The late astronomer Carl Sagan, who perhaps understood the unique threat of technocracy as well as anyone ever has, has emerged from the grave with a prescient warning on the dangers we are wading into unchecked.

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— Old Soldier (@OMGTheMess) July 17, 2023

"We've arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology," Sagan says. "And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces."

"I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?" he asks rhetorically.

"Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility," he adds.

Amen.

I have previously written about the uniquely 21st-century phenomenon of turning scientists into a new kind of priest class in possession of knowledge forbidden or unattainable to the population at large.

In this way, normal, mortal humans with questionable ethics (to put it charitably) are magically transformed into unquestionable demigods who cannot be criticized by mere mortals.

To hear it straight from the horse's mouth, the expert class is The Science™. The man is inseparable from the discipline.