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"Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species."

Many Science Fiction futures portray humanity as getting smarter. This is the inverse of that, a future where instead of becoming more intelligent, the average person is much, much stupider than they are today. Sometimes, this is portrayed as the result of a Dystopia deliberately repressing intellectuals, while other times it is a result of corporatism run amok, over-reliance on technology, evolutionary pressures that cause the stupid to outbreed/outcompete the intelligent, or any combination of these.

Expect there to be one or two exceptions, possibly from a different time or place, or just rebelling against the Crapsack World (which this trope invariably overlaps with) in which they live. If there are exceptions, they will invariably be the heroes of the story.

Sub-Trope of Humans Are Morons, and a Sister Trope to Medieval Morons. Might overlap with Big, Fat Future (via Fat Idiot), Advert-Overloaded Future, and, in extreme cases, Formerly Sapient Species. If the future people are generally intelligent but ignorant about their past/our present, see Future Imperfect and All Hail the Great God Mickey!. Contrast We Will All Be History Buffs in the Future, when people in future settings know the past better than the average person today does.


Examples:

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    Comic Books 
  • Judge Dredd: Most citizens of Mega-City One are right morons. For example, when there was a vote on whether to return the city to democracy or continue the rule of the Judges, many couldn't even figure out what the issue was or how to vote. Although for appearances' sake the Judges can't officially ban advocating democracy, a secret "dirty tricks" division works to undermine and discredit any nascent democracy movement, up to and including mindwiping and exiling the movement's leaders.

    Comic Strips 
  • Dilbert creator Scott Adams speculated the future would involve people doing less and less — as machines do more of the physical labour — and eating more and more readily accessible junk food, and not seeing a correlation between the two things. A series of cartoons shows the Dilbert characters rolling around on the floor of a futuristic house, huge fat blobs with vestigial arms and legs, perfectly happy with this state and not caring about it so long as the Internet provides entertainment and the food supply is uninterrupted.

    Films — Animated 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Ripley mockingly suggests this in Aliens to explain why no one is listening to her story about the alien after she wakes from a 57-year hypersleep.
    "Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?"
  • The whole premise of Idiocracy is the evolutionary and corporatism variety. The less intelligent have outcompeted and outbred the more intelligent, and as a result, we have devolved into a pop-culture obsessed Big, Fat Future, one so braindead that the protagonist, who was an average man of our own time, is now the smartest person on the planet.

    Literature 
Examples by author:
  • The Humanist movement in the stories by Poul Anderson is a social version. Automation lead to widescale unemployment, an anti-intellectual backlash against the geniuses who still have jobs, and a call for a return to Ye Goode Olde Days. The movement inevitably collapsed because even their supporters had become reliant on technology.
    The new situation was ugly. Anti-robot riots, the lynching of technies and scientists; the election of intellectually corrupt representatives—lunacy was building up as rapidly and unnecessarily as — to quote a classic example! — it did in the old United States between World Wars II and III.
Examples by title:

    Live-Action TV 

    Tabletop Games 
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • The Vast Bureaucracy combined with the Ecclesiarchy of the Imperium relies on keeping its people as ignorant as possible of the existence of Chaos. How easy this is depends on the world, there are some that haven't seen change in millenia, others where Chaos is a daily occurrence (here they're not as strict about it), and still others where they're prevented from executing countless amounts of Guardsmen who'd been exposed to Chaos by the Space Wolves who'd fought alongside them. This results in Witch Hunts and mass frenzies that tend to kill more innocents than guilty.
    • The Tau use mass mind-control to keep their population happy and unwilling to change their caste system. Whether or not they're kept deliberately ignorant is unknown, though they have been known to purge their kroot allies to make sure Chaos corruption (to which the Tau are immune) wouldn't spread (though to be fair, this is also practiced by the Imperium and for very good reason, they just tend to go overboard with it).

    Western Animation 
  • The 31st century setting of Futurama is filled with many less-than-smart people,note  although it is mostly for comedy's sake, and the 20th century's folks were not the brightest either. At worst, they stagnated, which could explain why Fry feels so at ease in the future.
  • The Jetsons tries to show this by having the worst problems in society being getting tired of pushing buttons all the time, portraying it as being joint-breaking labor that the characters did nothing but complain about. Ha ha, ignorant future people don't know what work is.

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