Carl Sagan prediction.

[Bobby]

https://www.inverse.com/article/26779-c ... ufacturing

Carl Sagan may have died back in 1996,
but one of his predictions has some people a little tweaked out 21 years later.





Making the rounds on Twitter and on reddit is a passage from Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark in which he forecasts a future where America’s manufacturing would be totally outsourced and people would be unable to question authority among grim possibilities.

Here’s the complete passage from Sagan’s 1995 book that has some people on edge:

“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 whats true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. 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), the lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

[Bobby]

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/carl- ... n-america/


If you continue reading, the chapter goes on to talk about how
the most popular videocassette rental was Dumb and Dumber,
and how Beavis and Butthead was incredibly popular on TV.
This, of course, was 1995, but there’s not much new to this way of thinking — each generation thinks that the next generation’s media is toxic and vapid and worthless.

Relevancy of the movie Dumb and Dumber notwithstanding, themes regarding the erosion of trust in favor of one’s own deeply entrenched views appear repeatedly in the book. For example:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

Whether or not 2017 was the fulfillment of a Carl Sagan nightmare is a subjective matter, but the proffered description of that nightmare was authentic.