“30 years ago, Carl Sagan predicted what the United States would be like in the future. How accurate is it 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...” ~Carl Sagan in "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark"
Sagan is right in his diagnosis but off in his proposed cure which relies heavily upon science as a corrective.
Graham Hall This is so prescient that I had to do a fact check that it was true.. In my search, I also found that the next paragraph is equally accurate: “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.” The problem with such writing is that the detractors dismiss it as “Project Fear”. Or the ramblings of an elitist. But dismissing prescience has been with us since the dawn of civilization. In Homer’s Iliad, Cassandra was granted perfect foresight, but cursed to be always ignored.
This is weirdly not a direct quote from that book. Anyhoo. Sagan did overstate some points. Manufacturing hasn’t fully disappeared, with sectors like clean energy and tech rebounding. Critical thinking hasn’t entirely declined, as there is growing engagement in STEM and wider education... though misinformation is a problem. US efforts to regulate tech shows that 'the people' haven’t lost all control, though are very willing to give up their privacy for functionality. US society faces many challenges including the power-led factions of social movements and unions, though his worst-case scenario is not here... yet.
The foreboding events were well pronounced in his time. The writing was already on the wall more than a hundred years ago as consumerism was winding up with the Henry Fords of the world and the birth of consumer psychology as a tool. What happens when 'science as a candle in the dark' has been bought and paid for by those creating the darkness?
We are conducting the world's biggest experiment. And we are the subject of it!
Ironically science was made to be part of this gloom and if one reads into this fragment assumed to be part of it. I've come to think we can only prevent a dark age with technocratic feudalism by cultivation of freedom, love, solidarity. In that I make no political statement, neither an ideological one. It is statement from one person to other persons.
I grew up watching the original Cosmos. I wish it was still available….
He really dialed in President Musk. I never thought I'd see a day when the presidency could so blatantly be bought - the last few days have been eye opening, hearing the speaker of the house say "...I spoke with Elon...." and then spending bills are passed.
Man was a genius. I’m editing a book due for publication in the new year, and that quote is included in its entirety.
CSO (ex-strategy head at W+K, Dentsu, Ogilvy). Strategist / Client Advisor / Trainer / Speaker / Lecturer / Founder. Co-Author of "The Creative Nudge" (thecreativenudge.com). Dad, Dog person, Autistic (and proud).
23hI’m always interested in past commentary on the present and/or future. This next passage was written in 1975. When I was 2 years old. “I think our hope for the future is that England remains a moderate country. But moderates are easily taken advantage of by extremists” This was written five years earlier: 'Nobody could do anything now without being accountable to the scorn of the liberal intellectuals in print or on television. England was too articulate at the top. Nobody, even in a Socialist liberal permissive society, had the slightest notion of the wishes of the people, out there beyond the great conversational shop of London” Orwell was writing about the end of the old life and the apocalyptic future of rubber truncheons & bullets in 1938 in Coming up for Air: “What's ahead of us? Is the game really up? Can we get back to the life we used to live, or is it gone for ever? Well, I'd had my answer. The old life's finished. Finally I'd stepped back into it and found that it didn't exist” Everybody always thinks that the time they’re living in is the most existentially threatening epoch. It may well be. I just know that every generation before, and yet to come, thinks the same.