Idiocracy

Watched that movie last night (in the title.) It's about a poor Air Force sap that gets volunteered for a top secret experiment in hibernation. Through a mishap, they forget about his pod and he wakes up 500 years in the future. Instead of what we think might happen ---with humanity getting smarter and technology advancing--- people get dumber. With an IQ of 100, he's the smartest person on the planet. It's a fun, silly movie, but it's also a strange idea.

And thought experiment. It got me thinking about aspects of humanity where we've regressed or haven't developed much at all. Aspects like emotional intelligence and spirituality. Now and then a person comes along like the Buddha or Christ or Mohammad and blinds the masses with a level of spiritual understanding that should be the norm. Scribes try to capture it with their limited faculties and rituals and religions spring up like apes mimicking human actions they don't understand. The rituals devolve into stunted expressions afflicting more pain and suffering and ignorance, reflecting less of the intelligence of the source and more the limited understandings that can't hold the original inspiration within their restricted capacities.

We pride ourselves in our material accomplishments. But our delegation of consciousness to an artifact of mechanism, of emotion to a chemical by-product, of spirituality to naivety of intellect --- illustrates just what happens when one aspect is overdeveloped while others wither. We are no closer to understanding anything essential about ourselves and our existence here than our ancestors 2000 years ago. Our failure to solve even the most basic of human struggles displays this. We've got one tool in our box, our trusty hammer, and thus everything must be a nail. Because, after all, if our tool can't deal with it, and our tool has done all this other wonderful stuff, then it must not be "real." Unless, of course, what we're dealing with is some kind of nail. We just have to figure out what kind of nail it is. But if it's not a nail, then our hammer will be useless, and we know that's not right, because of all the hammer has done enshrines its utility.

But then again, some of our smartest people working with the hammer, have discovered some strange things, deep down, where the hammer seems like the wrong tool entirely. Where deciding to hit a nail, makes a nail appear. Where one nail knows when another is hit faster than any physical signal could transport, so the nails must connect in ways our understanding of space and time can't currently explain. And somehow that pesky "conscious" seems to be implicated in a most salacious way with matter. A way that seems to make the simple cause and effect we think that runs the universe, a lot fuzzier and more entwined with events outside the loop than most mere physicists can imagine. And the ideas they come up with to "explain" what they can't imagine are even stranger than the data they are trying to make comprehensible.

So I don't know what it would be like 500 years in the future, if our emotional and spiritual intelligence actually evolved to half the level of our material shenanigans, but I can imagine.