Slouching Towards Idiocracy

Our children may remember when "being verifiably human" was still a thing. Their children may not.

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

—Gustav Le Bon

The 2006 film, Idiocracy, starts with a narrative premise:

As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which at once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent, but as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction—a dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence with no natural predators—death in the herd—it began to simply reward those who reproduce the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.

The satirical film unwinds that premise through a simplistic plot line. In 2005, average guy Joe Bowers (Luke Wilson) is selected to take part in a secret military experiment to put him in hibernation for a year, along with a woman named Rita (Maya Rudolph). When the army base is closed down, they are left in stasis for several centuries. When they finally wake up, they discover the average intelligence of humans has decreased so much that they are now the smartest people in the world.

Mike Judge, who made the film on a minuscule budget, said if he had it to do over, he would have had everyone walking around staring at their phones. When he began filming, social media didn’t exist. Facebook was only available at Harvard. The iPhone wouldn’t arrive for three more years. Judge told an interviewer in 2022:

Like, so I had the idea in the '90s, but I remember in the summer of the year 2001, I'd seen the movie 2001 again and thought, “Wouldn't that'd have been funny if that movie, instead of everything being a pristine advanced civilization, it was like giant Walmarts and the Jerry Springer Show and like, what if that movie made in the ‘70s was actually that accurate?” And I just kind of thought of a graph of everything from whenever that movie was made—1971—to the year 2001. If you just kept that progression going? And just like more crass foul language in the mainstream, more everybody getting dumber and dumber, and just advertising everywhere?

Imagine that. Imagine everyone being dumbed down by fast food diets, social media algorithms that trigger limbic reactions to boost engagement, and echo chamber tribalism reinforced by ubiquitous smartphones. As Pete Buttigieg said, “We’ve never had more information and we’ve never been less informed. That’s the result of information bombardment we’re living with and having our newsfeed be decided by an algorithm instead of an editor.”

Or, as Republican commentator George Conway said, “The Internet will end up having destroyed civilization but it will never stop amusing us along the way.”

In four generations, children have gone from roaming up to six miles from home to an average of just 300 yards. One result is to shrink their hippocampi—the seahorse-shaped parts of the brain near our ears that drive our spatial awareness and orientation. Children in the overdeveloped world now spend less time outdoors than prison inmates. They can’t tell East from West. It has led to a 50 percent rise in agoraphobia—fear of leaving home—and also biophobia--fear of the natural world. Jerry Brotton, author of Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction, wrote:

In my lifetime we have gone from looking up, aspiring to a shared global village inspired by NASA’s blue marble photograph, to looking down, glued to the blue dot on our phones as our hippocampi shrink and many of us withdraw from nature. It probably isn’t the end of civilization. After all, maps and compasses are cognitive artifacts, like the internet, and we’ve been using them for millennia.

According to psychologist Carl Jung, the greatest threat to civilization lies not with the forces of nature, nor with any physical disease, but with our inability to deal with the forces of our own psyche. Many have turned this trait to profit or political advantage. In February 2023, the British newspaper, The Guardian, reported that a team of Israeli contractors marketed a sophisticated software package, Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or AIMS, that could generate and control fake social media profiles. Their basic package, with 30,000 fake profiles, migrated to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram and YouTube. Some profiles even acquired real Amazon accounts with credit cards, bitcoin wallets and Airbnb or Uber ratings.

Some readers may recall that Cambridge Analytica acquired the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users in 2015, claiming close to 5,000 psychological profile data points for each person. They used that data and fake accounts like AIMS in the US 2016 presidential election, possibly the U.K.’s LeaveEU Brexit campaign, 44 U.S. political races and over 200 elections across the world. Following the 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica's data head, Alexander Tayler said, "When you think about the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by three million votes but won the electoral college vote, that's down to the data and the research.”

The commoditization of disinformation sometimes has more deadly consequences. One in four journalists killed in non-conflict zones between 2017 and 2022 were first targeted by disinformation campaigns.

In Civilization in Transition, Carl Jung said that the Latin proverb, “man is wolf to man,” comes most prominently into play at those times of history when mental illness became the norm rather than the exception in society. Jung termed those psychic epidemics. “Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious,” he wrote, “that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.”

Forensic Psychiatrist Dr. Bandy Lee has worked in prisons and mental institutions and observed how mental pathologies, when left untreated, can become contagious, just like an airborne virus. Lee says you do not require physical exposure to catch the symptoms, you only need emotional bonds. She also says there are accelerants of the spread of the pathology, which she calls “facilitating environments” such as a prison, but also propaganda networks, religious cults, and isolation from diversity.

When a mass psychosis occurs, Jung observed, the individuals who make up the infected society “become more unreasonable, irresponsible, emotional, erratic, and unreliable,” and worst of all, “crimes the individual alone could never stand are freely committed by the group.”

In The Rape of the Mind, Joost Meerloo wrote: “Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot — it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal.” Meerloo says that mass psychosis has been induced many times throughout history because “It is simply a question of reorganizing and manipulating collective feelings in the proper way.”

Smartphones and social media, television and the internet, all in conjunction with bots that spread propaganda and algorithms that quickly censor the flow of unwanted information, allow influencers to easily assault the minds of the unwary. “Modern technology” explains Meerloo, “teaches man to take for granted the world he is looking at; he takes no time to retreat and reflect. Technology lures him on, dropping him into its wheels and movements. No rest, no meditation, no reflection, no conversation – the senses are continually overloaded with stimuli. [A person] doesn’t learn to question his world anymore; the screen offers him answers—ready-made.”

Software engineers at Facebook and the other platforms could have designed their algorithms to optimize for social benefit, or preservation of the natural world. Instead, they optimized for engagement and soon discovered that the limbic center of the brain is hardwired to engage when driven by base emotions like fear, anger, and outrage. Tribal identity—our herd instinct—brings us together in common defense. We are rewarded by dopamine infusions to our pleasure centers when we engage in tribal identity activity and dissing “enemies” is far more rewarding, biochemically, than saying nice things to friends. Confused and battered by waves of misinformation, a population under an attack descends into a hopeless and vulnerable state. The never-ending stream of falsehoods turns minds once capable of rational thought into playhouses of irrational forces with chaos swirling inside them.

Writes Meerloo: “Whether gradually or suddenly, reason and common human decency are no longer possible in such a system: there is only a pervasive atmosphere of terror, and a projection of ‘the enemy,’ imagined to be ‘in our midst.’”

While 95 to 98 percent of the male population has no inclination towards pedophilia, the stigma associated with pedophilia has led in recent years to outbreaks of mass hysteria and false accusations, followed by false arrests and wrongful convictions. Well-known examples include the McMartin Preschool Case and the Fells Acres Day School Case.

Mass hysterias are “sociogenic, mental illnesses that propagate and spread rapidly within a community, with psychological symptoms sometimes manifesting themselves as physical conditions caused by longstanding stresses and fears,” says history writer Khalid Elhasson. Within a community, symptoms build slowly before emerging suddenly after weeks to months. “They usually explode in a rapidly contagious outbreak that engulfs the community or a large portion thereof, before subsiding over a period of weeks or months,” Elhassan says.  Deadly outbreaks of mass hysteria such as the Salem Witch Trials have occurred throughout history, but what happened to the United States in November 2024 has been happening with greater frequency in the era of social media and algorithmically directed outrage.

So, what is to be done? One response has been to wean children off electronic media until they are adults. It is difficult to find consensus for that approach, even in upscale private schools and summer camps. Another emerging remedy in many communities is convening gatherings of people in device-free zones just to talk, or to sit quietly with others, and de-tox from social media.

The Offline Club that began by hosting phone-free hangouts in the Netherlands recently branched out to London. At a venue for the club in West London, participants deposit their devices at the door.

A 50-year-old woman told a reporter she worried about the impact modern technology was having on younger people. “Individual loneliness has gotten a lot worse. We used to socialise much more. We used to have parties. When I was a kid, we would knock on our neighbor’s door and say: ‘Is so and so coming out to play?’ Kids are not doing that. My son is not doing that.”

A 31-year-old YouTuber said, “Everyone here is so lovely. You can just go up to someone who you don’t know and start a conversation. If you did that anywhere else in London, out of this bubble, people would be like: ‘You’re weird.’” Getting dopamine hits the old-fashioned way seems to satisfy a craving that screen time can’t. It may also be better for the natural world.

Given humanity’s steady slog towards Idiocracy, one can only wonder if it is clever to be hardwiring complex infrastructure like fusion power plants, cryptocurrencies, and robotically-staffed medical centers and assembly lines. It all seems “advanced,” but also very brittle. The lesson of countless vanished civilizations is that modernity is brittle.

Jerry Brotton says, “For our sense of well-being, and that of the world that sustains us, we can take steps not just to appreciate nature but to understand how we are part of it, acknowledging that it will always be bigger than us, in a positive, not phobic way.”

Those born to the colonial, overindustrialized world have only barely begun to grasp an ecological truth known to their ancestors and still kept by many indigenous land dwellers—that life is not a thing. It is not a commodity.

Life is neither subject nor object. Life, like an atom, is a verb. It entails relationships. Nexus. The interconnection of form in motion. A murmuring of swallows is a lesson drawn in the sky for those who have eyes to see and an open mind to grasp. This is us. We are they. We are not an app. There is no app for that.

References

Brotton, Jerry. Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction. Penguin UK, 2024.

Dershowitz, Alan. Guilt by accusation: The challenge of proving innocence in the age of# MeToo. Simon and Schuster, 2019.

Elhassan, K., 12 of History’s Most Baffling Mass Hysteria Outbreaks, 2017. https://historycollection.com/12-historys-baffling-mass-hysteria-outbreaks/

Jung, Carl Gustav. The symbolic life: Miscellaneous writings. Routledge, 2014.

Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd. Routledge, 2017.

Meerloo Joost. The Rape of the Mind. New York: Grosset & Dunlap; 1961.

Rabinowitz, D., No crueler tyrannies: Accusation, false witness, and other terrors of our times. Simon and Schuster 2004.

Tainter, Joseph. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

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