I have a friend who is a good person overall but really buys into the "real life is becoming Idiocracy" bit. I was frustrated, because I'm not the best real-time arguer so I don't think I did a good job of expressing why the movie is disgusting trash.
I attempted to talk about how it blames people instead of systems, and how it's an awful eugenics narrative. But we quickly got into a rabbit hole about whether intelligence can be passed on genetically or not and if that matters, and other dumb topics that went nowhere.
What's a concise and offline-compatible way of explaining why Idiocracy is bad & decent people should find it gross?
There is no strong evidence that intelegence is herritable.
Further, intelgence has both a survival and reproduction advantage. So if ot were strongly herritable over the long run it woudl be favored.
The situation postulated where a pwrson is "to dumb to read the instructions on a condom" is real. However on an evolutionary timescale if intelligence was herritable that lack of foresight would lead to misadventures removing them from the gene pool at higher rate. So that would be a little dip in an otherwise increaseing line.
However for as far back as we have evidence people's general intelligence appears to remain constant. Education is generally improving though. But ancient riddles are just as complex as modern ones for example.
also being able to read has to do with being taught to read or not. How could that be genetic