How Soon is Now?
The main premise of The Idiocracy is that in the future, society devolves to the point where everything is commercialized and branded until culture, diet, and indeed all aspects of life have been completely denatured.
The main premise of The Idiocracy is that in the future, society devolves to the point where everything is commercialized and branded until culture, diet, and indeed all aspects of life have been completely denatured.
Well, it looks like the future just got here ahead of time, because the Idiocracy Lives !
The adults have left the building and the kids are running the show now
Back in the '90s an epic battle raged between the states and Big Tobacco over the health implications of smoking. In the event, the states prevailed with the largest legal victory in U.S. history. (Leave aside the fact that the states themselves had made billions in the previous years via taxes on cigarettes and were hence beneficiaries of tobacco all along). The massive legal damages were based on the ever-mounting costs lung cancer was having on state medical systems. And it was during that same era of course that smoking itself became politically incorrect and banned indoors, mostly due to outrage over "second hand smoke" impacting children's health.
Fast forward 15 years and the tobacco health crisis has been replaced by the diabesity epidemic which dwarfs the impacts of tobacco in terms of the number of people affected and the extent of the damage. With respect to the negative impact that diabesity is having across all children, the effects of second hand smoke are de minimis by comparison. According to the book The Blood Sugar Solution, there are essentially now only two kinds of people - those who have diabetes and those on the way to getting it i.e. pre-diabetics. Thanks to all of the pseudo-food we are bombarded with constantly, we are now all somewhere on the continuum. And of course the list of diseases and negative health conditions related to insulin resistance and diabetes continues to mount - heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, accelerated aging, organ degeneration, inflammation, low testosterone, infertility, cancer, ADHD, Alzheimer's and depression.
Supersize Me
So, it's only ironic and fitting that the Olympics, intended to be a showcase of human athleticism and peak conditioning would be sponsored by a corporation which (among others) could be considered the Philip Morris of our time. And yet, if you mention this fact to the average person, they will likely laugh and/or shrug their shoulders. Apparently everyone has already forgotten "Supersize Me" in which Morgan Spurlock eats McDonald's for 23 days straight but can't make it to a full month because his Doctor says he may not live that long.
Phony and hubristic on the outside, Decayed on the Inside
I've said it before - so it's probably getting old now - but a society this crass and cynical, addled by junk food, having mortgaged its own grandchildren and now killing them with toxic waste pseudo-food - this is not a society I want to be around when the shit hits the fan. By far the most vacuous, graceless, and least resilient society in human history.
