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August 14th, 2017 
Awake Goy
Did Carl Sagan really warn about a time in the future when manufacturing jobs would slip away, when the average person would have virtually no control over their political lives, and when we would all cling to superstitions?
YES, Sagan did predict just that.
The screenshot you may have seen floating around social media is real …and there are plenty of people who are worried that Carl was talking about our current day times.
The passage comes from Sagan’s book Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, first published in 1995:
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or my 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 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 wrote this in 1996, and now I think he’s either a time traveler or a witch. pic.twitter.com/PxozbjTdkW
— Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) August 9, 2017
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.
Sagan died the year after the book was published and like the person who’s tweet is shown above, I’m suspecting things too. He had either a time travel machine …or maybe a crystal ball?
Source Article from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ASheepNoMore/~3/YuhIVQQK2lA/
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