this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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Ah, Idiocracy - that shining beacon of hope, where somehow the USA survives what was clearly a nation-ending process whereby nobody else around the world got dumber (e.g. in Russa or China), only us, but humans somehow gave the people in power (corporations) something valuable enough to allow to continue existence and subsistence.
Over a hundred years ago (30 years before the term "science fiction" was coined) H.G. Wells Time Machine portrayed a similar slant on the populace of the future.
The reality is that with Climate Change and automation happening as they are, even those nightmare visions seem increasingly unlikely, as the planet cannot sustain us all and robots replace the need for a worker class of humans anyway. Instead we might end up more like Half-Life where populace decrease becomes more desirable.
Travelers (2016) is an excellent TV show to watch btw - too bad we are unlikely to develop time travel to save us all.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm
This is what Idiocracy is an adaptation of. So they are largely in the same camp. The marching morons is only 73 years old, but still a decent amount of time ago.
The "Golden Era" of sci-fi in the 30s - a delay from the roaring 20s perhaps? - has a lot of stuff along the general lines of "Englishman (never Englishwoman mind you), often from some minor noble heritage, through mysterious means unknown ends up in an area of savages, but through the power of their greater Intelligence, becomes stronger, faster, and outer-smartier than all of those that they outsmart b/c they are smart I tell you, so smart!"
Idiocracy - and Marching Morons I see, and Time Machine as well from 1895 - is thus very much in line with the norm, with the twist that the savage lands are the future from now; the implication being that humanity has not only "reached its peak over all those that came before", but also "peaked, then declined, so that we - here, now - are the pinnacle of all civilization that ever was or ever will be".:-P Which there is a large degree of truth to that - e.g. antibiotic resistance and the enshittification of the internet and the state of ThE eCoNoMy ThO all reveal that we now have less than we ourselves did 10-20 years ago, even if for some that refers more to potential than actual.