More people need to see the film Idiocracy by the same Mike Judge of Office Space, King of the Hill, and Beavis and Butthead Fame. It is about an average do-nothing kind of guy who gets volunteered for an experiment only to wake up 500 years into the future in a dumbed down society in which he is now the smartest person alive! The most popular TV show is a guy getting kicked in the genitals over and over again, the sex industry is everywhere and has co-opted all language even the word "latte". A "rehabilitation" of a criminal is a public execution on TV replete with an electric guitar band and with machines to kill the person being "rehabilitated" that are functional metaphors for sodomy. The top movie getting critical acclaim is a shot of someone's naked butt, the FDA was bought by an energy drink company that has replaced water with a Gatorade like drink – even to water plants. And water is only used in toilets.
What's more is that everyone whom our protagonist encounters has only known the world to be this way and they have no clue what a better world would look like and have never asked the question of why a better world would be worth discussing. Buildings that are falling down are literally tied and taped together. With no clue of how to dispose of trash that accumulated to a massive mountain range, an avalanche of trash covered the cities and there was no idea or desire to clean it up. Costco is where you go to get literally everything, including degrees and education and it is the size of a small city in itself. Speaking or acting intelligently get you the label of being a "faggot". Healthcare is about the same thing as going through a carwash. The entire society is built on pure and raw instant gratification with no rational basis for anything and no desire to improve anything since there are no standards to make the world better and so, no desire for it. Listen to the clip for a little joy and then think about how the same kind of circular reasoning is used by politicians and countless religious personae…
Brawndo – It's What Plants Crave
So why is it important to have some kind of rational basis for what we say and do? Why do we need to have some kind of moral compass and sense of basic values that are also justified on rational grounds? Why do we need to critique this values and measure them against human experience continually? Hmmm… This film paints a hilarious picture of dystopia if all of those things were almost never to have existed. But behind the sex and fart jokes that are truly funny, there is a very serious commentary on the reduction of cultural production to immediate jouissance.
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