Note on Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back Into Superstition & Darkness” via OC

a future in which his nation, the U.S., would fall into a peri­od of ter­ri­ble decline:

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…

FROM:

OC

Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back Into Superstition & Darkness”

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Sagan invest­ed so much effort in pop­u­lar books and tele­vi­sion because he believed that all of us need­ed to use the tools of sci­ence: “a way of think­ing,” not just “a body of knowl­edge.” Without that, we have most of society depending on technology that only a precious few understand. That’s a recipe for disaster.