Protecting knowledge is a task for the mediocre

Last week’s screening, Idiocracy, was a very interesting movie. It portrayed a futuristic scenario I have not seen before: A future where mankind goes backwards in knowledge or evolution instead of going forward.

It seems very obvious to all that the future will always be better, or at least an opportunity to start fresh with the knowledge we already have and improve the world we live in. We take for granted centuries of knowledge and development and assume that it will never go away, just will be improved and augmented, like an encyclopedia.

The movie does a good job giving the opportunity to unconscious consumerism to take over the world and the way in which countries are no longer ruled in a traditional political way. What happens when the zones of citizenship are not longer political, economic, and cultural?

A corporate umbrella under which the political, economic, and cultural where situated ran the population in the movie. Brands took over every aspect of life, eliminating even the cultural background of the population. But is this too far away from what we experience today? After all, part of the culture in the United States and now spread though out the world was created by a soft drink company. Coca-Cola created the contemporary image of Santa Claus. The fact that he was a real person and what he did in his lifetime is no longer important as long as he remains the image of a nice holiday.

Personally, I think consumption is fine; everything in excess is bad for you, physically and intellectually. Drinking a Coke now and then, wanting to buy something because of the prestige the brand has (and the prestige it is not reduced to buying a pair of Jimmy Choo’s or an Armani gown, also brands like Tom’s shoes that give a pair of shoes to someone in need creates a consumerism network with a specific target audience. After all, a corporation is meant to create profit) should not be the most important topic of discussion of the movie.

What shocked me the most was that, from the very beginning of the movie, knowledge was taken for granted. The person in charged of the military library was not the most competent, intellectual, or even the most interested one. Since the beginning, knowledge was treated as something any average person, what is worse, someone considered to have no value for society, had to take care of. As if it was a job no one else wanted to do.

It is as if our most precious treasure was guarded by a mediocre. What kind of society do we expect to have in the future if in the present we do not give the proper value to knowledge. We can be a consumerist society, it is fine, as long as we consume so much knowledge as we consume Coke.

In the past, knowledge was reserved to the elites. Only royalty, members of the clerk, or their counterparts in different periods of history, had the privilege to access it. The movie shows that now that knowledge is open to “everyone”, it is not longer a privilege. It has been degraded to the least important task a soldier can have. You need no special qualities, skills, to be responsible for guarding knowledge; it is a comfort zone in which you can be mediocre and nothing will go wrong. That for me, is the biggest mistake a society can make. Knowledge should always be treated as a privilege, and we should be as much a consumerist society of knowledge as we are of goods.