I’ve always believed in science, logic, rationality, and reason, yet today I find myself inordinately worried about the lack of reason, facts, logic, and rational discourse. Carl Sagan, in his book, “The Demon-Haunted World”, wrote the following:
“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…
The dumbing down of American 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, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Were Carl here today, he would be saddened beyond comprehension by the accuracy of his foresight. America has become exactly as he envisioned it. Political discourse focuses on self-aggrandizement and tribal politics. The people have no say in the creation of the political elites, it’s all a chimera of representing the needs of the people while finding every mechanism, to satiate their need for power, greed, and self-interest.
The electorate has truly been dumbed down. Today those on the religious right are subject to stultifying religious fundamentalism, to such an extent that they have no mechanism to question or apply scientific methodology to any of the questions of import. They are fed a constant diatribe of hate towards ‘the others’, the ones who are lost as they see it, and without the ability to suspend independent thought and ‘just believe’. Truth is an irrelevancy. Instead, they formulate truth through alternate facts or lies, by any other name, listening to men without any ethics, morals, or intelligence.
Critical thinking by the masses has become lost in translation. Ignorance is revered. Fear, guilt, and hate inhabit the minds of many. Retribution and getting even are the words used most often by their ‘leader’ when talking about the formulation of policy, laws, and educational reform. America has been brainwashed, and the world looks on from the outside in abject horror.
Fear rules America. The only way to be safe is to be armed to the teeth whether at home, at work, at school, in a place of worship, as a state, or a country. America would rather spend a trillion dollars a year on weapons than on education, knowledge acquisition, and physical and mental health.
When I was a Fire Chief across the border from Detroit one year not long ago, Detroit had 650 homicides in that year with only a population of 880,000 people. Canada, with 37 million people at the time, had 650 homicides. Something is terminally ill in America. There is no way to involve citizens in a rational discussion related to gun control, never mind gun prohibition. Almost every single day in America there is a mass murder, yet people wring their hands, buying more weapons, and more ammunition, and stoke fear into the hearts of anyone willing to listen.
America is like a psychotic on drugs. No predictability or rationality is being exhibited from Congress down to the lowest level of municipal politics. The acquisition of power and ability by an autocratic state to control the masses through fear, lies, media control, guilt, and if need be force, is the only goal.
I find it interesting that The Handmaid’s Tale was written as much to impel people to think, ask questions, seek answers, use logic and yes, to be fearful of a fictional theocratic, autocratic, misogynistic nation’s formation. Today, that is almost where the United States has arrived, and it is worrisome.
Asked if she meant for “The Handmaid’s Tale” to be a warning, Atwood replied that her intention doesn’t matter. “It is a warning, simply because I never have believed it can’t happen here,” she said. “I’ve never believed that. And more and more people are joining me in that lack of belief.”
And it isn’t just the United States, although the United States is the most emblematic entity of that reality. European states are seeing a slide towards autocracy and dictatorships. Extremism, racism, and hate towards the ‘others’ in each nation, scapegoats what they see as the opposition. The intent is to control and exert power over whomever each autocratic group suggests is the reason for the problems of that state.
Isolationism is returning and with it a loss of empathy, reason, and logic. Insularity is meant to keep rationality at bay. We are at a turning point, an inflection point in history, and there is no safe place to escape the lunacy. Eighty-seven years ago, there was a similar inflection point. One that ordained another sociopath, murderer, and bringer of doom, and the world has never really been the same. But all the signs were there even earlier. Those signs and symptoms can be seen today.
Once the final act in this Hobsian story is complete, there will be no turning back without conflict and war. I for one will never again set foot in this Giliad-like state of oppression and ignorance.
Carl Sagan died almost thirty years ago. Were he here he would be both alarmed and disgusted by the country he called home. In his memory I have adopted a favourite saying which seems to apply to the American electorate today,
“Wisdom has been chasing you, but you have always been faster.”
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