Idiocracy

Idiocracy

By John Taylor; 2007 January 18

When I went to Ancaster High School I had a long walk to get there. I hitchhiked from our farmhouse way out on White Church Road, almost as far as Binbrook, to Highway Six (now called Upper James), where I met up with my buddy Doug, and from there we would walk a further several kilometers to Townline Road (now Airport Road) and finally take a school bus in to our destination, the rich kid's high school, Ancaster. It was then that Doug introduced me to his all-embracing theory as to what was behind all the world's problems. He had been used to always being the class brain, so I should not have been surprised at what he had come up with. The reason we are going to hell in a hand basket is because of stupidity, plain and simple. Answers and solutions are easy, we just have stupid people running things. No matter what I said to dispute this, he could always say,

"That is because the people in charge are dummies."

It was an irrefragable argument. I was a novice at debate at the time, and I did not know that unanswerable arguments are a dime a dozen. They are called ideology, though in this case it would be better called "idiotology." Not long afterwards, Doug threw out his rudimentary experiment in ideology and clasped to his breast his father's more sophisticated one, socialism. But his arguments for the New Democratic Party remained the same. Somehow, NDP candidates were very intelligent and those chosen by other parties were all a bunch of rank dummies.

Eventually, Doug attended Waterloo University to study mathematics, and married a classmate, a brilliant Rumanian artist named Isabella. One of the last times I I went to visit them in Waterloo my father sent on a message: "You should have children." He explained his reasons, but when I was there in Waterloo they slipped my mind. I passed the message on anyway, and Isabella got into a huff. She said she would like to debate him on that suggestion. She had sacrificed all for her career as an artist and did not like the suggestion that she had any such duty to bear offspring. We were discussing something else when finally I remembered my father's reasoning. Intelligent people should reproduce because if they do not, stupid people will breed like fruit flies and eventually high intelligence will be weeded completely out of the gene pool. The world will become an even stupider place than it already is. She was taken aback by this, and did not seem at all pleased.

Mike Judge, the maker of "Beavis and Butthead," has taken this ball of stupidity and run with it as far as it can be taken in his latest film, "Idiocracy." I was wondering whether I should rent it. Would it be intelligent enough to keep my attention or would it be another Butthead mindlessness that would badly waste my time? Then I heard that the studio had tried to bury the film and delayed its release by over a year. This clinched it, I had to see it then. If somebody is threatened by satire, it is successful and has to be worth seeing. Idiocracy is the story of Joe Average who is put to sleep for a year in an experiment that goes awry and he wakes up five hundred years later in a future world peopled total dummies. Language had degraded to a series of grunts and profane imprecations, and when Joe speaks he sounds "gay" and is rejected.

At the beginning of the film I was delighted to find a beautiful dramatization of my father's thesis about the dumbing down of the human gene pool. A highly intelligent couple, very like my old friends Doug and Isabella, is interviewed about their plans for having children. They come up with all sorts of lame excuses for putting it off. Meanwhile Fred Fat and Eunice Ugly are too dumb to remember their rubbers; they breed and breed and breed. The bright ones say, "We could not possibly have a child with the stock market being what it is this year. Maybe next year will be more propitious." Out pop two or three more dummies, and so it goes. Five hundred years in the future all the eugenicist's worst nightmares have come true.

There was far too much swearing to let the kids see it, so over the dinner table I recounted a summary in my own words of the major events of Idiocracy (I explained that the dummies in the film pepper their speech with swear words because they are too stupid to use language for emphasis). Even 7 year old Tommy pointed out gaping plot holes. How could they have survived for five hundred years if they are so dumb? Even now, with the help of some very intelligent people, we are in deep trouble. How could they keep clinging to the outer excesses enabled by advanced technology without going under completely? Indeed, this artist should probably have stuck with animation and steered away from live actors. But even so, I explained to the kids that we are supposed to take it as satire not a projection of real possibilities.

Idiocracy satirizes the prostitution of science. The narrator explains that over the centuries the few strong intellects that were not bred into non-existence, instead of trying to counteract the dumbing down of the human race remained preoccupied with researching drugs to eradicate receding hairlines and maintain erections for as long as possible. Which raises the question, "Who is the real dummy, the beer swilling monster truck addict, or the scientist who whores for corporate pimps?" Or perhaps an even better question is, "Is intelligence the operative factor here, or is it something else? Maybe something to do with morality?" I will come back to that.

In the future garbage is piled up so high that when the mountain shifts and an avalanche takes place, it is a major historical event. That is how Joe Average's coffin is unearthed and pops into the window of a dumb denizen of the future. (Tomaso wonders, how could Joe have been kept alive for so long in a little box without massive life support machines? I was too dumb to think of that, so I tell him that it is all in the cause of satire) This mention of mountains of garbage sends a chill running down my back, because to me this really is the greatest sign that things are dumbing down to the point where we really and truly are too dumb to live. Every time I go to the garbage can, every trip to the toilet, this bugs me. How can we be so stupid? Why are we not seeing to it that all this garbage and sewage we are producing every minute of the day is not being properly disposed of, either recycled or reused intelligently? Am I the only one that is bothered by this? This is not a complex or difficult problem. How hard would it be to separate out urine and put it to industrial uses, to compost sewage and recycle our waste, or better still, eliminate waste in the first place? This is not rocket science or brain surgery, and that is just the point. Surely this recycling problem is first priority, it will determine our long term viability on the planet, so surely solving this problem, easy as it is, must come long before we send our best brains into studying rocket science or brain surgery.

Now that I think of it, I served on the same Local Spiritual Assembly once with a very intelligent young Iranian couple, the man was a rocket scientist and the woman later went on to become a brain surgeon. Did they have children? Not a chance. You cannot slave away for a demanding elite career like that and take time to raise kiddies as well. And that is just my father's point, and Mike Judge's point, and my school friend Doug's point, intelligence is consciously suppressed while stupidity constantly increases its hegemony. Non-brains are taking over.

This explains why the film riled studio executives. They make a good living by pandering to the lowest common denominator. Who enjoys seeing the long term effects of what they are doing? The fact is that the North American Empire would have dumbed down into total collapse long ago were we not propped up by our de-facto world language, English, our dominance of the communication industries, by money and its consequent ability to buy the best brains from around the world. Poor places experience brain drain, and we get a constant brain infusion. And we still do not bother with important problems. The just the ones that suit the interest of the Plutocrats, trivialities like receding hairlines and enduring erections. Now with global warming we are showing ourselves more than capable of bringing down the entire planet with unlimited effluents.

And we are too stupid to see it. No, too stupid to care. No, too stupid to think, to wonder, to even try. Yes, watching this film however good the joke whenever I was about to laugh I looked over my shoulder. Am I a dummy like these future klutzes? This bothers me. Early in the film Joe finds that he can influence the dummies by offering them money. At the offer of a bribe they say blankly, "I like money." O no, that is just what I say when people offer me money. Am I a dummy? It must be true, no matter how dumb people get, they always want money. I am stupid, stupid, stupid.

You probably think you know what I am going to say. The problem is not stupidity, it is immorality. No, that does not quite hit the nail on the head. I find this film thought-provoking because I have to question and refine that presupposition. Here is what I think is going on.

As soon as a few come to own too much or gain a monopoly on anything, suddenly the general stupidity of the rest of the human race becomes in their interest. If I own all the widgets, it becomes my interest to see to it that everybody blindly consumes widgets. It is not in my interest that they know or care where their widgets come from, much less learn to make widgets on their own. They need, they desire, therefore they are. This of course is the thrust of the socialist critique:

"The interests of those who own the property in industry ... is that their capital should be dear and human beings cheap." R. H. Tawney

And the worst exploiter are mind exploiters, thought sucking brain worms who direct the best and the brightest into building rockets and chopping up brains instead of making elementary machines to clean up our own filth. These gnomes own the tools of thought, and they keep them to themselves. To paraphrase Tawney, the interests of those who own a religion are that their sect become dear and that free or deviant thinkers become cheap.

A malleable, naive, uninformed, avid person is the ideal mark.

For the boffin, stupidity is a good thing, something worth propagating. The interest of those who own an idea, any philosophy at all, is that all other people become stupid enough to fit into its mold. The interest of those who monopolize communications media is that mankind become relaxed, weak, receptive, passive, quiet, dumb. So stupidity spreads outward directly from systemic inequality, the inability of all to access and benefit from most goods most of the time, especially the tools of thought. Idiocracy becomes a vested interest. So yes, when the made a film called idiocracy, naturally it hit a nerve.

The overall problem, the reason dumbing down is accelerating is, yes, immorality, but more than that. The point, the whole reason that morality is moral, especially sexual morality, is because of eugenics -- among many other goods to be derived from it. A person who shuns promiscuity is upping the quality of the gene pool. Moral behavior is learning to use a tool devised over centuries and millennia to reverse that alarming tendency for stupid people to breed prolifically while smart ones impotently put off reproduction.

Marriage is designed to rationalize and control sex, and to put reproductive choice under the control of reason. It thereby encourages families to select for intelligence in the next generation. Parents get a say in who their children can mate with and to influence moral choices and the education of their grandchildren. That in itself increases intelligence, since intelligence is not all genetic, it is learned also from the shared experience of grandparents. If you doubt, consider one of the many threats to marriage, and the result: serial killers.

We fear these murderers far out of proportion to their real danger to society because they have no conscience. They epitomize the reverse of what a compassionate, kind human being is supposed to be. And evolutionary psychologists are not in the dark about where they come from. They tell us that serial killers are bred and spread by glib, ruthless males who master the art of seduction and use it to spread their genes to as many wombs as possible, without regard to the consequences. Seduce her, have your jollies, and go on to the next as fast as you can.

This cuckoo syndrome allows a sexual predator to devote his full energy to sex while other families must "do the right thing" by raising their genetic offspring as best they can. They usually work their magic outside the bounds of marriage, but in one case I know of personally, they effectively use serial monogamy for the same end. Judging by long term results, serial murder must be just one of many crimes caused by bluebeards. The evolutionary explanation is that sometimes a child with this dubious heritage gets a taste of blood early on, usually by killing small animals. Not having a conscience, they proceed to hunting and killing people.

It is estimated that one in ten of us have this frightening genetic inclination. If marriage were respected and upheld as it should, this weakness would tend to diminish over the generations, as would, probably, rank stupidity. The question is have we reached a tipping point where most people are just too stupid to realize what a bulwark for well-being marriage really is, or to see who is undermining it, and why?