There is one difference, and it is a very telling difference. In Idiocracy, people openly scorned smart people. They made no pretense of using any kind of logic or scientific method.

What we have now is different. People stopped vaccinating their kids because they actually believed the scientific evidence proved vaccines were dangerous. They can point to endless documents which have the overt form of being an actual research paper, written by people who are actually Ph.D.s from good universities.

You can go online and find endless meta-analysis, written by and endless number of untenured professors, that, say, Masking and social distancing didn't help stop the spread of Covid. Because these endless number of untenured professors need to land research grants and write papers. Sure, a face mask is useless against an airborne disease. Go ahead and sneeze on the salad bar.

If this were really like idiocracy, nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc. They would just make fun of anybody who was smarter than they were, because they sounded "effeminate."

I don't know which style of stupid is worse, but it is a pretty big difference.

We’ll give it 50-100 years down this trajectory and we will have arrived there

> nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc.

How do you know they're not too stupid to realize what/the damage they're doing in the first place?

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