Carl Sagan, writing in 1995, warned that soon America would be ruled by illiterate elites wielding “awesome technological powers,” and that most people, their brains broken by screens, would be unable to resist. We are living in the nightmare that Sagan foresaw.
Sagan envisioned a future in which the public is uninformed and superstitious. “The dumbing down of America,” he writes, “is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content, the 30-second soundbites … but especially a kind of widespread celebration of ignorance.”
Nov 8, 2025 21:45Sagan felt that the dumbing down of America was most evident in the rejection of science and the growing ignorance of history, art, literature, music and the humanities. If we're to reserve course, we need to revive mass education and literacy.
