Thoughts on Idiocracy (2006)

A comedy film from a funnier time.

Amid the sweltering humidity of early September, I took refuge at one of my best friend’s homes. Here, L and I were joined by a mutual best friend T. Together, the three of us relished the air conditioning and planted ourselves on the soft sofa. We were then in prime movie-watching position.

The film: Idiocracy (2006). Directed by Mike Judge and starring Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph, Idiocracy lambasts insatiable consumerism, mindless hedonism, and demagoguery; the film predicts these factors halving the median IQ by 2505, catering to people’s basest impulses, and producing a society of dopamine-addicted cretins who do little but watch porn and masturbate.

Idiocracy is not subtle, but it is often funny. Some of the dialogue is so funny as to instantly broadcast that the movie was made in the aughts—certainly not past 2014. Hilarious though it may be, the economic premises of the film are flawed; it’s political conclusions objectionable.

In the film, America spirals into its 2505 hellscape due to a lack of “moral restraint” on behalf of the stupidest and an overabundance thereof on behalf of the smartest. Malthusianism is uniformly tiresome and this instance is no exception. This plot device is especially unpersuasive when one surveys the fertility rates of developed nations around the globe: They’re at or below replacement levels. The not-so-subtle undertones of eugenics and social Darwinism add insult to injury.

If the premise of the film is flawed and morally dubious (it is), its conclusion is doubly so. In the end, the idiocracy is replaced with an epistocracy in which the smartest man on earth runs the economy—and everything else—by fiat. Technocratic tyranny is a poor substitute for liberal democracy in the short term and absolutely ruinous in the long run, particularly if one values an educated, responsible, and autonomous citizenry.

(Read Brave New World and Seeing Like a State to disabuse yourself of whatever attraction to high modernist planning you may have.)

But I don’t mean to sound too curmudgeonly—only curmudgeonly enough. I think the film was entertaining enough to warrant a sequel more suited to today: Gerontocracy.