1094
We're learnding. (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/memes@lemmy.world
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[–] 134 points 1 year ago (16 children)

As much as I enjoyed Idiocracy when it came out, I wish its proposed answer/crux of the issue wasn’t “smart people should have kids” and instead focused on educating the ones that are already here/brought into this world.

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  • [–] [S] 98 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    People want easy solutions, like "Have more people be born smart" instead of hard, complex, realistic ones like "Put time, effort, and resources into robust education of the population in stable familial and social environments to develop higher averages of generally recognized metrics of intelligence in the general population"

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  • [–] 59 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

    There was already a precedent for all this. After the Second World War, American jumped right into the Cold War with the Russians and wanted to take the lead in science, technology, rocketry, space and engineering. They quickly realized that their country at the time was ill equiped and not well trained or educated for all this ... so they took the shortcut of using former Nazis to head their science and technology fields for a few years. Then to take up the slack, the government heavily invested in education and training to pump out the scientists, engineers and professionals they needed to gear up their technological war with the Soviets.

    So the 50s, 60s, and 70s got filled with a lot of bright well trained, well educated and informed young people. They were able to power the American war machine but a side effect to all that was all these insightful young people became the backbone of a counter culture that fought against war, capitalism, inequality, conservatism and racism and supported black rights, Native rights, women's rights, minority rights, animal rights and environmentalism.

    Then they had to bring in people like Reagan and Thatcher to reign in these counter culture movements and swing the pendulum back again. Once they defeated the Soviets in the Cold War, conservative America had all the incentive to break everything down again and dumb down the population until it was a just a compliant pulp that could elect a clown.

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  • [–] [S] 27 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Using former Nazis wasn't because there was a shortage of educated people in general in the US after WW2. The vast majority of Nazi scientists who made major contributions to US progress (or Soviet progress, for that matter), were in rocketry, which the Nazis put disproportionate effort and funding into.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Agreed ... but in order for the US to push through their rocket program, they needed scientists and researchers to develop, test, build, test, retest, and test some more all of the applied science that had been developed. The country needed to build an entire community of thousands of professionally trained technicians, scientists, engineers, professionals ... and with them had to come teams of administrators, academics, trainers, bureaucrats, office workers ... and with all of them had to come entire groups of trained builders, workers, electricians, plumbers, draftsmen, planners and all the people that came with ... and all that had to be supported by an industry that needed to build and develop all the things that had to be needed to get this monolith moving, which meant that all these corporations and businesses needed their own teams of professionally trained people.

    It was a massive investment in education in order to get the ball rolling in industry to build the rocket program. It wasn't just building rockets ... it was building an entire industry upon industry upon industry to get to the point of building a single rocket that could launch anything into orbit.

    The reason why any of it happened was that the government heavily invested in educating and training an entire population to make it all possible.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago

    Your analysis is spot on. (most of my career has been in aerospace)

    I would also add that the training programs and apprenticeships that were developed have been gutted as they destroyed the unions.

    The whole rebuilding American manufacturing through tariffs is a total pipe dream. I'm one of the few machinists that stuck through the great recession in my generation. There are no where near enough people like me to train kids and the guys that taught me are dead.

    It takes minimum, four years, to grow a self-sufficent machinist on the job. Trade schools are pretty much worthless, kids come out of trade school and they're fit to sweep floors or maybe punch a button if they're real sharp.

    It would take twenty years of consistent government and corporate support to rebuild and we all they are too greedy and short sighted for that.

    I assume it is similar for a lot of other trades.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The US literally beat the Nazis to developing fission technology, i.e. nukes (admittedly with a very international research community). It's quite clear just from that, that the US had plenty of strong scientists before they brought in Nazis/Nazi collaborators from overseas.

    As a complete side note: I believe it's been speculated (by people who know much more about this than me) that Nazi research on nukes, among other things, was hampered by researchers like Heisenberg deliberately dragging their feet because they were forced to work on the projects but didn't believe in the cause. I'm not meaning to clear the name of any Nazi collaborators, but pointing out that not all scientists working under the Nazi regime were necessarily nazis.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Nuke and atomic technology was one thing ... and the Americans basically had that in their pocket regardless if they had Nazi scientists or not

    The big leap that the Americans made with Nazi scientists was to pair atomic technology with ballistic missile technology.

    When you just have a bomb and you need a big slow moving aircraft to deliver the bomb, then it is almost useless as there are plenty of ways to take down a jet in mid flight before it even reaches a target.

    The unholy match that humanity came up with was to pair nuclear weapons with missile technology ... which created a weapon that is nearly unstoppable and completely dangerous for all of humanity.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    more like rich and powerful people want stupid masses

    stop blaming these issues on individuals when the whole system is setup to fuck them into this mess

    anymore than individuals can fix our plastics or fossil fuel issues

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought Idiocracy didn’t propose any solution at all. If I remember correctly, smart people not having kids was just a plot driver. Sadly, with the way things are that is how it’s gonna happen in our lifetime most likely. Education is getting worse over time, so the ones who’ll be able to educate their kids properly are those who are already educated.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Pretty sure the smart folks waited till they could provide for their kid well before finding out they couldn't even have any. Implying that even if they did that kid would have been outnumbered by the mass breeding of fuckwits who's only objective in life was rawdoggin after a good time.

    It actually feels crazy that I know dudes who emulate the idiots from the beginning montage almost exactly. They didn't used to be that way, it ramped up the last couple years

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Yeah, the problem with Idiocracy is that it over plays the role of genetics and doesn't differentiate between ignorance and stupidity.

    Sure, genetics plays some role, but I've seen some very smart people that came from average parents and some very dumb people who came from smart parents.

    Education plays a much bigger role than people give it credit for.

    I feel like there are probably some very smart people out there who we don't know about because of their lack of educational opportunities.

    Pretty much my whole life (I'm 51) Americans have been talking about how bad our education system is compared to much of the world, yet nothing substantial was done about it. I think the current state of affairs is a reflection of that fact.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I don't think that the movie was proposing that the issue or solution is eugenics based. I would argue that educated people are probably able provide a better education, and that uneducated parents are less likely to be able to provide their children with a quality education.

    I don't specifically remember Idiocracy really going into depth about "passing good genes".

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