This year marks the 20th anniversary of Idiocracy — director Mike Judge’s sci-fi comedy envisioning a future America staggering under the weight of popular stupidity. Initially sent straight to video by the studio system, the film soon emerged as a cult classic. It returned as a cultural touchstone in the wake of the 2016 election, which many in liberal America saw as a harbinger of the kind of society depicted in the film: mindlessly consumerist and enslaved to low passions, with a public discourse more befitting of WWE-style wrestling than a Jeffersonian republic (Donald Trump had appeared in WWE events, after all).
Yet today, it’s clear that Idiocracy was, if anything, too optimistic. Twenty years hence, American public discourse is cruder and attention spans are shorter; mind-deadening drugs have become more pervasive, and politics is far more tribal and hateful than anything depicted by Judge. All this has taken place on a much faster time scale than Idiocracy predicted, moreover, and the changes are far more the result of ideologies spun up from resentment and hate than the biological degeneration featured in the film.
Call it the Great Stupidization.
In Idiocracy, set in 2005, Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), a low-ranking soldier in the US Army, and a prostitute named Rita (Maya Rudolph) are selected to be frozen for a year in a top-secret experiment. But with the general leading the initiative caught in a personal scandal — he gets a little too close to the pimp who procures the prostitute for him — the program is shut down and forgotten by the feds. Joe and Rita wake up 500 years in the future.
During those five centuries, the narrator informs us, dysgenic breeding has dramatically dumbed down the American population, leaving Joe and Rita the two smartest people on the planet. In this brave new world, corporations dominate the globe, down to the hospitals and law courts. Massive piles of garbage are everywhere, and agriculture has failed because crops are watered with a branded sports drink (“Brawndo, it’s what plants crave”). Joe, with an IQ of 100 according to the scale of his era, scores off the charts on an intelligence test while in prison, and is then appointed secretary of the interior by President Camacho, a former professional wrestler who governs via spectacle.
The parallels with our own world are easy enough to spot, from the reality-TV president to the short, declarative sentences that characterize both President Trump’s and Camacho’s manner of speech (“I know everyone’s shit is emotional right now,” Camacho declares amid a looming famine). We even have a form of scientific illiteracy similar to watering crops with sports drinks in the form of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine stance. He’s just using his position to promote Steak ’n Shake instead of Carl’s Jr., the real-life fast-food chain whose advertising motto in the film runs: “Carl’s Jr. — fuck you, I’m eating!” As for cinema, Americans in the film’s distant future relish watching human butts up-close, farting.
Yet despite its obviously dystopian vision, the film reflects the optimism of the era from approximately the end of the Cold War to the Great Recession. Consider that its stupid people do not engage in racial or ethnic scapegoating. They’re not aggressively misogynistic, and the institutionalized homophobia is limited to a prosecutor telling the court that Joe “talks like a fag.” In Idiocracy, the president is black, and no one comments on it; compare this to either the woke left denigrating speakers for their whiteness, or those on the right who now believe that the value of an individual’s opinions depends on whether he is a “Heritage American.”
In the film’s future America, moreover, conspiracy theories do not seem to play any role, despite the fact that they dominate our own timeline, such as the QAnon theory that liberal elites like Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks kidnap and rape children, with it being Donald Trump’s mission to stop them. Stupid people in Idiocracy repeat corporate slogans, but they don’t believe that they have discovered secrets about the way society works that have been hidden from them by shadowy elites. Judge couldn’t imagine the toxic spew of hate and paranoia, fueled by fantasies of persecution and revenge, that we generate today.
We laugh at QAnon, but we don’t fully consider the bloodlust generated in the theory’s adherents, who believe in a horrifying universe of elite Satanic pedophiles and dream of mass executions when the child rapists finally face justice. And the Epstein saga drags on, without proper moral weighing of its consequences for truth and probity. The reality is that not a shred of evidence has emerged for elite pedophile or sex-trafficking rings surrounding Epstein, and the woman who was most responsible for spreading these claims was a confirmed fabulist, with deep mental-health issues. Yet high-school-dropout-turned-congresswoman Lauren Boebert drags the Clintons before Congress in order to ask Hillary about the connection between the Epstein story and Pizzagate. Such accusations are nearly always combined with at least an undertone of violent threat.
Our era, fueled by this venom, is much darker than that of the film. President Camacho compares favorably with Trump in terms of decency and interest in the common good. He at least wants to address his nation’s crises in a serious way. The fictional president even admits fault, unlike Trump, who blatantly lies about economic and crime data and has an uncanny ability to convince his supporters that up is down.
“In ‘Idiocracy’, the president is black, and no one comments on it.”
As Camacho tells the House of Representatives, “I know shit’s bad right now. With all that starvin’ bullshit. And the dust storms. And we runnin’ out of French fries and burrito coverings. But I got a solution.” Camacho informs the audience that Joe has the highest IQ of any man alive, and the crowd is impressed. After the speech, Camacho promises Joe a full pardon for a crime he is facing if he fixes the crop situation. That implies public-spiritedness and can be contrasted to Trump’s use of the pardon power for the benefit of those who can help him politically or who contribute to his family’s various crypto scams.
Dumb people in Idiocracy are relatively harmless: they just want to be entertained. They don’t harbor deep, irrational social grievances, or construct false oppression narratives for themselves. Yes, they will laugh when a guy gets hit in the crotch — the 26th century has an entire TV show dedicated to the concept, Ow My Balls — and they enjoy criminals being eliminated in a spectacle that is a combination of a monster-truck rally and the Roman Colosseum. But there’s none of the ideology-driven moral righteousness that has motivated many of history’s greatest atrocities and now fuels contemporary haters. They’re also much humbler. When told that the smartest man in the world is going to fix their problems, they’re inclined to give him a chance, rather than think that they know better because they “did their own research” on vaccines.
In Idiocracy, humanity’s IQ drops, but the impact on our moral culture is relatively limited. We still maintain capitalism and democracy, albeit in degraded forms. The achievements of the civil-rights revolution are apparently locked in for good. The morons seem generally happy, comfortable with their place in the universe.
In the real world, we know that intelligence has a strong association with practically every positive trait we might measure. Smart people are more tolerant of others, have more liberal social views, and are less authoritarian. They commit fewer crimes and are more pro-social, which is the main reason why richer communities, where the people are more intelligent, are nicer places to live. Intellectual elites not only have nicer houses, but are also better friends, neighbors, and citizens.
Perhaps the fact that the movie’s stupid people are so much more decent than our own explains why the America of Idiocracy maintains a GDP per capita that is higher than one would expect based on the national IQ. Their society still has advanced technology, such as a machine at the hospital that correctly diagnoses one’s condition by putting tubes into various orifices (the dull health-care workers, of course, manage to screw it up, putting the wrong tubes into the wrong orifices before correcting their errors, to hilarious effect). Rita finds it easier than ever to work as a prostitute: she doesn’t need the protection of a pimp, and the johns are stupid enough to pay without her having to service them.
The relative success of Idiocracy’s America — a country where everyone is borderline or fully retarded, yet the streets are safer than modern Honduras or Brazil — is never satisfactorily explained, though the public does appear to be dulled into a much less agentic state. We are told that the English language has deteriorated into a combination of “hillbilly, valley girl, inner-city slang, and various grunts,” reflecting popular subcultures that exist in modern America, and giving the speech of the masses a comfortable familiarity. But conspiracy theorists were too far below the radar in the mid-aughts to get representation; if Judge made the same film today, he would fail the test of verisimilitude.
The benevolence of the universe of Idiocracy — and of our former world, or at least the way we perceived it — is also reflected in its omission of international relations. You would think that maybe countries would genetically decline at different rates, allowing one state or a small group of them to establish hegemony over the rest. But 1990s and early-aughts optimism saw the world as such a safe, predictable place, the film fails to even gesture at such possibilities.
The mechanism through which humanity gets stupider in Idiocracy is genetic, while what’s happened to us has been the result of screens melting our brains, demagogic politicians exploiting preexisting ignorance, and the internet and social media removing gatekeepers and democratizing the discourse (yes, healthy public discourse needs intelligent gatekeepers, a fact that was obvious to Western civilization going back to Plato). Moreover, it is at this point difficult to see many scenarios where we get to 2505 without humanity being either destroyed by artificial intelligence, or so transformed by it as to be unrecognizable.
Insofar as this fate is the result of advanced technology, we might say that the real problem has been not too little intelligence, but too much of it, carelessly applied. The confidence of the Idiocracy era contained the seeds of our downfall. We once believed that you can get as dumb as you want and the world would still remain relatively safe; no one would look for reasons to hate; and other human beings, whether foreign adversaries or local criminals, would be unlikely to try to purposely hurt you. The crude genetic determinism of the film likewise obscured the more immediate threats to human cognition; the iPhone was officially announced a mere four months after Idiocracy’s release.
Luckily, we still have the biological potential to change course. But doing so must begin with a recognition of how bad things have gotten, and a realization that a stupider world is also a much darker and more unsettling one. The political discourse is not simply insignificant chatter providing various forms of entertainment and anxiety to tens of millions of Americans. It reflects the character with which we approach public life and the nature of our existence as political animals. From that perspective, we are in many ways in a more degraded state than the viewers of Ow, My Balls!.
