A recent Reddit post quickly gained momentum when a user posted a photo of a passage from Carl Sagan's 1996 book, "The Demon Haunted World."
The book, known for the examination of scientific thinking, had this prediction which seems to be eerily accurate on page 40:
"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."
MarketWatch notes another passage from the book that some might apply to the current political state:
"Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
Read more about it here.
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