The UN, UN-Nazi'd the World

Idiocracy - (2006) Directed by Mike Judge

Starring Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepherd

Today I discovered first-hand, the patient efforts that must be in ones possession to view the film Idiocracy on network television. For starters, Mike Judge's dystopia (or utopia, as ignorance is bliss) about a future so dumbed down the people lose the most rudimentary knowledge, such as water makes plants grow, is not as an amazing film as it is just plainly and painfully as frightening as reading 1984.

Idiocracy is a satire and its viewing brings about an analysis of today's value on intelligence declining in favor of pop culture addicts, non-thinking workers, and desensitized half-wits who can be entertained and controlled as technologies advance. I watched this film on Comedy Central and at every commercial break the same ads and promotions where again displayed before me as if I'd change my mind since the last time they came around. Disgusting fast food, cellphones, cars, online hook-up sites, and movie trailers. So naturally, I should buy this car, meet someone on this site, call her on this cellphone through this provider, watch this movie and afterwards take her to eat this food.

The movie is absolutely correct. But sitting there in front of a television, which is the biggest advocate of The Moron, it was really difficult to finish the program. I felt like a boxer, boxing a winning opponent and my trainer, at my corner, is shouting useful advice and strategies but not to me. He's shouting them to my opponent. Alright, that was an awful analogy. Let me give it another go. It felt more like sitting for a dentist, who uses candy to fill a cavity. As I said the movie is absolutely correct, in that the masses for whom entertainment and consumption are tailored for, are at a risk of becoming idiots. However, this film excludes those who stand to benefit by an idiotic populace. This is not a failure of the movie as it wasn't intended to do much more than critique how mindlessly we enjoy ourselves today and the consequences of this behavior.

"Men who think neolithically about themselves and so scientifically about matter, that they can devise and manufacture the weapons of modern war, are not likely to found a stable civilization. One should either be entirely neolithic or entirely modern. It is in the power of educationalists to breed up a generation that shall be entirely modern."

Technology does not make you modern. Regardless of the apps on your i or G phone, regardless of tracking devices in your car or passport, the appliances in your kitchen or the entertainment system in your living room. However, all these ideas were creatively designed, engineered, and marketed by innovative and highly imaginative people. Yet, this technology does not exercise creativity or constructive imagination in the consumer. Where are we heading then? The above quote is by Aldous Huxley and was from an essay written in 1926. Why is it still just as true? As Eyedea wrote on the subject of technology, "...we think we're so smart but there's not much to know." Sadly, there is much to know, an infinity of possible answers to unasked questions and curiosities, but we don't want to think about it. Such wonders, I state sarcastically, belong exclusively to scientists.

I hope others have watched Idiocracy and got the message. To me, Idiocracy is not about, What If This Were To Happen? Its about Look, This Is Happening!

At the end of the movie, as is usual of network television, the credits were sped up and cut to half a screen, shared with a brief review of upcoming programs, so that the viewer would not become bored, as an idiot would become if constant activity weren't maintained.