Around 30 years ago, Dr Carl Sagan made an eerily prophetic prediction about the future of the US, appearing to foretell the rise of big tech, misinformation, and superstition.
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Sagan is best known as a preacher of science, communicating complex ideas with passion and poetry like no other, but the late astrophysicist was also a dab hand at sharp insights into humanity.
In his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan explained how the scientific method helped to illuminate many of the universe’s gloomiest corners. However, he argued that the pursuit of peace and truth was being undermined by humankind’s old friends: superstition and pseudoscience.
Within a passage of the text that frequently goes viral, Sagan set out his pessimistic vision of where the US will go if it loses its admiration for reason, rationality, and open-minded thinking.
It reads: “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
“And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
For more insights from this wise soul, you might want to check out his “secret” essay about the benefits of marijuana use.
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An earlier version of this article was first published in August 2022.
Source Link: Carl Sagan Made A Worrying Prediction About America's Future 30 Years Ago
