'Idiocracy' Is Not Fiction

The Malthusian cycles will take their course.

Idiocracy is a 2004 comedic satire film about an average man and an average woman who are both cryogenically frozen for a military test project. Instead of waking up a year later as planned, the two wake up five hundred years in the future. During that time, the global average IQ has plummeted. The idiotic masses cling loosely to the social infrastructure of their predecessors, but that is quickly fading away. In Idiocracy, humanity degrades in the same way we are degrading. The film is not only a comedy but a premonition of mankind’s future.

The film is extremely politically incorrect, and not because a white guy says the Voldemort word. Idiocracy strikes at a deeply reactionary truth about the inevitability of ruin in the blind pursuit of progress, thanks to dysgenic demographic dynamics.

Idiocracy is a rare case of crassness and crudity being a believable part of the setting rather than to get a cheap laugh. The President of the United States is also a professional wrestling champion and adult film actor. Cabinet members are selected on a random basis. Congress is somehow more debased than ours. The citizenry consumes slop food and slop entertainment. Inmates can escape prison by simply telling the guards they are not supposed to be there, and all water has been replaced with a corporate-made sports drink (aside from in toilets).

The opening scene of Idiocracy showcases exactly what happened. In a post-industrial society, intelligent people have the luxury of being picky with breeding. They can wait for the right time, be indecisive with IVF, or cut it off after one or two kids. As the movie demonstrates, unintelligent people have no such scruples. The 140 IQ couple in the introductory sequence ends up with zero children. The 85 IQ man living in a trailer park sees countless descendants spawn in his lifetime.

Over 20 generations, this process has an obvious dysgenic effect. IQ steadily drops. Nobody knows how to maintain infrastructure anymore. Nobody knows why social taboos existed in the first place, and those go as well. Water becomes pointless, even for agriculture. Instead, crops are watered with sports drinks.

The protagonist, played by Luke Wilson, is discovered to have the highest IQ in the world. In 2004, he had an average IQ, but in the land of the 50 IQ, he is regarded as a super genius. He narrowly avoids famine by convincing the President to water crops with, well, water. The movie has a happy ending, where the people learn to trust Wilson’s character for being intelligent. What is not shown, but still implied, is that he is only staving off the inevitable.

The genetic component of Malthusian cycles is often overlooked. In times of abundance, where survival pressures are relaxed, anyone can have kids, even if they are unintelligent. In times of famine, however, only the cunning survive. During Malthusian contractions, there is downward social mobility because elite bloodlines have more children, while lower classes have fewer. This puts upward pressure on average IQ, with smart people taking lower-status jobs. During Malthusian relaxation, high-IQ bloodlines do not necessarily breed more and may even breed less than their less-intelligent neighbors. This creates downward pressure on average IQ. Upward social mobility becomes common, and unintelligent people gain positions of power.

The inevitable outcome of Idiocracy is mass starvation, creating harsher selection pressures that will eventually raise IQ.

The society of Idiocracy is a consequence of the dysgenic decline brought about by the abundance of Malthusian relaxation. In 2024, we are experiencing the largest and most comfortable Malthusian relaxation in recorded history. This Malthusian relaxation is so luxurious that many have even declared Malthus bunk and outdated. This is an unwise position, relying on total faith in an eschatological progression of human development where everything only gets better.

In reality, there are resource and spatial limitations. The reverse Flynn effect is already diving into the deep end of the pool. People are getting dumber. Intelligent people are having fewer kids, instead focusing their lives on surrogate activities and “finding meaning.” All the while, they ignore the most basic biological imperative. Super smart people use their super smart brains to end their bloodline and leave no legacy. Feminism also deserves much of the blame, with the most intelligent women now taking high status and demanding jobs instead of having the most intelligent children.¹

Nick Land’s 2014 essay ‘IQ Shredders’ showcases how prioritizing economic development rapidly destroys the gene pool. Time is limited. If both parties in a marriage are employed and grinding 80 hours a week, when are they supposed to have kids? They have far less time to build the next generation than the bumpkin breeder collecting unemployment checks. Land states:

How does an IQ Shredder work? The basic machinery is not difficult to describe once its profound socio-historical irony is appreciated. The model IQ Shredder is a high-performance capitalistic polity with a strong neoreactionary bias.

1. Its level of civilization and social order is such that it is attractive to talented and competent people.

2. Its immigration policy is unapologetically selective (i.e., first-order eugenic).

3. It sustains an economic structure that is remarkably effective at extracting productive activity from all available adults.

4. It is efficiently specialized within a wider commercial network, to which it provides valuable goods and services and from which it draws economic and demographic resources.

In sum, it skims the human genetic stock, regionally and even globally, in large part due to the exceptional opportunity it provides for the conversion of bio-privileged human capital into economic value. From a strictly capitalistic perspective, genetic quality is comparatively wasted anywhere else. Consequently, spontaneous currents of economic incentive suck in talent to optimize its exploitation.

IQ Shredders do exactly what they sound like they would do. IQ Shredders are and will continue to suck up intelligence, dumping them into the never-ending hole of capital. We are marching toward Idiocracy, and it will come a lot sooner than 2504 AD.

Is there any way to avoid this? Not really. This is the natural cycle of demographics. We just got lucky with which part of the cycle we were born into. The best thing you can do is create value and store resources for yourself and those close to you. On a society-wide level, however, there is not much we can do, especially without breaking some serious ethical boundaries. The evil of breaking those boundaries is probably worse than the downturn in IQ, anyway.

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I have written on Malthusianism and genetic cycles at length in another essay, linked here:

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1. This is not to say that women should not work. However, if the most intelligent women are foregoing children entirely, their genes obviously will not propagate.