2039) We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future? Some of the habits of our age will doubtless be considered barbaric by later generations - perhaps for insisting that small children and even infants sleep alone instead of with their parents; or exciting nationalist passions as a means of gaining popular approval and achieving high political office; or allowing bribery and corruption as a way of life; or keeping pets; or eating animals and jailing chimpanzees; or criminalizing the use of euphoriants by adults; or allowing our children to grow up ignorant.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2040) If aliens would only keep all the folks they abduct, our world would be a little saner.

anonymous scientist
quoted by Carl Sagan in
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2041) True memories seemed like phantoms, while false memories were so convincing that they replaced reality.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Strange Pilgrim (1992)
quoted by Carl Sagan in
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2042) Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2043) I hope no one will consider me unduly cynical if I assert that a good first-order model of how commercial and public television programming work is simply this: Money is everything.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2044) It is possible - given absolute control over the media and the police - to rewrite the memories of hundreds of millions of people, if you have a generation to accomplish it in. Almost always, this is done to improve the hold that the powerful have on power, or to serve the narcissism or megalomania or paranoia of national leaders. It throws a monkey wrench in the error-correcting machinery. It works to ease public memory of profound political mistakes, and thus to guarantee their eventual repetition.

In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion pictures, and videotapes, technologically within reach, with television in every home, and with critical thinking in decline, restructuring societal memories even without much attention from the secret police seems possible. What I'm imagining here is not that each of us has a budget of memories implanted in special therapeutic sessions by state-appointed psychiatrists, but rather that small numbers of people will have so much control over news stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work major changes in collective attitudes. [...]

[A] contemporary example is the "war" on drugs - where the government and munificently funded civic groups systematically distort and even invent scientific evidence of adverse effects (especially of marijuana), and in which no public official is permitted even to raise the topic for open discussion. [...]

Trends working at least marginally towards the implantation of a very narrow range of attitudes, memories, and opinions include control of major television networks and newspapers by a small number of similarly motivated powerful corporations and individuals, the disappearance of competitive daily newspapers in many cities, the replacement of substantive debate by sleaze in political campaigns, and episodic erosion of the principle of the separation of powers. It is estimated (by the American media expert Ben Bagdikian) that fewer than two dozen corporations control more than half of the "global business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books and movies," The proliferation of cable television channels, cheap long-distance telephone calls, fax machines, computer bulletin boards and networks, inexpensive computer self-publishing, and surviving instances of the traditional liberal arts university curriculum are trends that might work in the opposite direction.

It's hard to tell how it's going to turn out.

The business of skepticism is to be dangerous. Skepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of skeptical thought, they will probably not restrict their skepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials, and 35,000-year-old channelees. Maybe they'll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they'll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be?

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2045) Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. 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 key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other counties; 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 facilities in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2046) It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

[Note: See #1754-1757, #2007-2014, #2015-2025, #2026-2031 and #2032-2038 for additional quotes from The Demon-Haunted World]