Apr 08, 2026 15:00:00

The 'Proximity Index to Ignorance' tracks how close reality is to the 2006 film 'Idiocracy,' in which all of humanity became foolish.

'Idiocracy' is a 2006 American film about a man who awakens 500 years in the future after being put into cryogenic sleep, only to find himself in a society ruled by stupidity and crude humor. The '

IDIOOCRACY PROXIMITY INDEX ' is a website that tracks how close the real world is getting to the bizarre world of 'Idiocracy.'

Are We Idiocracy Yet?
https://idiocracy.wtf/

The story of 'Idiocracy' begins with a secret cryogenic sleep experiment being conducted by the U.S. Army. A soldier chosen as 'America's most average man' and a woman introduced by a pimp close to the experiment's director are selected to undergo cryogenic sleep for a year. However, after the experiment, the director is arrested for corruption and crime, and the subjects are left in secrecy and abandoned until they awaken 500 years in the future.

The world the two awaken to has become extremely decadent and skewed in intelligence. For example, people laugh uncontrollably at videos that simply show close-ups of buttocks, and lewd jokes are commonplace even in public. The president is a famous pornographic actor, and the bureaucrats are people with low intelligence by modern standards. No one notices policy errors, such as 'crops not growing because they're spraying the farmland with sports drinks that seem more nutritious than water.' A soldier from 500 years ago, who possesses an average IQ of 100, is an almost godlike genius in this era, and the story follows him as he uses his average intelligence to improve politics and society while searching for the rumored 'time machine.'

'Idiocracy' is a comedy film that depicts a future 500 years from now where all of humanity has become too stupid, using crude humor and dark jokes. Around 2018, when Donald Trump was first elected president, it became a hot topic that 'the film's predictions had come true,' and memes comparing President Trump to the president in the film were created. In an interview about this topic, Mike Judge, the director of 'Idiocracy,'

said , 'I'm not a prophet, because I've been off by 490 years in terms of the timing of my predictions.'

Based on such memes, the 'IDIOCRACY PROXIMITY INDEX' is a website that tracks how close the ridiculously absurd setting and story of 'Idiocracy' are to the real world. According to the site, the Idiocre Politics Proximity Index is a rather high '78%' at the time of writing.

The IDIOCRACY PROXIMITY INDEX also shows the degree of agreement between each setting and reality. For example, the character who serves as the President of the United States in the film is a former professional wrestler and porn actor, elected solely for his entertainment value, not for his political power or intelligence. President Trump was inducted into the WWE

Hall of Fame in 2013, and his campaign rallies featured wrestling-style entrances and catchphrases, as well as his past as a reality TV host, making him a highly entertaining figure. As a result, the IDIOCRACY PROXIMITY INDEX calculates a 92% agreement between the film and reality in the 'Presidential Election' category. However, the calculation method is not disclosed.

Furthermore, in 'Idiocracy,' a film that simply shows buttocks on a large screen has packed audiences roaring with laughter, and a show in which a man is repeatedly kicked in the groin is so popular that it sweeps

the Emmy Awards . Of course, not all content is like that these days, but there are aspects where the film's depiction isn't necessarily outrageous, such as the popularity of shows that feature pranks and dangerous challenges, and the trend on social media like TikTok and YouTube of videos that could be considered self-harming and result in hospitalizations.

In the future depicted in 'Idiocracy,' cities are overflowing with garbage, piled up so much that it sometimes triggers avalanches. A 2023 National Geographic report estimated that the 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch,' a massive accumulation of marine debris in the North Pacific, would be twice the size of Texas, the second-largest state in the United States. In 2017, a 'garbage pile collapse' actually occurred in Ethiopia, killing 115 people.

In 'Idiocracy,' which depicts a future where intelligence quotients have drastically decreased, the film begins by presenting

the theory that 'highly intelligent individuals adopt the K strategy , aiming for a select few to ensure successful child-rearing, and refrain from having children, while less intelligent individuals adopt the extreme R strategy, continuing to have children according to their instincts, resulting in a continuous decline in the overall intelligence quotient of the population.' The IDIOCRACY PROXIMITY INDEX cites a paper published in the academic journal Intelligence in 2023 by researchers at Northwestern University, stating that 'the ' Flynn effect ,' which suggests that IQ test scores have been continuously rising, has reversed, revealing that Americans' IQ scores have fallen for the first time in almost a century. Scores in logic, vocabulary, and mathematics have all declined significantly since 2006,' and gives the film a 90% agreement rate with reality.