Today’s Insight: Carl Sagan’s Prophecy
The Celebration of Ignorance
Carl Sagan’s 1995 best seller The Demon-Haunted World is worth re-reading for those of my readers who have already been fortunate enough to have read it.
Much of what is happening today was forseen: real science versus pseudo-science, Orwellian propaganda, Big Tech dominance and the suppression of critical thinking.
I especially like this quotation, as it is just so right on with what is happening all around us today:
“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 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”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
The Celebration of Ignorance
