“Welcome to Costco. I love you.”
-Costco greeter in Idiocracy
The 2005 film Idiocracy is disturbingly prescient in its themes. The satirical depiction of a dysgenic future presents a world in which the promiscuous and unintelligent vastly outbreed the refined and educated people. As one review sums it up: “In the year 2505, a 90-minute film of someone’s butt will win an Oscar. America kills its crops with a Gatorade-esque sports drink (because plants crave electrolytes, right?) Costco awards law degrees. The House of Representatives has long since become the House of Representin’. And a popular newsmagazine is called Hot Naked Chicks & World Report.”
It’s by no means a masterpiece, but it’s quite funny. The movie was evidently so unsettling in its skewering of corporate America that the release of the film was limited and restricted. In the years since, the legacy of Idiocracy continues and the satirical glee of the film continues to delight.
What Idiocracy got wrong is that it’s not primarily inferior genetics that do us in but bad ideas. If you look around you’ll see that some of the most seemingly well bred and highly educated are the ones parroting the idiocy mocked in Idiocracy.
Fundamentally, the bad idea hollowing out so much of our culture is the notion that self-preservation and comfort is preferable to transcendent meaning and self-sacrifice. We convince ourselves that we want to be coddled and prefer not to exert ourselves. Yet, so obviously, the stories that enliven us and the people who fascinate us are marked first and foremost by valiant struggle against forces of selfishness.
We carry this stupidity out into the world and, like the hapless fools of Idiocracy are stunned to discover that other people also prefer being comfortable and self-interested: “You like sex and money, too?!” We have any number of excuses for ending marital commitment, foregoing more children, shirking duty, and engaging in vice.
We want to believe that “loving” and “helping” people involves only vaguely proclaiming support from afar, not encumbering ourselves with the mess of someone else’s life. We think that we are being “eco-friendly” while wearing our disposable mask and shopping at a massive retail giant of cheap furniture and junk food simply because it is of European extraction. We can try to blame it on genetics, but a survey of human potential reveals a great many have done much more with much less.
Idiocracy is worth watching for the chuckles about circular logic and consumerism run mad. In the real world, as we journey further into the 21st century, it seems less that the unintelligent are overbreeding and more that the intelligentsia is increasingly taken with bad ideas. For being smart, some smart people are acting very dumb.
The way to confirm that we are all living a lie is just how few people really do let the bottom fall out. You may pass the time with someone who appears to have no standards for conduct. Slovenly in dress, undisciplined in diet, frequently intoxicated, often mired in sexual sin. There is sometimes a temptation in the immature to spend time with such ne’er-do-wells to feel an inflated sense of self. We don’t eat like that or spend hours on such filth; we aren’t that bad. However, spend enough time with those we look down our noses at and you’ll find that most people have a line they will not cross. Even in the extraordinarily undisciplined, there remains a struggle to cultivate order, even if only in the most primitive ways.
The image of God imprinted in us by our maker is indelible, however we may distort it. The Lamb of God continues to attract. A favorite moment:
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