The Future is a No Brainer…Literally

Holidays…a time for celebrating, a time for friends and family, but for some of us who are alone it is a time of boredom. Surfing the web, playing online games and reading the news can get old very fast.

As a result of my boredom I went through old episodes of Nova, Discover and The American Experience; somehow intermixed in this stack of DVDs was Idiocracy. This was very deceptive movie; for the first few minutes I thought it was actually a documentary.

The movie starts off discussing natural selection and genetics. It points out that genetic evolution is indifferent to intelligence. The dumbing-down of the world is examined. Intelligent people are having fewer children for a variety of reasons: financial, educational, concern for the environment, and selfishness. People with loose morals, educated by the media and advertising, and those who are on the low end of the economic ladder tend to have more children either because they don’t believe in or don’t understand birth control or possibly because their only amusement is sex. People vote for politicians like they vote for the American Idol. Name recognition is everything

The English language in the film has degraded into catch phrases and meaningless grunts and resembles something akin to ghetto speak as written by Madison Avenue, kind of like modern television shows. In the film, technology runs the world. Technology repairs technology because the people have lost any ability to think. People become slaves to the machines. Reading has become a thing of the past. Common sense has been bred out of the human race. While this film is classified as a black comedy in the same genre as Woody Allen’s Sleeper, to which it bears some semblance, it is more…much more.

Mike Judge, the creator of Bevis and Butthead and Office Space, wrote and directed the film which has garnered a cult like following, but since the film first debuted in 2006 the news, the polls and the election results have proved this film is not truly a satire. This film is a microscopic look into our future.

• Idiocracy at Wikipedia
• Idiocracy at IMDB