I recently came across a quote from a book by the late astronomer Carl Sagan that really opened my eyes and and put into focus just how crazy today’s progressives have become.  Carl Sagan, the host of the original PBS show Cosmos, was a professor at Cornell.  Needless to say, Sagan was very liberal, or at least so I thought.  I think it’s now fair to say that Carl Sagan was a classical liberal.  That is, a liberal in the sense that liberalism used to have some connotation of tolerance.  Classical liberals valued free speech and jealously guarded the right to dissent.  Remember the 1960’s?  Liberals never got tired of advising us to “challenge authority.”  Things certainly have changed, and Carl Sagan predicted it.  In 1995, Sagan wrote a book entitled The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  In it, Sagan made the following observation:  “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 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.”  Astronomers exploring far-away stars and galaxies are looking back in time.  In late March, the Hubble Space Telescope discovered what may be the most distant object ever detected, a star the astronomers nicknamed “Earendel,” at least 50 times the mass of our sun, and some 12.9 billion light years from the Earth.  That means that the light from Earendel that we are seeing today emanated from the star 12.9 billion years ago, 6 billion years before our sun began to shine, and 6 billion years before a cloud of debris would form the Earth.  Carl Sagan, it seems, could also see into the future, because the dystopian future that he feared has truly come to pass.  America has become a service and information economy, and industry has slipped to other countries.  We don’t manufacture products as we once did.  It was bad in 1995, and it’s only gotten worse.  We not only don’t make things, we don’t know how to make them, and once we’ve got them, we don’t know how to fix them.  Just throw it out and buy some new Chinese piece of crap.  We’re an information economy because our lives are consumed by information companies.  The internet is awash with information, much of it unnecessary, and much too much of it false.  People’s lives are dominated by social media outlets that spew false information, censor inconvenient truths, and provide the consumer with an artificial sense of importance.  Where once, aspiring authors labored for years to get their work into print, now any boob can post anything on a media site an immediately consider himself important.  What’s more, any boob can post anything, no matter how false, misleading, defamatory, or hurtful, knowing he will be protected by anonymity and the charm of distance.  That’s a bizarre paradox, I know.  Social media users can achieve both fame (I have 400 followers!) and  anonymity (I can remotely smear others).  Both these pastimes feed bloated egos.  And at the end of the day, a day frittered away emailing, posting, blogging, Tweeting, Instagraming, Snapchatting, and just talking on the phone, the consumers of our information economy have accomplished exactly nothing.  Well, maybe not nothing.  Part of the information economy is e-commerce, so an Amazon package might be on the way.  Carl Sagan was right to worry about his children and grandchildren because they are the ones most vulnerable to injury.  Some of us who are older actually remember reading books made from paper, and possess the ability to go to a library, look up a book, and find out the truth.  Our kids, by and large, don’t have a clue and don’t have a chance.  Everything they know, or think they know appears on a screen.  Instead of abbracadabbra, they simply need say “Siri” or “Alexa” and the wisdom of the ages magically appears.  Or does it?  Spoiler alert.  Wikipedia is no substitute for learning history, and what appears might, and then again, might not be true.  When most young people rely on the likes of John Stewart and Trevor Noah to tell them the news, we’re screwed.  Back to Sagan.  “When awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few?”  We’re there right now.  Tech titans that nobody elected, even heard of, and whose motives are undisclosed, are deciding which viewpoints may be heard, and which viewpoints are to be banned.  These nameless, faceless people get to decide what will be considered information and what is to be labelled as disinformation, which is then suppressed.  As Sagan feared, the very ability to question authority is now at risk.  Today’s so-called progressives are free to pedal lies as truth and to suppress truth under the banner of disinformation.  As Sagan prophesized, most people merely pursue that which feels good and can no longer distinguish what is true.  And as Sagan so sagely observed, we risk descending into a new version of the Dark Ages, not so very different from the version we experienced a thousand years ago.  The old Dark Ages were characterized by a lack of information in the hands of an ignorant, uneducated populace, resulting in factionalism, superstition and isolation.  In the New Dark Ages, abundant information, much of it false, is flowing over a purposely poorly educated populace, resulting in the self-same factionalism and superstition.  We’re divided, and that division is growing.  What’s more, our computerized world has discouraged individual achievement, and even basic curiosity.  When your phone can answer any question, there’s no need to find out for yourself, there’s no need even to go outside to meet people face to face, and a new isolation, rivaling that of the 10th Century monks is becoming commonplace.  The only difference is the monks were literate.  “LOL” and “LMAO” isn’t a language, and Tweets are not literature.  Simply put, Carl Sagan was right.  If anything, he failed to fully grasp just how bad things might become.