Carl Sagan 1995 words are now USA reality

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding (year 1995) 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. The dumbing down of America 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. As I write, the number-one videocassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. “Beavis and Butthead” remain popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning—not just of science, but of anything—are avoidable, even undesirable.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995

 

Carl Sagan, teacher and educator, who was often in mass media systems was not the first to give the warning about loss of society to media systems of "10 seconds or less" behaviors, memes that fit the Apple iPhone screen size, HDTV Fox News, etc. A decade earlier in 1985, Neil Postman (educator / teacher) also made a prediction about America's future.

 

"My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World. The ascent of Donald Trump has proved Neil Postman’s argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death was right." - Andrew Postman. February 2, 2017

 

This is the USA Sunday April 20, 2025.

Trivialization is the act of making something seem less important, serious, or complex than it actually is. It involves reducing something to a trivial or insignificant level, often with the intent of dismissing or minimizing its significance.

The constant meme machines hammering the 5,000 alternate reality screen games upon the population, people trivialize it.

Fox News language and thinking that conditions minds with wealth televangelism of Rupert Murdoch's media systems. People trivialize it, act like it is normal, and refuse to study media ecology of how it influences every other media platform. When education and learning and understanding is presented how the Mosque and Church and Synagogue do the same thing as Rupert Murdoch media environments to empower land lords and kings over everyday people, people dismiss it, trivialize it, act like it is unimportant topic.

The anti-intellectualism problems of meme-think Twitter-thinking meme-head society people trivialize and LOL and are so amused that they can't even understand what they have lost. Russia has won your heart and mind with surreal comedy and absurd humor, and all you do is mock humanism and goodness itself in favor of mocking and name-calling and LOL at orange skin color and poopy diapers of Donald Trump and side-act Elon Musk all 2024 and year 2025.

It is sickening, sick society, bottom to top, and has been since Q4 2014 when the Putin Media Invasion of Cambridge Analytica mental payloads had been deployed for 18 months. People can not get enough of mocking Donald Trump's image and mimicking his mass dehumanization behaviors on Twitter.

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985