- In The Marching Morons, all the supergeniuses took refuge at the south pole when they weren't busy running things for the idiots; since Idiocracy shows a much greater degree of automation, it's entirely possible.
- ...An army full of increasing numbers of idiots?
- After one year? Should still be more or less the same as always.
- Look closely at the newspaper which says Collins and Upgrayedd were incarcerated. On the same title they say it's printed daily and weekly. In 2006.
- It's implied that only a couple of people knew about it, and since the lead researcher got busted, they probably wanted to distance themselves from it.
- It's actually a decent concept. A bunch of the best people were chosen to colonize Sirius or Vega (class A or O stars are more likely to have habitable but uninhabited planets), and either put in hibernation on ships taking centuries to get there, or the same with decades and they haven't been able to send anyone back yet. With Earth becoming increasingly unintelligent, contact with the ships would probably have been lost, and you can't really give good advice with a 16-year time lag anyway.
- Of course, some could have chosen to stay in a vain attempt to help, but eventually were overwhelmed by the unequal numbers and died off.
- Or simply gave up because the stress of trying to save the world became too much for them. It has already been hinted at with the end result of Carol and Trevor's case study.
- So, just like Atlas Shrugged?
- There must not have been a lot of smart people then, since Galt's Gulch only had one baker, one coal miner, one... wait, who built Galt's Gulch and maintained it anyway!?
- Jossed, it was created by the same guy that made King of the Hill, and as far as I know, he was born in the 60s.
- As far as you know. This is WMG, remember?
But what if there was more to it than that?
In Peter Watts's Rifters Trilogy, there is a mention of biotech corporations deliberately spreading buggy genotypes to create more sick people, who then require expensive treatments and become potential customers. Perhaps Idiocracy is the end result of something like that.
Say that somebody released a virus that would infect people, attack the sperm and egg, and change the genes that influenced intelligence to make the victim's children subnormal. The victim would then have to seek an expensive medical treatment for their children. Most people couldn't afford it, but the virus's makers figured that was OK because they would still make a profit from the people who could afford it and because they're evil bastards. Of course, they would want to make sure that the virus wouldn't be obvious, since they don't want anybody to realize what they did. Thus, they designed it to change a different randomly selected collection of genes in each victim or each target cell (this assumes that there are many genes that influence intelligence, but that's plausible). If many of the altered genes were dominant, then the first generations born after the virus would be only lightly affected because they would have only a couple of buggy genes; in many cases, the damage wouldn't even be noticed.
But, as the different affected lineages interbred with each other, the offspring would accumulate more and more buggy genes with each generation; thus, with each generation, people would get stupider. The virus would spread better among populations where general health was poor, access to medical care was restricted, and (assuming the virus is transmitted by bodily fluids) condoms were inadequately used, which would mean that the effects would show up most dramatically among the poor and uneducated.
Once you started to get significant portions of the population that were dramatically affected, then "stupid people breed faster" might kick in and enhance the effect.
The virus was subtle enough that nobody ever found out about it. Since no one knew what caused the decline in intelligence, the stupid people breeding faster seemed a plausible scapegoat.
It doesn't necessarily have to be Corrupt Corporate Executives who did it. It could be some crazy cult with access to genetic engineering technology, or an alien plot to weaken humanity until we're easily conquered, or a group that wanted the Idiocracy scenario to happen....
This would explain why no other nations have "stayed smart" and conquered the US. That didn't happen because the virus spread everywhere.
- This actually happens in the short story The Marching Morons.
Think about it: in this future, Starbucks is essentially prostitution, and Costco is a whole city. Yet Fox News still shows news. The anchors do it naked, but they still show the news.
Think about MTV (a Viacom company) from today. Fox News from Idiocracy shows less Network Decay than our MTV has despite its being around for much longer. The anchors being naked can be attributed to their pandering to the Lowest Common Denominator, something FOX and its related media outlets are already doing, albeit in other ways.
Thus, we can assume that all the remaining smart people are working for news agencies feeding the population whatever information they deem necessary.
Questions to ponder: does The New York Post still exist, and what is it printing? Is Bill O'Reilly still around doing his political talkshow stuff?
- Unfortunately, those three children are the part of the only intelligent family. Having grown up in a home environment of intelligent people, they are most attracted to intelligent people. Either their dynasty will have genetic defects due to inbreeding, or the parents will have a tradition of taking away infants, raising them intelligently for the purpose of providing their children with intelligent spouses.
Going alternatively from the theory above me, the smart people keeping themselves smart made the Too Dumb to Live populace easy to manipulate, and they eventually became the ruling class. (President Camacho was presumably just a puppet.) The way they stay in power is by Bread and Circuses and the bare minimum of stable infrastructure to keep the people complacent and not rioting. And of course, plugging your product into every possible application, suited or not, for the sake of maximising profit.
- Alternatively, given how many other people seem to think that nothing in this movie could come true, it could be a social experiment of a different kind: Present the public with a movie that criticizes social trends to such an exaggerated extent that the audience rejects all of it; then, they won't be vigilant or responsible enough to guard against some of it coming true. Example: present the public with the possibility of Gatorade taking over the watering of crops. Exaggerated, unrealistic, the population rejects it... so the population loses vigilance, and eventually a lesser version occurs that's almost as bad; the soft-drink companies buy up all sources of water and charge much stiffer prices for it than they charge for soft-drinks, for example, so only the rich could afford a healthy drink. Another example: present the public with a movie in which nobody knows what 1 + 1 equals. Exaggerated, unrealistic, the public rejects it...but they're so sure that could never happen, they then don't exercise enough vigilance in teaching their children basic math skills of any kind, so a slightly lesser version happens that's almost as bad: instead of kids growing up not knowing what 1 + 1 is, they grow up without the math required to make sound economic decisions when they get elected to Congress.
- If this was a social experiment in either direction, it would've gotten a wider release.
From that time on, stupidity became the new cool, and every following generation took the idea and ran with it even further, possibly reaping further benefits from stupidity by blending it with other political agendas such as pacifism and debt reduction. ("Vote for me: I'm so stupid, I don't even know how to start a war!" "Vote for me: I'm so stupid that when it's time to mail the welfare checks, I don't know where to send them!") Uhhhmerica (the nation's actual official name) is now a one-party state run by the Idiocrats, with the primaries being the actual election and the supposed general election really being the Idiocrat's candidate pretending to be running against the Stupublican candidate from Canuhduhhh. Every election year, each side proclaims victory over the other in their respective countries to much general rejoicing, and everyone's belief that ignorance is bliss is reaffirmed for another four years.
- This is actually the plot of the Alice, Girl from the Future story The City Without Memory. After the population of an entire planet accidentally got their memories wiped, they descended into a stone age society ruled by a caste of priests who proclaimed that "ignorance is the greatest degree of knowledge" and knowing anything at all was a crime.
Prof. Membrane, Dib and Gaz are President Not Sure's descendants. The bloodline of Not Sure slowly started making the society smarter, to the point where they started to go to "Skool" and advance their entertainment level from Ass and Ow! My Balls! to Vampire Piggy Hunter and Scary/Angry Monkey Show, but they still remained fairly dumb. For one, they can't tell a human and an Irken apart and still think of Dib as the same "fag" Not Sure initally was considered to be.
Speaking of the Irkens, they suffered the same dumbing down as the humans centuries ago, but invented space travel so they could consume up one planet and go to another, and cloning so that the dumbing down would be stopped, but not reversed.
Bad spelling/grammar and general disregard for reality in these fics comes from the society's great demention. Any resemblances to people from famous books/movies/games/etc. is either a coincidence or Product Placement by the last smart people to force the dumb look up to intelligence. The reason Mary Sues think they're powerful is the same reason Beef Supreme was able to emerge from a pile of rubble without a scratch.
It's by Mike Judge, even though it's live action rather than animation, and it's In a World… where all the stupidest, crudest, and generally worst members of the human species, such as Beavis and Butt-Head, have managed to avoid succumbing to natural selection long enough to reproduce explosively while the intelligent keep putting it off and never have children.- By the 23rd century, the world was already a corrupt and dismal place, since the government endured such a severe budget crisis that Brawndo was able to buy out crucial government agencies. Because of this, they were able to convince all of America to buy their drinks and use them for water. It is also possible that other corporations did the same thing: buy out entire parts of the government to give themselves incredible power.
- One of the present day cabinet members gets paid off because he says "Brought to you by Carl's Jr." This could be a reflection of how corrupt society got, with getting paid for Product Placement a legacy of how the corrupt corporations could easily pay off politicians.
- However, it is unlikely that people just accepted this, even in this time, so the corporations came up with a wonderful solution: build a totalitarian society where anybody who challenged them was silenced. There are hints of this being the case:
- Costco is apparently a place that churns out public defenders like Frito. The joke of the movie is how crappy Frito is, but there may be a more sinister reason for Frito's ineptitude: he was deliberately trained that way, because Costco, one of the corrupt corporations, bought out the education system and designed it to create crappy lawyers. Joe's trial doesn't descend into Kangaroo Court because the courtroom is staffed with idiots: it is because it was designed that way by the evil oligarchy to rule over society.
- The prisons in 2505 are also really terrible because, like the courts, they were designed that way to punish dissidents.
- There is also the "Rehabilitation," a Deadly Game where prisoners are killed in gladiator-style combats. What if, in the past, the corporations did this to political opponents to silence all dissent?
- Apparently in the world of 2505, corporations can seize children as property. This has several disturbing implications, but one is that, again, the corporations remade society so they could seize children from their parents. By claiming custody over children, they could indoctrinate them any way they wanted: the reason why the people in 2505 behave the way they do is that they were reared that way in corporate orphanages to be nothing but sheep who would slave away and serve as a captive market. The people in 2505 hate Joe's behavior because the corporations told them to reject things like empathy, respect, and critical thinking. Joe's demeanor is something they've been engineered to reject, and after centuries of this kind of indoctrination, people accept this as how things work.
- Of course, the social-engineering of the mega-corporations worked too well. Their attempts to manipulate society were so thorough that there was nobody left to succeed them who could keep that society functioning. The Brawndo CEO in 2505, a nominal elite, doesn't know how to stop the computers from laying off employees or keep the stock from plummeting. The elites eventually came to believe the horrible ideology they forced onto society. The evil assholes were replaced by people who didn't know the real reason society was structured that way.
- By the time Joe woke up, the world was already crumbling. The social systems and technology were breaking down, drought and environmental collapse were rampant, and even whole cities has become replete with garbage. Inertia and centuries of indoctrination were the only forces keeping everything together. Camacho and the political elite were vaguely aware the world was collapsing, but like everybody else, he was too brainwashed to know how to fix it. Hence creating a prison program that would help him find any intelligent person who could solve society's problems.
It's possible that Camacho intended it as an Impossible Task, and if Joe failed, that he could use Joe as the scapegoat for all the nation's issues to preserve his political reputation. After all, if the smartest man alive couldn't solve this problem, then why would anyone expect Camacho to?
