A história canônica da SF que lida com um mundo dominado pelos estúpidos, com o sofrimento inteligente com a mesma eficácia de seus servos, levando a maior parte da população a ser enviada para outro planeta para morrer é "Os idiotas em marcha, "por CM Kornbluth, provavelmente o trabalho mais conhecido e influente do autor. Embora a história descrita na pergunta tenha algumas características diferentes, o elemento principal da trama parece ser o mesmo.
O resumo da trama, por Wikipedia:
The human population is now 3,000,000 highbred elite and 5,000,000,000 morons, and the "average" IQ is 45 (whereas now an IQ score of 100 is average, by definition). Several generations before the onset of the story, the small number of remaining 100-and-higher-IQ technocrats work feverishly to keep the morons alive.
The elite have had little success in solving the Problem (also called "Poprob", for 'population problem', in the story) for several reasons:
The morons must be managed or else there will be chaos, resulting in billions of deaths and "five hundred million tons of rotting flesh";
It is not possible to sterilize all of the morons;
- Propaganda against large families is insufficient, because every biological drive is towards fertility (the story predates the development of hormonal contraception).
The elite have tried everything rational to solve the population problem but the problem cannot be solved rationally. The solution requires a way of thinking that no longer exists – Barlow's "vicious self-interest" and his knowledge of ancient history.
Barlow derives a solution based on his experience in scamming people into buying worthless land and knowledge of lemmings' mass migration into the sea: convince the morons to travel to Venus in spaceships that will kill their passengers out of view of land. The story predates the moon landing, and the safety of space travel is summed up in a description of a rocket that crashed on the moon. Propaganda depicts Venus as a tropical paradise, with "blanket trees", "ham bushes" and "soap roots". In a nationalistic frenzy, every country tries to send as many of their people to Venus as possible to stake their claim.
O texto completo é disponível online via Projeto Gutenberg.