And the fact that in a democracy we are ok to becoming an idiocracy for our temporary comfort indicates we are already an idiocracy perhaps -- hopefully untrue and just a joking statement.
I personally think people get the movie Idiocracy wrong when they see it as a warning of what could happen. I personally take it as a story of how, if you took someone 100 years ago and moved them to today, they would feel very much like they were already in that world. The movie is just using even further exaggerations of what America has become today, in order to shine a light on what's already happened: we've become idiots in many ways. Idiocracy is already here, we already do a ton of useless crap for comfort and aesthetics, but we all just got used to it and don't see how fucked the country has become. We've already gotten to the point where adding classes pre-college about dis/misinformation would probably be considered indoctrination of some kind, so we kinda lost.
I agree with your synopsis. Idiocracy is allegorical of now.
And you're right that one would meet stiff resistance broaching the
matter head-on. Misunderstanding, offence, divisions and accusations
of indoctrination would surely fly.
So I tried a different approach, some of which is mentioned but not
documented in detail here [1]. The discussion of art and literature as
a method can be extended from digital self defence to a more general
"intellectual self defence".
The long and short of it is that this has all happened before. Great
civilisations have fallen into the intellectual doldrums. That's why
we have literature, poems, plays and songs. The Arts are there to
rescue us from this sort of nonsense when we reason ourselves into the
corner of stupidity.
Would agree that we are totally screwed now. I tend to wonder sometimes if we've actually always been this dumb, but now that we are connected enough we can see it better. And this phenomenon seems to amplify not only how dumb we are, but for people to act even more dumb.
I love the internet, but a great experiment IMO would be turning it off for three to six months just to see what would happen. I know it's not possible, but the idea still runs through my head here and there.
And the fact that in a democracy we are ok to becoming an idiocracy for our temporary comfort indicates we are already an idiocracy perhaps -- hopefully untrue and just a joking statement.