[tremon]

I never understood that eugenics criticism of the movie. They make zero references to genetics in that opening sequence, and the nurture side of that argument is readily trotted out as a truism even here on HN: "people from affluent parents have easier access to education".

[lynndotpy]

The introduction describes it as a "turning point in human evolution", and that "natural selection ... began to favor different traits". These are some of the very first sentences of the movie.

The thesis is given: "Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species". The characters dramatizing the inciting incident in the introduction are introduced with their IQs. It's very explicitly a dysgenic apocalypse narrative, which could have been avoided with earlier eugenicist intervention. (They attempt "genetic engineering" later on, but they fail, as the unintelligent are able to win by sheer numbers.)

It's okay to like the movie, and it is fiction. But it's certainly a dysgenic narrative which has eugenicist implications.

[tremon]

That's not a eugenics argument, that's merely an evolutionary argument (identifying a change in selection pressure). The eugenics argument would first have to make the case that the people are stupid/intelligent because of their genetic lineage rather than their upbringing.

[lynndotpy]

To repeat, in narrative, they attempt genetic engineering to fix the declining intelligence.

On top of that, it is explicitly a dysgenics narrative, which comes with an implicit eugenics argument unless it's explicitly addressed.

I'm not trying to argue you can't like the movie (it is fiction, after all), but the eugenics argument is right there in the text.

[Froztnova]

This is one of those threads that's making me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Like, I don't think enjoying Idiocracy makes someone a bad person or anything like that, but it's pretty clearly making a eugenics argument without any mitigating counter-hypothesis.

It's particularly amusing because there are people quoting Neal Stephenson in this thread, ignoring the fact that when Stephenson tackles similar subject matter, he's very careful to make it clear that he's talking more about the cultural axioms which have a long-term effect on how people value learning and intellectualism. It's not even subtext, I've been reading The Diamond Age recently and very early on there's a line where a character clearly states that there's no coherent genetic theory of human intelligence, and the entire thesis of the book runs counter to that notion that intelligence is primarily genetic.