Maybe this isn’t right, but I remember reading that most young boys 50 years ago dreamed about becoming astronomers, scientists, firefighters and policemen. Now young boys dream about becoming influencers, streamers, and rich personalities. Was Idiocracy written by a time-traveller? Are we working hard to make it a reality?
YOU certainly do, because (like all of us) you’ve grown up.
It’s hard to remember how big your dreams were when you were young enough that the universe was infinite.
As for kids of that age, they want to be what society values. Cops aren’t well-loved at the moment; and firefighters are mostly ‘just another profession.’
Was Idiocracy written by a time-traveller?
I’m always a little irked when people say things like this. Art is a product of its environment. It responds to what it’s seeing in the world and talks about it through abstraction, extrapolation, and embellishment. The world Idiocracy was created in already had these problems. The movie just turned that into a comedy with enough distance from real life for people to laugh at.
To the question: I think it just speaks to the lack of opportunities we have today. The American Dream was always a lie, but there was at least a period in the post war years where it was somewhat accessible to a relatively larger part of the population. The US was still an industrial economy. It was building new things. Now all that manufacturing is being done in poorer countries and now our economy is largely based on rich people shuffling money around and skimming off the top while the rest of us serve them to get the scraps.
When success looks like a Wall Street investor making money from doing nothing and failure means barely being able to afford to have a home and feed yourself, it’s no wonder people are dreaming of finding a way to make an easy buck.
But going back to art looking at the reality it exists in, this isn’t super new either. Look at the movie Wall Street from 1987. The movie revolves around a Wall Street broker who is the son of a union airline mechanic. The father is working in a productive job, but despite the union, isn’t exactly living in luxury. The son, in pursuit of this ideal of success, works in a job that leeches off people like his dad and to advance his career further he starts doing insider trading. So the parasitic criminal gets grossly rewarded while the hard working guy stagnates. And of course by the end of the movie, the son’s greed ends up almost ruining his dad’s job before he finally tries to make things right at great cost to himself.
yeah caused you know what boys had 50 years ago strong Unions. Today your only chance of making it is by scamming kids and lonely people out of their money by creating a parasocial relationship with lots of people like some kind of prostitute.
i mean my dream was to have a not too shitty 9-5 so i could have a garage band and do community theater. failed in that my band is not in my garage so i got that goin for me
It’s all the corruption of the planet. We are just a part of this living system. But we have poisoned it and now it’s a warm stew of rancid sewage. Micro-plastics, MechaHitler, Orange-Hitler, Global Warming, disease and war, famine, Pfas, Lead, toxins everywhere. We’re almost done destroying it all…
So no, there is no more dreaming. My childlike hope of a Star Trek future is now like a Reverse-Aliens movie. We must do everything possible to prevent mankind from escaping this planet alive. Kill the Virus before it spreads.
I think it’s more about what children see in front of them and what they see as role models. With the internet age we see people making tons of cash fast. Many years ago we had cops and doctors on TV among other things and that is what kids wanted to be.
Simply put kids emulate and want to become what they see. That is part of the reason why some parents want more control over what things their children are exposed to. Many of those parents also want to sit in front of a screen vs actually spending time with and teaching their children.
It doesn’t help that everyone is more worried about making a fast buck vs doing something that will help others lives be better. I just wonder what kind of abuse will be handed out by parents from a generation that is almost completely self centered.
“They used to sell gladiator sweat as a beauty treatment, they would sell it in souvenir pots.”
“It’s the worst of me … I never do pay my bills. Have been so from a child!”
TLDR; no we’ve pretty much always been unhinged.
But OP asked about “decades ago”. What if humanity was actually making progress in the 20th century, becoming better, and now we’re backsliding to where we were during gladiator times?
More of a cycle, I would argue. Part of the rise and fall of empires or whatever.
Nah, you’re showing selection bias or something. Kids have always wanted to be rock stars.
As a kid I always said I wanted to “work on the computer at home so I could take care of my farm”.
Which coming from where I grew up was about as realistic as owning the moon.
I do think dreams have gotten more generic with a lot of kids aiming for that influencer life, but the other day I heard a neighborhood kid say he wants to be a deep sea monster truck driver. I’m not sure what that means but I love it.
Fascism is growing. New communication media are allowing for large scale, in-depth brainwashing.
People now strive more than ever to be part of the “norm” and eliminate all the rest. Capitalism keeps everyone so busy and self-centered that morals disappear. “Charismatic leaders” spearhead the new trends in a sect/religion approach.
It’s not stupidity of the masses. It’s an engineered death spiral, where the stupid people are the ones engineering it thinking that if it’s good for them, it is good.
Was Idiocracy written by a time-traveller?
It was the logical and expected result from the current course of America…
But what people miss is that Idiocracy is always real for a surprising amount of people. Joe didn’t magically get smarter, his frame of reference stayed the same. But everyone around him became a lot stupider. We adjust IQ scores when they drift so the average is always 100 because of that.
And adjusting it at 100, also adjustes the cutoff at 70 for having an intellectual disability. Because the real issue isn’t a line of how smart someone is in a vacuum, it’s that an IQ difference of 30 points or more is enough for both people to realize something is off and communication to be hindered.
An IQ of 145 isn’t that rare, about 1 in 1,200. And that’s the cutoff for what an IQ test can reliably measure so it’s a good reference point. Most people who score over the test limits never get the bigger test, because that bitch can take multiple days and the numbers pretty much stop mattering.
For someone over that line though, over 80% of humans are more than 30 points below them, the majority much lower. To them every day of their lives has been Idiocracy, and they have existed at a relatively stable percentage of humanity for all of our past and will for all of our future.
What people are noticing when they think Idiocracy is coming true, is a widening gap in education. IQ just honestly isn’t that noticable except for a statistically insignificant amount of people at either end.
Well I mostly agree, here is my take.
Something interesting is that living in a radically different country, it becomes painfully obvious to most people, i reckon. Because values change as the respective IQ average and culture differs across countries and especially continents.
Just a personal observation.
So a person who have a slightly higher than average IQ in a developed country will quickly feel their social circles shrink significantly across continent borders. Because culture is shaped by the people live there. And values change. E.g. It is more socially acceptable to be manual labourer/violent/chauvinistic some places than others. Many other factors play in, and many highly intelligent people are manual-labourer/violent/chauvinistic. I am just talking about a trend. It is also noticeable across generations which you will see that the younger generations usually being more developed than the older generations.
A handyman used to be valued higher in developed societies than today. Because values have shifted
I reckon it is mainly the quality of education and nutritional food that makes the difference.
But my point is that most people completely underestimate the importance of those things because they have compounding effects across generations. A single mother of 5 can’t produce useful citizens without a social support system.
My other point is that everyone is a time traveller constantly traveling through a changing world. Just ask an elderly person about their youth.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
I dream just as big. My path to realizing them has only gotten more narrow.
My dreams are so big, them becoming reality isn’t even possible or at least won’t be possible in my lifetime.
Sounds like they are just dreaming about different things. Back then they also dreamed about being rich celebrities like actors and actresses, which is comparable to streamers and rich personalities.
I think we still dream big. We just chase those dreams less.
