Then stop praising the accuracy of Idiocracy. I loathe that movie, and right now I’m seeing a lot of smug Democrats talking about how it’s coming true.
I never expected #idiocracy to become a documentary.
— Etan Cohen (@etanjc) February 24, 2016
No. Idiocracy is a movie that assumes all the premises of social Darwinism and eugenics are true. Try watching it and noticing how it thinks evolution works. Poor people are biologically inferior and inherently stupid, and since they’re breeding madly, they’ll overwhelm the superior, intelligent, responsible people who restrain themselves. It assumes that the poor are stupid, and the stupid are poor.
It is especially ironic that people are praising its veracity now because of Trump and the Republican presidential slate. Do I need to point out that these terrible people are the products of good schools and are loaded with cash? Donald Trump is a billionaire and the others are millionaires backed by other obscenely rich billionaires…yet somehow, ignorant, pampered, selfish lower class people are going to poison the gene pool with their substandard genetics, swamping out the potential of the human species?
Others have noted the fallacious premise driving the movie.
The origin story for Idiocracy’s future world of half-wits is that uneducated people in the early 2000s are having kids and smart people don’t reproduce enough. It’s clear from the film that the intelligent people are wealthy, while the uneducated people are poor. So we’re starting from a position of believing that wealthy people are inherently more intelligent and, by extension, deserve their wealth. This link between intelligence and wealth is perhaps the most dangerous idea of the film and pretty quickly slips into advocating for some form of soft eugenics to build a better world.
If only we could get rid of the uneducated Americans (read: redneck poors) and we’ll have the opportunity to live in a utopian world filled with smart and civilized people. Of course, everyone here in 2014 making a reference to Idiocracy as a pseudo-documentary identifies with the soon-to-be-extinct intelligent class. They believe it’s the “others” — the dumb, impoverished people — that are ruining America with their binging on crap TV and crap internet and crap food.
This is pure, unadulterated social darwinism. It’s a movie that reassures its viewers that because you’re smart enough to see how stupid rednecks are, you are one of the good, worthy people who ought to be rewarded and encouraged to have more children. It is your responsibility to reproduce, lest those feeble-minded nitwits have more children than you.
It’s also a message that resonates with certain atheists.
It’s also a message at the heart of many racists: we must protect the pure Whites before they are outbred by all the Mud People!
I’ve complained about this belief before. It’s shameful to see so-called progressives in the 21st century praising a movie that promotes the ideas of eugenics, and that Nazis would have found perfectly copacetic.
I thought it was a terrible movie for several reasons, and that was without any particular concern for the evolution subtext.
People who think Idiocracy is advocating social darwinism are similar to those who think Starship Troopers (the movie not the book) advocates a military police state.
Is that quote supposed to be in Comic Sans?
Of course they do. While I was alternately yawning and eyerolling my way through that flick, I noted the protagonist ain’t all that in the thinking department. Average high school, perhaps. So, that’s the intelligence they fear is passing out of the picture?
There is, obviously, a negative correlation between fertility and level of formal education, especially for women; but not for IQ. (Viz. the “demographic transition” and sustainable development goals.) This leads to some complicated arguments about where we will be in the future, a can of worms I will allow others to open if they wish. Bottom line, however, this is a problem amenable to social policy.
I thought the movie sort of funny, though far from the funniest movie ever. But anyone who calls it a documentary, even jokingly, or in any other way is accurate is so stupid he/she should stop reproducing according to the very doctrine of the movie.
I’ll be honest, i’ve watched that movie a few times and i laughed my arse off (weed helps, i’ll freely admit). But yeah, the premises are complete horseshit and choc full of prejudicial, classist bigotry. I have friends who have advanced the “omg, Idiocracy is so becoming real” shite and i’ve tried to explained any number of times how no, it really isn’t and it couldn’t because the premises are false and unrealistic. As a silly fictional movie, though, it’s a laugh…
Having worked in the federal family planning program, I can tell you several reasons why there’s a higher birth rate among poor women. The first is little or no access to affordable health care of any kind, let alone contraceptives. Free clinics are nearly unavailable; abortion counseling not allowed under most state laws; no transportation to available clinics; and OTC methods such as condoms and foam (should be used together, not alone) are prohibitively expensive. Very few providers will deal with minors, as well, other than free/sliding-fee clinics. My metro area has over a million people, but we only have one Planned Parenthood office. Finally, you get the docs who STILL won’t do a sterilization on any woman who doesn’t meet the 120 rule, nor any man under 40. WTF?
Rich women can pay $1,000 for that hormone-infused IUD insertion up front, plus revisits. A working-poor woman could pay $60 to $150 for a month of OC’s, which doesn’t include the office visit of $250 or so. It depends on which formulation she can take. Just as with food, the poor pay far more for what they need than the middle class or UC’s do. Poor people buy eggs three or four at a time at $.50 each. The only time they buy a dozen is for holidays. Other social classes have no blanking clue about what poor people live with.
Growing up where I did, I know for a fact that from welfare to working class, hand-to-mouth or paycheck-to-paycheck people, there are shitloads of very, very smart people – far smarter than most of my teaching colleagues. It’s hard to graduate from high school when you’re working full-time to help support the family. It’s harder to survive to 24 when you’re urban, black, and destitute. Even if you do, you probably have a jacket, and then no one will hire you.
Eat the rich.
I’m mysteriousqfever, and I approve PZ’s message.
I have nit seen the movie that kind of overly broad smug humor goes right over my head. I have had a surprising discussion with a close friend of mine on the same subject namely that indicated that the “rich and successful” were the more “highly evolved” or an expression of them (he) being more “highly evolved”. Without defining what biological traits were responsible for their success none that were more exclusive to the rich and successful. There were I pointed out some things that were inherited such as money and property and social standing that did have a very strong influence on success.
science how does it work?
uncle frogy
I come from a family of proud (ethically ambiguous) “rednecks” and I loathe this movie.
Luke Owen was pretty hot in it, though. I’ll stick to “Royal Tennenbaums” for that particular fix, though.
I don’t remember stupid=poor or poor=fecund being a big part of the that movie- there was the implication that stupid people were poor at the beginning, with the whole trailer park vs. yuppie setup, but we’re later treated to the future where doctors and lawyers live like kings and are imbeciles never the less. And stupidity isn’t even presented as relative, even smart people in the Idiocracy future seem to have no Theory of Mind or even a sense of consequences or the passage of time.
Also the whole “Starfucks” thing and the equation of stupidity with not just having lots of kids, but just having lots of sex, needs a lot more unpacking. You’d think sexual selection would make people smarter, though in Idiocracy women are all sluts. Curious, that– also curious that the only “sane” woman from the past is a prostitute.
It is also true that Mike Judge might be an ass. He may have been more mellow in his “Beavis and Butthead” youth but he’s slowly making the transition to Hollywood Republican wingnut (anyone ever see “The Goode Family”? He did that.) I expect he’ll soon be hanging out with David Mamet and Jerry Zucker.
I think that I watched it, but I guess it never really resonated with me because I can’t recall a thing about it now. I guess that is a good thing.
Articles like this are the reason why I think Matt Novak is the best part of Gawker. :]
As I mentioned on that article, and P.Z. pointed out too, Idiocracy bears more than a merely accidental resemblance to “The Marching Morons.” In this short story, the, um, “hero” is a conman-slash-real estate salesman who used to scam people into buying worthless land. Having slept through the centuries thanks to a dental drill and an anesthetic (no, really) he wakes up in the dystopic future where the dummy dumb-dumbs outbred the intellectual elite. The latter are being run ragged ruling the world, so they promise Our Hero to make him “World Dictator” (sic) if he solves the problem. He comes up with an advertising campaign that depicts the planet Venus as a new garden Eden with bushes made out of ham and other nonsense. He explicitly uses Nazi methods to trick the degenerate hoi polloi into boarding the rocketships en masse (and consequently dying due to the dangers of space travel) by sending fake postcards telling how nice it is on Venus. Yep, the solution here is the Final Solution. Sure, the future people don’t stick to the bargain and kill Protag because they despise his generation for failing to solve the problem sooner.
In conclusion, Kornbluth was a fucking fascist and Nazi apologist, like many other SF writers of the so-called “Golden Age.”
The fact that these ideas still enjoy such popularity can be traced back to the dirty little truth that there exists a tenacious strain of reactionary authoritarianism among intellectuals and nerds. Just look at Dawkins’ influence over the atheist community.
The same soopergeniuses who bitch about how “OMG, the world gets stupider all the time” on Facebook or Youtube are those who go out and see Transformers or American Sniper to cheer for the All-American Warrior Mangods teaching the terrorists what’s what or vote Trump.
Articles like this are the reason why I think Matt Novak is the best part of Gawker. :]
As I mentioned on that article, and P.Z. pointed out too, Idiocracy bears more than a merely accidental resemblance to “The Marching Morons.” In this short story, the, um, “hero” is a conman-slash-real estate salesman who used to scam people into buying worthless land. Having slept through the centuries thanks to a dental drill and an anesthetic (no, really) he wakes up in the dystopic future where the dummy dumb-dumbs outbred the intellectual elite. The latter are being run ragged ruling the world, so they promise Our Hero to make him “World Dictator” (sic) if he solves the problem. He comes up with an advertising campaign that depicts the planet Venus as a new garden Eden with bushes made out of ham and other nonsense. He explicitly uses Nazi methods to trick the degenerate hoi polloi into boarding the rocketships en masse (and consequently dying due to the dangers of space travel) by sending fake postcards telling how nice it is on Venus. Yep, the solution here is the Final Solution. Sure, the future people don’t stick to the bargain and kill Protag because they despise his generation for failing to solve the problem sooner.
In conclusion, Kornbluth was a fucking fascist and Nazi apologist, like many other SF writers of the so-called “Golden Age.”
The fact that these ideas still enjoy such popularity can be traced back to the dirty little truth that there exists a tenacious strain of reactionary authoritarianism among intellectuals and nerds. Just look at Dawkins’ influence over the atheist community.
The same soopergeniuses who bitch about how “OMG, the world gets stupider all the time” on Facebook or Youtube are those who go out and see Transformers or American Sniper to cheer for the All-American Warrior Mangods teaching the terrorists what’s what or vote Trump.
In my experience, those on the left who speak tongue-in-cheek about Idiocracy coming true are referring to the many poor/middle class Americans (mostly white) whom vote Republican because of identity politics as opposed to what’s in their own economic best interests. (Yeah! I’m gonna vote for the guy who will let me keep my guns and who is gonna bomb them Ay-rabs. Who cares if he won’t raise the minimum wage and will break up unions and collective bargaining?) Not the millionaires/billionaires pouring money into those campaigns.
Let’s also not forget that it’s a fictional dystopian comedy. Not to be taken seriously. Honestly, has this much effort and thought been given to the future as represented in Wall-E?
When we start conjuring up thoughts of eugenics and social Darwinism in regards to movies such as this we come in danger of disappearing up our own assholes.
Funny, I was just in an argument last month with a libertarian dumbass who argued that the movie was coming true because government assistance somehow makes people stupider on a genetic level.
@13 occidentalist
You seem to have missed the bit where OTHER people are the ones claiming that it is indeed becoming true, that that is how shit works and that if things continue the way they are, that’s not a far fetched depiction of what is to come. That’s what’s being reacted to here.
I disagree. I think Idiocracy is about stupid people reproducing more, and the priviledged and prejudiced writers didn’t even realize they were portraying all the stupid people as poor.
I didn’t mind the movie, but it’s obvious that whoever wrote the script did not understand regression to mean.
Also Trumps rise, and Bernie’s too, is more about a general disillusionment with the how politics is done in the USA. It seems to be something on the rise in Western democracies. Could any of us imagine someone like Jeremy Corbyn becoming head of the UK Labour party five years ago?
I found the premise is just a plot device to comment on our current stupidity, and especially the raging anti-intellectualism… Palin anyone?
I honestly don’t see the connection poor = stupid.
It’s a movie about the present, not about the future, I really liked it.
I see how it lends itself to feed someone’s superiority complex though.
I basically just assume the first half of Idiocracy is a tedious setup for the Brawndo “it’s what plants crave!” scene, which is where I felt like the movie had stopped wasting my time. The worthwhile bit of Idiocracy is not the premise.
I mean, apart from the social Darwinism of the thing, it assumes that genetic diversity is bad enough that what it defines as “stupid people” won’t have intelligent offspring, or that “smart people” won’t have a dullard. It’s really kind of a shitshow all round, the premise.
The tragic irony of Idiocracy is that, in many ways. their society is better than ours. At least in the movie, the stupid people KNOW they’re stupid and that their stupidity is a problem. Compare that with the woman who refused to believe that Obamacare was making her life better even as the evidence was presented to her, the Creationists who constantly recycle the same old arguments that everyone and their dog has refuted, or Republicans who are willing to set civil rights back decades because they’re more concerned with bloodying Obama’s nose any way they can than serving the country. The problem isn’t in our genes, it’s in our culture.
In Idiocracy, the people find the smartest person they can, the person who has the person who has the best chance of anyone to fix the world’s problems, and they put that person in charge of making things better. They go on to elect the smartest person they can find to be their leader and try to make the world a better place.
Now look at Trump.
Idiocracy is a better world than ours.
If we lived in the world of Idiocracy, our best climatologists would be put in charge of solving global warming. ‘Merica would be voting for actual brains in the oval office, not a buffoon. Idiocracy is in a lot of ways damn optimistic, especially compared to the Republican primaries (granted that’s setting the bar pretty low).
mysteriousqfever @ 8:
Oh hells yes to all of this. I’ll point out that condoms and foam are not only expensive, they still allow for the shit happens rule. I got pregnant using both. Fortunately, in my case, that was in the 70s, and no one thought terminations were their business yet. As for sterilizations, could I just scream? I went through hell trying to get sterilized, started when I was 17, and I ended up in a near homicidal rage over the amount of patronizing head-patting I underwent from one doctor to another. Oh, there’s a pregnant 15 year old? Great, great. A 17 year old wants to be sterilized? Fuck no! To this day, I’m ever grateful to the PP doc who finally paid attention and helped me out.
Sadly I have been guilty of this, and you are right its wrong and I shall never do it again. Although I must admit seeing trump lead the republican nomination race brings that movie to mind everytime i watch the news.
quints@2: the movie definitely argues social darwinism — unlike Starship Troopers which is openly mocking the fascistic and militaristic undertones of Heinlein’s novel (“The Marines made me the man I am today!” says the multiple-amputee recruiting officer — not a line that holds up to any interpretation except as satire). Idiocracy on the other hand makes it abundantly clear that it believes the essential lie of social darwinism that the genetic inferiors in society are outbreeding the smart ones. It may not advocate the social policies that many social darwinists promoted such as mass sterilisation, but it still accepts their false premise and runs with it.
There’s no question that Idiocracy is a satire, but it’s not satirising social darwinism, it’s using social darwinism as its premise in order to poke fun at modern stupidities like celebrity politics, magic thinking about health products (electrolytes are good for everything!), awfulest-common-denominator entertainment, the triumph of marketing over product quality, and so on. These are eminently suitable subjects for satire and I found these bits the best. But some of its satirical targets say a lot about the filmmakers — remember that they also sneer at the mindless simplicity of street slang, which shows they’ve never really listened to it since street slang is usually among the most clever and inventive sources of new language. And they somehow find it funny to have the pimp arrive in the future to try to beat his prostitute back into his service. Ho ho!
And the thing is, all of the satire that works could easily have been kept in a film about anti-intellectual cultural degradation driven by a society beholden to the worst excesses of marketing and cut all the genetic bull dust out of the script.
If they’d kept to Kornbluth’s story it would be a significantly better film.
The genetics would still be crap, of course.
Well, the fact this film is still readily available in our collective pop culture psyche is unfortunate, because I think it and it alone is the reason anyone is invoking bad biology based social darwinism metaphors (metaphors if we’re being generous) in what should be entirely justified attacks on the obvious changes to education, politics, and social discourse over the last several decades that can only be described as a dumbing down. I’m not afraid of the term “dumbing down”, because when used appropriately it should describe an effect rather than a process. That process of course has nothing to do with population whatsoever, to say nothing of a misunderstanding of how genes work or IQ as an emergent effect. We ought to be talking about education, not IQ, and about circumstances, not natures. But damn it I reserve the right to be a crotchety elder longing for an amalgam of time and place that never coexisted but was still somehow good and preferable (even if I’m 30).
What I’m referring to is specifically that media used to pay lip service to, well, something you can only describe these days in pejorative or loaded language. I don’t really want to say “elite”, or “the high-brow”, or “the ivy-leagues”, because what I think is lost wasn’t nearly so narrow as those things. And I don’t think any of us can say “common sense” anymore. In any case I need some signifier of an appeal to or an attempt at being “the best”, which can but doesn’t have to include higher education. This wasn’t always a good thing, as sometimes they could take it as far as foster-wallacing a love of obscurantism for its own sake, which was not just alienating to everyone not lucky enough to get a classical education, but also dangerous praise of the mediocre. But I’ll still take it over the alternative.
If Idiocracy were just a film about society catering to the broadest base and deteriorating as a result, and didn’t have eugenics as its thesis statement, it would be good satire. It would be much needed satire.
But its misuse where its misuers are merely trying to wax nostalgic (not saying they all are, I’m sure many are quite happy running with the eugenics aspect) shouldn’t mean we have to throw away the right to complain about the football-ization of national politics. I’m referring of course to “debates” without judges, declared winners, or periods of silent note-taking. There should be some way to complain about explody-graphics, applause prompts, and the reduction of complex subjects to buzzwords. That geography isn’t a subject in primary school, that only the very rich will ever get exposure to Greek and Latin, that history textbooks are virtually identical to ones from the 1950s, because everything past 1950 is too controversial to get to before the semester ends? That although, for example, both Donald Trump and William F. Buckley lied a stream of nonsense out their faceholes, one of them belongs in a debate setting and the other on a playground? (that is, to complain about the triumph of the McCarthy politic without indicting everyone I disagree with in exactly the same way). Do we pretend there was always such a thing as fratboy radio, ultraloud television commercials, or Rupert Murdoch? Maybe those things would have resonated with as many people then as they do now, but the powers that be sure didn’t make it so easy.
Either people are far less educated than they used to be, or we are far more willing to showcase it, or both. It’s essentially an economic problem, or has become one, in our effort to make more money and sell the most high fructose corn syrup we can, but there’s an awful lot of sentiment in that movie that I don’t feel the least bit guilty about sharing.
It’s not good filmmaking, but that’s completely tangential, and besides is filmmaking even still alive? I mean, I haven’t seen anything I’ve liked since 2005 when everyone realized explosions don’t need to be subtitled for the Southeast Asian market and they stopped financing two and a half hour close-ups of Max von Sydow’s face. Kids these days, man. I’m just going to go cry in the corner with my tracksuit and Hi-C and Brian Lamb marathon. Let me know when it’s safe to come out of my time capsule. I wonder how that Sidney Blumenthal fellow’s career will turn out…
I can’t say I’ve ever seen this film. I think it hardly got any kind of cinema release outside the US, if it got one at all, and to be honest Americans discussing it on the internet is the only place I’ve ever encountered it.
But it does make me think that perhaps classism is a bigotry not dealt with very well, either in the US or the UK. To take just the sciences and their attempt to reform their public image, we do see attempts made to promote the contributions of female scientists and ethnic minority scientists quite often now. Which is a good thing. But when is the last time anyone made serious attempts to point out the contributions of scientists from very poor backgrounds? I know, there really haven’t been that many historically speaking. Science is something that you generally need a supportive establishment to help you pursue, and that establishment has traditionally been very exclusive. But there are some. Michael Faraday springs most readily to mind, coming as he did from abject poverty. Scientists very often seem keener to present science as an elite activity for special, superior people, rather than something anyone could get involved with. When was the last time a TV scientist spoke with anything but a high-status RP or similar accent? Brian Cox and Carl Sagan are sort of getting their with noticeable urban regional accents, but it’s not a broad Brummie or deep South accent is it?
Of course, making higher education accessible to and a realistic aspiration for everyone regardless of family wealth would be an even better start there.
Damn, typo with there and their. I really should avoid typing when tired…
What classism? What little satire the film tries to do is directed against consumerism, celebrity culture, and the desire to characterize everyone with a vocabulary broader than Basic English as some kind of boffin brigade. If Idiocracy was what Marx meant by classlessness then I would have to change parties. We’re really not talking about that kind of “class”.
I thought it was dumb fun, and didn’t really think about the science of it — probably ’cause it was so ridiculous. And I loved President Camacho.
@28
For reasons that remain obscure, Idiocracy only received a token theatrical release in the United States, but attained a cult following mostly from replays on Comedy Central.
There are legends of various skulduggeries at Fox between Rupert Murdoch and then Fox prez Tom Rothman, concerning them spiking the film either because they hated it, or felt it insulted their audience (heh), or had some vendetta against Judge and wanted to make an example of him, because of his attitude, or because he delivered a hard-R comedy, or some other in fathomable reason. So they released the film in a few cities but refused to market it. No ads no nothing, it lost tons of money, and it killed Judge’s career in feature films.
Another reason not to use Trump supporters as proof that Idiocracy is coming true:
As all of the regulars here know, neither “crazy” nor “stupid” is a synonym of “bigoted asshole”.
It’s a pretty mediocre film, but a couple of things stick out — The people in it are not spiteful or nasty, and are willing, and even happy to seek advice from those cleverer than themselves.
Could do with a bit more of that in real life, really.
I think Idiocracy got it partly right, and mostly wrong.
Right, in that our country really is run by a bunch of non-thinking jackasses who can’t imagine anyone not having enough (and clearly think that if you’re poor, you must have done something to “deserve” it.)
Wrong in precisely who the stupid people are. The way I see it, poor people are smarter than the rich simply because they have to be creative to make ends meet. The rich have no need or desire to do so, and so their intellects stagnate because they never have to fucking think about “how am I going to make this half-pound of beef stretch for a week” or “how do I juggle the budget necessities with unexpected expenses”. They just throw money at whatever the problem is and it “goes away”.
My father is one of those libertarians who believes that humanity is getting less intelligent. It was a lot of fun getting him to read about the Flynn Effect. I now just automatically link people to it when they say things like “the average IQ is getting lower” (which is impossible, of course, the average IQ is always 100, because IQ tests are calibrated that way).
Unfortunately in my father’s case (after he finished his tantrum) he just doubled down. I don’t understand why people are so invested in this idea that the younger generation is stupid (well, okay, yes I do– it’s to discount liberal ideas and prevent any kind of social progress).
As one who has been following techno-eugenics (the shiny modern “consumer-driven” version) for many years, I’m still surprised that all the talk about changing humans focuses on superhuman abilities of one kind or another. Why not dumb a class of people down?
Common laborers (what a lovely term) don’t need much analytical intelligence, and if they are too smart they’ll try to grab their fair share, which would never do. Besides, we already know how to mess people up; simple environmental methods such as calorie control and appropriate plumbing will tide us over nicely until we can use gene drive to breed traits into the population.
Am I a bad person for mentioning this concept? Do you think someone might take it seriously? Is Donald Trump the odds-on favorite for the Republican nomination, in a year when they think it’s their turn?
Nobody put that video yet?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmZOZjHjT5E
A sitting black president can ride on a motorbike through city streets without being assaulted by some loon shouting “Where’s the birth certificate?” or organize an open-to-all BBQ on the White House’s front lawn without needing a secret service detail on steroids, the people in charge are actually pro-meritocracy instead of merely paying lip service to it while doing everything in their power to allow their lazy & inept kids to retain their parents’ status and material comforts.
Yes, Idiocracy is an utopia in disguise, which, ironically enough, stems from the writers who wanted to produce the next seminal Rapture of the Nerds story not being smart enough to realize that their self-satisfied masturbatory tale implicitly assumed that viciousness could be bred out of humanity as well if the poor just kept producing more offsprings than the rich.
***
And, as it needs to be repeated over and over, Social Darwinism is actually older than Darwinism itself: Social Darwinism seminal book, Social Statics was published in 1851: eight years Before the Origins of Species.
Social Darwinists were always rich kids who thought that the best way to justify rigging the competition and preemptively stop smart and capable plebeians from taking their place was to loudly proclaim that their attempt at cheating was born from clear-eyed pragmatism. They rebranded their “Fuck the plebs, especially those who are smarter and more hardworking than us” Social Darwinism after Darwin published his book to make their parasitic egoism appear sciencey.
***
I for one would not be surprised in the least if the Brotheist crowd concluded from the movie that “The only way to stop Idiocracy is to castrate the male plebs and give male nerds huge harems so they can breed intellectually superior offsprings“…
Actually, That could make for an interesting prequel to Brave New World.
I’m quoting cervantes
Please don’t take it as an attack, but rather a good point to start discussion.
That’s what it always boils down to: Those damn women reproducing irresponsibly. It’s a sword that cuts both ways: There’s those bad women (poor, of colour, muslim…) who have too many babies and there’s those good women (white, christian, educated, middle class…) who don’t have enough babies. Reasons for this, as shown by mysteriousqfever, are never discussed. Reasons why women who might actually like to have kids still don’t do are also not discussed, because that would again require changing deeply sexist societies.
Can we just stop treating IQ as something interesting and informative?
The problem is mostly one of social policy and one of overhauling society as such.
Good sex ed, access to contraception and abortion can do a lot to reduce unplanned pregnancies and birth. Free/highly subsidized quality daycare that really suits parents’ and children’s needs can keep people in their jobs and reduce poverty.
Most importantly, removing the connection between parental income and education. From daycare over the holidays* to college, parental education and income are the deciding factors, not some innate quality. I’ve written about this topic here.
And lastly it would require an overhaul of all of society. Men would have to truly take 50% of reproductive work (household, childcare…). People of colour would have to have fully access to society. People would no longer be stigmatized and penalized for having more than two kids…
*The learning gap, the gap between what middle to upper class kids learn and know and what poor kids learn and know increases during the holidays. That’s because people with resources can give their kids stimulating holidays that increase their learning while poor people have to park their kids in front of the rectangular babysitter because they have to work.
Also, if you could stop poisoning your children with lead I’m sure that would help, too.
And improving access to education (including free higher education and university access) would be a form of socialism that further contaminates the purity of our genes, surely.
I’m firmly in the “nature and nurture”-camp when it comes to these sorts of questions, but considering how similar we all are, you could probably put me more in the “nurture”-camp if I had to choose between one and the other, not the “nature”-camp that these folks clearly believe in.
Um, hi cuz? I’m from much the same sort of family and have never seen the movie.
In the “nature versus nurture” debate, I’m in the camp that says “yes”. Genetics matter to many things, including one’s intelligence (and social ability and energy and many other “desirable” traits). Environment also matters: How much lead were you exposed to as a child? Were you exposed to hypoxia during birth? Were you given appropriate stimulus to learn and feedback encouraging learning at a young age? Etc. These things all matter. More subtly, a very smart person from a very poor family might express their intelligence in ways other than traditional academic achievement. They might found a company or find a way to get their children to college despite being on welfare or become community organizers. Or they might become highly successful criminals. Or both. Lack of PhD and house in the burbs does not equal stupidity.
As I see it, nature gives you a very broad range of possibilities. Clearly some things are innate. If they weren’t we wouldn’t now accept learning disabilities but still insist that this kid just study more. But they’re also a wonderful example of what nurture can do with the possibilities of nature: You can simply shut out a kid with a disability, you can treat them like the rest or you can provide special ed material tailored to this kid’s needs. The nature is the same, but the results will differ greatly.
If only wealth were distributed the way grades are — by intelligence and hard work. As Thomas Piketty demonstrated, wealth follows capital, not merit. I have several very wealthy friends from college. All of them got their wealth through inheritance.
It’s absolutely vital to eliminate the uneducated poor. Ideally by improving education and reducing income inequality. Neither of which is likely to happen so long as we believe people are born intrinsically poor and stupid.
At the risk of rescinding my geek card I haven’t seen the film yet. But I would say that you do find that general sentiment of degradation of society without any genetic, social Darwinist component necessarily.
It’s surely a different sort of fallacy, but you can get there via perceived cultural means as well. Anti-intellectualism, lowest common denominator media aiming ever lower, falling educational standards, fragmented politics seemingly based on entrenched lies etc etc (Perceived, I said)
It’s a different sort of rote cynicism which might imply a certain sense of smug superiority all its own. But I think championing the film can come from that direction too, without anyone thinking through the soft any soft eugenics arguments it might have.
When I watched this movie, the one thing that took me out of the movie was the fact that the world was run by morons, yet SOMEONE’S maintaining the equipment they had, some of which was fairly advanced. (voice controlled computer stuff and the “advanced” tv’s they had, that kind of thing). You’d see it throughout the movie…the people were too dumb to function at all, and yet aside from a few joke technologies, they were fairly advanced and able to maintain them well enough. I can’t picture them maintaining a drive-through let alone a medical computer and bar-code tattoo machine in any fashion.
It was like the unspoken rule was the dumb people THINK they run the world, but somewhere there had to be a secret cache of smart engineers, doctors, etc hiding out in fear of these morons probably, but still maintaining stuff and running things behind the scenes. Or maybe they had them in chains or something, forcing them to keep building things, who knows.
But clearly they weren’t doing it themselves. They couldn’t even grow a basic plant.
Did you know: If you only watch the middle of Idiocracy, it’s actually marginally decent. Approximately 90% of the (socially/politically) offensive content is in the beginning (where it spews the Social Darwinist bullshit to set up the main plot) and in the end (where it reiterates same).
@47 mamba: I think the implication was that all the advanced high-tech equipment they had was super-durable— it hasn’t been maintained for many years, but most of it is still somewhat functional.
Sonja
You may not know this, but to claim that grades are primarily distributed by intelligence and hard work is as absurd as claiming that wealth were distributed by hard work.
Grades are at least more correlated with hard work than wealth is— all else being equal, the harder working student will get better grades. Meanwhile, there tends to be an inverse correlation between hard work and wealth; poor people work their asses off just to get by while aristocrats who inherit wealth never work at all.
Yeah, but most people aren’t monozygotic twins…
It would not surprise me one bit if there are people promoting this idea who have never even seen the movie, but have only a very high-level idea of what the movie is about, an idea that does not include these terrible false premises on which it is based. It is unfortunately not at all ironic for people who don’t know what they are talking about to poke fun at others who do the same.
This is awesome. Because of Fox’s scuttling of the film’s release, and the distributors’ subsequent lack of promotion, the film was released in only 130 theaters and grossed only half a million dollars before it vanished. Its cult status has relegated it to merely a handful of semi-famous memes and quotes that are dallied back & forth by its fanbase.
Which means: this movie has never had THIS much discussion and thought devoted it.
Nice job!
Giliell
There is a right-wing meme going around about a college student who complains to her Republican father about income inequality. He responds by suggesting her GPA should be lowered so that her lazy, partying friend get a better GPA. The implication being that wealth is distributed the same way as grades. Of course I thought, “if only…”.
Hiya!
Yeah, lately my middle class friends have been riding me about my “bad habits” (drinking, smoking) and I keep telling them to back off and mind their own business. Besides, half of them are serious potheads anyway, and the other half drinks, so where exactly do they get off?
IRT to Mike Judge – sorry for taking so long to read the whole thread – he’s a total wingnut. He’s done multiple intros for the Alex Jones show where he does his Hank Hill and Beavis voices to encourage people to watch.
Somehow, he managed to become Dale Gribble.
Really? Then tell me why I had to work twice as hard as everybody else for the same grade?
Sonja
What does that have to do with the price of butter?
There’s ample evidence on income inequality being independent of how hard people work and there’s ample evidence about grades being not really objective AND of course family background playing a huge role.
So, yeah, in a way income and grades are similar: They ain’t just.
Methinks you worry too much, PZ.
@Vivek
I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the Bundy militia holdouts was one Mr. Rusty Shackleton…
(Shackleford)