Years later and I feel like Idiocracy is cope. Wanting to believe the deterioration of the world is caused by stupidity and not actively malicious, aparthic, bigotted, and/or greedy people.
I do feel like idiocy IS a deterioration of the world, but it is directly caused by malicious people trying to defund education in order for people to vote for them and be more easily susceptible to propaganda. The right KNOWS that people learning from others leads to more love and leftist views.
@@kap1618WRONG idiots are far more dangerous than evil people (Assuming that the evil person is not an idiot). An idiot would set a ship ablaze and blame everyone but himself. The evil person at least cares enough to make sure there is a ship and crew for them to rule.
the thing I hate most about idiocracy is how many people call it "scarily accurate" except the in universe president of the united states recognized that he is no where near a perfect being and had the humility to step down and listen to someone smarter than him and holy fucking shit if our modern dystopia could be so kind.
What's even more terrifying and sad is that Starship Troopers did the same thing. A military that is post race and sex actually has a system of accountability. I wish we had that.
@@kap1618lol calling the military in starship troopers desirable is so hilarious to me. It’s like clapping when a trans woman is allowed to shoot 200 brown people for American oil companies.
@@vitmartobby5644You guys are all just sad. Imagine living in the greatest time in human history and crying about how it’s a dystopia on your brand new $2000 iPhone.
The thing that always baffles me is Terry Crews. I mean, all showboating aside, he evinces some clear leadership skills, and admits when he needs help. If anything he's better than what we've got now.
It also has the general ''its funny because person is mentally deficient/dysfunctional'' punchline told to you over and over again which definitely doesn't get tiring at all and is definitely not punching down others to feel superior masqueraded as ''just a joke'', but this is something applicable to most 2000s adult comedies.
It would have been way more interesting to extrapolate increasing CO2 levels (frequent in poorly ventilated buildings) decreasing productivity to its logical conclusion. No one can really think very well anymore because they're always mildly dying of CO2 poisoning. Therefore they can't learn well henceforth rest of the movie. Corporate greed literally making the world have less forethought and ability to correct past mistakes is a way better punchline.
I never laughed at those jokes in the movie, yet despite that the movie is still clever and has a lot of insight into what sort of future we are headed into. Ignore the jokes and see what it's trying to say. Because ultimately it's making fun of EVERYONE.
@@epsilon3667 yeah I don't buy it. Every single time I've heard this "oh but they make fun of EVERYONE" it amounts to "it violently advocates for the status quo and ridicules every diversion from it" Like south park. They have this huge façade of making fun of every group without caring if it's offensive, but in reality it's just ridiculing everything that breaks the american status quo (their shtick is literally making episodes out of topical events every week). For gods sake they had two fuckin climate denial episodes where they deny climate change. Aged like wine lol
I saw Idiocracy in the theaters because it was being flushed by Fox because it made fun of Fox news. I had to insist to the theater they were in fact playing it and after they got a manger I got to see it. I did at the time laugh at the shallow jokes and during the bush admin it was easy to fall into the "I'm surrounded by idiots" feeling. When I left the theater I was left with the whole "Well intelligence doesn't work that way." and the vague eugenics feel Really over the years the film has fallen lower in my feelings due to the way people throw around the words IQ. Really this wasn't a left leaning film it was a very centrist film much in the way South Park falls into that "Enlightened Centrist" realm.
I think it's extremely fitting that people who defend Idiocracy usually don't actually understand Idiocracy. They think about it on the same level as the filmmakers. It's just "stupid people funny." Funny enough they're exactly what is ostensibly being skewered, and they don't understand that at all
The point made at 10:18 isn’t just correct, it’s an understatement. I hated/enjoyed Idiocracy since its original release in part because the movie’s writers inadvertently attack themselves. They insist that the problems of the future are caused by genetic stupidity - a clear and unmistakeable eugenicist canard - but then, within the plot of the film and even in the *text* of the narrative that relies on eugenics, they make it clear that all of the problems of the future are caused by the “smart” people of the past. Not 70%, not 80%, literally all. Future infrastructre is built on extremely durable and sophisticated technology, all built around efficiency and convenience. Despite poor maintenence, it works well enough generation after generation. Who built that? Not present-day Americans. Basic checkup medical devices are so sophisticated that laymen can manage them. Who built those? Not present-day Americans. The political system has been utterly corrupted, as the video points out. Who created that system? Not present-day Americans. There are massive piles of trash everyplace. Who created that environmental crisis? Not present-day Americans. And let’s not forget the eugenics narration at start. The movie claims that smart people (particularly scientists) couldn’t solve the problems of growing stupidity. . . despite the fact that it was all so obvious that said stupidity is the basis for lowbrow humor throughout the film. If they couldn’t tackle what was an obvious issue from the viewer’s perspective and instead created the world of the future, then . . . present-day and past humans are a bunch of dumbasses. On top of this, Idiocracy’s future political society is objectively less disfunctional than ours. Let’s review the plot: • The country faces a problem created by political actors that pre-date the present-day administration. • The President hires a person to solve this problem, based on merit, with no recourse to self-serving political favors. • The President holds that person accountable for his job performance (!!) based on the laws and customs of the day. . . which are utterly barbaric, but the President didn’t create them. • But the new hire succeeds and is not only rewarded by having his deal with the President honored, he achieves political office based on demonstrated merit (!!). Read that last bit again. We’re told, over and over, as a constant refrain, that the people of Idiocracy are idiots, and that the leaders are idiots, but the President and the majority of the population both evaluated a political actor based on objective merit and placed him in high office as a result. That’s something that our system, run by “smart people,” cannot do. Not just fails to do, but is designed to not do. Idiocracy presents itself as a dystopia to be shunned by the present-day political establishment, but it portrays a utopia burdened by the malice and garbage created by the present-day political establishment. The problem with Idiocracy isn’t its nihilism; it’s that its nihilism is sent through a very specific cultural lens, that being the well-off white guy in the U.S. This nihilism requires one to ignore the moral failures that create social ills and dismiss them as intellectual failures. We don’t have our present-day problems because of immorality in politics manifested as rightwing policies and institutions; we don’t have politicians relying on white supremacy and electoral fraud; we don’t have a rightwing media establishment employing a Woke Branding while pushing for policies of mass theft, embezzlement, murder, protection of rapists, and racist institutions; we don’t have an anti-labor, anti-small business plutocracy acting as a worldwide, lower-case-“c” conspiracy against human interests. No. We have dumb-dumbs *on* *the* *bottom* the social scale that make everything dumb. Don’t blame your leadership, even though they have literally all of the responsibility for these problems. If this sounds a lot like reactionaries, including white supremacists, telling you not to blame their cult leaders who run the economy for the economy, but to instead blame a scapegoat, that’s because you’re hearing the same grift. This is why South Park was crapped on back when it was relevant. When faced with the actual causes of politically-generated suffering, the creators rebelled from their own intellects because the source of those problems makes them feel bad about themselves. Seth McFarlane has gotten similar criticism (anyone remember his Rush Limbaugh episode?). People who advocate for mass-murder are morally respectable, but the guy who cut you off in traffic is a degenerate. It’s through this chauvanism that the nihilism of the film is processed, leading to both its imbecilic maliciousness and its contradictions. It wants to attack political corruption and present-day political policies because its creators know, intellectually, that those are bad, but it can’t do that and still let the writers attack their neighbors and thereby Get Their Smug On. The creators sacrifice the former in order to do the latter, and the result is a hot mess that makes the creators look far dumber than the people they lampoon - as well as immoral. On top of this, the film in its explicit text tries to tell us that the smart white guy is good, but then it craps itself when it simultaneously makes that guy responsible for literally all of the world’s ills (alongside smart white women). It fails, unintentionally, for the same logical reason why white supremacist logic fails: if you’re so much better than other demographics, why not demonstrate that (without resort to immoral policies)? The superiority of “smart” people in the film is asserted, but it is never delivered in the text. Instead, the “smart” people drive the country, and/or planet, into the ground for the sake of short-term personal and social satisfaction and literally - literally - leave an ocean of their own g0dd@mn garbage for their children to suffer through.
You are wrong in your analysis in various ways. Saying that a previous generation created the current problems doesn't make sense. Each generation is responsible for adressing the specturm of issues that occur on their watch. The future is unwritten, so pepople can only go by their current understanding. It is up to future generations to deal with the present problems. Secondly, you're projecting your own context onto the white guy as svaior. He's just a vector. He was a rising actor at the time of production. There was no ideolgical narrative regarding the white guy as savior. He was merely average. The film had more to do with the rise of misinformation, and marketing dominance than eugenics. That was just a comedy trope. Again, this is the result of reading far too much into what was a cynical comedy sketch meant to highlight our current state.
@@itheuserfirst3186 "Each generation is responsible for adressing the specturm of issues that occur on their watch." The problems involved didn’t occur on the current generation’s watch. Did you watch the movie? It goes out of its way to show that, for example, the trash was created by our genration and others before the final present day in the film. “Secondly, you're projecting your own context onto the white guy as svaior.” He literally saves everyone. That’s not subtext, that’s the movie’s text. “He's just a vector. He was a rising actor at the time of production.” Which doesn’t contradict him saving everyone. “There was no ideolgical narrative regarding the white guy as savior.” You don’t need “ideology” for a savior to be a savior. The savior just needs to save people. You’re inventing irrelevancies that are not factors in the issue at hand. “He was merely average.” He was not average in the future-present, only in the past. You literally missed the point of the film; his averageness became vastly above-average after he moved forward in time. “The film had more to do with the rise of misinformation, and marketing dominance than eugenics.” Misninformation wasn’t a factor at all in the first act of the movie, and the only reason misinformation was an issue in the later acts was because people in those acts were idiots - hence the name of the film. You’re literally ignoring the name and main theme of the movie in order to say the movie was about something else. And the “market dominance” you’re referring to was the direct result of people being stupid - the theme of the movie - and a running gag in the film, played for laughs. It wasn’t the point of the film. One aspect of the presence of a big corp causes a problem; the problem is solved. The big corp is not molested or maligned or otherwise fought. It isn’t treated as a bad guy or even as an enemy. “That was just a comedy trope.” You literally mistook the comedy trope - corporatism - for the movie’s main theme at the expense of ignoring the movie’s theme - a farcical link between genetics and intellect - that is literally part of the movie’s title. “Again, this is the result of reading far too much into waht was a cynical comedy sketch” Friend, coming away from a movie called “Idiocracy” and determining that it’s about corporations is some serious deep-diving into a film, only to miss and get the result from onesself. That projection may be what is leading you astray.
"As people eventually come to understand that the strict ability to control your mouth has no direct correlation with self-awareness or inner complexity-" is such a banger line. This applies in so many contexts where so much of our judgement is based on face-value perceptions.
I never bothered to think about the movie much (or think at all) but it always struck me as a fantasy for people with self-proclaimed above average intelligence who say most people are dumb and we shouldn't allow them to vote etc
Uh I haven’t watched the whole video yet. But I would like to correct this - the film explicitly shows that Joe is NOT above average intelligence. This is the entire joke - that in this world a very, very average man is seen as a genius in this dystopian world.
@@zenleeparadise My personal experience, but most people that think they are wildly intelligent and everyone else is dumb are also exceptionally average intelligence.
Rift Vallance I just don’t see this, though. You would have to sincerely believe that other people are like those depicted as the masses in this world to have this view of it - this world is so absurdly removed from ours that this reading seems like a leap. The average person today IS better and smarter than those depicted as the majority in this film.
I always found things deeply misanthropic that blame the worst nature of the populace as the cause of their own misfortune to be almost akin to victim blaming someone in a toxic relationship. It's almost like the well established power structures abuse the worse parts of us to perpetuate themselves and then blame us for being awful.
@@theadtheogrekiller5629 There's a difference between your worst flaws being inevitable and naturally self destructive than having them be toyed with and exacerbated by a 3rd party. For example someone may be an recovering drug addict and have that weakness exploited by lets say a toxic lover to keep them dependent on them. You don't call the addict to have been doomed from the start cause they had the potential for addiction. By your line of logic people just even having the potential to do bad things is their own personal moral failing.
Dyer by my line of logic flaws are flaws. Even in my worst situations that seem to be not my fault I could’ve done something differently to change it. I find it more productive to improve myself then to focus on who is causing my tragedy. That isn’t to say those outside forces aren’t to blame, just that I’m the only factor that I know I can 100 percent control, therefore I’m the only piece of the puzzle I have control over. And so I always blame myself
@@theadtheogrekiller5629 Interesting point, though its honestly a shame this isn't about you or how pragmatically self critical you claim to be. When discussing the by nature broad topic of misanthropy attempting to steer the conversation away from the broad effects, changes, and power that effect our society but rather to a petty and self centered view of morality that all but claims the reason people are immoral is because we're almost as a species incapable of self critical reflection is such a blatant attempt of well poisoning I find myself emotionally and physically taxed from processing either the sheer bad faith you must come into this discussion or that you don't realize the inherent hypocrisy of claiming your supposedly infinitely self critical moral stance lets you make a species wise judgement call on morality with such confidence. I'm terribly sorry not all of us can be so noble as to pursue the quest for eternal self judgement, but it's almost like people can pursue self improvement AND be aware of and criticize the existing power structures that effect all of our lifes. Assuming you can't or even shouldn't try fix anything beyond yourself is narrow minded, and only breeds a continuation of the status quo.
@@theadtheogrekiller5629 To me, it really reads like such absolute self-focus is itself a flaw that you should work on. If something is an external threat, and by acting upon the threat you could stop it, isn't doing so the obvious best course of action? If a power structure causes harm, and power structures are created by people, it follows that people can stop harmful power structures. The solution's pretty clear here.
hmm, seems like you're overthinking it. it's just a movie, after all (also I would love to see the reaction of anyone involved in the protest against margaret thatcher shutting down the mines watching the "dumb angry mobs" riot because they all just suddenly lost their livelihoods)
Margaret Thatcher didn't shut down the coal mines to protect the public health, attempting to rebuild her nation after devastation directly caused by capitalist opportunism. That seems like an important difference between that historical event and the one in the film.
@@noneofyourbusiness4616 And the current one we are living through. Anyone paying attention to people protesting stay-at-home orders? I am already making a bad name for myself so I didn't want to say anything in the comment of this video but the timing couldn't have been worse for the points Patricia is trying to make.
Also the introductory sequence of the movie seems to suggest that higher IQ people are less capable of cooperating than lower IQ people, since the high IQ couple is still hung up on petty things while the lower IQ couple manages to stay together in way worse condition (which, according to the movie, they may have brought upon themselves, but that's not the point). In a hostile environment, the ability to cooperate is essential for survival: if you and the rest of your group can't help each other, you will die tomorrow. In fact, I'd say that is a much more essential trait than intelligence, which helps you improve your condition in the long run. So yeah, if high IQ people were as the intro showed, they would have been culled by natural selection at a much greater rate than low IQ people, and it would be them that can only exist thanks to natural selection being removed. The fact that the movie uses the phrase "Natural selection rewards the strongest, fastest, smartest" is a telling sign. That's how natural selection is taught in middle school. Actually scratch that. When I went to middle school (a long time ago), the teachers made an effort to offer us a significantly more nuanced take than that. I mean, I get it, it's just a movie, but it's so weird because it didn't even NEED this stupid eugenics angle. It could have simply went with "in the future people are dumb because consumerism" angle, which yeah, is a bit cliché, but also not so stupid.
If you can't justify your world's existence without resorting to eugenics it might be worth considering... not justifying it? Plenty of fantasy and adjacent works get along just fine ignoring the question of "how did we get here". For a recent example take Nimona. The film never sees fit to specify *if* Nimona had a creation story or just always existed. Much less how she came to exist and it works because it doesn't need to make sense. If you want to write a world filled with idiots you could literally just write a world where the point is the absurdity of not knowing how this world functions. It'd still need a heavy rewrite of course.
I temember making something in those lines for dumb fun with a friend.a wizard tried to make a virility potion that has gone *R E A L L Y* wrong and essentially turned everyone into extremely strong,extremely stupid and highly unstable barbarians with all sort of absurd mutations and obsessions.the difference is that we did not try to pretend we were predicting the future of humanity,we were just laughing at the fictional equivalent of a punching bag
You're misreading the issue with the high IQ couple. It's implied that they've grown to resent each other because they failed to have children. You are reversing the causality. The actual reason the high IQ couple puts off having children is because they want to wait until they are ready, so the children grow up a good environment. Since high IQ people put such high requirements on themselves for having children, they have fewer kids. The low IQ parents just breed with reckless abandon, so they have more kids. The reason they're not being selected out is due to medical advances and other technologies that protect them from their own stupidity.
@@SimGunther I like hearing movie critiques and discussions but this negative filter is disgusting. Would be way better with stills or if Patty or whoever just drew crude depictions of the scene in crayon or whatever.
@@AstraIVagabond The movie didn't compare skulls or imply race was related in any way to intelligence. Sure, it starts with eugenics but that joke hit both sides. Dumb folk can't keep it in their pants and smart folk are afraid of sex. Also, half of it was Brawndo's fault for misleading the already less intelligent public so they could become even more idiotic and easier to control.
I was the only person in my family who didn't like this movie when it came out in my teens. As a comedy, as a sci fi, as social commentary - on every level, it's just entirely unpleasant. It appealed way too much to the neolib fantasy that the problems of economic inequality are largely the result of individual choices or failings on the part of the very people who are harmed by those problems. Y'know, the same fantasy that is killing us all as we speak. Sorry To Bother You is loads better in every dimension. Perfect comparison. Brava.
I'm not understanding the reasoning that the citizenry aren't at fault for the society as much as anything else. I'm not trying to be hostile, I'm trying to understand. Wouldn't you blame the citizens of a society for electing Trump who then funnels more legislation that suppresses and harms the majority of the population? To me that seems to be a given. I think that believing that we're fundamentally incapable of not seeing through at least enough of the blatant propaganda to have more of our best interests at heart and acting accordingly, is even more misanthropic. I'm just not understanding this sentiment.
@@mushroomheaification Individuals make the choices that are available to them. For instance, when birth control and abortion are readily available, as well as sex education, and when healthcare is available in general, people tend to have fewer children. We have seen this happen. So while it's true that individuals make choices, they're typically in response to social factors they have no control over. And as for Trump, remember that most people DIDN't vote for him. He was not elected democratically. We haven't had truly democratic elections in many years, perhaps never, due to large-scale voter suppression and outright disenfranchisement of various minority groups. (This is not widely believed, but I believe it, and I believe it's a reasonable conclusion to come to given the facts) So no, we can't "blame" the citizens for voting for a certain politician when their options are limited (see the systematic exclusion of truly left-wing candidates from most races) and many of them are suppressed from voting at all. (I myself have been unable to vote due to individual circumstances in multiple elections. I don't think anyone has been deliberately keeping me, personally, from voting, but the folks who make the rules know that the more hoops we make voters jump through, the harder it will be for people who are poor, who have insecure housing (and thus can't register under a single, unchanging address) or whose personal identification is subject to change or doubt (trans people, like me, or immigrants, or people who can't afford state-issued IDs) to participate, thus they can keep the system from changing such that these people have a better chance at living well. Basically, individuals without power don't have a lot of control over the societies they live in.
@@sycastells1212 I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to explain your point and to do so politely and damn near pleasantly. I'll take it to heart and considering I don't believe anything that you said was wrong. In fact I strongly agree with most of it. Perhaps I would suggest from the perspective inside the petri dish I've seen too many people doing horrible things regardless of what options were afforded to them. Too many people who would take the given (for lack of a better word that I can think of atm) unaccountability, and wear it as a shield from any further rebuke. *That isn't to say what you said was invalid. It's just perspectives inside the metaphorical petri dish are different from the outside looking in. I understand they both can cloud the others perspectives and this very likely is the case for me at the moment. I myself am trying to find a place of home or community at the moment. I'm a mixed race bi (call me a dude but depending on definitions I don't even know if that's what I am or not) who's pretty much homebound due to psychological and physiological issues, but I'm kind of a social libertarian (Socialist economically, I'm just talking socially) as in I don't really care about how people conduct themselves around me. I'm a very tolerant person towards others, though I am one to voice my opinion. So I find myself searching to find a peoples where I can commingle. Your comment is helping find myself at this time. I want to learn and grow. I'm truly thankful for your time.
@@mushroomheaification I do hope you find a way forward with this. It's not easy. I struggle myself with being compassionate toward others who are acting atrociously. But honestly, it's usually worth it when I try.
@@sycastells1212 I feel that way with the vast majority of people but just the past few years I've seen things that just buckles me. A victim of parental abuse who went on to have serious drug addictions to cope who then dragged her uncared for kids into her issues who then suffered the same kinds of abuse she did. Another person having kids they can't care for and then fighting tooth a nail to keep them regardless of the life they were subjecting and in my opinion condemning them to. Then add in the people who garner less sympathy that use other peoples empathy and sympathy as a foot hold for sustaining their own toxic behavior. But again, thank you. I mean it. It's nice to reach out and actually have someone catch your hand. It doesn't happen often enough in my opinion. I'll try to pay it forward.
This movie feels like it helped pave the way for Rick and Morty's "dumb people are good, smart people are cruel and miserable bastards who are always right" philosophy.
I feel like that kind of idea which Rick and Morty parodies has been around for far longer. You can look at Bloodborne and the eldrich lore that inspired it, where knowledge is both power and despair, as well as lots of horror where finding out too much and going beyond the very laws of nature leads the smart but mad scientists to create monsters (Frankenstein) or otherwise meet their doom.
I don't think Rick is framed as the correct one in the show. The entire underlying dark humor of the show comes from the fact that Rick is a subversion of the typical scientist Dr Who type character who can do wrong because he is smart but Rick is still a miserable person at the end of the day and gets a lot of things wrong but dances around that.
@@islandboy9381 the show always proves Rick right. If he suffers it is because he is smart, not because he is an awful person. The suffering is the burden he has to bear for being smart. That's why it's awful.
Honestly at some point it's important to mature a bit and realize that generally people aren't all that bad - nor is the world. There aren't just people that do bad things - there are people that do good things. Negativity bias just makes people feel like everyone's bad. Getting $10 doesn't feel as good as losing $10 feels bad after all.
We do have a negativity bias, after all, investing the same amount of attention on the good things (which normally don't requiere urgent care or maintanence) than You do the bad things (problems to be solved, things that, if not taken care of, can lead to negative consequences quicker than the lack of positive ones can) will leave you exausted
No. Literally all scientific knowledge on the subject shows that humans in general are “bad.” Every psychology study we do shows that humans are perfectly fine with being bad given any excuse whatsoever. Humans in general don’t act *malicious.* But we’re still bad, we’re just not actively *trying* to be. But it doesn’t excuse anything.
Calling it misanthropic I think is being generous. Whenever I see media that seeks to portray the masses of people or the public at large in a way that shows them to be unfit to hold political power, I just tend to call that media anti-democratic.
How many Trumps, Borises, and Bidens will it take before you acknowledge that huge swathes of the population are incapable of making good political decisions? The public _is_ by-default unfit to hold political power. No, someone with zero political knowledge should not be allowed to have their uninformed opinions affect politics. What we need is a democracy of the educated. If people can demonstrate knowledge in the relevant area, they can vote on those topics. If you want to vote on Brexit, you should have to pass a test on the nature of the EU and international relations. If you want to vote in a general election, then at the very least you should have to demonstrate that you understand the policies of the party you're voting for. Have people do a political science course before they get to vote. Something. _Anything._ Never forget that the goal should be ensuring the best political decisions are made. Democracy without qualification is, at best, a heuristic.
@@amaryllis0 Cyan Griffin Awful, awful comment. Just wow. Get out of here with that technocratic bs pal. The problems of the world don't come from an excess of democracy. The state we labour under now is profoundly lacking in democratic decisionmaking. The system of liberalism that exists now *is* what you claim to want. Power is already delegated to political "elites" who supposedly know best. All your idea would do to change it is to alter the selection of these people, from a quasi-democratic choice by the people from a preselected list of candidates vetted by the political establishment, to a pure meritocratic bureaucratic nightmare. The problems you mention aren't caused by people having too much power. It's the exact opposite. The miniscule amounts of power the masses do have isn't enough to stop the tendency of oligarchy to deteriorate into despotism and poor governance. What's needed is to increase the amount of power held by the masses. To not merely have them employ their one vote in a system where it's been proven to be an irrational and illogical decision for anyone to actually bother participating in it. But instead to actually have the issues of public concern be decided by the public. If your concern is people not being informed and active enough in absorbing information necessary to make reasonable decisions, then the solution would be to actually incentivize people to get informed by having their decisions matter. To have the matters decided on by democracy have weight. One example of decision that aren't democratically made today is when we go to war. In all the history of the world, every decision to go to war has been made by ruling classes. As Eugene Debs put it "in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people." And that really gets at the bedrock of what makes democracy important. Contrary to what technocrats and liberals obsessed with the myth of meritocracy will say, governance is not something evaluated by competence and incompetence, but by values and interests. Of all the people you point to - Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and any others like them - all of these people have basically the same level of expertise and information behind them as their opponents. Trump doesn't implement policy himself, no more than any other modern leader. It is handled by the bureaucracy, the civil service. For all the positions of authority appointed by Trump, there is a multitude of Harvard educated republicans to fill them. What makes governments like these bad is not that they are filled by stupid people carrying out stupid plans. It's that they are filled with people with horrible and repugnant ideas and priorities, carrying out plans that accomplish horrible aims. Or to put it another way, monsters carrying out evil plans. It is a matter of ideology, of what our aims are. Fascism isn't bad because it's stupid and harms everyone, but because it is evil and seeks to improve the lives of a tiny portion of the population by exploiting and slaughtering the rest. Why do I bring this up? Because values are what determines good policy. The world doesn't have this famine-level shortage of smart people as you seem to think. There are people, think tanks, parties and academics ready to make plans and strategies for whatever side holds power, whatever their policy goals are. So when we elect politicians it's not the most important thing above any other consideration to make sure they are the smartest of smarties, because they aren't the ones making everything run by themselves anyway. We don't need to put Steven Hawking in control of Britain and trust his intelligence to put things to right. What we need to prioritise is making sure the decisions made and the policy chosen in government are ones that benefit the majority of people. That they don't merely enrich the already rich and make life easier for the upper classes while doing little and less for the poor and marginalized. So to sum up, stop venerating intelligence above everything else and actually think about what the priorities should be when we deal with politics. Because politics is about resource distribution, not just about efficiency. And stop trying to make a country work like a corporation with a fucking board of directors by getting rid of democracy and putting power in the hands of the best educated. In a modern rationalized society that comes second to how they actually view the role of the state and whose interests they want it to protect and further.
@@vallraffs Huge amounts of your comment are targetting straw-positions I don't hold and never said nor implied. I never said anything about candidates or vetting candidates based on their intelligence? You just plucked that out of thin air. You fail to address the objective facts that huge proportions of the population voted for and support candidates like Trump and Boris. The problem is not some strawman that I think Trump and Boris have low IQs and thus are unqualified, but that these candidates are obviously harmful and are going to enact policies which make their societies worse. The problem then is that our system gives power to the masses who, we can agree, are making the wrong decision. And why are they making the wrong decision? Well yes, lots of it is about values, but that is ultimately subjective and would set a bad precedent if you were to try and regulate that. But lots of it is about ignorance. Lots of people regret voting to leave the EU because they were ignorant of what it would entail. And ignorance is something which can be objectively measured and prevented against without it being intrinsically biased towards certain parties. It seems plainly to be an objective improvement; if the goal is good decision making, then knowledge about the context of that decision is obviously going to correlate to better decision making. If you're trying to land on the moon, you don't fill the control room with random people off the street just because you think it would be nice if everyone could participate What I believe is that people should not be ignorant of the things they vote for, that we should ensure people have a knowledge of the facts of the issues on which they are to be allowed to impact. For example, you don't want climate deniers voting on issues of climate change. If someone is believing falsehoods about the nature of the EU, they shouldn't be allowed to vote on Brexit. A system that allows this has failed. I do not, in fact, "venerate intelligence above everything else". I just take issue with giving power to the uninformed and misinformed. The only goal is creating the best society possible in order to maximise the wellbeing of humanity, and if pure, unqualified democracy is less efficient at that than other methods, then out the window it should go.
I remember a friend showing me Idiocracy. He was really, really hyped to show me and I went and rented it for us. I ended up absolutely hating it. I didn’t even really know why I hated it at the time. Something about it just innately frustrated and upset me. As someone with undiagnosed autism and a history of being treated like I’m dumb, strange or otherwise lesser, the film felt like it was punching down at people like me. The eugenics angle at the beginning of the film wasn’t lost on me, but I figured I was just thinking too hard about it and decided this was something I needed to turn my brain off to enjoy. But the movie just got worse to me. Look, I can enjoy dumb humor. I can enjoy offensive jokes. I can’t help that I still laugh at peepeepoopoo and the VERY cringe joke that I am a furry that desperately tries to convince you I am not a sexual deviant while there’s literally BDSM gear on my nightstand. But a whole movie of nothing but dumb/offensive humor and telling me I theoretically would suck if I were in this universe gets grating pretty quickly.
Everyone would suck if they lived in this world because it’s a world where everyone is basically the same, but you decided to take it as some personal attack. Autism doesn’t make you stupid, and embracing stupidity as a society is a pretty bad idea (that’s where we came from)
I just finished watching the movie about 30 minutes ago, and before I start the video I'd just like to say that the line, "After several hours, Joe finally gave up on logic and reason, and simply told the cabinet that he could talk to plants and that they wanted water." Absolutely made me lose my shit. That is all.
I would like point out that the uncomfortably close proximity between genetic engineering and eugenics is there, but genetic engineering isn't (generally) a euphemism or interchangeable. In transhumanist circles, especially leftist ones, it's a given rule of etiquette that you've got to bring a lot of nuance and walk on eggshells when talking about genetic engineering or the eugenicists will try and hijack your points. It's like how punks have to weed out fascists and Marxists have to weed out tankies. Editing in a great example from Citizen Cyborg by James Hughes: Chapter 4 specifically deals with intelligence and genetics. It opens talking about Francis Galton founding the concept of eugenics and predicting a decline in intelligence since "lower classes and non-white races, who they believed to be less intelligent, had higher birthrates." A lot like the opening to Idiocrarcy. But it immediately goes into detail of how the opposite has been happening and intelligence has been rising, a phenomenon dubbed the Flynn Effect. "There is no widely accepted explanation for the Flynn Effect, but the causes are assumed to be entirely environmental." It lists some contributing environmental factors then goes into how this creates a systemic feedback loop with poverty. Only then it gets into the genetic side, citing research from a UVA professor that saw genetic factors having very little influence to poor kids' intelligence but a higher influence on the intelligence of affluent kids, essentially meaning that genetics are largely irrelevant until environmental factors have been standardized for everyone. But even then it notes there's an inevitable biological threshold for human intelligence that technology and medicine can surpass. It's an excellent turnaround of framing: genetic engineering is not a necessary response to some form of degradation, but an enhancement to the limitations we'll eventually hit *after* standardizing environmental factors.
@@brianb.6356 oh yeah, Idiotocracy is absolutely using it as a euphemism for eugenics, but a lot of transhumanist ideals aren't commonplace in politics yet, so this might be quite a few people's first exposure to the concept and I don't them walking away with a purely bad impression. Genetic engineering is a potentially great field. *Potentially*.
Eh look at any interview with the author and he says it's both nature and nurture - eugenics is the complete wrong reading. We know that culture is inheretable, and being It's a bit annoying when one do cultural criticism and can't Google for a few minutes before making a massive script. And criticism is a bit more than finding problematic issues. This is looking more like breadtube click bait - I expected something deeper than "oh this might be problematic" repeated a hundred times.
@Jacqueline A Death of the author is no excuse to ignore it, especially if you say things such as "I have no idea what was happening in the writers room". The death of the author makes more sense if you write fanfic, not when you insist on a specific exclusionary interpretation.
@@informativt It doesn't matter what the author says the movie's message is supposed to be, if that message doesn't actually come across. All that does is make the author look merely incompetent, rather than outright malicious.
@@tomshraderd4915 It didn't come across that way to me honestly. I think the parts about consumer culture and irresponsibile behavior stood out to me and eugenics not so much. I think these are all valid critiscisms, but they come across like they put too much value in subjective interpretations. "I interpreted this movie to promote eugenics, eventhough the author made clear that it doesn't, so the author is either evil or dumb."
On the subject of Mike Judge, I've always thought Office Space kind of squandered some of it's potential by never addressing that banal office culture never HAD to be a thing. Coincidentally, that's something Sorry To Bother You's also more introspective about.
i really appreciate the 'compare & contrast with a second movie you'd actually recommend' bit, because the "arggh, it could have been good!" feeling really eats me up inside when thinking abt poorly-executed movies
I‘m very late to the party I know. I‘ve watched this essay for the firs time, when it came out. I‘m glad that you focused on the opening sequence so much, because, I feel like, all of the failings of „Idiocracy“ basically hinge on it‘s explanation of the rise of „stupidity“. If the idiocy in „Idiocracy“ had been painted as a result of the system people had to live and participate in, it would‘ve been a (maybe even good) political satire. The way it is though, it isn‘t even a *political* satire at all. The way it is, it just gives off the vibe of 90s/2000s edgy comedy for kinda pretentious college-boys.
The movie is based on a short story. The March of the Morons or The Marching Morons. It was more about the collapse of civilization than the genetics of humans. The short story was much better than the movie. In the original story, the elite ran the world and brought "Joe" out of the freezer to start a revolution.
The ending line "not bad for an average Joe", is clearly giving the message that you don't need to be some kind of genius to make positive change. Just realize the importance of education and striving for knowledge, something slowly being lost in a Capitalist consumer culture that deliberately dumbs us down to produce obedient drones. Go ahead and criticize the misanthropic themes if you want, at least you correctly identify those. But racist? Just as many white people (if not more) are depicted as being stupid as other races. so by racial measures the movie offended with equal opportunity. But as far as the opening goes, it's using exaggerated American stereotypes of "stupid" and "smart" people for the satire and has little resemblance to reality. You took clear silliness seriously.
You can't expect everyone to know the same things as you. We all have separate paths in life which provides vastly differing educations and accrued knowledge. Whatever lead you to learning what eugenics means does not guarantee someone else from ever hearing of the word. Hell, it was probably the first time he even heard the word. That doesn't make him dumb, it means you quite literally brought up a new term for him.
No joke, I immediately watched Sorry to Bother You after you started talking about it at the end. Highly recommend it to anyone who watched this video and hasn't seen it yet. Brilliant stuff.
I loved idiocracy when I was, 13, and have sense not really cared for it. This summed up a lot of latent feelings I had about it, and the parallels to Sorry to Bother You are so glaringly obvious I can’t believe I never made the connection. now I know why I like STBY so much more
@@lordhoot1 oh god i watched it on dvd and i couldn't bear to watch any part where the [SPOILERS REDACTED] were there. i literally looked away i can't imagine seeing it in theaters
You mean impediments? Grammar impediments 😂 ? Sorry I couldn't help myself. You aren't wrong, but use of language has correlation to education. Intelligence and education are two different things though and don't always go hand in hand.
"Intelligence" is heritable, but only because poverty is heritable. The reason poorer people tend to be less educated and thus "less intelligent" is because they have less resources by which to support themselves and to support the education of their children. It can be difficult to educate and raise children when both parents need to work and thus won't be able to ensure their child goes to school and gets their school work done and advocate for them in school. Furthermore the stresses of poverty are known to have a detrimental effect on education. When children are thinking: "where am I going to sleep tonight, will I be able to eat tonight?" they won't be able to focus on their studies no matter how hard they try. Furthermore they may even have to divide their times between studying and caring and looking after their younger siblings. They may eventually be forced to drop out of school or be unable to attend college so that they can work and help to support their families. But with only a high school education they will only be able to get low paying jobs leaving them mired in the exact same poverty that plagued their parents. Thus the solution to this problem is not to control the sexuality of the poor but instead to ensure that the basic needs of the poor are met. If the poor do not need to worry about paying rent, buying food, and pay for basic utilities because those are provided through their taxes and they are paid a livable wage they will be able to improve themselves and their communities. Leading to a more educated and prosperous population. The problem with this solution is that it will cost the ultra wealthy their army of unskilled laborers whose surplus labor they can exploit. It also leads to a large class of people who can devote more time to question social systems challenge the authority of traditional elites. It's much more profitable to cull the poor and control their reproductive rates than to uplift them out of poverty.
this critique actually fixes the whole movie. instead of the original prologue where low iq is inherited from low iq parents who breed too much, just show the results of poverty as a lack of education makes people less aware of their surroundings and easier to manipulate. you can keep the whole plot about the drink company buying the government and ruining crops and it would actually be an admittingly on the nose, but relevant and accurate portrayal of capitalism
@@courtneys.7113 Not to mention-considering the events that led up to "Idiocracy" took hundreds of years, I'm also under the impression that the suppression of information has a greater effect generationally? Like, there are children being born who will only know the world Brawno has crafted in the minds of their parents. They've never heard about how water keeps plants alive because Brawno made an effort to erase that information.
""Intelligence" is heritable, but only because poverty is heritable." I'm pretty sure there has to be at least some genetic heritability. Otherwise, we wouldn't even have evolved human-level intelligence in the first place. Here's one study that found 58% heritability for IQ in Japan. link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01067719
IQ is not based on a person's education level, or having any prior education. It's mostly about pattern recognition, and spatial reasoning. These things can be tested for without prior educatioin, or income level.
Can I just say that I appreciate that at the end of this review it turned out that you weren't just shiting on a piece of media, but rather shiting on it and then proposing a solution to said problems with an example of the same concept better executed. That put you miles above a lot of TH-cam videos doing hot takes on stuff like this. That said, a misanthropic view of society is very much a consistent undercurrent in Mike judge's work. From the very first Milton short and frog baseball all the way up to Silicon Valley. You really get the impression that Mike Judge really just thinks people, in general, are complete garbage by default.
i think this movie is pretty coherent in its passive nihilism, especially with the corporate takeover towards the end of the movie. the company does a corrupt thing, initially because the people in power see how it benefits them, then later because the people in power are too stupid to see how it solves their crisis. the average intelligence protag then sees the simple solution, without realizing the broader macroeconomic concerns that are usually the job of a team of trained professionals to track. just like the people who used to be in power, he uses naive arguments like "i can talk to plants" to justify gaining power and later "the plants grew!" to justify the unemployment caused by his actions, and thus saves himself and allows him to restore the bourgeois world he misses. the movie was nihilistic from the start, coldly describing disgenic phenomena that are naively plausible, mockingly caricaturing the shallow consumerist world we live in now, and coldly describing corporate takeover of the government. i dont think the movie is advocating for eugenics or for corporate responsibility, the movie was advocating for seeing it all as an absurd joke, possibly at the expense of impaired people. now that still means the movie is at best coping for nihilists and at worst circle-jerking for misanthropists, but i do think it does either of these things relatively coherently. now enabling nihilism and misanthropy is certainly aesthetically/spiritually problematic, and perpetuating "foreign accent = dumb" "bad with words = dumb" is rewarding lack of empathy, so for those points I like this critique, but my points still stand. The movie is still morally bad, just coherent in its badness.
Honestly, this is one of my favorite movies, but I've been learning more about its connections with modern eugenics history, and although I still enjoy it, I can't really view it in the same way anymore . For all of the times I've watched it, I always interpreted the opening three-minute sequence as a lament over the nurture/environmental/behavior factors passed down to kids rather than genetics. It was also an extreme caricature of two cultural stereotypes, guilty of dehumanizing and oversimplifying both the "responsible, educated, upper-class" and the "hot-blooded, uneducated, lower-class" tropes for comedic effect (clearly, the latter of the two families gets the shorter end of the stick in its depiction). Ultimately, I think this is a cultural critique and clearly silly premise used to vent anxieties about a cultural majority losing interest in education, logic, ethics, courtesy, healthy social connections, personal growth, and so on, because it overvalues automated services, entertainment, and instant gratification. To this end, I think it mostly works, but there's an obvious flaw. Idiocracy emphasizes the LOSS of ethnocentric, elitist culture and shows us a society that is DEFINED BY that loss rather than just DIFFERENT from that culture, sporting positive and negative features. It's not even close to a realistic scenario because it's a film overflowing with hyperbole, but I don't realistic worldbuilding was Mike Judge & co.'s goal in this film. It bears almost no resemblance to historical, linguistic, or cultural developments in the way its setting and society function. For the most part, I think this was a toilet-humor daydream about exploring an "idiot" dystopia and as well as an exaggerated imagining of people failing to think critically on a large scale. I like what you've done here--after all, social darwinism and eugenics theories throughout the last couple centuries were SO pervasive, appealing, and dangerous that we still see consequences of them today. "Survival of the fittest" sounds like a common-sense statement at first, but it quickly becomes dark when considering that the traits defining what was "fittest" were typically devised by those seeking to maximize their OWN worth through cultural elitism and racial superiority over others scapegoated as "unfit." Eugenics was popularized by Enlightenment thinkers and appealed to elitists and people of lower status alike--the narrative was so appealing that all of the heinous implications and consequences that go along with eugenics crept into people's ethical values and formed a new, normal consciousness. SO, in entertainment media like Idiocracy, it's important to pay attention to subject material that could skew as an endorsement of eugenics hiding under a comedy romp.
It's not eugenics to decide not to have children. Eugenics itself, believe it or not, isn't an inherently evil idea, so long as it is VOLUNTARY. What made eugenics so vile was that somebody else was going to decide who could or couldn't breed, and who was "fit" or "unfit," on a very arbitrary characteristic. No individual has the right to decide those things. But on the other hand, parents absolutely do have the right to control whether or not they are going to be parents or not, and the quality of that parenthood. There is a natural tendency for the smarter people to have fewer or no children with more investment in their upbringing, versus the stereotypical dumb hicks breeding like rabbits and passing on the same values to the next generations. Are there hints of that eugenics philosophy behind this narrative? Sure. But I don't think this prologue is really what Mike Judge is critiquing. It's more a quick explanation to get us to the world of the future. Once we actually see the future, then the real critique begins and it's meant to be social satire of the present, not any sort of prediction about the future. If you walk away from the film thinking it's pro-eugenics, evidently the commentary went way over your head.
I don't think the protest at the end was supposed to represent labour protest. I read it more as a metaphor for how masses could be mislead into protesting against their own interests (Like we're seeing right now with everyone protesting to reopen businesses during an epidemic rather than demanding welfare, fairer pay or UBI). It is an interesting way to interpret it, but I don't see it that way.
@@islandboy9381that stupidity can become a value and ignorance a deliberate choice. unless people value intelligence and critical thinking people will just choose whatever seems easier simpler. The movie goes out of it's way to demonize automation and taking things for granted. Idiocracy is the inevitable end byproduct of mindless consumerism
Robert Baur You know you could've had a point if the movie didn't go out of it's way to say that only a low IQ populace would fall so easily for those values and that that's the reason they let themselves get ruled over so easily.
Intelligence is genetic to a degree, but like most things it also has a huge environmental factor. I’ve heard gifted children can have stunted growth if they aren’t allowed to flourish at their own pace but instead are forced to adhere to the school system. It’s like a seed, not every seed can grow into the same plant, but no matter what kind of plant emerges it’s still up to us to grow it into the best version of its kind it can be.
Evan Blenkinsopp intelligence is simply a combination of several mental abilities given to us thru evolution. Intelligence only becomes subjective when speaking in small degrees of difference or when using separate mental abilities to test. Despite this it must be quantifiable as any other trait found in nature. Honestly it’s like memory, we know it exists and we know it’s quantifiable, but we don’t necessarily have the tools for pin point accuracy when studying it. This doesn’t refute its existence or measurability, just as our ignorance to bacteria and atoms and even gravity did not refute its existence nor its place in our world. So far we have concluded that intelligence is found more often then not in social and predatory animals, and is most likely to evolve in species that require problem solving skills when surviving. We have also found that pattern recognition plays a huge part, as it helps us use and learn information. This can be as simple as a bear learning where the fish like to frequent and by using this info is able to find the best fishing spot even in rivers it hasn’t been to yet. It can also be as game changing as realizing the correlation between heat and fire and figuring out how to make and utilize it with friction. Life is a collection of patterns and being able to recognize them is the first step to utilizing them.
The way he solves the agricultural crisis by telling the future leaders that he can talk to plants always gets a rise out of me. I wonder if I can make people care about the environment a little more if I said I can talk to plants.
Thanks for making me hate a movie I love lol. Seriously, you're being pretty much as fair as possible to the movie, and as a fan of it I know you didn't take anything out of context, so I appreciate seeing you dissect it like this.
My dad (who funnily enough is a self-described socialist) absolutely LOVES this movie, and I just never really could. I found it a really dumb concept and thought it became like the 21st century movie equivalent of 1984 - in the sense that people who didn't understand the source material will always use it as a point to prove that the other side is bad.
Sorry to bother you is brilliant. My union branch and i did an online watch party of it recently. I LOVE the way it shows solidarity in everything. The football guys are so good.
The much darker story, The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth is supposedly the inspiration for idiocracy. The book has a clearly eugenic meaning, the film ... not so much. The film is not a left wing dystopian fairy tale but a liberal one I think based upon highly subjective view of their superiority.
@Sahja Nhabeni I agree that it also has points about big brothetism and like authoritarianism, but yeah the anti-semetism is clearly a big point of sorts as well. Orwell as an Anarcho-Syndicalist/Communist really inspired me and made me pretty happy to hear about his other books like homage to catalonia. And it convinces me he was probably at least in his heart a pretty somewhat swell guy, though I admit to not knowing everything about him or ever having a hard copy of his books. Thankfully we have library's and the Internet.
I never liked the idea that, in the future, people just got dumber. It just seemed too unbelievable to me. There's no golden age to return to. The future is always a maybe, maybe good if we make it that way, maybe bad if we don't (or if we make it that way), but there is no golden past to return to. IT NEVER REALLY HAPPENED.
I mean, I could imagine a version of idiocracy where the reason the people got dumber was because of a ploy by corporations/pollution. the best would be a story about an education system designed to make people dumb, but the protagonist eventually finds out that people are uneducated, but not dumb, understands how to work with them to overthrow the unjust order of things.
YOOOOO I WAS JUST FUCKING THINKING ABOUT HOW SORRY TO BOTHER YOU IS THE EPIC AND BASED VERSION OF THIS BAD BAD BAD MOVIE. SORRY TO BOTHER YOU IS A 10/10!
Many good points. I never really thought of the mob after irrigating the fields with water as mocking labor protests, though. It reads to me as mocking society's desire for instant solutions and getting in our own way of something good because it didn't yield results in the time frame that we wanted. This is why I see Idiocracy being referenced a lot at the time of writing (in the wake of a number of politically motivated protests against stay at home orders that were designed to mitigate the damage of a pandemic) -- stay at home orders work to minimize the spread of covid-19 but it is a long term result, one that if it works feels like you weren't at risk at all. But in the short term, the solution provides immediate negative drawbacks (massive unemployment, psychological issues stemming from isolation, etc.). We stopped the societal model that fed corporations, and we didn't immediately see that the crops were able to start growing as a result. We partially stopped the societal model that fed corporations to stop a pandemic, and people felt they were being made to suffer from a virus they didn't need to worry about because they didn't catch it and a loud portion of propaganda told them not to worry about it. But yeah, the eugenics stuff is pretty bad. Hard agree on that.
Ok maybe it's just me but Joe's journey kinda felt like it had elements of the "Hero's Journey" archetype to show that he needed to survive trials and learn how to communicate on the level of the people he's destined to lead (I suppose you could call Frito a mentor?). Hell, considering his "rebirth" after the arena and the way he pretended to talk to plants that miraculously grew visibly in just two days... and he marries an "artist"... Yeah Christ allegory as well, why not. That was fun. Good video.
Idocracy feels like a giant missed opportunity. It could've been an interesting cautionary tale about how corporations try to manipulate and deceive people, and the danger that can come from trusting such corporations. But instead it feels like a movie made by hypocritical capitalists who decided the movie's premise was gonna be based in eugenics with the punchline being "haha stupid people funny"
So it's a wasted opportunity because it's not exactly the movie you would have made? Seems like the wasted opportunity is the fact that you're not making the movie you're describing here. I might have given it a watch.
Would have mentioned average intelligence has rose up historically, like a middle school kid that grew up with Bill Nye and understand the importance of hygiene would be smarter that a peasant back at the middle ages
I agree that Sorry to Bother You is a fantastic film and a much better execution of a similar premise, but it's so easy to imagine a coherent version of Idiocracy, just have a bunch of rich people conspire to replace schooling with corporate propaganda in order to make the general public more compliant. It's literally a real thing that corporations attempt to do and it would even make the plot make more sense. That would be a movie with a core that works, brought down by a reliance on clumsy stereotypes, instead of a movie that fundamentally misunderstands the thing it's trying to satirize and also relies on clumsy stereotypes. With all the references to brands, it's almost like they had written a coherent script and then some exec went in and clumsily tore out the whole premise (both in the intro and the main body) and replaced it with eugenics, but I don't think there's any evidence that kind of meddling occurred.
I fucking love sorry to bother you. Nothing will beat going into that movie completely blind after selecting it as my movie to watch for a random film assignment and then being hit in the face with its content. Love it.
Sorry to Bother you is such a fantastic movie. It tackles so much and is just so interesting Even if we just compare the two as "funny voice gag: the movie" Sorry to Bother You does so much more with their voice gag that it's unreal.
I think Idiocracy wants to sincerely blame the irresponsibility of the public/corporate/state for the downfall of future society, but struggles to do so in a 90-minute span while being unclear in its opening that all three create the problem. It's a film that wants to say a lot but struggles to do so. It's flawed but I think in some ways brilliant, crude as it is.
I really appreciated this video. I liked Idiocracy when it came out and i was 13, and it's nice to see it through a left perspective now that I'm not 13 anymore. Also i love the way you layer visuals, it's interesting to look at but not distracting. Great video!
What's wild is there is a world where this movie could be made in a way that makes sense. It's a known fact that exposure to like... basically any pollutant can cause mental deficiencies and/or developmental delays. Brawndo/other corporations buying everything so they can pollute as much as they want, causing the populace to be exposed to high levels of harmful pollutants, leading to a populace perpetually bogged down by brain fog for generations, is not anywhere near as far-fetched as the original idea.
The movie is more clearly about the human complacency regarding those subjects rather than the effects they have, IE, criticism of people for accepting it.
The best way to describe the ideology of the film is essentially pseudo-leftist elitism (also known as limousine liberalism, champagne socialism, etc.). It's ostensibly opposing consumerism, capitalism, and conservatism, but most of the time just ends up insulting the very people it claims to be supporting.
Even when I saw this movie as a young teen, I thought it was dumb. Mostly for its very low brow comedy. Now, I realize that this movie was just a misanthropic and extremely bitter film that is used as an easy strawman for people to create and imagine of those that they see as lesser if they got their way. I hate this movie, and I thank you for reminding of it by tearing it a new asshole. It was quite satisfying.
Idiocracy's attempt to criticize both the general populace and the systems ruling them isn't a "pitfall." Whether or not you agree, the choice to represent the population and systems as inseparably entangled was deliberate. We ARE the systems we've created. An unjust law is unjustly decreed, unjustly enforced, and unjustly ignored. Every step of the process is human. To pretend that corrupt and bureaucratic systems are dragons and not our collective, genuine best effort to make a cohesive social contract shifts the responsibility for evil from us, the angry, dumb mob of humanity, to the formless bogeyman of "systems." It's a scapegoat -- to allow us to reckon with the cognitive dissonance of actively participating in and upholding an evil, stupid society while simultaneously being victimized by it. But yeah, Sorry To Bother You is a much better movie.
This! Literally this! The movie is not deep ‘nor is it pro anything, the ending lines are “not bad for average Joe”, where at the end he makes a difference and before that, says how people like him, *the average joe*, are complicit in stupidity and corruption, The movie couldn’t be more blatant
I didn't see the protest over unemployment as a satire on labor protests. The first thing that came to mind was most Americans reaction to any kind of socialized health care. They'd rather have money now than any long term benefit later on that they'll definitely need. But yes, this film is not without its issues to someone who took everything it said without thinking about it too much.
@@blakchristianbale I see your point. I still think it's a matter of degrees. Jobs are important when you need them to support yourself and taxation also pinches at the same nerve though the context is admittedly different. I think I'll watch the movie again and see if I got the same vibe.
i swear i wanted this one to be more simple visually but mister copyright claim said no
I will throw one (1) brick at mister copyright claim
What do you think about beavis and butthead?
It still looks pretty good, wasn't too distracting to me and I think it works well
the visual deluge is the fun part though
I liked that negative effect though. So it's fine, don't worry about it.
Years later and I feel like Idiocracy is cope. Wanting to believe the deterioration of the world is caused by stupidity and not actively malicious, aparthic, bigotted, and/or greedy people.
yeah it was bush cope and the infantilization of the sadistic people responsible for collapse and hypocrisy
Wanted to add onto this comment. Basically the banality of evil is what causes the most harm, not stupidity.
I feel idiocracy has a bit of that too, Gatorade has literally replaced water in the movie
I do feel like idiocy IS a deterioration of the world, but it is directly caused by malicious people trying to defund education in order for people to vote for them and be more easily susceptible to propaganda. The right KNOWS that people learning from others leads to more love and leftist views.
@@kap1618WRONG idiots are far more dangerous than evil people (Assuming that the evil person is not an idiot). An idiot would set a ship ablaze and blame everyone but himself. The evil person at least cares enough to make sure there is a ship and crew for them to rule.
the thing I hate most about idiocracy is how many people call it "scarily accurate" except the in universe president of the united states recognized that he is no where near a perfect being and had the humility to step down and listen to someone smarter than him and holy fucking shit if our modern dystopia could be so kind.
What's even more terrifying and sad is that Starship Troopers did the same thing. A military that is post race and sex actually has a system of accountability. I wish we had that.
@@kap1618lol calling the military in starship troopers desirable is so hilarious to me. It’s like clapping when a trans woman is allowed to shoot 200 brown people for American oil companies.
Starship Troopers comes from the mind of a lifelong communist trying to be a libertarian in the final decades of his life.
@@vitmartobby5644You guys are all just sad. Imagine living in the greatest time in human history and crying about how it’s a dystopia on your brand new $2000 iPhone.
@@Razzanonymous We should improve society somewhat
The thing that always baffles me is Terry Crews. I mean, all showboating aside, he evinces some clear leadership skills, and admits when he needs help. If anything he's better than what we've got now.
I like this a lot
Yeah, I thought Camacho was incredibly intelligent. He knew how to get votes, he knew enough to get a smart guy on his cabinet, he steps aside, etc.
This didn't age well
@@hezekiahramirez6965 Sure it did. Camacho is still played as someone with better leadership skills than most people in DC.
It also has the general ''its funny because person is mentally deficient/dysfunctional'' punchline told to you over and over again which definitely doesn't get tiring at all and is definitely not punching down others to feel superior masqueraded as ''just a joke'', but this is something applicable to most 2000s adult comedies.
It would have been way more interesting to extrapolate increasing CO2 levels (frequent in poorly ventilated buildings) decreasing productivity to its logical conclusion. No one can really think very well anymore because they're always mildly dying of CO2 poisoning. Therefore they can't learn well henceforth rest of the movie. Corporate greed literally making the world have less forethought and ability to correct past mistakes is a way better punchline.
@@solsystem1342Hell yeah
I never laughed at those jokes in the movie, yet despite that the movie is still clever and has a lot of insight into what sort of future we are headed into. Ignore the jokes and see what it's trying to say. Because ultimately it's making fun of EVERYONE.
@@epsilon3667 yeah I don't buy it. Every single time I've heard this "oh but they make fun of EVERYONE" it amounts to "it violently advocates for the status quo and ridicules every diversion from it"
Like south park. They have this huge façade of making fun of every group without caring if it's offensive, but in reality it's just ridiculing everything that breaks the american status quo (their shtick is literally making episodes out of topical events every week). For gods sake they had two fuckin climate denial episodes where they deny climate change. Aged like wine lol
@@solsystem1342 that would be just sad tho
I saw Idiocracy in the theaters because it was being flushed by Fox because it made fun of Fox news. I had to insist to the theater they were in fact playing it and after they got a manger I got to see it. I did at the time laugh at the shallow jokes and during the bush admin it was easy to fall into the "I'm surrounded by idiots" feeling. When I left the theater I was left with the whole "Well intelligence doesn't work that way." and the vague eugenics feel Really over the years the film has fallen lower in my feelings due to the way people throw around the words IQ. Really this wasn't a left leaning film it was a very centrist film much in the way South Park falls into that "Enlightened Centrist" realm.
I think idiocracy is an incredibly shallow movie that doesnt think deep enough about what its saying, which is very ironic
I think it's extremely fitting that people who defend Idiocracy usually don't actually understand Idiocracy. They think about it on the same level as the filmmakers. It's just "stupid people funny." Funny enough they're exactly what is ostensibly being skewered, and they don't understand that at all
It`s a fucking comedy.
The point made at 10:18 isn’t just correct, it’s an understatement. I hated/enjoyed Idiocracy since its original release in part because the movie’s writers inadvertently attack themselves. They insist that the problems of the future are caused by genetic stupidity - a clear and unmistakeable eugenicist canard - but then, within the plot of the film and even in the *text* of the narrative that relies on eugenics, they make it clear that all of the problems of the future are caused by the “smart” people of the past. Not 70%, not 80%, literally all.
Future infrastructre is built on extremely durable and sophisticated technology, all built around efficiency and convenience. Despite poor maintenence, it works well enough generation after generation. Who built that? Not present-day Americans. Basic checkup medical devices are so sophisticated that laymen can manage them. Who built those? Not present-day Americans. The political system has been utterly corrupted, as the video points out. Who created that system? Not present-day Americans.
There are massive piles of trash everyplace. Who created that environmental crisis? Not present-day Americans.
And let’s not forget the eugenics narration at start. The movie claims that smart people (particularly scientists) couldn’t solve the problems of growing stupidity. . . despite the fact that it was all so obvious that said stupidity is the basis for lowbrow humor throughout the film. If they couldn’t tackle what was an obvious issue from the viewer’s perspective and instead created the world of the future, then . . . present-day and past humans are a bunch of dumbasses.
On top of this, Idiocracy’s future political society is objectively less disfunctional than ours. Let’s review the plot:
• The country faces a problem created by political actors that pre-date the present-day administration.
• The President hires a person to solve this problem, based on merit, with no recourse to self-serving political favors.
• The President holds that person accountable for his job performance (!!) based on the laws and customs of the day. . . which are utterly barbaric, but the President didn’t create them.
• But the new hire succeeds and is not only rewarded by having his deal with the President honored, he achieves political office based on demonstrated merit (!!).
Read that last bit again. We’re told, over and over, as a constant refrain, that the people of Idiocracy are idiots, and that the leaders are idiots, but the President and the majority of the population both evaluated a political actor based on objective merit and placed him in high office as a result. That’s something that our system, run by “smart people,” cannot do. Not just fails to do, but is designed to not do. Idiocracy presents itself as a dystopia to be shunned by the present-day political establishment, but it portrays a utopia burdened by the malice and garbage created by the present-day political establishment.
The problem with Idiocracy isn’t its nihilism; it’s that its nihilism is sent through a very specific cultural lens, that being the well-off white guy in the U.S. This nihilism requires one to ignore the moral failures that create social ills and dismiss them as intellectual failures. We don’t have our present-day problems because of immorality in politics manifested as rightwing policies and institutions; we don’t have politicians relying on white supremacy and electoral fraud; we don’t have a rightwing media establishment employing a Woke Branding while pushing for policies of mass theft, embezzlement, murder, protection of rapists, and racist institutions; we don’t have an anti-labor, anti-small business plutocracy acting as a worldwide, lower-case-“c” conspiracy against human interests.
No. We have dumb-dumbs *on* *the* *bottom* the social scale that make everything dumb.
Don’t blame your leadership, even though they have literally all of the responsibility for these problems. If this sounds a lot like reactionaries, including white supremacists, telling you not to blame their cult leaders who run the economy for the economy, but to instead blame a scapegoat, that’s because you’re hearing the same grift.
This is why South Park was crapped on back when it was relevant. When faced with the actual causes of politically-generated suffering, the creators rebelled from their own intellects because the source of those problems makes them feel bad about themselves. Seth McFarlane has gotten similar criticism (anyone remember his Rush Limbaugh episode?). People who advocate for mass-murder are morally respectable, but the guy who cut you off in traffic is a degenerate.
It’s through this chauvanism that the nihilism of the film is processed, leading to both its imbecilic maliciousness and its contradictions. It wants to attack political corruption and present-day political policies because its creators know, intellectually, that those are bad, but it can’t do that and still let the writers attack their neighbors and thereby Get Their Smug On. The creators sacrifice the former in order to do the latter, and the result is a hot mess that makes the creators look far dumber than the people they lampoon - as well as immoral.
On top of this, the film in its explicit text tries to tell us that the smart white guy is good, but then it craps itself when it simultaneously makes that guy responsible for literally all of the world’s ills (alongside smart white women). It fails, unintentionally, for the same logical reason why white supremacist logic fails: if you’re so much better than other demographics, why not demonstrate that (without resort to immoral policies)? The superiority of “smart” people in the film is asserted, but it is never delivered in the text. Instead, the “smart” people drive the country, and/or planet, into the ground for the sake of short-term personal and social satisfaction and literally - literally - leave an ocean of their own g0dd@mn garbage for their children to suffer through.
Yeah, you're way overthinking this. Maybe you can submit it for your PHD in film criticism.
This sounds like some bizarre endorsement of Trump.
You are wrong in your analysis in various ways. Saying that a previous generation created the current problems doesn't make sense. Each generation is responsible for adressing the specturm of issues that occur on their watch. The future is unwritten, so pepople can only go by their current understanding. It is up to future generations to deal with the present problems. Secondly, you're projecting your own context onto the white guy as svaior. He's just a vector. He was a rising actor at the time of production. There was no ideolgical narrative regarding the white guy as savior. He was merely average. The film had more to do with the rise of misinformation, and marketing dominance than eugenics. That was just a comedy trope. Again, this is the result of reading far too much into what was a cynical comedy sketch meant to highlight our current state.
That's like blaming the sun for people going blind because they were too clueless to avert their eyes lol
@@itheuserfirst3186 "Each generation is responsible for adressing the specturm of issues that occur on their watch."
The problems involved didn’t occur on the current generation’s watch. Did you watch the movie? It goes out of its way to show that, for example, the trash was created by our genration and others before the final present day in the film.
“Secondly, you're projecting your own context onto the white guy as svaior.”
He literally saves everyone. That’s not subtext, that’s the movie’s text.
“He's just a vector. He was a rising actor at the time of production.”
Which doesn’t contradict him saving everyone.
“There was no ideolgical narrative regarding the white guy as savior.”
You don’t need “ideology” for a savior to be a savior. The savior just needs to save people. You’re inventing irrelevancies that are not factors in the issue at hand.
“He was merely average.”
He was not average in the future-present, only in the past. You literally missed the point of the film; his averageness became vastly above-average after he moved forward in time.
“The film had more to do with the rise of misinformation, and marketing dominance than eugenics.”
Misninformation wasn’t a factor at all in the first act of the movie, and the only reason misinformation was an issue in the later acts was because people in those acts were idiots - hence the name of the film. You’re literally ignoring the name and main theme of the movie in order to say the movie was about something else.
And the “market dominance” you’re referring to was the direct result of people being stupid - the theme of the movie - and a running gag in the film, played for laughs. It wasn’t the point of the film. One aspect of the presence of a big corp causes a problem; the problem is solved. The big corp is not molested or maligned or otherwise fought. It isn’t treated as a bad guy or even as an enemy.
“That was just a comedy trope.”
You literally mistook the comedy trope - corporatism - for the movie’s main theme at the expense of ignoring the movie’s theme - a farcical link between genetics and intellect - that is literally part of the movie’s title.
“Again, this is the result of reading far too much into waht was a cynical comedy sketch”
Friend, coming away from a movie called “Idiocracy” and determining that it’s about corporations is some serious deep-diving into a film, only to miss and get the result from onesself. That projection may be what is leading you astray.
"As people eventually come to understand that the strict ability to control your mouth has no direct correlation with self-awareness or inner complexity-" is such a banger line. This applies in so many contexts where so much of our judgement is based on face-value perceptions.
I never bothered to think about the movie much (or think at all) but it always struck me as a fantasy for people with self-proclaimed above average intelligence who say most people are dumb and we shouldn't allow them to vote etc
Uh I haven’t watched the whole video yet. But I would like to correct this - the film explicitly shows that Joe is NOT above average intelligence. This is the entire joke - that in this world a very, very average man is seen as a genius in this dystopian world.
@@zenleeparadise My personal experience, but most people that think they are wildly intelligent and everyone else is dumb are also exceptionally average intelligence.
Exactly what I thought the first time through. Elitist propaganda targetted at people who precieve themselves as superior.
Rift Vallance I just don’t see this, though. You would have to sincerely believe that other people are like those depicted as the masses in this world to have this view of it - this world is so absurdly removed from ours that this reading seems like a leap. The average person today IS better and smarter than those depicted as the majority in this film.
I mean...most people ARE dumb though.
I always found things deeply misanthropic that blame the worst nature of the populace as the cause of their own misfortune to be almost akin to victim blaming someone in a toxic relationship. It's almost like the well established power structures abuse the worse parts of us to perpetuate themselves and then blame us for being awful.
Dyer to be absolutely fair in that exact example you gave if we weren’t bad we couldnt be abused by those power structures.
@@theadtheogrekiller5629 There's a difference between your worst flaws being inevitable and naturally self destructive than having them be toyed with and exacerbated by a 3rd party. For example someone may be an recovering drug addict and have that weakness exploited by lets say a toxic lover to keep them dependent on them. You don't call the addict to have been doomed from the start cause they had the potential for addiction. By your line of logic people just even having the potential to do bad things is their own personal moral failing.
Dyer by my line of logic flaws are flaws. Even in my worst situations that seem to be not my fault I could’ve done something differently to change it. I find it more productive to improve myself then to focus on who is causing my tragedy. That isn’t to say those outside forces aren’t to blame, just that I’m the only factor that I know I can 100 percent control, therefore I’m the only piece of the puzzle I have control over.
And so I always blame myself
@@theadtheogrekiller5629 Interesting point, though its honestly a shame this isn't about you or how pragmatically self critical you claim to be. When discussing the by nature broad topic of misanthropy attempting to steer the conversation away from the broad effects, changes, and power that effect our society but rather to a petty and self centered view of morality that all but claims the reason people are immoral is because we're almost as a species incapable of self critical reflection is such a blatant attempt of well poisoning I find myself emotionally and physically taxed from processing either the sheer bad faith you must come into this discussion or that you don't realize the inherent hypocrisy of claiming your supposedly infinitely self critical moral stance lets you make a species wise judgement call on morality with such confidence. I'm terribly sorry not all of us can be so noble as to pursue the quest for eternal self judgement, but it's almost like people can pursue self improvement AND be aware of and criticize the existing power structures that effect all of our lifes. Assuming you can't or even shouldn't try fix anything beyond yourself is narrow minded, and only breeds a continuation of the status quo.
@@theadtheogrekiller5629 To me, it really reads like such absolute self-focus is itself a flaw that you should work on. If something is an external threat, and by acting upon the threat you could stop it, isn't doing so the obvious best course of action? If a power structure causes harm, and power structures are created by people, it follows that people can stop harmful power structures. The solution's pretty clear here.
hmm, seems like you're overthinking it. it's just a movie, after all
(also I would love to see the reaction of anyone involved in the protest against margaret thatcher shutting down the mines watching the "dumb angry mobs" riot because they all just suddenly lost their livelihoods)
Exactly, SJWs always overthinking things
Me, "This guy is a good troll" looks at username, "I'm an idiot."
Margaret Thatcher didn't shut down the coal mines to protect the public health, attempting to rebuild her nation after devastation directly caused by capitalist opportunism. That seems like an important difference between that historical event and the one in the film.
For a brief moment I took this comment earnestly before remembering the Sky High gag. Great stuff lol
@@noneofyourbusiness4616 And the current one we are living through. Anyone paying attention to people protesting stay-at-home orders? I am already making a bad name for myself so I didn't want to say anything in the comment of this video but the timing couldn't have been worse for the points Patricia is trying to make.
Also the introductory sequence of the movie seems to suggest that higher IQ people are less capable of cooperating than lower IQ people, since the high IQ couple is still hung up on petty things while the lower IQ couple manages to stay together in way worse condition (which, according to the movie, they may have brought upon themselves, but that's not the point).
In a hostile environment, the ability to cooperate is essential for survival: if you and the rest of your group can't help each other, you will die tomorrow. In fact, I'd say that is a much more essential trait than intelligence, which helps you improve your condition in the long run.
So yeah, if high IQ people were as the intro showed, they would have been culled by natural selection at a much greater rate than low IQ people, and it would be them that can only exist thanks to natural selection being removed.
The fact that the movie uses the phrase "Natural selection rewards the strongest, fastest, smartest" is a telling sign. That's how natural selection is taught in middle school. Actually scratch that. When I went to middle school (a long time ago), the teachers made an effort to offer us a significantly more nuanced take than that.
I mean, I get it, it's just a movie, but it's so weird because it didn't even NEED this stupid eugenics angle. It could have simply went with "in the future people are dumb because consumerism" angle, which yeah, is a bit cliché, but also not so stupid.
Or even no "logical explanation" maybe a space wizard cursed humanity, it doesn’t matter
If you can't justify your world's existence without resorting to eugenics it might be worth considering... not justifying it? Plenty of fantasy and adjacent works get along just fine ignoring the question of "how did we get here". For a recent example take Nimona. The film never sees fit to specify *if* Nimona had a creation story or just always existed. Much less how she came to exist and it works because it doesn't need to make sense.
If you want to write a world filled with idiots you could literally just write a world where the point is the absurdity of not knowing how this world functions.
It'd still need a heavy rewrite of course.
I temember making something in those lines for dumb fun with a friend.a wizard tried to make a virility potion that has gone *R E A L L Y* wrong and essentially turned everyone into extremely strong,extremely stupid and highly unstable barbarians with all sort of absurd mutations and obsessions.the difference is that we did not try to pretend we were predicting the future of humanity,we were just laughing at the fictional equivalent of a punching bag
Your last paragraph is literally just Wall-E.
You're misreading the issue with the high IQ couple. It's implied that they've grown to resent each other because they failed to have children. You are reversing the causality. The actual reason the high IQ couple puts off having children is because they want to wait until they are ready, so the children grow up a good environment. Since high IQ people put such high requirements on themselves for having children, they have fewer kids.
The low IQ parents just breed with reckless abandon, so they have more kids. The reason they're not being selected out is due to medical advances and other technologies that protect them from their own stupidity.
Honestly, I want more videos where the reviewer suggests a piece of art that does what the subject matter is trying to do better.
What did they suggest
@@Alianger "Sorry To Bother You"
Thankfully since then I've seen a lot of "Why X works and Y doesn't" videos.
“Just a trick to get you to watch Sorry To Bother You” The best tricks are the ones where everyone benefits while having a laugh.
Please don’t make me look at negative-exposure clips anymor
You'll have to tell that to the copyright boogeyman...
@@SimGunther I like hearing movie critiques and discussions but this negative filter is disgusting. Would be way better with stills or if Patty or whoever just drew crude depictions of the scene in crayon or whatever.
Philip Ramirez you can set your screen to inverse colors and it makes it look normal again
My eyes are on fire
@@Agos226 not really
Went from "dumb people lol" to phrenology like that
'Cause it's not that long of a stretch.
Gotta be careful with that phrenology, we got incels shooting themselves because they dont have Muh Perfect Caucasoid Jawline
Where was the phrenology?
I'm surprised that Mike Judge isn't a Quillette member
@@AstraIVagabond The movie didn't compare skulls or imply race was related in any way to intelligence.
Sure, it starts with eugenics but that joke hit both sides. Dumb folk can't keep it in their pants and smart folk are afraid of sex. Also, half of it was Brawndo's fault for misleading the already less intelligent public so they could become even more idiotic and easier to control.
You said "I win" and you didn't follow it up with a "bye-bye".
Disgusting.
Missed such a great Dunkey reference
@@DeronHargrove paying reverence to a youtube creator in your video would be weird. the video would be worse with a direct reference
@@juneguts I guess I'll agree to disagree. She already did in the beginning with Sky High and fascism video
I was the only person in my family who didn't like this movie when it came out in my teens. As a comedy, as a sci fi, as social commentary - on every level, it's just entirely unpleasant. It appealed way too much to the neolib fantasy that the problems of economic inequality are largely the result of individual choices or failings on the part of the very people who are harmed by those problems. Y'know, the same fantasy that is killing us all as we speak.
Sorry To Bother You is loads better in every dimension. Perfect comparison. Brava.
I'm not understanding the reasoning that the citizenry aren't at fault for the society as much as anything else. I'm not trying to be hostile, I'm trying to understand. Wouldn't you blame the citizens of a society for electing Trump who then funnels more legislation that suppresses and harms the majority of the population? To me that seems to be a given. I think that believing that we're fundamentally incapable of not seeing through at least enough of the blatant propaganda to have more of our best interests at heart and acting accordingly, is even more misanthropic. I'm just not understanding this sentiment.
@@mushroomheaification Individuals make the choices that are available to them.
For instance, when birth control and abortion are readily available, as well as sex education, and when healthcare is available in general, people tend to have fewer children. We have seen this happen.
So while it's true that individuals make choices, they're typically in response to social factors they have no control over.
And as for Trump, remember that most people DIDN't vote for him. He was not elected democratically. We haven't had truly democratic elections in many years, perhaps never, due to large-scale voter suppression and outright disenfranchisement of various minority groups. (This is not widely believed, but I believe it, and I believe it's a reasonable conclusion to come to given the facts) So no, we can't "blame" the citizens for voting for a certain politician when their options are limited (see the systematic exclusion of truly left-wing candidates from most races) and many of them are suppressed from voting at all. (I myself have been unable to vote due to individual circumstances in multiple elections. I don't think anyone has been deliberately keeping me, personally, from voting, but the folks who make the rules know that the more hoops we make voters jump through, the harder it will be for people who are poor, who have insecure housing (and thus can't register under a single, unchanging address) or whose personal identification is subject to change or doubt (trans people, like me, or immigrants, or people who can't afford state-issued IDs) to participate, thus they can keep the system from changing such that these people have a better chance at living well.
Basically, individuals without power don't have a lot of control over the societies they live in.
@@sycastells1212 I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to explain your point and to do so politely and damn near pleasantly. I'll take it to heart and considering I don't believe anything that you said was wrong. In fact I strongly agree with most of it. Perhaps I would suggest from the perspective inside the petri dish I've seen too many people doing horrible things regardless of what options were afforded to them. Too many people who would take the given (for lack of a better word that I can think of atm) unaccountability, and wear it as a shield from any further rebuke.
*That isn't to say what you said was invalid. It's just perspectives inside the metaphorical petri dish are different from the outside looking in. I understand they both can cloud the others perspectives and this very likely is the case for me at the moment.
I myself am trying to find a place of home or community at the moment. I'm a mixed race bi (call me a dude but depending on definitions I don't even know if that's what I am or not) who's pretty much homebound due to psychological and physiological issues, but I'm kind of a social libertarian (Socialist economically, I'm just talking socially) as in I don't really care about how people conduct themselves around me. I'm a very tolerant person towards others, though I am one to voice my opinion. So I find myself searching to find a peoples where I can commingle. Your comment is helping find myself at this time. I want to learn and grow. I'm truly thankful for your time.
@@mushroomheaification I do hope you find a way forward with this. It's not easy. I struggle myself with being compassionate toward others who are acting atrociously. But honestly, it's usually worth it when I try.
@@sycastells1212 I feel that way with the vast majority of people but just the past few years I've seen things that just buckles me. A victim of parental abuse who went on to have serious drug addictions to cope who then dragged her uncared for kids into her issues who then suffered the same kinds of abuse she did. Another person having kids they can't care for and then fighting tooth a nail to keep them regardless of the life they were subjecting and in my opinion condemning them to. Then add in the people who garner less sympathy that use other peoples empathy and sympathy as a foot hold for sustaining their own toxic behavior.
But again, thank you. I mean it. It's nice to reach out and actually have someone catch your hand. It doesn't happen often enough in my opinion. I'll try to pay it forward.
Dunning-Kruger pt II: “Everyone is stupid except me!”
Dunning-Kruger II: South Park Boogaloo
Dunning-Kruger 2: The quickening.
Dunning II: The Krugering.
@@schwarzerritter5724 Dunning Kruger DLC
Literally that image of Homer Simpson saying this exact line.
This movie feels like it helped pave the way for Rick and Morty's "dumb people are good, smart people are cruel and miserable bastards who are always right" philosophy.
I feel like that kind of idea which Rick and Morty parodies has been around for far longer. You can look at Bloodborne and the eldrich lore that inspired it, where knowledge is both power and despair, as well as lots of horror where finding out too much and going beyond the very laws of nature leads the smart but mad scientists to create monsters (Frankenstein) or otherwise meet their doom.
I don't think Rick is framed as the correct one in the show. The entire underlying dark humor of the show comes from the fact that Rick is a subversion of the typical scientist Dr Who type character who can do wrong because he is smart but Rick is still a miserable person at the end of the day and gets a lot of things wrong but dances around that.
@@tigerfestivals5137 steins;gate is a great example of that
But Rick and Morty routinely rips on Jerry, the dumbest person on the show...
@@islandboy9381 the show always proves Rick right. If he suffers it is because he is smart, not because he is an awful person. The suffering is the burden he has to bear for being smart. That's why it's awful.
Honestly at some point it's important to mature a bit and realize that generally people aren't all that bad - nor is the world. There aren't just people that do bad things - there are people that do good things.
Negativity bias just makes people feel like everyone's bad. Getting $10 doesn't feel as good as losing $10 feels bad after all.
Feeling like everyone around you is dumb only helps the people on top who seek to divide us all into capital
We do have a negativity bias, after all, investing the same amount of attention on the good things (which normally don't requiere urgent care or maintanence) than You do the bad things (problems to be solved, things that, if not taken care of, can lead to negative consequences quicker than the lack of positive ones can) will leave you exausted
No. Literally all scientific knowledge on the subject shows that humans in general are “bad.” Every psychology study we do shows that humans are perfectly fine with being bad given any excuse whatsoever.
Humans in general don’t act *malicious.* But we’re still bad, we’re just not actively *trying* to be. But it doesn’t excuse anything.
Calling it misanthropic I think is being generous. Whenever I see media that seeks to portray the masses of people or the public at large in a way that shows them to be unfit to hold political power, I just tend to call that media anti-democratic.
You think calling something anti-democratic is more harsh than saying it evokes a hatred of humanity?
Misanthropy is inherently antidemocratic because a misanthrope would say people can't have self determination because they're inherently bad
How many Trumps, Borises, and Bidens will it take before you acknowledge that huge swathes of the population are incapable of making good political decisions?
The public _is_ by-default unfit to hold political power. No, someone with zero political knowledge should not be allowed to have their uninformed opinions affect politics.
What we need is a democracy of the educated. If people can demonstrate knowledge in the relevant area, they can vote on those topics. If you want to vote on Brexit, you should have to pass a test on the nature of the EU and international relations. If you want to vote in a general election, then at the very least you should have to demonstrate that you understand the policies of the party you're voting for. Have people do a political science course before they get to vote. Something. _Anything._
Never forget that the goal should be ensuring the best political decisions are made. Democracy without qualification is, at best, a heuristic.
@@amaryllis0 Cyan Griffin Awful, awful comment. Just wow. Get out of here with that technocratic bs pal. The problems of the world don't come from an excess of democracy. The state we labour under now is profoundly lacking in democratic decisionmaking. The system of liberalism that exists now *is* what you claim to want. Power is already delegated to political "elites" who supposedly know best. All your idea would do to change it is to alter the selection of these people, from a quasi-democratic choice by the people from a preselected list of candidates vetted by the political establishment, to a pure meritocratic bureaucratic nightmare.
The problems you mention aren't caused by people having too much power. It's the exact opposite. The miniscule amounts of power the masses do have isn't enough to stop the tendency of oligarchy to deteriorate into despotism and poor governance. What's needed is to increase the amount of power held by the masses. To not merely have them employ their one vote in a system where it's been proven to be an irrational and illogical decision for anyone to actually bother participating in it. But instead to actually have the issues of public concern be decided by the public. If your concern is people not being informed and active enough in absorbing information necessary to make reasonable decisions, then the solution would be to actually incentivize people to get informed by having their decisions matter. To have the matters decided on by democracy have weight. One example of decision that aren't democratically made today is when we go to war. In all the history of the world, every decision to go to war has been made by ruling classes. As Eugene Debs put it "in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people."
And that really gets at the bedrock of what makes democracy important. Contrary to what technocrats and liberals obsessed with the myth of meritocracy will say, governance is not something evaluated by competence and incompetence, but by values and interests. Of all the people you point to - Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and any others like them - all of these people have basically the same level of expertise and information behind them as their opponents. Trump doesn't implement policy himself, no more than any other modern leader. It is handled by the bureaucracy, the civil service. For all the positions of authority appointed by Trump, there is a multitude of Harvard educated republicans to fill them. What makes governments like these bad is not that they are filled by stupid people carrying out stupid plans. It's that they are filled with people with horrible and repugnant ideas and priorities, carrying out plans that accomplish horrible aims. Or to put it another way, monsters carrying out evil plans. It is a matter of ideology, of what our aims are. Fascism isn't bad because it's stupid and harms everyone, but because it is evil and seeks to improve the lives of a tiny portion of the population by exploiting and slaughtering the rest.
Why do I bring this up? Because values are what determines good policy. The world doesn't have this famine-level shortage of smart people as you seem to think. There are people, think tanks, parties and academics ready to make plans and strategies for whatever side holds power, whatever their policy goals are. So when we elect politicians it's not the most important thing above any other consideration to make sure they are the smartest of smarties, because they aren't the ones making everything run by themselves anyway. We don't need to put Steven Hawking in control of Britain and trust his intelligence to put things to right. What we need to prioritise is making sure the decisions made and the policy chosen in government are ones that benefit the majority of people. That they don't merely enrich the already rich and make life easier for the upper classes while doing little and less for the poor and marginalized.
So to sum up, stop venerating intelligence above everything else and actually think about what the priorities should be when we deal with politics. Because politics is about resource distribution, not just about efficiency. And stop trying to make a country work like a corporation with a fucking board of directors by getting rid of democracy and putting power in the hands of the best educated. In a modern rationalized society that comes second to how they actually view the role of the state and whose interests they want it to protect and further.
@@vallraffs Huge amounts of your comment are targetting straw-positions I don't hold and never said nor implied.
I never said anything about candidates or vetting candidates based on their intelligence? You just plucked that out of thin air.
You fail to address the objective facts that huge proportions of the population voted for and support candidates like Trump and Boris. The problem is not some strawman that I think Trump and Boris have low IQs and thus are unqualified, but that these candidates are obviously harmful and are going to enact policies which make their societies worse. The problem then is that our system gives power to the masses who, we can agree, are making the wrong decision. And why are they making the wrong decision? Well yes, lots of it is about values, but that is ultimately subjective and would set a bad precedent if you were to try and regulate that. But lots of it is about ignorance. Lots of people regret voting to leave the EU because they were ignorant of what it would entail. And ignorance is something which can be objectively measured and prevented against without it being intrinsically biased towards certain parties. It seems plainly to be an objective improvement; if the goal is good decision making, then knowledge about the context of that decision is obviously going to correlate to better decision making. If you're trying to land on the moon, you don't fill the control room with random people off the street just because you think it would be nice if everyone could participate
What I believe is that people should not be ignorant of the things they vote for, that we should ensure people have a knowledge of the facts of the issues on which they are to be allowed to impact. For example, you don't want climate deniers voting on issues of climate change. If someone is believing falsehoods about the nature of the EU, they shouldn't be allowed to vote on Brexit. A system that allows this has failed.
I do not, in fact, "venerate intelligence above everything else". I just take issue with giving power to the uninformed and misinformed. The only goal is creating the best society possible in order to maximise the wellbeing of humanity, and if pure, unqualified democracy is less efficient at that than other methods, then out the window it should go.
I remember a friend showing me Idiocracy. He was really, really hyped to show me and I went and rented it for us. I ended up absolutely hating it.
I didn’t even really know why I hated it at the time. Something about it just innately frustrated and upset me. As someone with undiagnosed autism and a history of being treated like I’m dumb, strange or otherwise lesser, the film felt like it was punching down at people like me. The eugenics angle at the beginning of the film wasn’t lost on me, but I figured I was just thinking too hard about it and decided this was something I needed to turn my brain off to enjoy. But the movie just got worse to me.
Look, I can enjoy dumb humor. I can enjoy offensive jokes. I can’t help that I still laugh at peepeepoopoo and the VERY cringe joke that I am a furry that desperately tries to convince you I am not a sexual deviant while there’s literally BDSM gear on my nightstand. But a whole movie of nothing but dumb/offensive humor and telling me I theoretically would suck if I were in this universe gets grating pretty quickly.
Everyone would suck if they lived in this world because it’s a world where everyone is basically the same, but you decided to take it as some personal attack. Autism doesn’t make you stupid, and embracing stupidity as a society is a pretty bad idea (that’s where we came from)
@reiianyt best response, was thinking something similar.
You didn’t like it, because you hate the truth
I just finished watching the movie about 30 minutes ago, and before I start the video I'd just like to say that the line,
"After several hours, Joe finally gave up on logic and reason, and simply told the cabinet that he could talk to plants and that they wanted water."
Absolutely made me lose my shit.
That is all.
I would like point out that the uncomfortably close proximity between genetic engineering and eugenics is there, but genetic engineering isn't (generally) a euphemism or interchangeable. In transhumanist circles, especially leftist ones, it's a given rule of etiquette that you've got to bring a lot of nuance and walk on eggshells when talking about genetic engineering or the eugenicists will try and hijack your points. It's like how punks have to weed out fascists and Marxists have to weed out tankies.
Editing in a great example from Citizen Cyborg by James Hughes: Chapter 4 specifically deals with intelligence and genetics. It opens talking about Francis Galton founding the concept of eugenics and predicting a decline in intelligence since "lower classes and non-white races, who they believed to be less intelligent, had higher birthrates." A lot like the opening to Idiocrarcy. But it immediately goes into detail of how the opposite has been happening and intelligence has been rising, a phenomenon dubbed the Flynn Effect. "There is no widely accepted explanation for the Flynn Effect, but the causes are assumed to be entirely environmental." It lists some contributing environmental factors then goes into how this creates a systemic feedback loop with poverty. Only then it gets into the genetic side, citing research from a UVA professor that saw genetic factors having very little influence to poor kids' intelligence but a higher influence on the intelligence of affluent kids, essentially meaning that genetics are largely irrelevant until environmental factors have been standardized for everyone. But even then it notes there's an inevitable biological threshold for human intelligence that technology and medicine can surpass.
It's an excellent turnaround of framing: genetic engineering is not a necessary response to some form of degradation, but an enhancement to the limitations we'll eventually hit *after* standardizing environmental factors.
In the context of Idiocracy I feel like this is splitting hairs.
@@brianb.6356 oh yeah, Idiotocracy is absolutely using it as a euphemism for eugenics, but a lot of transhumanist ideals aren't commonplace in politics yet, so this might be quite a few people's first exposure to the concept and I don't them walking away with a purely bad impression. Genetic engineering is a potentially great field. *Potentially*.
Surely you mean Marxists have to weed out Trotskyists, right?
@@Arrakiz666 Hopefully the trots can dodge a few icepicks.
@@AbstractTraitorHero Best luck to 'em. I mean, I'm not gonna swing any less effectively, still, all the power to 'em!
I don’t remember subscribing to this channel but I’m so glad I did, very interesting video and a well constructed critique!
Oh, now I remember, it was the PragerU ytp
I already watched Sorry To Bother You, so I win more. Ha.
Everyone who watches Sorry To Bother You before or after watching this video wins.
@@chocokittybo yup win win situation
The real winners were the comrades we made along the way.
@@chocokittybo What about during?
@@blarg2429 So long as you don't miss anything you still win
Yay!
Seemingly-innocent-comedies-turning-out-to-be-about-eugenics is my favorite subject!
It's a niche genre that's growing rapidly.
Eh look at any interview with the author and he says it's both nature and nurture - eugenics is the complete wrong reading. We know that culture is inheretable, and being
It's a bit annoying when one do cultural criticism and can't Google for a few minutes before making a massive script. And criticism is a bit more than finding problematic issues. This is looking more like breadtube click bait - I expected something deeper than "oh this might be problematic" repeated a hundred times.
@Jacqueline A Death of the author is no excuse to ignore it, especially if you say things such as "I have no idea what was happening in the writers room". The death of the author makes more sense if you write fanfic, not when you insist on a specific exclusionary interpretation.
@@informativt It doesn't matter what the author says the movie's message is supposed to be, if that message doesn't actually come across. All that does is make the author look merely incompetent, rather than outright malicious.
@@tomshraderd4915
It didn't come across that way to me honestly. I think the parts about consumer culture and irresponsibile behavior stood out to me and eugenics not so much.
I think these are all valid critiscisms, but they come across like they put too much value in subjective interpretations. "I interpreted this movie to promote eugenics, eventhough the author made clear that it doesn't, so the author is either evil or dumb."
On the subject of Mike Judge, I've always thought Office Space kind of squandered some of it's potential by never addressing that banal office culture never HAD to be a thing. Coincidentally, that's something Sorry To Bother You's also more introspective about.
i really appreciate the 'compare & contrast with a second movie you'd actually recommend' bit, because the "arggh, it could have been good!" feeling really eats me up inside when thinking abt poorly-executed movies
I don't believe that idiocracy is a poorly executed movie.
The visuals for this were just aggghhhhh, but it’s still a great video
Oh, it’s for a copyright claims, damn
I‘m very late to the party I know. I‘ve watched this essay for the firs time, when it came out.
I‘m glad that you focused on the opening sequence so much, because, I feel like, all of the failings of „Idiocracy“ basically hinge on it‘s explanation of the rise of „stupidity“. If the idiocy in „Idiocracy“ had been painted as a result of the system people had to live and participate in, it would‘ve been a (maybe even good) political satire.
The way it is though, it isn‘t even a *political* satire at all.
The way it is, it just gives off the vibe of 90s/2000s edgy comedy for kinda pretentious college-boys.
The movie is based on a short story. The March of the Morons or The Marching Morons.
It was more about the collapse of civilization than the genetics of humans. The short story was much better than the movie.
In the original story, the elite ran the world and brought "Joe" out of the freezer to start a revolution.
The only thing I liked about that movie is the designs for buildings and tech modeled after fast food restaurants and preschool toys
The ending line "not bad for an average Joe", is clearly giving the message that you don't need to be some kind of genius to make positive change. Just realize the importance of education and striving for knowledge, something slowly being lost in a Capitalist consumer culture that deliberately dumbs us down to produce obedient drones.
Go ahead and criticize the misanthropic themes if you want, at least you correctly identify those. But racist? Just as many white people (if not more) are depicted as being stupid as other races. so by racial measures the movie offended with equal opportunity. But as far as the opening goes, it's using exaggerated American stereotypes of "stupid" and "smart" people for the satire and has little resemblance to reality. You took clear silliness seriously.
One time me and my dad were discussing Idiocracy and I said “it’s just eugenics!” and he responded with “what’s that?” I cannot make this shit up
The realocracy
You can't expect everyone to know the same things as you. We all have separate paths in life which provides vastly differing educations and accrued knowledge. Whatever lead you to learning what eugenics means does not guarantee someone else from ever hearing of the word. Hell, it was probably the first time he even heard the word. That doesn't make him dumb, it means you quite literally brought up a new term for him.
@@robertsides3626 Yep. People don't know certain things, but that's not a big problem. The issue is that some are unwilling to learn.
@@robertsides3626 I mean, I'm suprised because I learned this shit in school during ww2 study
aykay tm we have no indication whatsoever that OP’s dad is one of those people
Thank you. I've been desperately wanting more people to recognize this for so long.
No joke, I immediately watched Sorry to Bother You after you started talking about it at the end. Highly recommend it to anyone who watched this video and hasn't seen it yet. Brilliant stuff.
I loved idiocracy when I was, 13, and have sense not really cared for it. This summed up a lot of latent feelings I had about it, and the parallels to Sorry to Bother You are so glaringly obvious I can’t believe I never made the connection. now I know why I like STBY so much more
Oh my gosh! A Patricia Taxxon video essay about politics and pop culture?? Why is this exactly what I didn't know I needed??
sorry to bother you is so good. laughed out loud when you said you didn't spoil it.
Saw it in the cinema with a friend, we both began to lose interest around the "rapping" scene... and then things went mental. Absolutely brilliant.
@@lordhoot1 oh god i watched it on dvd and i couldn't bear to watch any part where the [SPOILERS REDACTED] were there. i literally looked away i can't imagine seeing it in theaters
@@luiysia what, you anti-equisapien bro?
Yeah, it’s sad when people relate any speech predicaments with low intelligence.
But low intelligence is most likely there
Or Southern accents. As someone with a Southern accent, it has absolutely nothing to do with someone's education or intelligence.
You mean impediments? Grammar impediments 😂 ? Sorry I couldn't help myself. You aren't wrong, but use of language has correlation to education. Intelligence and education are two different things though and don't always go hand in hand.
@@gaiusjuliuscaesar9296 Any accent, really...
@@milspec1 if i speak two languages does that mean i am two times smarter?🤔
"Intelligence" is heritable, but only because poverty is heritable. The reason poorer people tend to be less educated and thus "less intelligent" is because they have less resources by which to support themselves and to support the education of their children. It can be difficult to educate and raise children when both parents need to work and thus won't be able to ensure their child goes to school and gets their school work done and advocate for them in school. Furthermore the stresses of poverty are known to have a detrimental effect on education. When children are thinking: "where am I going to sleep tonight, will I be able to eat tonight?" they won't be able to focus on their studies no matter how hard they try. Furthermore they may even have to divide their times between studying and caring and looking after their younger siblings. They may eventually be forced to drop out of school or be unable to attend college so that they can work and help to support their families. But with only a high school education they will only be able to get low paying jobs leaving them mired in the exact same poverty that plagued their parents. Thus the solution to this problem is not to control the sexuality of the poor but instead to ensure that the basic needs of the poor are met. If the poor do not need to worry about paying rent, buying food, and pay for basic utilities because those are provided through their taxes and they are paid a livable wage they will be able to improve themselves and their communities. Leading to a more educated and prosperous population. The problem with this solution is that it will cost the ultra wealthy their army of unskilled laborers whose surplus labor they can exploit. It also leads to a large class of people who can devote more time to question social systems challenge the authority of traditional elites. It's much more profitable to cull the poor and control their reproductive rates than to uplift them out of poverty.
This! This comment deserves more likes.
this critique actually fixes the whole movie. instead of the original prologue where low iq is inherited from low iq parents who breed too much, just show the results of poverty as a lack of education makes people less aware of their surroundings and easier to manipulate. you can keep the whole plot about the drink company buying the government and ruining crops and it would actually be an admittingly on the nose, but relevant and accurate portrayal of capitalism
@@courtneys.7113 Not to mention-considering the events that led up to "Idiocracy" took hundreds of years, I'm also under the impression that the suppression of information has a greater effect generationally? Like, there are children being born who will only know the world Brawno has crafted in the minds of their parents. They've never heard about how water keeps plants alive because Brawno made an effort to erase that information.
""Intelligence" is heritable, but only because poverty is heritable."
I'm pretty sure there has to be at least some genetic heritability. Otherwise, we wouldn't even have evolved human-level intelligence in the first place. Here's one study that found 58% heritability for IQ in Japan.
link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01067719
IQ is not based on a person's education level, or having any prior education. It's mostly about pattern recognition, and spatial reasoning. These things can be tested for without prior educatioin, or income level.
How anyone can misunderstand philosophy and misanthropy this much is beyond me.
Can I just say that I appreciate that at the end of this review it turned out that you weren't just shiting on a piece of media, but rather shiting on it and then proposing a solution to said problems with an example of the same concept better executed.
That put you miles above a lot of TH-cam videos doing hot takes on stuff like this.
That said, a misanthropic view of society is very much a consistent undercurrent in Mike judge's work. From the very first Milton short and frog baseball all the way up to Silicon Valley. You really get the impression that Mike Judge really just thinks people, in general, are complete garbage by default.
when that trailer burned down his take was "this sucks bc Beavis can't say 'fire' anymore" even though a little girl died
wait didn't he make a down-to-earth comedy portraying fat texan people sympathetically?
i think this movie is pretty coherent in its passive nihilism, especially with the corporate takeover towards the end of the movie.
the company does a corrupt thing, initially because the people in power see how it benefits them, then later because the people in power are too stupid to see how it solves their crisis.
the average intelligence protag then sees the simple solution, without realizing the broader macroeconomic concerns that are usually the job of a team of trained professionals to track.
just like the people who used to be in power, he uses naive arguments like "i can talk to plants" to justify gaining power and later "the plants grew!" to justify the unemployment caused by his actions, and thus saves himself and allows him to restore the bourgeois world he misses.
the movie was nihilistic from the start, coldly describing disgenic phenomena that are naively plausible, mockingly caricaturing the shallow consumerist world we live in now, and coldly describing corporate takeover of the government.
i dont think the movie is advocating for eugenics or for corporate responsibility, the movie was advocating for seeing it all as an absurd joke, possibly at the expense of impaired people. now that still means the movie is at best coping for nihilists and at worst circle-jerking for misanthropists, but i do think it does either of these things relatively coherently.
now enabling nihilism and misanthropy is certainly aesthetically/spiritually problematic, and perpetuating "foreign accent = dumb" "bad with words = dumb" is rewarding lack of empathy, so for those points I like this critique, but my points still stand. The movie is still morally bad, just coherent in its badness.
Haven’t even seen this movie but I’m just going to assume President Terry Crews is the only un-ironically worthwhile thing here.
he's also in sorry to bother you.
Here.
I saved you some time.
Your assumption is correct
He's basically Charlemagne with a gun, it's great.
Basically
As Patricia pointed out, some of the sight gags are also good.
Honestly, this is one of my favorite movies, but I've been learning more about its connections with modern eugenics history, and although I still enjoy it, I can't really view it in the same way anymore . For all of the times I've watched it, I always interpreted the opening three-minute sequence as a lament over the nurture/environmental/behavior factors passed down to kids rather than genetics. It was also an extreme caricature of two cultural stereotypes, guilty of dehumanizing and oversimplifying both the "responsible, educated, upper-class" and the "hot-blooded, uneducated, lower-class" tropes for comedic effect (clearly, the latter of the two families gets the shorter end of the stick in its depiction).
Ultimately, I think this is a cultural critique and clearly silly premise used to vent anxieties about a cultural majority losing interest in education, logic, ethics, courtesy, healthy social connections, personal growth, and so on, because it overvalues automated services, entertainment, and instant gratification. To this end, I think it mostly works, but there's an obvious flaw.
Idiocracy emphasizes the LOSS of ethnocentric, elitist culture and shows us a society that is DEFINED BY that loss rather than just DIFFERENT from that culture, sporting positive and negative features. It's not even close to a realistic scenario because it's a film overflowing with hyperbole, but I don't realistic worldbuilding was Mike Judge & co.'s goal in this film. It bears almost no resemblance to historical, linguistic, or cultural developments in the way its setting and society function. For the most part, I think this was a toilet-humor daydream about exploring an "idiot" dystopia and as well as an exaggerated imagining of people failing to think critically on a large scale.
I like what you've done here--after all, social darwinism and eugenics theories throughout the last couple centuries were SO pervasive, appealing, and dangerous that we still see consequences of them today. "Survival of the fittest" sounds like a common-sense statement at first, but it quickly becomes dark when considering that the traits defining what was "fittest" were typically devised by those seeking to maximize their OWN worth through cultural elitism and racial superiority over others scapegoated as "unfit."
Eugenics was popularized by Enlightenment thinkers and appealed to elitists and people of lower status alike--the narrative was so appealing that all of the heinous implications and consequences that go along with eugenics crept into people's ethical values and formed a new, normal consciousness. SO, in entertainment media like Idiocracy, it's important to pay attention to subject material that could skew as an endorsement of eugenics hiding under a comedy romp.
this is an old comment so i'm just gonna say that the eugenics endorsement in Idiocracy isn't hidden. it's the first part of the movie in plain text.
It's not eugenics to decide not to have children. Eugenics itself, believe it or not, isn't an inherently evil idea, so long as it is VOLUNTARY. What made eugenics so vile was that somebody else was going to decide who could or couldn't breed, and who was "fit" or "unfit," on a very arbitrary characteristic. No individual has the right to decide those things. But on the other hand, parents absolutely do have the right to control whether or not they are going to be parents or not, and the quality of that parenthood. There is a natural tendency for the smarter people to have fewer or no children with more investment in their upbringing, versus the stereotypical dumb hicks breeding like rabbits and passing on the same values to the next generations.
Are there hints of that eugenics philosophy behind this narrative? Sure. But I don't think this prologue is really what Mike Judge is critiquing. It's more a quick explanation to get us to the world of the future. Once we actually see the future, then the real critique begins and it's meant to be social satire of the present, not any sort of prediction about the future. If you walk away from the film thinking it's pro-eugenics, evidently the commentary went way over your head.
I don't think the protest at the end was supposed to represent labour protest. I read it more as a metaphor for how masses could be mislead into protesting against their own interests (Like we're seeing right now with everyone protesting to reopen businesses during an epidemic rather than demanding welfare, fairer pay or UBI).
It is an interesting way to interpret it, but I don't see it that way.
You are smart and everybody else is stupid for not seeing those obvious solutions.
I think the creator of this video missed the point of the entire movie
@@robertbaur3145 which is?
@@islandboy9381that stupidity can become a value and ignorance a deliberate choice. unless people value intelligence and critical thinking people will just choose whatever seems easier simpler. The movie goes out of it's way to demonize automation and taking things for granted. Idiocracy is the inevitable end byproduct of mindless consumerism
Robert Baur You know you could've had a point if the movie didn't go out of it's way to say that only a low IQ populace would fall so easily for those values and that that's the reason they let themselves get ruled over so easily.
I've had sorry to bother you on my list for several months now, but after this I'm moving it to the top. Well played, Patricia. You do win.
everyone is stupid except of me, the movie
You can’t have issues with Misanthropic
If you just look at the way
2020 is
People are just so angry
And Rude all the time
Humanity this year has gotten crazy
Intelligence is genetic to a degree, but like most things it also has a huge environmental factor. I’ve heard gifted children can have stunted growth if they aren’t allowed to flourish at their own pace but instead are forced to adhere to the school system.
It’s like a seed, not every seed can grow into the same plant, but no matter what kind of plant emerges it’s still up to us to grow it into the best version of its kind it can be.
+Thead The ogre killer But the issue is that “intelligence” is an incredibly subjective thing to judge.
Evan Blenkinsopp intelligence is simply a combination of several mental abilities given to us thru evolution. Intelligence only becomes subjective when speaking in small degrees of difference or when using separate mental abilities to test. Despite this it must be quantifiable as any other trait found in nature. Honestly it’s like memory, we know it exists and we know it’s quantifiable, but we don’t necessarily have the tools for pin point accuracy when studying it.
This doesn’t refute its existence or measurability, just as our ignorance to bacteria and atoms and even gravity did not refute its existence nor its place in our world. So far we have concluded that intelligence is found more often then not in social and predatory animals, and is most likely to evolve in species that require problem solving skills when surviving. We have also found that pattern recognition plays a huge part, as it helps us use and learn information. This can be as simple as a bear learning where the fish like to frequent and by using this info is able to find the best fishing spot even in rivers it hasn’t been to yet. It can also be as game changing as realizing the correlation between heat and fire and figuring out how to make and utilize it with friction. Life is a collection of patterns and being able to recognize them is the first step to utilizing them.
The way he solves the agricultural crisis by telling the future leaders that he can talk to plants always gets a rise out of me.
I wonder if I can make people care about the environment a little more if I said I can talk to plants.
birb
Thanks for making me hate a movie I love lol. Seriously, you're being pretty much as fair as possible to the movie, and as a fan of it I know you didn't take anything out of context, so I appreciate seeing you dissect it like this.
My dad (who funnily enough is a self-described socialist) absolutely LOVES this movie, and I just never really could. I found it a really dumb concept and thought it became like the 21st century movie equivalent of 1984 - in the sense that people who didn't understand the source material will always use it as a point to prove that the other side is bad.
Sorry to bother you is brilliant. My union branch and i did an online watch party of it recently. I LOVE the way it shows solidarity in everything. The football guys are so good.
The much darker story, The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth is supposedly the inspiration for idiocracy. The book has a clearly eugenic meaning, the film ... not so much. The film is not a left wing dystopian fairy tale but a liberal one I think based upon highly subjective view of their superiority.
Anyone tired of people comparing everything Idiocracy. I swear it's the new 1984
The thing is, 1984 doesn't preach eugenicist, neoliberal dogma like this film does
@@TheNinja94a Oh I wasn't judging the actual quality of either work. I'm just tired of hearing "we're literally living in the Idiocracy"
Whenever I hear someone use Idiocracy to describe the state of the world, I want to punch them in the face.
@Sahja Nhabeni George Orwell was cool as hell, sad people don't read homage to catalonia nearly as much as 1984.
@Sahja Nhabeni I agree that it also has points about big brothetism and like authoritarianism, but yeah the anti-semetism is clearly a big point of sorts as well.
Orwell as an Anarcho-Syndicalist/Communist really inspired me and made me pretty happy to hear about his other books like homage to catalonia.
And it convinces me he was probably at least in his heart a pretty somewhat swell guy, though I admit to not knowing everything about him or ever having a hard copy of his books.
Thankfully we have library's and the Internet.
Humans aren't getting stupider we've always been stupid
I never liked the idea that, in the future, people just got dumber. It just seemed too unbelievable to me. There's no golden age to return to. The future is always a maybe, maybe good if we make it that way, maybe bad if we don't (or if we make it that way), but there is no golden past to return to. IT NEVER REALLY HAPPENED.
I mean, I could imagine a version of idiocracy where the reason the people got dumber was because of a ploy by corporations/pollution. the best would be a story about an education system designed to make people dumb, but the protagonist eventually finds out that people are uneducated, but not dumb, understands how to work with them to overthrow the unjust order of things.
@@maximeteppe7627 that could actually work well as a story concept and avoid the genetic elements...
YOOOOO I WAS JUST FUCKING THINKING ABOUT HOW SORRY TO BOTHER YOU IS THE EPIC AND BASED VERSION OF THIS BAD BAD BAD MOVIE. SORRY TO BOTHER YOU IS A 10/10!
It is a bit disturbing how so many people either don't notice the eugenics subtext (despite how brazen it is) or are unable to reconcile it.
Or are genuinely on board with it
Many good points. I never really thought of the mob after irrigating the fields with water as mocking labor protests, though. It reads to me as mocking society's desire for instant solutions and getting in our own way of something good because it didn't yield results in the time frame that we wanted. This is why I see Idiocracy being referenced a lot at the time of writing (in the wake of a number of politically motivated protests against stay at home orders that were designed to mitigate the damage of a pandemic) -- stay at home orders work to minimize the spread of covid-19 but it is a long term result, one that if it works feels like you weren't at risk at all. But in the short term, the solution provides immediate negative drawbacks (massive unemployment, psychological issues stemming from isolation, etc.). We stopped the societal model that fed corporations, and we didn't immediately see that the crops were able to start growing as a result. We partially stopped the societal model that fed corporations to stop a pandemic, and people felt they were being made to suffer from a virus they didn't need to worry about because they didn't catch it and a loud portion of propaganda told them not to worry about it.
But yeah, the eugenics stuff is pretty bad. Hard agree on that.
Ok maybe it's just me but Joe's journey kinda felt like it had elements of the "Hero's Journey" archetype to show that he needed to survive trials and learn how to communicate on the level of the people he's destined to lead (I suppose you could call Frito a mentor?).
Hell, considering his "rebirth" after the arena and the way he pretended to talk to plants that miraculously grew visibly in just two days... and he marries an "artist"...
Yeah Christ allegory as well, why not.
That was fun. Good video.
found your channel through the end music of hbomb's flat earth video. didn't know you made content like this as well :0
and it's from yesterday? :O
Idocracy feels like a giant missed opportunity. It could've been an interesting cautionary tale about how corporations try to manipulate and deceive people, and the danger that can come from trusting such corporations. But instead it feels like a movie made by hypocritical capitalists who decided the movie's premise was gonna be based in eugenics with the punchline being "haha stupid people funny"
So it's a wasted opportunity because it's not exactly the movie you would have made? Seems like the wasted opportunity is the fact that you're not making the movie you're describing here. I might have given it a watch.
Would have mentioned average intelligence has rose up historically, like a middle school kid that grew up with Bill Nye and understand the importance of hygiene would be smarter that a peasant back at the middle ages
why do the movie be looking like when you have a laptop screen at a 40 degree angle and you try to look at it
Lmao, that's true.
She did this to avoid copyright claims because youtube is still run by a bunch of braindead algorithms.
I think I missed the "and why misanthropy is for dummies" part. Really was looking forward to that.
I agree that Sorry to Bother You is a fantastic film and a much better execution of a similar premise, but it's so easy to imagine a coherent version of Idiocracy, just have a bunch of rich people conspire to replace schooling with corporate propaganda in order to make the general public more compliant. It's literally a real thing that corporations attempt to do and it would even make the plot make more sense. That would be a movie with a core that works, brought down by a reliance on clumsy stereotypes, instead of a movie that fundamentally misunderstands the thing it's trying to satirize and also relies on clumsy stereotypes.
With all the references to brands, it's almost like they had written a coherent script and then some exec went in and clumsily tore out the whole premise (both in the intro and the main body) and replaced it with eugenics, but I don't think there's any evidence that kind of meddling occurred.
I fucking love sorry to bother you. Nothing will beat going into that movie completely blind after selecting it as my movie to watch for a random film assignment and then being hit in the face with its content. Love it.
im convinced with how much people on reddit simp for this film that this is where they were introduced to the eugenics reddit is so into
Reddit is the most leftist thing.
Damn, the trick worked, you won. Watched it immediately after the video and you most definitely did not spoil the movie
Sorry to Bother you is such a fantastic movie. It tackles so much and is just so interesting
Even if we just compare the two as "funny voice gag: the movie" Sorry to Bother You does so much more with their voice gag that it's unreal.
This is my first video seeing you and you rocked it, thanks
I think Idiocracy wants to sincerely blame the irresponsibility of the public/corporate/state for the downfall of future society, but struggles to do so in a 90-minute span while being unclear in its opening that all three create the problem. It's a film that wants to say a lot but struggles to do so. It's flawed but I think in some ways brilliant, crude as it is.
I was super young when I watched this movie, so I thought electrolytes were fake until like mid high school
That's because "Freddy Got Fingered" is high art and you can't change my mind.
I really appreciated this video. I liked Idiocracy when it came out and i was 13, and it's nice to see it through a left perspective now that I'm not 13 anymore. Also i love the way you layer visuals, it's interesting to look at but not distracting. Great video!
What's wild is there is a world where this movie could be made in a way that makes sense. It's a known fact that exposure to like... basically any pollutant can cause mental deficiencies and/or developmental delays. Brawndo/other corporations buying everything so they can pollute as much as they want, causing the populace to be exposed to high levels of harmful pollutants, leading to a populace perpetually bogged down by brain fog for generations, is not anywhere near as far-fetched as the original idea.
The movie is more clearly about the human complacency regarding those subjects rather than the effects they have, IE, criticism of people for accepting it.
You had one good point in the beginning, the rest fell kinda flat to me. But the reccomendatiom at the end is good, I'll watch that
"i like the big costco" is a giant mood at this present moment.
spoken like an idiot
Dude amazing video! Now I have a video to watch and look forward to.
The best way to describe the ideology of the film is essentially pseudo-leftist elitism (also known as limousine liberalism, champagne socialism, etc.). It's ostensibly opposing consumerism, capitalism, and conservatism, but most of the time just ends up insulting the very people it claims to be supporting.
I wasn't expecting a Sorry To Bother You mention but it's nice to see since this weekend, I'm gonna watch it for the first time. Can't wait!
Even when I saw this movie as a young teen, I thought it was dumb. Mostly for its very low brow comedy. Now, I realize that this movie was just a misanthropic and extremely bitter film that is used as an easy strawman for people to create and imagine of those that they see as lesser if they got their way.
I hate this movie, and I thank you for reminding of it by tearing it a new asshole. It was quite satisfying.
You hate it because you're the kind of person it's lampooning. Lmao
@@aithjawcraig9876 I'm sad for people like you who considers lowly Ad Hominem to be good arguments.
@@aithjawcraig9876 so what
LMFAO, "How else am I supposed to take this!" This video is great.
Idiocracy's attempt to criticize both the general populace and the systems ruling them isn't a "pitfall." Whether or not you agree, the choice to represent the population and systems as inseparably entangled was deliberate.
We ARE the systems we've created. An unjust law is unjustly decreed, unjustly enforced, and unjustly ignored. Every step of the process is human. To pretend that corrupt and bureaucratic systems are dragons and not our collective, genuine best effort to make a cohesive social contract shifts the responsibility for evil from us, the angry, dumb mob of humanity, to the formless bogeyman of "systems." It's a scapegoat -- to allow us to reckon with the cognitive dissonance of actively participating in and upholding an evil, stupid society while simultaneously being victimized by it.
But yeah, Sorry To Bother You is a much better movie.
This a great take, I completely agree!
This! Literally this! The movie is not deep ‘nor is it pro anything, the ending lines are “not bad for average Joe”, where at the end he makes a difference and before that, says how people like him, *the average joe*, are complicit in stupidity and corruption,
The movie couldn’t be more blatant
3:43 🎶 _fantasy costco, where all your dreams come true~_ 🎶
Thanks for the reminder to watch the good movie. I used to work in telemarketing this is gonna be fun I feel it
Just watched Sorry to Bother You after your recommendation, and I can confirm for anyone wondering that basically nothing was spoiled here.
It’s incredible how deep you get within the first minute of the video, straight to the point, I like it.
I still occasionally see/here people say "idiocracy is coming true!!" And it's real disappointing.
and it's always the kind of liberals who think Trump happened because poor people are dumb
@@hpoz222 And people who use 'liberals' as an insult.
Dash dot dot which people do you think those are?
I'm a leftist btw
@@blakchristianbale Mostly but not limited to dickheads.
Thank you. Been waiting for this kind of take down for years.
Damn, can't believe you're still the only good TH-camr
I didn't see the protest over unemployment as a satire on labor protests. The first thing that came to mind was most Americans reaction to any kind of socialized health care. They'd rather have money now than any long term benefit later on that they'll definitely need. But yes, this film is not without its issues to someone who took everything it said without thinking about it too much.
xethified but in the movie they were angry over job loss, not tax raises. Those are different issues
@@blakchristianbale I see your point. I still think it's a matter of degrees. Jobs are important when you need them to support yourself and taxation also pinches at the same nerve though the context is admittedly different.
I think I'll watch the movie again and see if I got the same vibe.
Misanthropy is for people who actually question our society and humanity.
this video is painful to watch only because of the copyright editing
Yeah, the negative colors were fucking with my eyes.
Malthus: the movie