole about whether intelligence can be passed on genetically or not and if that matters, and other dumb topics that went nowhere.
What’s a concise and offline-compatible way of explaining why Idiocracy is bad & decent people should find it gross?
1 - Human evolution doesn’t happen on a timescale that humans give a damn about.
2 - Stupid people don’t outcompete smart people. You’re just conflating poor people with stupidity so you can mock them for something you feel justified in, rather than have to think about why people are poor and/or admit your classism.
That second bit is good ammo - “you really just want to laugh at poor people.” 👍
Ask them to do a “dumb person” voice then ask them to stop and think about what that voice they did was. It’s almost always a “black” or “Appalachian” accent that people do.
Then get them to start exploring why it is they think that an entire group of people are “dumb” and think about the types of media that tend to portray those groups that way (hint: they tend to have “normal” accents and live in California).
Then point out that Idiocracy is best watched as a refutation and satire of the deeply ingrained classism of Hollywood and the media class in general. The world of Idiocracy isn’t real, it’s a parody of the absolutely psychotic levels of elitism saturating all of our media.
The problem is that you can’t agree on Idiocracy if you both start from different premises, which seems to be the case. That’s why you got onto different topics. Your big hurdle is trying to get enough common premises to start from so that you can both move on to the movie itself. There simply is no way to just say the movie has a bad message and your friend agree if they think some people are just naturally more stupid than others and think that the stupid people are the problem in the world. Ironically, that’s a dumb person opinion. Not to be ablelist, but it’s a very common idea with little critical thought or rigor.
A lot of people live with nothing but common sense. They’re not curious people. They don’t spend their spare time learning or reading things or trying to be critical of their own ideas. But through the general cultural filter they develop these ideas about the world and just hold onto them until they die. The idea that everyone around you is stupid and you’re one of the few smart ones is exactly that kind of thinking. Idiocracy is a movie for that kind of person.
Plus it came out during a time of supreme liberal smugness about intelligence because Bush was a big dumb dumb poo poo head and they lost their shit over how someone so stupid could be president. All the hyperventilating about Trump’s personality isn’t anything new, they did it under Bush too. That was such a powerful cultural motivator for lib writers in the 00s.
You make a really good point about initial premise. I think you’re right - that’s the real disagreement, and I think it would be very difficult to convince someone that they’re not fundamentally “the last smart or sane one” in a sea of dangerous idiots. It starts from empathy, and I don’t know how to teach empathy. If teaching is even the right word.
Regarding your second paragraph, I agree, but I would add that it’s very much a product of their environment. When you’re surrounded by a a vast wasteland of inane garbage that encourages uncritical consumption, that’s a natural result. I believe very strongly that people CAN be better, when afforded the opportunity. Including in areas like critical thinking.
In particular I think stand-up comedians makes this worse, which feature heavily in this person’s life. Lines like “think about how dumb the average person is - then realize half of em are dumber than that” are funny, but also IMO make it easier to slip into this kind of framing.
This one’s more short and quippy than a perfect refutation
A child’s success in education correlates with the parents’ income, not their IQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
The Flynn effect is the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores that were measured in many parts of the world over the 20th century
Test score increases have been continuous and approximately linear from the earliest years of testing to the present
so first of all, the premise literally has no scientific basis. The measurement known as IQ keeps keeps going up. So they essentially just made a movie to punch down.
Secondly, as you might be able to guess from the fact that IQ is going up, IQ doesn’t actually measure intelligence, it just measures some capabilities that we have labeled intelligence and what’s actually going on is we’re educating & caring for people better so they’re better at useless brain tests. You can see this with physical athletes too. Look up any olympic sport all times records for something like the 10k meters and you’ll see that the oldest record in the top 25 is from 1996, even though the event was added in 1912.
Modern humans are just better.
Secondly, the fucking classism in the movie. The characters behave like stereotypical trailor trash and enjoy everything you would associate with that trope. Being uneducated, messy, belching, toilet humor, drinking beer etc = tropes of the poor.
The movie even takes it a step further with the paternalism by having the outcome be the smart person lead the poor for their own good. In the movie this is played for laughs, but this is literally a real argument that racists made for why they needed to subjugate black people into slavery or sterilize disabled people. For their own good and especially for “society’s” own good.
So they paint this as a farce but this is actually what racists think about people of color unironically and it supports the idea that ‘dumb’ people will outbreed the good people and we should step in to save them from their fate.
Many of the jokes punch down, and some don’t go beyond basically “AAVE isn’t grammatically correct, lol.” It’s just kinda lazy!
