Mike Judge is a really creative and intelligent man. I’ve loved so many of his previous creations (Beavis & Butthead, King of the Hill, Office Space, and so on) but I just saw his feature film Idiocracy. This film chimes with so many references I’ve made before in this blog, that at times it was a bit spooky to watch.
The premise is, contrary to the Darwinian notion of evolution being through the survival of the fittest, the human species had engineered a situation whereby only the most mindless and moronic elements in society actually reproduced. The more intelligent, who thought so intensely about whether it was the right time to have children, who worried whether the economic situation was right, and who just didn’t want to rush into it, just never did. Those who were ignorant of any possible consequences of having a child, and much less cared about them, ended up populating the planet with children who they would raise to be as mindless and ignorant as they. Generation after generation of unwanted, unloved, and uneducated children eventually resulted in the average IQ of the species going into decline and society crumbling.
Perhaps the reason this seems so pertinent today is a brief exchange I had yesterday on a website for ex-pats here in Sweden. One poster had started a thread about The Obama Deception – a film that I have my own link to on this blog. The reaction, with one or two exceptions, was typically irritating and pathetic. Some highlights follow:
“ha ha ha ha ha ‘facts’ “
“OP we’ve already reached our quota of right wing American numpties on this site. Please find somewhere else to post your opinions.” - this one came from the aptly-named ‘Thick Edge’.
“We don´t need another right wing extremist.”
“To the posters that say Obama has an agenda….What the hell is ii then? Stop saying he has an agenda STATE what it is with evidence to support your claim. If not just go away.” This poster seemed to be unaware of the sole purpose of the thread, which was to post a link to a film that would answer this very question.
“Those little round brown pills you take aren’t smart pills they are sheep shit.”
Now I don’t mind people disagreeing with me. Having a discussion with someone coming from another angle can teach us things, improve our understanding of our own point of view, make us look at things in different ways, and even change our minds. What I found, and routinely find, irritating about people’s reactions to things they don’t understand is their lack of curiosity; their incredulity that they could possibly learn something from someone else; the absurd notion they don’t know everything already.
The drivel just continued, so, ever willing to lend a hand to a kindred spirit, I decided to enter the fray with this:
“The hallmark of someone who has no counter argument to what he’s saying is that they go after the man, not what he’s saying. It’s wrong that so many people don’t, or can’t, debate the actual issues. If only you could get your heads around the fact that the only way to discredit someone is not to laugh at them, but to defeat their ideas. Are you able to?
This thread started with someone posting a link to a film he made, viewable for FREE, on the internet. Yet not one of you has watched it and tried to debate the ideas, but have literally wasted all that time and energy bickering like children – about NOTHING. Don’t you see how pathetic that is?”
Of course this cut no ice, it rarely does, but sometimes the point of saying something is for your own satisfaction of having said what you believe in. I’ve promised myself I won’t post again, getting sucked into an online argument such as this is the very definition of modern madness – I’ve been there, you may well have too, and I don’t want to go back.
Anyway, Idiocracy is a funny, intelligent and entertaining film and, judging by the rampant anti-intellectualism in our world, could well turn out to be a visionary masterpiece. By the way, when I turned off the DVD, the TV clicked onto MTV’s Jersey Shore, which made me realise we’re closer to the future than we would like to think.
Tags: Culture, evolution, Idiocracy, Jersey Shore, media, Mike Judge, MTV
