updated paper

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The movie Idiocracy portrays a bleak future for thinkers of the world by portraying the future United States as a waste land of idiots who are perpetually unable to care for themselves. The proclaimed cause for the infestation of morons is the rampant reproduction of dumb people. The main protagonist in the film is Army private Joe Bauers who engages in a government experiment where he is placed into a hibernation chamber with a mouthy hooker named Rita. The hibernation chamber is forgotten about and not recovered for 500 some years. The intellectual collapse of America renders most technology useless, and creates an explosion of mass consumption and pollution. There was a historical garbage avalanche that covered Washington D.C. in year 2505 that uncovered the hibernation chambers containing the preserved bodies of Joe and Rita. Soon after awaking for hibernation Joe meets Frito a future defense attorney. Prior to being a inhabitant of the future Joe was a regular person of low to normal intelligence unto his imminence in the future he is soon known as the smartest man alive. After Joe has been found to be the smartest person on in America he is expected to fix everything that has gone wrong over the last few centuries. The movie Idiocracy does a great job of showing what a world would be like if people stopped thinking for themselves. In the future where people can not do anything for themselves more Americans are fat and have vocabularies so small they can barely communicate their thoughts much beyond a few cuss words and flipping people is a term of endearment. In the future the only news is Fox News. In future one of Americas favorite past times is watching TV shows with names like Ow! My Balls!, and a movie who entirety is two hours of a naked butt farting called Ass. In the future there are highways that are unfinished and because people are so dumb, continue to drive off the edges of the highway.  Most everything is misspelled and super stores like WalMart are the size of small cities. In the future people who seemingly have any semblance of intelligence left are refereed to as a “fag” or “faggy”.

 

Kant wrote on ideas pertaining to immaturity and enlightenment. Kant believed that “enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.  Immaturity when a person can  not use their own understanding with out the help from another person. Immaturity is self imposed, caused from lack of courage and resolve and is a symptom of laziness. He said “If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all.”  By that he means that society is set up so that people do not have to think for them selves if they prefer not to because guardians are appointed to make the decision processes easier for immature people. Guardians are people who supervise humanity and according to Kant they make the path to enlightenment hard my suppressing peoples minds making critical thinking and self exploitative thoughts foreign and uncommon.  Kant also held a strong belief that knowledge would grand its possessors freedom. He believed that thinking for your self is paramount. In order to obtain enlightenment people need ambition to learn, the ability to use judgment and the ability to see truth objectively. Kant believed that if people became enlightened they could live life with out the protection from rules and guardians set up by government. The ability to decide what is right and wrong for your self is important to Kant; he believes that if people follow rules and religions beliefs but it is important to have a complete understanding of why you are following the rules or beliefs and make sure that you are not just blindly following the rules. 

 

In the world Idiocracy takes place in, it is clear that Immaturity has taken over.  Nobody can take care of themselves, and they put all their problems onto one man, Joe Bauers.  He is not their teacher, most likely they just did away with that, but they force him to become their caretaker.  The citizens and president of that future country are the definition of Kant’s Immaturity.  They are lazy and simply have no interest in being intelligent.  They make it seem like being intelligent is a dumb or “faggy” thing to do.  Kant would most likely go insane with hatred of everyone being immature.   How that world works is beyond me, everyone seems to be their own guardian making them fear being smart.  They do not wish to understand anything, they physically cannot become enlightened, because at the point they are now in the movie, they are their own guardians.  If their were Guardians in their government, slowly making their people lethargic and unthinking, some people could still become enlightened.  Their is no ambition in that society to become smart, there is no truth: objective or subjective.  They live, they laugh, they procreate, they die;  Their society is based on that. 

When Joe Bauers becomes their pariah, he is amazed.  Before, Kant would argue he was not enlightened, he listened to his orders did what he was told.  He did however have the ability to critically think, so when he was brought into the world hundreds of years later, he was smarter than everybody else, and became “enlightened”, but only to the new people.  He breaks the rules and beliefs that have been set forth and attempts to make people see what is wrong with the world they live in.  When he tries to enlighten them they fight back, being their own guardians, and attempt to kill Joe, but Joe shows them that he is right and sets a new era of critically thinking onto this unenlightened society that is its own Guardian.