In the dystopian comedy “Idiocracy,” written and directed by master satirist Mike Judge, an average present-day American wakes up in the distant future after being put into a long-term deep-sleep by the U.S. Army. Supposed to only sleep for a full year, human error and bureaucratic incompetence leave our hapless hero forgotten in a box until he awakes, like Rip Van Winkle, 500 years in the future. Rather quickly he finds himself to be the proverbial stranger in a strange land.
That’s because the bright future predicted for mankind in his own time did not play out as planned, and instead, he finds himself stuck in a hellishly hilarious future. This brave new world isn’t a terrible one because it has been blasted into radioactive ash, nor is the hellscape the protagonist finds himself in the result of alien invasion, environmental catastrophe or self-aware artificial intelligence. No, the situation our painfully average everyman hero finds himself in is a world in which the human IQ has fallen to such catastrophic lows that when he awakes, he is, in fact, the most intelligent man on Earth.
As it turns out, rather than getting smarter, mankind had fallen into a low-brow dark age in which natural selection had long-since ceased to favor the most intelligent, prudent and far-thinking, and instead favored those who — acting on short-term, instant-gratification impulses — merely reproduced the most. The catastrophic diminishment of human intelligence occurred because in the world depicted in “Idiocracy,” the intelligent — realizing how onerous and burdensome having children was — often chose not to have or to otherwise put off having children until it was too late, leaving the field, so to speak, to the progeny of the less bright. Technology and the protection provided by civilization, in turn, allowed the less dim to reproduce freely, given innate stupidity was no longer thinning the herd as it once had.
While the situation is given a hilarious send up in Judge’s film, the point made by “Idiocracy” is nonetheless a sobering reminder that intelligence, foresight and planning aforehand are important traits that a civilization needs if it is to survive over the historical longue durée. This is especially the case when events in the movie seem to intersect so uncannily with those in the real world as it has, tragically, in the case of the Ebola epidemic now ravaging West Africa.
An ounce of prevention….
The disease in question is by any definition horrifying. Discovered in 1976, the Ebola virus is a tropical hemorrhagic fever spread through contact with bodily fluid that, depending upon the strain, kills anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of those infected. Indeed, fear of it is such that mere mention of the deadly disease conjures up images of Biblical plagues of old that spread like wildfire and wipe out entire populations, leaving nothing but corpses and empty cities in its wake.
While nothing like this has happened yet, the situation in West Africa is dire. Desperately poor, ramshackle health services have been overwhelmed by the disease and it is very likely that it will spread even further in the region, if not more broadly in Africa itself. The World Health Organization is holding emergency meetings on the disease, health offices around the world have mobilized to combat it, and here in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control has heightened the nation’s public health service to its highest level of readiness.
What’s most awful about this unfolding tragedy, however, is that in many respects this outbreak and the threat it poses are completely unnecessary. Nature may have crafted the disease in the fetid jungles of tropical Africa, but despite its deadliness, it is ultimately something that is preventable as long as proper education and public sanitation efforts are enacted to combat and quarantine it. Indeed, it even turns out that in the West, potentially life-saving treatments and experimental vaccines may also be available or at least in the development pipeline.
As always, it also turns out that money is the stumbling block to successfully implementing these absolutely commonsense measures and getting treatments and vaccines out of R&D limbo to those who most need it. That’s right — a terrifyingly deadly disease that could easily turn into a global pandemic of catastrophic proportions could be stopped dead in its tracks if only enough money and resources were spent to ensure that an outbreak does not happen. With enough money, public health services in West Africa could be reinforced, thus strengthening the first line of defense against the disease. Then, if that failed, drugs and vaccines developed in the West and elsewhere could be brought in as necessary to further stem Ebola’s ability to take down large and vulnerable human communities.
This may sound fantastical, considering our current inability to do anything competently, but there is nothing stopping us from doing any of this. Indeed, concerted, long-term and well-funded public health campaigns of exactly this type were pivotal in eradicating such deadly diseases as measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, yellow fever, polio and smallpox. Back then, however, our political and economic system and overall culture were not so slavishly devoted to short-term thinking and profit-taking that we could not do it. Back then, our system — both political and economic — was both sufficiently competent and aware enough of complex, long-term problems that we could leverage the needed resources over time to successfully combat them.
Civilizational Darwin Awards
Tragically, that does not seem to be the case today. Instead of having public and private research dollars aimed at solving long-term problems posed by something like Ebola, we have a pharmaceutical research complex that literally spends more on coming up with solutions to erectile dysfunction and male-pattern baldness than Ebola containment and eradication. If this seems insane, guess what — it gets worse. The same goes, for instance, for overcoming the problems posed by increasing levels of antibiotic resistance and a host of other public health problems whose solutions are known, but hard, expensive and promise little in the way of immediate profit for corporate actors.
What’s more, we can’t even get government to step in to fill in the gap these days because our system is so polarized and gridlocked by the ignorant ramblings of populist pseudo-experts espousing long-debunked economic talking points that nothing — not even funding for vitally needed public health research and programs — can be done. Rather than our society heeding the wise counsel of scientific and technical experts, we now deride, distrust and defund them because they are perceived as threatening, know-it-all elites who offer opinions little better than that of the often misinformed common man. More depressing still is that this reality and sentiment applies to a wide spectrum of pressing issues ranging from infrastructure investment to global warming.
Our society is now one where the opinions of educated experts and trained professionals in a variety of vitally crucial technical and scientific fields are frequently disregarded and commonly derided as being elitist. This, in turn, is where the tragedy of Ebola and the grim hilarity of a dumbed-down humanity envisioned by Mike Judge meet. In “Idiocracy,” the experts and the intelligent all understood what was happening as, year after year, the stupid and ignorant made up a greater portion of the population and as a result disastrously wielded more and more power via democracy and the market. Unfortunately for them, the institutional incentives and cultural values of the society they resided in were too hostile to the idea of intelligent, prudent, long-term planning aimed at securing the public good for the world’s increasingly beleaguered experts to do much about it.
Instead, as the movie’s narrator solemnly informs us, mankind’s greatest minds were increasingly diverted not to solving issues like the desertification of farmland, malfunctioning nuclear power plants or Ebola, but to ”conquering hair loss and prolonging erections.” Satire, then, predicted something similar to our current situation eight years ago. While the movie brilliantly skewers the fictional society of imbeciles who inherited the Earth from us, it isn’t hard to see its larger point about just how dangerous it is when a public and its entire system of political economy become overly enamored with ignorance and much too focused on ill-advised, instant gratification.
So, perhaps we should take Judge’s movie not as satire but as a warning. Civilization is a hard thing to pull off, and while it seems invincible to those protected by it, it is actually an extremely fragile thing. Civilizations have collapsed before — quite often, in fact — and although we have had a good run so far, we cannot rely on good fortune and the accomplishments of the past to forever protect us from what may come in the years, decades and even centuries ahead. Incipient idiocracy like the one we are living in now is not something humanity — both now or in the far-distant fictional future — can afford for very long.