The 'Idiocracy' Premise Isn't Evil But It Is Wrong, Enjoy Your Brawndo

Idiocracy is about a future made dumber by dumb people’s tendency to breed more, spreading stupidity more quickly through the gene pool than intelligence. “As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point,” the movie opens, before launching into a parable about a clan of dumb hicks pumping out kids while a smart couple waits to breed until it’s too late.

While Idiocracy was a tremendous flop upon release (primarily because Fox fulfilled only the bare minimum contractual obligations in its distribution), it’s since become a rallying point for millions of humans certain that they they’re the smart ones and definitely not the dumb ones.

As a dystopian reference, Idiocracy has all the advantages of Brave New World, in which social injustice and tyranny is drowned out by hedonic dissipation, without the need to read a book.

“You’re creating the idiocracy!” can easily be lobbed against Hillary supporters, Trumpanauts, Fox News viewers, libtards, and One Direction fans. As a political, social, and moral critique, it’s hard to get more basic than “you’re dumb and your dumb will also make the future dumb.”

But is Idiocracy “cruel and terrible,” and should you “be ashamed for liking it,” as Matt Novak of Paleofuture argues in his post “ Idiocracy Is a Cruel Movie and You Should Be Ashamed For Liking it” ?

In order to make his argument, Matt reads several steps past what the text provides and ignores the more potent rebuttal to the Idiocracy vision for the future: it simply isn’t true.

Novak begins his critique, “Idiocracy lays the blame at the feet of an undeserved target (the poor).” Yeah, that’s accurate. Like so much of our comedy, the Idiocracy opening pisses on some of the least fortunate members of our society, essentially blaming poor hicks for the entire downward curve of the human race.

This critique of Idiocracy slots in nicely with the “punching up” and “punching down” framework much of the progressive commentariat uses in assessing when comedy has chosen the wrong targets. Under this rubric, comedy shouldn’t go after the less fortunate or less privileged. It should instead embrace the journalistic standard of Finley Peter Dunne, a turn of the century humorist who coined the “comforts the afflicted, afflicts comfortable” standard used to argue that the media should be adversarial to power (though Dunne originally intended to mock media self-importance).

Unfortunately, this kind of attack on the lowest rungs of society isn’t limited to Idiocracy. Poor, white hicks are one of the few categories of people that it’s still widely acceptable to mock, even among liberal millennials typically sensitive to “punching down” across lines of racial and class privilege. If Idiocracy is damned on this count, then we all are.

Few artists have done as much to humanize hicks more than Idiocracy director Mike Judge himself, whose King of the Hill still stands as one of the most sympathetic portraits of right-wing, low-class, Southern americans.

Perhaps sensing the insufficiency of arguing Idiocracy ’s unique cruelty on the basis of its premise, Novak spends much of his post on a more extreme claim: Idiocracy is “ implicitly advocating a terrible solution (eugenics).”

“The great irony of a film like Idiocracy is that when we take the film to its logical conclusion, 99 percent of Americans should be sterilized,” Novak writes. This conclusion takes a flying leap over the is-ought divide and keeps on sprinting. Portraying the world in a certain light never commands action.

Instead of criticizing what Idiocracy actually says, Novak’s argument relies on the conclusions he imagines its viewers will make. “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,” Novak writes.

In any other context, holding a movie responsible for its most dire possible extrapolations would look absurd. This style of argumentation produces silly results when applied anywhere else. Would anyone say that Room is arguing for the abolishment of backyard sheds if its viewers could reasonably conclude that would be safer? Should we take The Lord of the Rings to its logical conclusion and rally against its murderous agenda against jewelers?

Couldn’t instead Idiocracy lead us to all sorts of other conclusions other than forced sterilization? Perhaps Idiocracy is an argument for Bernie Sanders’ subsidized public education plans. Or perhaps Idiocracy could be read as arguing for slightly less “mass sterilization” eugenic sentiments like those of the fundamentalist Christian Quiverfull movement. Mass sterilization of stupid people is one plausible solution to the societal problem the world of Idiocracy faces, though it’s trivial to imagine others. That Novak uses his own extrapolation to condemn the movie is misguided.

Instead—if we’re determined to take a Luke Wilson comedy by the creator of Beavis and Butt-head seriously—it’d be better to look at the premise itself. The way Idiocracy portrays its world either is or isn’t applicable to our own. The claims of a dysgenic effect on our world from stupid people breeding is simply true or not true.

So does the premise of Idiocracy map to our own world? There are two claims being made in the opening to Idiocracy:

1. Stupid people are breeding more than smart people.

2. This will have a dysgenic effect on the gene pool, making us all dumber.

Research has been conducted on both points.

Are stupid people breeding more than smart people? Research is constrained to small subsets of American society, but the answer seems to be “yes, but less yes than before.”

Family size in America is shrinking across all demographics. While women with advanced degrees used to have far fewer children, that gap is narrowing substantially in recent years. “About one-in-five women ages 40 to 44 with a master’s degree or higher (22%) have no children—down from 30% in 1994,” a Pew Research Foundation census study found. “Not only are highly educated women more likely to have children these days, they are also having bigger families than in the past.”

Though less educated segments of American society did produce more children in the 70s and 80s, this is starting to look more like a demographic anomaly than the norm.

But what about the second half of the Idiocracy premise? Do the children of stupid people infect the gene pool with their stupid? According to psychiatrist Scott Alexander, “In practice, the effect is too small to be significant.”

Alexander cites Richard Lynn, who wrote a paper on dysgenic effects reverberating through American families. “Lynn, who is the closest we will get to an expert on dysgenics,” Alexander writes, “calculates that American society as a whole is losing 0.9 IQ points per generation.” As part of the human biodiversity movement (a variety of modern scientific racism, it’s gross), Lynn has a vested interest in conclusions that would find a dysgenic effect and a drop of 0.9 is the most dire conclusion he could reach with his axe-to-grind in hand.

A loss of 4 IQ points by 2100 isn’t exactly Idiocracy. But even that minor dumbing down isn’t accurate, since it will be countered by the Flynn Effect (which Lynn’s paper intentionally doesn’t compensate for). IQ tests have to be readjusted every decade because IQs increase by 3 points every ten years for poorly understood reasons, possibly environmental.

Humans are getting smarter, not dumber. We are not becoming an Idiocracy , nor will we. Idiocracy isn’t an evil or cruel movie, just a dumb one. Enjoy your Brawndo, it’s got what plants crave.