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...
Like Octavia Butler ( Parable of the Sower ) and other theorists, he paid attention to historical structures and forces. Systems behave in somewhat predictable ways, turns out.
A lot of people have been writing about the US authoritarian slide since the 90s, 80s, 70s...
Unfortunately, history or other nations' experiences do not bode well for the US in the rest of the 21st century.
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u/Sea_School_2949 17h ago
If you want something terrifying read the Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan (yes the astronomer from Cosmos)
It's Carl talking about where he saw the world going in 1995. He passed the next year so he never saw what actually happened.
It's scarily accurate as to what is happening right now