In Popular Culture
- The science fiction film Idiocracy (2005) portrays the U.S. as a greatly dumbed-down society 500 years from now. This cultural condition was achieved by dysgenics, the rate of over-reproduction, by people of low intelligence being greater than the rate of reproduction of the more intelligent people of the society, i.e. the educated. The concept of Idiocracy derives from the science fiction short story The Marching Morons (1951), by Cyril M. Kornbluth. The novel Brave New World (1931), by Aldous Huxley discussed several ways their society was effectively dumbed down to maintain stability and social order.
- Music groups The Divine Comedy, Ugly Duckling and Lupe Fiasco have songs titled "Dumb it Down". Chumbawamba has a song titled "Dumbing Down".
Read more about this topic: Dumbing Down
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“For those that love the world serve it in action,
Grow rich, popular and full of influence,
And should they paint or write, still it is action:
The struggle of the fly in marmalade.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)