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If you’ve been on any social media platform, chances are you’ve picked up on the fact that a lot of people are very insecure. It seems like most people would sooner admit to being evil than being stupid.

I want to talk today about a movie called “Idiocracy”, which is what I like to refer to as a “DVD Movie”. This is one of those movies that bombed at the box office, but developed a cult following through it’s home video release. It’s not the kind of thing we see as often these days, so if you’re looking for an argument to support physical media, well, there you have it.

It’s a movie directed by Mike Judge and as far as cartoonists go, I consider him to be “a real one”. He comes across as someone who grew up, you know, having friends, and as a result has some actual interesting observations on life.

And Idiocracy is no different. It redefines stupidity not because nobody knows anything, but because everybody thinks somebody else does. In the end, the movie encourages the audience to embrace smart stuff like books, and most importantly, to figure things out for themselves. The end.

Part 0: Now, hold on...

That’s not to say the movie is perfect. According to the film, society slowly devolved because all of the dumb hillbillies thoughtlessly procreated, whereas the smart people abstained to focus on their careers. It is simply “redneck culture” producing people who are so emotionally determined, that they succumb to their base impulses and breed recklessly.

But in real life, there is no scientific basis for “Degeneration” and is simply the delusional panic of crotchety reactionaries who don’t like change. People haven’t gotten any dumber since this movie came out, the same guy who was using AskJeeves back in the day, is using ChatGPT now, because they’re too much of a lazy bitch to sift through search results.

It’s best to just think of this as a darkly humorous setup, akin to what you might see in Futurama. And it’s important that I bring that up.

Part 1: The Media

Now, finally, there’s a scene where the main character suggests that the energy drink they're using is killing the crops, but the secretary of state simply repeats “it’s got what plants crave, it’s got electrolytes”. The point being, nobody knows what electrolytes are or why plants crave them, but they do know how to repeat slogans and buzzwords tautologically.

It’s here where I think the movie has the right idea. People aren’t stupid because nobody knows anything, but because they think somebody does. They’ve outsourced the responsibility of knowing, and in this case, they’ve outsourced the role of knowing to the big corporations.

Big corporations are one such example, but the source where you find meaning, seek validation, and look for guidance can be a lot of things, be that a religious institution or a political ideology. It relieves us of the anxiety of living with that lack, that gap in knowledge, that thing we’re missing. And this idea that there’s someone or something out there who has what we’re missing, is a comforting illusion.

Idiocracy exaggerates this physiological reliance, where humanity entirely outsources their whole understanding of the world, where trials are won not with evidence, but with machismo and profanity.

Because a luxury car commercial isn’t just advertising a means of transportation, but an authoritative reference point as evidence for our self-worth. Being able to cultivate self-confidence is difficult, so it’s much easier to adorn yourself with a commodity that asserts that self-worth for you, it does the work for you.

Part 2: The Public

I would now like to shift gears to mention Hazbin Hotel Season 2, at least for a second. Not because it’s good, mind you. And it’s not very good because the villains aren’t very interesting. They’re not very interesting because the plot basically revolves around the media manipulating the public to do this or that against their will, which is not how the media works.

"I'm just a TV, you're the smart one!" See, it can’t make you do something you don’t already want to do, and if it does make you do something, you already wanted to fucking do it. You just needed someone to tell you that it was okay.

See, basically any kind of explanation for the public’s bad behaviour that implicitly absolves them of responsibility for said behaviour, is usually wrong and designed to reassure them and keep them from self-reflecting.

The public are not innocent victims of the media or advertising, they’re the willing participants in it. It cannot thrive without their consent, and it works because they wanted it to be true, all it takes is a little cleaver, vague wording to help them turn their brains off.

How many times throughout history have “The Jews” been referred to as “Elites”? Or how many times has bigotry online been referred to as “petty grievances”? And shifting through the noise and finding out the truth for yourself takes effort, so I guess you would rather just outsource the responsibility of knowing and have someone else do the work for you.

Oh, yaahhh bro, I could check and verify the truth for myself, but that’s like... inaccessible, can’t someone else do my thinking for me?

Hey, remember those knuckleheads who would, you know, instead of using a search engine, wouldn’t stop fucking bothering people only to get directed to “let me google that for you” anyways? And they did this because search engines require you to actually look through the search results, while asking someone else might get you the answer immediately.

It turns out, those assholes are still here! And people wonder how ChatGPT got so popular! And you can laser-focus on the AI, but you were the willing participant, you were the problem this whole time! And this sort of thing wouldn’t have it’s hooks in you, if you weren’t such a lazy fuck-tard.

Ultimately, what we need is a story that re-centres the responsibility on you, the public, whom are too eager to accept simple, reassuring versions of events to avoid thinking too hard about their own bad behaviour and their own bad habits. A story that centres their own goddamn laziness, of wanting someone else to do all their thinking for them, instead of doing the work themselves.

And you know what? If you’ve ever wondered why your social media feed is so negative, it is because you are a negative person. That’s all this shit boils down to at the end of the day, the call is coming from inside the house. You're not getting bamboozled, you're the smart one, it's your responsibility.