I read this last night and it sent shivers down my spine – prophetic!

[Texin]

27. I agree with you on that. Manufacturing was well into its decline before this was written in 1995.

I remember discussing it with a man I dated at the time who told me he had witnessed employees where he worked actually dismantling production equipment in order to send it to China back then. It's only been escalating since that period and before. I remember having a discussion with him about the Texas state legislators tossing around the idea that Texas motorists would have to be fingerprinted and the print tied to their drivers' licenses, and he told me that he wouldn't do it if it passed, to which I replied that he wouldn't be doing any legal driving in the state of Texas if he didn't. That law wasn't enacted, but the licenses today are bar coded with some sort of information that law enforcement personnel can scan into their databases.

I don't see Sagan's piece as being so much prescient as it was an observation on an increasingly intellectually lazy society. It's not entirely the fault of the masses, though. Public school curricula has never emphasized the importance of the concept of individual critical thinking and analysis of anything. And one can't lay the entire fault on the educational process in this country alone. I don't wish to incite fury, but organized religion has a long established precedent in controlling thoughts and behaviors through indoctrination and the fear of retribution and eternal damnation and punishment (as if living a hell on Earth wasn't enough for some people, it needed to follow them into an afterlife that may or may not actually exist - and probably doesn't, but the churches need to make money to survive so they make their followers obedient so they're perpetually terrified and glad to obediently pay out whatever paltry sums they can scrape together to buy salvation and keep the churches coffers filled so they won't carry their mundane personal hell into hell in the hereafter).