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Stupid Future People
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Many Science Fiction futures portray humanity as getting smarter. This is the inverse of that, a future where instead of becoming more intelligent, the average person is much, much stupider than they are today. Sometimes, this is portrayed as the result of a Dystopia deliberately repressing intellectuals, while other times it is a result of corporatism run amok, over-reliance on technology, evolutionary pressures that cause the stupid to outbreed/outcompete the intelligent, or any combination of these. Expect there to be one or two exceptions, possibly from a different time or place, or just rebelling against the Crapsack World (which this trope invariably overlaps with) in which they live. If there are exceptions, they will invariably be the heroes of the story. Sub-Trope of Humans Are Morons, and a Sister Trope to Medieval Morons. Might overlap with Big, Fat Future (via Fat Idiot), Advert-Overloaded Future, and, in extreme cases, Formerly Sapient Species. If the future people are generally intelligent but ignorant about their past/our present, see Future Imperfect and All Hail the Great God Mickey!. Contrast We Will All Be History Buffs in the Future, when people in future settings know the past better than the average person today does. |
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In Planet of the Apes, the apes got smarter after being trained by the humans to be their servants, while a 'cerebral laziness' took over the humans until a change in the balance of power occurred. The Hollywood adaptations replaced this with a different kind of stupidity. | |
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The Jetsons tries to show this by having the worst problems in society being getting tired of pushing buttons all the time, portraying it as being joint-breaking labor that the characters did nothing but complain about. Ha ha, ignorant future people don't know what work is. | |
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The Time Machine: Because of Extreme Speculative Stratification and over-reliance on technology, the lower class have evolved into brutal savages, while the upper class have evolved into flimsy dimwits with the physical and mental capabilities of small children. | |
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Pump Six and Other Stories is revision of "The Marching Morons" above, but without eugenics involved. The handful of people with anything even resembling intelligence, each on their own and separated from others, are doing their very best to maintain the world populated by lethally stupid, nearly feral humanity, only to get more and more tired and less and less caring in the process. Unlike "The Marching Morons", we are talking about not-too-bright repairmen and maintenance techs, not some titans of intellect. | |
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The whole premise of Idiocracy is the evolutionary and corporatism variety. The less intelligent have outcompeted and outbred the more intelligent, and as a result, we have devolved into a pop-culture obsessed Big, Fat Future, one so braindead that the protagonist, who was an average man of our own time, is now the smartest person on the planet. | |
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Dilbert creator Scott Adams speculated the future would involve people doing less and less — as machines do more of the physical labour — and eating more and more readily accessible junk food, and not seeing a correlation between the two things. A series of cartoons shows the Dilbert characters rolling around on the floor of a futuristic house, huge fat blobs with vestigial arms and legs, perfectly happy with this state and not caring about it so long as the Internet provides entertainment and the food supply is uninterrupted. | |
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In Galápagos, humanity ultimately devolves into seal-like creatures. The idea is that this is for the better. | |
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Harrison Bergeron is another deliberate Dystopia example. Intellectuals are repressed for the simple reason that having some people smarter makes everyone else feel inferior. | |
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Feed (2002) is a Dystopia variety in which all information is available in implanted chips inside the head, but all of it is laced with advertisements, so almost no one bothers to actually figure out the significance of the information. | |
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In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the government removes Proles who get too smart. However, this trope is not in place with regards to Party members, who are left alive to do tasks of intermediate difficulty, but experience even more surveillance because they're much more of a threat. They create Newspeak, intended to dumb down the population by eliminating words. | |
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Incompetence shows that Europe is going this way thanks to Political Overcorrectness dictating laws. People can't be fired for being bad at their jobs, so there's no incentive to be any good. One character suffers from a condition called "Non-Specific Stupidity", which is just general idiocy recognised as a medical condition. The protagonist finds that dealing with many of the idiots in society tends to hamper his job a bit. | |
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Ripley mockingly suggests this in Aliens to explain why no one is listening to her story about the alien after she wakes from a 57-year hypersleep. | |
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In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Spock's Brain", a society of Brainless Beauties steal Spock's brain because they need a replacement Brain in a Jar to run their automated Underground City. Because all their needs are catered for in the city, over thousands of years their intelligence has atrophied until they have the mental age of children. They have a device called the Teacher that implants them with the Knowledge of the Ancients on the rare occasions that intelligence is required. | |
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Fahrenheit 451 has the Dystopia variety: reading is deliberately suppressed in favor of TV watching. | |
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The Foundation Trilogy attributes the fall of the Galactic Empire to a variant of this trope that was more to do with complacency than evolutionary pressure per se. Everyone believes that the system is perfect and needs no further innovation or adjustment, so nobody does much in the way of scientific research anymore, particularly in the "soft" sciences like economics or sociology... or Hari Seldon's newly invented discipline of "psychohistory".note Which was literally the art of predicting the future by extrapolation, so perhaps the skeptical reception he got wasn't altogether unreasonable. Nobody bothers listening to the few people who can see that this isn't sustainable in the long-term until it's too late. | |
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The 31st century setting of Futurama is filled with many less-than-smart people,note (not just humans, but the aliens and robots are also typically dim-witted) although it is mostly for comedy's sake, and the 20th century's folks were not the brightest either. At worst, they stagnated, which could explain why Fry feels so at ease in the future. | |
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Downplayed in Brave New World — while the masses (Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons) are deliberately made stupid, Alphas and Betas are quite intelligent. However, the intelligent elite are just as shallow and superficial in their philosophical worldview as the stupid people. | |
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Colony is set on a Generation Ship full of these. The protagonist is unfrozen for his ability to read with nobody realising that everybody in the past could do it. Also, a breeding program with jobs being selected centuries in advance has led to some unqualified people such as a child captain and a womanising, atheist priest. | |
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Warhammer 40,000: The Vast Bureaucracy combined with the Ecclesiarchy of the Imperium relies on keeping its people as ignorant as possible of the existence of Chaos. How easy this is depends on the world, there are some that haven't seen change in millenia, others where Chaos is a daily occurrence (here they're not as strict about it), and still others where they're prevented from executing countless amounts of Guardsmen who'd been exposed to Chaos by the Space Wolves who'd fought alongside them. This results in Witch Hunts and mass frenzies that tend to kill more innocents than guilty. The Tau use mass mind-control to keep their population happy and unwilling to change their caste system. Whether or not they're kept deliberately ignorant is unknown, though they have been known to purge their kroot allies to make sure Chaos corruption (to which the Tau are immune) wouldn't spread (though to be fair, this is also practiced by the Imperium and for very good reason, they just tend to go overboard with it). |
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Judge Dredd: Most citizens of Mega-City One are right morons. For example, when there was a vote on whether to return the city to democracy or continue the rule of the Judges, many couldn't even figure out what the issue was or how to vote. Although for appearances' sake the Judges can't officially ban advocating democracy, a secret "dirty tricks" division works to undermine and discredit any nascent democracy movement, up to and including mindwiping and exiling the movement's leaders. | |
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