The introduction may be confusing but it wasn’t advocating for eugenics, the movie intro can be viewed as dumb people raise their kids to be dumb, not that intelligence was passed down genetically. And you are correct, religion and power need uneducated people to maintain hegemony.
After repetitive exposure to this propaganda (repetition priming), the people were beginning to believe and stand up for what each respective government had been flashing before their eyes, without them even knowing it.
https://sites.psu.edu/psych256sp18003/2018/03/04/h/
The fact of being exposed to propaganda and misinformation, repeatedly and continuously, has a psychological affect over time.
The individual must not be allowed to recover, to collect himself, to remain untouched by propaganda during any relatively long period, for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand. It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition. It must create a complete environment for the individual, one from which he never emerges.
Propaganda, Jacques Ellul
Republican rhetoric follows Le Bon’s The Crowd method: Affirmation, Repetition and Contagion.
First they espouse an idea or belief (ex. Radical Left are violent animals). The crowd accepts these statements as true, regardless of reality.
Then blast it on repeat through every medium so it becomes internalized in their minds.
Finally, the contagion phase, where the crowd is spurned to action, whether it is getting out to vote, storming the capital or going door to door murdering “The Enemy Within.”
It’s not difficult to see what the fascist intent is behind the extreme violent rhetoric.
Gotta capture and warp the minds of the youth to transform them into obedient fascist dogs.
Only through concentration in a few hands of a large number of media can one attain a true orchestration, a continuity, and an application of scientific methods of influencing individuals. A state monopoly, or a private monopoly, is equally effective.
Propaganda, Jacques Ellul
While the connection may not ultimately matter scientifically, it matters ideologically. This modern day Lysenkoism emerging in America is a common feature of totalitarianism, and it will permeate throughout all sciences.
Incredible as some of these aberrations may appear, we must yet be on our guard not to dismiss them as mere accidental by-products which have nothing to do with the essential character of a planned or totalitarian system. They are not. They are a direct result of that same desire to see everything directed by a “unitary conception of the whole,” of the need to uphold at all costs the views in the service of which people are asked to make constant sacrifices, and of the general idea that the knowledge and beliefs of the people are an instrument to be used for a single purpose. Once science has to serve, not truth, but the interests of a class, a community, or a state, the sole task of argument and discussion is to vindicate and to spread still further the beliefs by which the whole life of the community is directed. As the Nazi minister of justice has explained, the question which every new scientific theory must ask itself is: “Do I serve National Socialism for the greatest benefit of all?”
The word “truth” itself ceases to have its old meaning. It describes no longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief; it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the unity of the organized effort and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it.
The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek