Carl Sagan was a man of extraordinary vision and offered great insight into the world. In a very eerily similar way that George Orwell did. A time where the people were so lost in their daily life that the biggest threats to their long term existence were obscured and put on the back burner. Where the media was obsessed with identity politics. And where the people have no grasp or scientific understanding of the world they live in. If Carl was alive today, I know he’d be alarmed. Let’s take a look at what he said about the future of America. I’ll let you make sense of it on your own. Keep in mind others who were thinking about the future as they saw patters through history. I’ll give you a small example of it, I wish you well in this very hostile time.
A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.
-George Orwell
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 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…
The dumbing down of American 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
-Carl Sagan
