propaganda | The Ethical Skeptic

I contend once again, Carl Sagan was neither correct, nor really all that brilliant. In his oft-lauded ‘The Demon-Haunted World’ quip, he miscalled entirely the constituency who would end up becoming our problem. I fixed it.

I bear an apprehension about an America in my, my children’s, and grandchildren’s time – when oligarch and technology powers rule and are in the hands of a few elite cronies, and no one representing the public interest is permitted to speak against, much less stop what is occurring; when the people have lost the ability to control their own destinies and are forbidden access to the resources and rights to question those in authority; when, clutching our progressive buzzwords and nervously surveying our science communicators’ latest witch-hunt, our critical faculties seared, unable to distinguish between virtuous-sounding agitprop and what’s actually ethical or scientific, we slide, almost without noticing, straight into civil strife, an equality in paucity, and oppression.