Carl Sagan didn’t just believe in science. He believed in people’s capacity to ask questions—and in what would happen if they stopped.

In on of his final interviews, Sagan warned of a society built on science and technology, yet proudly ignorant of both. His fear wasn't just ignorance—it was institutionalized anti-thinking.

“We've arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology…If we are not able to ask skeptical questions…then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.”

If you’re still wondering how we got here—how a culture so advanced in tools could become so regressive in thought—Sagan already told you.

We live in an America that distrusts experts, punishes nuance, and rewards the loudest man in the room. A country where school boards ban books while billionaires build bunkers. Where facts are optional and feelings, particularly those of patriarchal authority, are gospel.

Sagan warned that the real danger wasn’t just ignorance. It was the fusion of ignorance with power—especially in a democracy. That combination, he argued, was combustible. And we’re watching it detonate in real time.

Well, the charlatans arrived years ago. And now they’re passing legislation.

Across the country, decisions about healthcare, environmental policy, gender, and education are being made by people who don’t understand (or deliberately reject) the systems they are supposed to govern. And worse—many of them proudly campaign on that rejection. Expertise has become suspect. Intelligence, elitist. Uncertainty, weakness.

And now the United States is experiencing a brain drain in real time—a slow-motion intellectual exodus, not because we lack talent, but because we’ve made intellect incompatible with power. Our most brilliant minds are being driven out of public life not with violence, but with mockery, suppression, and bureaucracy that favors ideology over inquiry.

This is not just a failure of education. It is a strategy of domination.

Because when people stop interrogating power, power stops being accountable. And that, Sagan feared, is when democracy begins to rot from within.

The deeper rot, though, is how this anti-intellectualism so often serves the oldest agenda in the book: the preservation of patriarchal control. You can see it in the way reproductive rights are rolled back based on religious dogma, not medical fact. You can see it in the way discussions of race, gender, and equity are vilified as “woke indoctrination.” You can see it in the way science is reduced to feelings and policy to culture war theater.

The truth is, many of the loudest voices in American politics today are not trying to govern. They are trying to protect a shrinking worldview—one that elevates male authority, suppresses communal care, and clings to a mythic past where questioning the order of things was seen as betrayal.

In this sense, the “charlatan” Sagan warned us about wasn’t just a single politician. It was a mindset. One that thrives in a vacuum of knowledge. One that survives by telling people that asking questions is dangerous and thinking too deeply is un-American.

What’s even more insidious is that this erosion doesn’t always look like violence. Sometimes it looks like tradition. Sometimes it looks like family values. Sometimes it looks like God. But make no mistake—it is still a war on truth. And truth, in a society that fears change, becomes the greatest threat of all.

Sagan believed that science was more than a body of knowledge. It was “a way of thinking.” A discipline of curiosity. A humility in the face of complexity. That kind of thinking isn’t just useful—it is civilization-saving. Because without it, we don’t just become misinformed. We become manipulable.

So what now?

We teach the next generation that it is not dangerous to ask questions—it is dangerous not to. We rebuild the muscle of critical thought. We name the forces that profit off our confusion. And we stop treating ignorance like a quirk of the American character and start calling it what it is: a system. A system that Sagan saw coming. A system we now have to undo.

We have the world’s most powerful tools—run by people who don’t know how they work and don’t care to learn.

Sagan saw it. He feared it.
And now, we’re living it.

But this doesn’t have to be the end of the story.

We can still fight for a culture that respects thought. That protects education. That invests in truth, not tribalism. That stops telling kids that critical thinking is dangerous and starts telling politicians that willful ignorance is disqualifying.

Because in the end, it’s not just about knowledge. It’s about survival.

The charlatans didn’t sneak in. We opened the door. It’s time to shut it—and start thinking again.