[BoxOfRain]

I feel this won't necessarily be a popular take here but I really don't like things like Idiocracy. To me it comes across as deeply misanthropic, and kind of ignorant of what human nature actually looks like outside of our very specific cultural window. It's the same deep misanthropy that makes me really dislike most post-apocalyptic fiction, look at actual how actual humanity behaves in disaster conditions for five minutes and you'd see most of it is just misanthropic nonsense. We haven't let go of this Victorian idea all that separates man (particularly working-class man) and beast is a thin veneer of civilisation that can collapse at any minute. To me Idiocracy is a product of that mentality, it's a satire of Western consumer culture but this idea is not presented satirically, Idiocracy seems to believe this earnestly.

You can look at skeletons of prehistoric man and see bone healing which can only have occurred if the group decided to look after someone who couldn't work at that point. Humans are inherently stupid and selfish, but they're also inherently clever and cooperative; it's all so dependent on material and cultural context. It's true in my view that the general culture of late capitalism makes people inclined towards stupid and selfish ideas, but the idea this could actually do serious long-term damage to humanity's actual nature until everyone is a bumbling moron is absurd. Not just absurd either, but fundamentally insulting to all of us in my view.

Culture is often a product of material conditions, if Idiocracy's premise that it's possible to make humanity dumber on a lasting basis had the slightest merit then it would have happened already a hundred times over. Not least from the amount of lead we were pouring into the environment from the 1930s onwards! In reality if humanity did get dumber for cultural reasons, the material conditions associated with that culture would soon collapse and there'd be a new selection pressure to avoid the same kind of stupidity.