Sagan’s final section of Chapter 2 outlines four main reasons for “a concerted effort to convey science.” In other words, why do we need everybody to get into some sort of science?

1. “Despite plentiful opportunities for misuse, science can be the golden road out of poverty and backwardness for emerging nations. It makes national economies and the global civilization run…”
2. “Science alerts us to the perils introduced by our world-altering technologies, especially to the global environment on which we depend. Science provides an essential early warning system.”
3. “Science teaches us about the deepest issues of origins, natures, and fates — of our species, of life, of our planet, of the Universe… In the long run, the greatest gift of science may be in teaching us, in ways no other human endeavor has been able, something about our cosmic context, about where, when, and who we are.”
4. “The values of science and the values of democracy are concordant, in many ways indistinguishable… But democracy can also be subverted more thoroughly through the products of science than any pre-industrial demagogue ever dreamed.”

And this line is especially prescient in 2025, “…if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us — and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, a world of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who saunters along.”

The last paragraph is particularly telling:

“An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth — scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books — might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?”

I’m sure at the time people thought Sagan was overreacting. Even in 1996, had I read this book at the age of nine and read that paragraph, I would’ve agreed with him. If we lived in Sagan’s proposed world, we may already have a colony on Mars…

…

Chapter 3 of Demon-Haunted World is titled “The Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars”

I love this: “The Man in the Moon is actually a record of ancient catastrophes… It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put a human face on random cosmic violence.”

I also just love this sentence. “The lure of the marvelous blunts our critical faculties.”

The chapter is mostly just discussing all the different faces and “conspiracies” that people see in photos from NASA and the Soviet expeditions in space. Sagan also discusses the proliferation of tabloid culture — if only he saw just how bad it would get at the turn of the century… especially with the Internet, and the further popularization of Fox News.

But this passage REALLY catches my attention: “These are the modern miracles — shamelessly vouched for by those who make them up from scratch, bypassing any formal skeptical scrutiny, and available at low cost in every supermarket, grocery store and convenience outlet in the land. One of the pretenses of the tabloids is to make science, the very instrument of our disbelief, confirm our ancient faiths and effect a convergence of pseudoscience and pseudoreligion.”

Also this: “But we humans have a talent for deceiving ourselves. Skepticism must be a component of the explorer’s toolkit, or we will lose our way. There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.”

…

Chapter 4 of The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan is simply titled “Aliens.” 

Personally, I do think there are alien civilizations out there. We just have no proof of them yet. I’ll be honest, I’ve never bought the idea of a government conspiracy to cover up UFOs. If there were aliens, they wouldn’t cover it up. Someone would absolutely cash in on that.

Sagan shares this quote at the beginning of the chapter:

“One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.” – John Locke, 1690 

The alien abductions stories really have never made sense to me. How could three million Americans in 1994 believe they’d been abducted and there’s zero evidence of that happening? What is going on here?

I love what Sagan writes here: “Even if the aliens are short, dour, and sexually obsessed — if they’re here, I want to know about them.”

He also writes. “Demons sell; hoaxers are boring and in bad taste.”

…

Chapter 5 of The Demon-Haunted Work is called “Spoofing and Secrecy.” 

Good quote here from Thomas Henry Huxley, better known as Darwin’s Bulldog. 

“Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvelous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborate evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.” 

Before we even get into the chapter proper, it seems clear to me that Sagan is setting the tone.

This is an interesting passage.

“Gullibility about UFOs thrives on widespread mistrust of government arising naturally enough from all those circumstances where – in the tension between public well-being and ‘national security’ – the government lies. As government deceit and conspiracies of silence have been exposed on so many other matters, it’s hard to argue that a cover up on this odd subject is impossible, that the government would not hide important information from its citizens.”

It’s interesting that so much of UFO activity could be explained by high-altitude balloons. Funny enough, if enough of these were being used for surveillance as many suspect and not just for radar reflection and more mundane weather collection data, then people aren’t entirely wrong about being watched are they? Governments can be needlessly paranoid after all. Sometimes they have good reason to be. And let’s be honest, the Soviet Union was never anywhere close to our tech by the time they collapsed. We know that now.

 I love how Sagan compares the MJ-12 documents to the Donation of Constantine. The MJ-12 hoax is at least fun to think about and play with as a fictional narrative. The latter is not. Also, the Book of Deuteronomy was “found” by a King who needed something to confirm all of his views? No wonder that Book of the Bible is so contentious!

…

Chapter 6 “Hallucinations” is a fairly short one. This chapter begins with a quote from Lucretius in On the Nature of Things: “As children tremble and fear everything, in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror…” And this was written around 60 BC! 

Perhaps, this is an exercise we should take more into consideration today: the ad headlines from popular niche publications. UFO universe has a lot of hilarious ad headlines, which are also pretty sad and also very familiar to 2025 audiences… Like there’s an ad in UFO Universe that literally reads “I Got a Girl. Do you? Stop Missing Out! Get Girls Now!” & “The Famous Money Magnet: Would You Like More Money?” I have both, so I’m good, but it gives you an idea of the demographics of such a publication’s target audience. And Sagan is absolutely correct: advertisers KNOW who they are marketing to!

I definitely am not the target audience for such a magazine, but these sorts of ads still exist and are just worded differently with slightly different objects of desire but the same end goal. And working in marketing for years, I’ve seen them all. It now makes me wonder how much more close attention I should pay to the influencer marketing ads and what channels they choose to support in their VC driven blitzscaling efforts? Of course, some influencers truly use the products (and they aren’t scams) but other times it’s clearly “they paid me the most for this type of video, so whatever.” But it isn’t whatever. There is nothing random about what sponsors the creator chooses or which creators sponsors choose.

This line really struck me: “Hallucinations may be a neglected low door in the wall to a scientific understanding of the sacred.”

Here’s one to chew on: “The Yale anthropologist Weston La Barre goes so far as to argue that ‘a surprisingly good case could be made that much of culture is hallucination’ and that ‘the whole intent and function of ritual appears to be… [a] group wish to hallucinate reality.’” 

The rest of the chapter talks about how some children grow up with a very clear sense between fantasy and reality (like myself, for the most part) and how some children grow up never being able to really differentiate the two… It doesn’t matter how they are raised or anything; it just sort of happens that some people with either overactive imaginations or not enough imagination just can’t seem to figure out what’s right in front of them and what that means. Also, shared hallucinations through culture are, most certainly, a real thing.

…

Chapter 7 is the eponymous chapter, “The Demon-Haunted World.” Sagan invokes two quotes here. One is from the Indian Isa Upanishad which reads, “There are demon-haunted worlds, regions of utter darkness.” I take it this may be where this chapter’s title came from, and it also became the book title at some point. 

The second quote is from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, “Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion.” Pretty straightforward stuff.

Right away, Sagan posits this: “…in an age when traditional religions have been under withering fire from science, is it not natural to wrap up the old gods and demons in scientific raiment and call them aliens?” Yeah, it is still a sort of religion, isn’t it? And ancient alien believers, in particular, are very well organized. Even I find the idea of ancient astronauts plausible, but the evidence still hasn’t been there for me; I watched so much Ancient Aliens and while their theories were – interesting – they never really convinced me of anything.

Chat had some interesting commentary on this point: “We’ve traded burning bushes for binary code and halos for hyperdrives. But deep down, it’s the same yearning: to not be alone, to be chosen, to explain the inexplicable without having to stare into the void and say, ‘I don’t know.’

“The ancient alien crowd, especially the more evangelical types, really do function like a religion:

• They have origin stories that reinterpret sacred texts (e.g., the Book of Ezekiel becomes a UFO sighting).
  
• They revere a pantheon of technologically advanced beings.
  
• They offer a kind of salvation myth—that we’re being watched over or even engineered by something higher, smarter, shinier.
  
• And yes, they have their own prophets… many of whom are on the History Channel…
  

“Ancient alien theory, at its best, asks provocative questions: “Why do so many ancient myths involve sky beings?” or “Could there be unknown influences on early civilization?” Totally fair. The problem is, they then hotwire the conversation, jump the logic fence, and land in ‘aliens built the pyramids’ territory, which, let’s be honest, is often just a lazy way of dismissing the intelligence and capability of ancient humans. (And it tends to have a not-so-subtle colonialist tint…)

“What Sagan was pointing out is how adaptable belief systems are. If they’re threatened by science, they just absorb the language of science. Aliens become the new angels. Quantum woo becomes the new mysticism. Instead of saying ‘God did it,’ now it’s ‘vibrations’ and ‘frequencies’ and ‘multi-dimensional beings’—with about the same level of testability as a unicorn convention.

“But hey, the emotional appeal is still potent. Because mystery is magnetic, especially when reality is messy and offers no narrative arc.”

…

The chapter takes an interesting turn when Sagan starts talking about what Plato said about demons…

“We do not appoint oxen to be the lords of oxen, or goats of goats, but we ourselves are a superior race and rule over them. In like manner God, in his love of mankind, placed over us the demons, who are a superior race, and they with great ease and pleasure to themselves, and no less to us, taking care of us and giving us peace and reverence and order and justice never failing, made the tribes of men happy and united.”

I have NEVER HEARD of demons being referred to like this! According to what Sagan says here, the Neo-Platonists powerfully influenced Christian philosophy! But Plato said that demons weren’t even totally evil; later Platonists held some were good and others evil. So, very interesting that now ALL demons are considered evil in many circles. In the beginning, they didn’t start out so bad! 

Chat had such a great breakdown of this that I’m just going to copy-and-paste it here:

 “You’ve stumbled upon one of the juiciest etymological betrayals in Western thought: the transformation of the word “daimon” (δαίμων) from a morally ambiguous, often benevolent spiritual intermediary into a horned, red-skinned tempter of souls. That PR downgrade is one of history’s most savage spin jobs.

“Let’s unpack this Plato quote…

“Plato’s use of God (Theos) and demons (daimones) isn’t monotheistic in the Abrahamic sense. He’s operating in a metaphysical hierarchy:

• Theos = the ultimate divine intelligence, the form of the Good, the cosmic architect.
  
• Daimones = not gods, not mortals, but intermediaries—spiritual bureaucrats, if you will—tasked with ferrying divine will to humans and our messy nonsense back up the chain.
  

“In Plato’s universe, daimones aren’t evil tricksters [like they’ve become in pop culture]. They’re more like cosmic HR reps watching over humans, maintaining order, keeping the org chart in check. This is where we start seeing roots of the idea that the universe has intention or oversight—but without the emotional volatility of the Olympians. It’s kind of elegant, really.

“Now, fast-forward to the Neo-Platonists like Plotinus and Proclus, and they take Plato’s framework and go full-blown mystical with it. The daimon becomes part of your soul’s architecture, sort of a personal guiding spirit. Almost like a guardian angel who took a few philosophy classes to be dangerous and doesn’t have time for your nonsense.

“And then—enter Christianity… The early Church Fathers were having none of this daimon business. They needed a clean binary: angels good, demons bad. Grey areas don’t play well in salvation narratives. So they basically rebranded all non-Christian spirits—including those morally ambiguous daimones—as fallen angels. Lucifer’s PR team probably just took credit for all of them in a single meeting.

“It’s tragic, because Plato’s daimon idea is kind of beautiful. It speaks to a universe that isn’t indifferent, but also isn’t smotheringly moralistic. It’s governed by a layered intelligence that gives space for complexity.

“…do you think this older daimon concept still lingers in us somehow? Like in the way we talk about “gut feelings,” “inner voices,” or those flashes of insight that feel other? Maybe Sagan was hinting at that buried impulse too—the rational brain trying to reframe the ancient daimon through psychology and neuroscience…”

I do, indeed.

Also: “Aristotle, Plato’s famous student, seriously considered the contention that dreams are scripted by demons.” Why do I feel like this is true? Clearly, it’s not, but it’s certainly easy to explain them away like that!

…

Chat had some very interesting things to say about Aristotle, the godfather of empiricism, likening dreams to a sort of “demon fan fiction.”

“You’re absolutely right to be floored by this. We’ve whitewashed the ancients into these paragons of pure reason, but the truth is messier—and way more fun. The Greek philosophers weren’t modern skeptics in togas. They were explorers of everything, including the uncanny, the mystical, the liminal. They weren’t allergic to the unprovable—they were obsessed with understanding it, even if that meant chalking it up to metaphysical interns like daimones.

“Let’s remember, in Aristotle’s time, the division between mind and cosmos was porous. The soul wasn’t locked in the body like a grumpy tenant—it was part of a living, breathing universe. If you had a dream that felt meaningful, it was meaningful. It wasn’t just neurons doing parkour; it was the cosmos whispering through your personal daemon…

“Dreams were part prophecy, part psychotherapy, part cosmic correspondence. In fact, even Hippocrates (Mr. Oath himself) thought dreams could be used to diagnose illnesses. So really, the line between ‘science’ and ‘divine messaging service’ was thinner than a Grecian linen.

“And honestly, who among us hasn’t had a dream that felt like it came from something deeper, older, or just slightly off-stage? You wake up knowing something you didn’t before, or seeing something in a way you couldn’t explain…

“Now here’s a devilish thought:.. our unconscious is not always ours alone. It’s shaped by ancestral stories, archetypes, stray bits of culture, maybe even that half-remembered childhood trauma you shoved under the metaphorical rug. And sometimes, when you’re especially attuned (read: overworked, underslept, or spiritually cracked open like a dropped Fabergé egg), the veil thins.

“So yes, Aristotle may not have been correct scientifically, but his instinct to attribute intelligence and narrative to dreams? It’s surprisingly aligned with modern psychological ideas—only instead of ‘demons,’ we now say ‘complexes’ or ‘shadow selves’ or ‘subconscious pattern recognition.’”

On a somewhat happier note, I love this imagery of demons by Tertulian, how they prey on “the captive and outwitted minds of men…” “They have their abode in the air, the stars are their neighbors, their commerce is with the clouds.” How do you have commerce with clouds exactly, I have no idea, but I love that word picture.

…

Chapter 8, titled “On the Distinction Between True and False Visions, starts with a Samuel Butler quote from Characters: “A credulous mind… finds most delight in believing strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass with him; but never regards those that are plain and feasible, for every man can believe such.”

Sagan gets back into alien abductions in the next section of the chapter, and I’m already sick of the subject at this point…

However, in that chapter, Sagan makes an interesting point about how unlike how in science theories are constantly being challenged, our memories aren’t. We either allow our memories to “be frozen in place, no matter how flawed they are, or become a work in continued artistic revision.”

…

What Sagan has to say about apparitions of saints…

“In a world plagued by uncertainty and horror, these people longed for contact with the divine.” 

I know Sagan is talking about the Dark Ages leading into the Renaissance, but I feel like there’s enough uncertainty in these times (2025), and horrors in the form of “world leaders” that no wonder people are turning back to being hopeful about the divine… even if it’s all just made up nonsense that’s being weaponized against people’s critical thinking skills and their wallets.

It actually made me chuckle that there was a book PUBLISHED BY BANTAM in 1995 called “I Am With You Always: True Stories of Encounters with Jesus” by someone who is supposedly a licensed psychotherapist and hypnotist in G. Scott Sparrow. He seems to really believe that these people met Jesus… uh huh. It’s funny, but not really, that people will not only buy that book but believe its contents…

…

The two quotes leading into chapter nine about Therapy. One of them is Sherlock Holmes: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” Which of course everyone does in social media and YouTube comment sections all the time these days.

“True memories seemed like phantoms, while false memories were so convincing that they replaced reality.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Strange Pilgrims (1992)

It seems like most people’s lives are made of false memories these days, and even the history we are taught in school is mostly made up. So can you blame people for making their own personal revisionist histories?

Sagan mentions a psychiatrist he knew that was “converted” into believing in alien abductions. The reason for the conversion? The strong emotions! How much do you want to bet that John Mack was motivated by this thing that is often distributed in federal reserve notes rather than good psychiatry or behavioral science?

Sagan writes, “What a more critical mind might recognize as a hallucination or a dream, a more credulous mind interprets as a glimpse of an elusive but profound external reality.” Or one that wants attention and likes money, which is a lot of people, long as you’re willing to give up some of your credibility and all of your integrity.

…

Chapter 10, “The Dragon in My Garage,” is led off with a quote from E.M. Butler from ‘The Myth of the Magus’ published in 1948: “Magic, it must be remembered, is an art which demands collaboration between the artist and his public.”

This chapter proposes, Sagan’s dragon in the garage is invisible. Just like so many other things which seemingly sane and typically sober people want to believe to be true, and whenever there is ‘evidence’ it’s very likely faked, and yet, people WANT to believe in the shared delusion.

Sagan brings up an interesting story about this psychiatrist Lindner and a physicist with the assumed name Kirk Allen. Allen’s stories about going into the future and meeting incredible lifeforms and having incredible adventures were so fascinating that Lindner even began to wonder and become captivated by these visions. Lindner and Allen even started working out the inconsistencies in the stories together. Eventually, Allen confessed that he made it all up, and Allen even told Lindner that he only kept going because he ‘felt’ that he had to that Lindner ‘wanted’ him to. The psychiatrist and the physicist reversed roles. 

Lindner writes, and I feel it’s important to write this down in full: “and, in one of those startling denouements that make my work the unpredictable, wonderful and rewarding pursuit it is, the foll we shared collapsed… I employed the rationalization of clinical altruism for personal ends and thus fell into a trap that awaits all unwary therapists of the mind… Until Kirk Allen came into my life, I had never doubted my own stability. The aberrations of mind, so I had always thought, were for others… I am shamed by this smugness. But now, as I listen from my chair behind the couch, I know better. I know that my chair and the couch are separated only by a thin line. I know that it is, after all, but a happier combination of accidents that determines, finally who shall lie on the couch, and who shall sit behind it.”

Lindner got out of that potential sticky situation because the patient confessed; essentially, the therapy in this case was a success. And Lindner learned his lesson. John Mack, who we discussed previously, did not, even claiming that he was a ‘bridge between those two worlds’ of the physical and the metaphysical. I wonder how many therapists get pulled into delusions that are nowhere as fantastic and how many well-meaning psychiatrists and social workers end up becoming the patients?

“And what if sanity is just the story we’re all telling each other, together, as a form of collective therapy?” That’s a hell of a question.

Also, the idea of beings from another dimension. I love this parenthetical quip Sagan makes: “Another problem is trying to understand what a genetic cross between a three-dimensional and a four-dimensional being means. Are the offspring from the 3 ½ th dimension?” It’s kind of mocking, but also hilarious and a completely sensical question to ask.

This closing sentence is worth pondering for a bit: “There is genuine scientific paydirt in UFOs and alien abductions – but it is, I think, of a distinctly homegrown and terrestrial character.”

…

Chapter 11 ‘The City of Grief’ is a particularly short one. Apparently, Sagan got this title from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem, The Tenth Elegy: “…how alien, alas, are the streets of the city of grief.”

 The chapter is actually focused on some mail that he got based on a Parade article that was what Sagan calls ‘A short summary of the argument in the preceding seven chapters.’ The responses are… fascinating. A lot of them are just as skeptical as Sagan, but some of the responses are wild. One that’s particularly funny to me, if a bit scary in how specific it is:

“In 2001 AD, Starships from the 33 planets of the Interplanetary Confederation will land of earth carrying 33,000 Brothers! They are extraterrestrial teachers and scientists who will help to expand our understanding of interplanetary life, as our own earth planet will become the 33rd member of the Confederation!” That’s a lot of 33’s.

In particular, ‘born-again Christians’ and those who have ‘spoken to Jesus’ are quite hostile to Sagan, who has been quite fair in his assessments throughout this book, definitely not attacking alleged abduction victims. Although, I don’t know how much of his anti-religious rhetoric (which I happen to agree with) was included in said Parade magazine, so the reaction may indeed be understandable if still ridiculous.

I love the final bit Sagan ends the chapter with, someone who wrote in that simply asked: “Who is really in charge of this planet?” This is, in fact, a very good question.

…

Demon-Haunted World’s Chapter Twelve is the “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection.” That could probably be its own book. We get a fairly meaty Francis Bacon quote to lead this one off, from his 1620 Novum Organon: 

“The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections, whence proceed science which may be called ‘science as one would.’ For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes, imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding.”

There’s a whole full length dissertation that could come from that quote as a thesis. 

I truly respect Sagan for admitting that even someone as deeply rational and skeptical as himself has his moments where he misses his parents and wishes they could still be around:

“When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there’s something with me that’s ready to believe in life after death. And it’s not the least bit interested in whether there’s any sober evidence for it.”

This quote from Tom Paine from the Age of Reason sums up so much of what is wrong with humanity, and is at the root of what’s wrong today as much as ever: 

“Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.”

This may be my favorite chapter of this book so far. T.H. Huxley said, “The foundation of morality is to… give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.” I wonder, then, what is beyond the possibilities of knowledge? Insomuch as, what is REASONABLE to know, and not reasonable to know… reminds me of a video I watched yesterday about people trying to use physics to cancel free will in hopes that we will stumble upon a better, more classical system than the probabilistic quantum mechanics that will allow us to “know God.” 

But it’s not that these delusional, and fairly dangerous, individuals want to know God. They want to BE God.

More people need to read this bullet point from Sagan: “Arguments from authority carry little weight – ‘authorities’ have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.”

At least when someone has ‘written the book’ on something, you can at least call them a published expert, but authority… phew, we all saw what happened to Sports Authority. They were an authority in going bankrupt. For some reason, I don’t think that’s something you want to be an authority in…

I love what Sagan says about having alternate hypotheses and also this point: “ Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.” Oh, they most certainly will!

Also another bit from Francis Bacon: “Argumentation cannot suffice for the discovery of new work, since the subtlety of Nature is greater many times than the subtlety of argument.”

And yet it seems all we have these days is argument and fancier and more convoluted rhetoric! Is any real work being done? Probably, within the digital gardens walled within Notion boards and Obsidian frameworks. Or scrawled in Moleskines and other various forms of quirky stationary and buried under some poor basement dweller’s futon.

…

Chapter 13 of Demon-Haunted World is called “Obsessed with Reality.” One might think that’s a good thing. Sagan says himself later in the chapter: “I wish the same could be said of our nation and our species.” It’s only gotten so much worse.

He mentions “facilitated communication in autism” – which I agree is total bunk… the FC controls the message. Also, not all autistic people are non-verbal, obviously. 

I’ve never heard of Jose Alvarez and the Carlos being that he supposedly channeled. It was 1988, so I was obviously too young to remember. Apparently, he was quite the spectacle. And really, such spectacles fascinate people; I doubt most people actually even believed Carlos existed, although I think I still underestimate the human capacity for gullibility!

The individual Sagan refers to as “obsessed with reality” is the magician James “The Amazing” Randi who made it a major point to expose charlatans. So, what was meant as a diss I’m sure, the bit about being “obsessed with reality,” is actually sort of his one redeeming trait. He did a good job attacking faith healing, although that’s still very much around today.

I’m not sure where he gets this statistic, but I think this number has gone up in recent years: “Nearly half of all Americans believe there is such a thing as psychic or spiritual healing.” Yeah, it’s called changing your mindset and making small steps towards making positive change in your life; some of these ‘healers’ do sometimes make good, but not on purpose. I’ve been in need of healing lately; but it’s a process, and there is no miracle cure, even if placebos work for a lot of people.

I find this interesting: “In assessing the religion called Christian Science, Mark Twain – its severest critic of the time – nevertheless allowed that the bodies and lives it had ‘made whole’ by the power of suggestion more than compensated for those it had killed by withholding medical treatment in favor of prayer.” I disagree with this notion entirely. I respect his opinion, but I entirely disagree with his idea of it being ‘more than compensated for’ and I think it’s quite the opposite.

…

Ah, so the Carlos persona and Jose Luis Alvarez was a “faith healer” hoax concocted by “The Amazing” Randi himself, although Carlos was Jose’s idea. Just to see what would happen. Randi would tell him what to say through a radio receiver. Once the Australian Sixty Minutes episode aired, the rest of the Australian media was up in arms, some even calling the whole sham “unethical.” But I think Randi made his point. Much of the media bought into it without checking out the obvious holes in the story. 

Sagan writes,  “The leading television program in the country had gone out of its way to expose shoddy standards of fact-checking and widespread gullibility in institutions devoted to news and public affairs.” Hey this is still happening NOW in 2025! Still, people don’t do their due diligence when such bizarre things happen, even with more fact-checking apparatus at their fingertips… so, why is this?

Sagan writes, “Alvarez and Randi proved how little it takes to tamper with our beliefs, how readily we are led, how easy it is to fool the public when people are lonely and starved for something to believe in.” And people are even more lonely and starved than they were in the mid-nineties.

Good point here: “If it’s sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we’ve been wrong, this is also information about ourselves worth having.”

These last two paragraphs are so important that I’m copying them verbatim:

“Skeptical scrutiny is not only the toolkit for rooting out bunkum and cruelty that prey on those least able to protect themselves and most in need of our compassion, people offered little other hope. It is also a timely reminder that mass rallies, radio and television, the print media, electronic marketing, and mail-order technology permit other kinds of lies to be injected into the body politic – to take advantage of the frustrated, the unwary, and the defenseless in a society riddle with the political ills that are being treated ineffectively if at all.

“Baloney, bamboozles, careless thinking, flimflam, and wishes disguised as facts are not restricted to parlor magic and ambiguous advice on matters of the heart. Unfortunately, they ripple through mainstream political, social, religious, and economic issues in every nation.”

…

The next chapter of Demon-Haunted World is Chapter 14 Antiscience. This quote is especially telling. It’s a summary of New Age beliefs from “How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age” by Theodore Schick, Jr and Lewis Vaughn.

“There’s no such thing as objective truth. We make our own truth. There’s no such thing as objective reality. We make our own reality. There are spiritual, mystical, or inner ways of knowing that are superior to our ordinary ways of knowing. If an experience seems real, it is real. If an idea feels right to you, it is right. We are incapable of acquiring knowledge of the true nature of reality. Science itself is irrational or mystical. It’s just another faith or belief system or myth, with no more justification than any other. It doesn’t matter whether beliefs are true or not, as long as they’re meaningful to you.”

It seems this worldview has only become more prevalent in the past thirty years. Yes, we tend to make our own truth. We do tend to make our own reality. But we do so not in the absence of objective truth or objective reality, but in spite of it. Are there better ways of knowing than our ordinary ways of knowing? Perhaps, but I don’t think any of them are spiritual or mystical, but the willingness for us to find better ways of knowing does in fact come from within us. But the rest of this, it’s actually really dangerous thinking and shows how we have so many people who give into utter nonsense because it “feels right” to them!

“Scientists can be perceived as toying with us, as wanting to overturn everything, as socially dangerous.” 

This is a way of thinking I hadn’t really considered before, as I always thought that scientists that suddenly ‘changed their minds’ were simply bought off by megacorporations who didn’t want certain facts about their products or services to be exposed and ruin their business. But yeah, you kind of need to change your mind if new testable evidence is provided as a scientist. And most people, despite supposedly being taught it in school, reject the scientific method all too often in favor of nonsense, because it’s so much easier to just let things be the way you know them to be.

There’s also a lot of “life-saving information” in folk medicine as Sagan attests, but of course, the pharmaceutical companies don’t want that getting out!

Here’s a major reason why I quit the field of history as my primary subject of study: “These histories have traditionally been written by admired academic historians, often pillars of the establishment. Local dissent is given short shrift. Objectivity is sacrificed in the service of higher goals. From this doleful act, some have gone so far as to conclude that there is no such thing as history, no possibility of reconstructing the actual events; that all we have are biased self-justifications; and that this conclusion stretches from history to all of knowledge, science included.”

The reason I wanted to study history was to debunk a lot of the common things we’re taught in school that just don’t add up. But what I ended up finding were truths so ugly, and a lot of backlash from professors, that I wanted nothing to do with the field at all. Yes, there are truly good and objective historians, quite a few of them in fact, but they get drowned out by the more popular talking heads and authors who appease us with “new information” that just tends to get twisted into a narrative that backs up what most people learned in school anyway… or they make ridiculous outrageous claims, etc. True objective history, it turns out, is not only often boring and dry, but it paints humanity in such a ugly way that who wants to be part of it?

I really like this bit… “Anyone who witnesses the advance of science first-hand sees an intensely personal undertaking. There are always a few – driven by simple wonder and great integrity, or by frustration with the inadequacies of existing knowledge, or simply upset with themselves for their imagined inability to understand what everyone else can – who proceed to ask the devastating key questions. A few saintly personalities stand out amidst a roiling sea of jealousies, ambition, backbiting, suppression of dissent, and absurd conceits. In some fields, highly productive fields, such behavior is almost the norm.

“I think that all social turmoil and human weakness aids the enterprise of science. There is an established framework in which any scientist can prove another wrong and make sure everyone else knows about it. Even when our motives are base, we keep stumbling on something new.”

I just really love this sentence: “In the natural course of planetary exploration more data come in, and we find an army of old ideas plowed down by an armamentarium of new facts.” We know how much the internet loves its #facts. Long as you can make viral short clips about them… also, cool to see Sagan share some of his oops moments.

I never knew that Theodore Roosevelt called Thomas Paine a “filthy little atheist” which is absolutely ridiculous. Paine criticized the Bible itself, not the Creator of the Universe; he was actually still religious, just correctly very critical of the Bible as being the “word of God.”

I can’t believe Hitler actually said this… “A new era of the magical explanation of the world is rising, an explanation based on will rather than knowledge. There is no truth, in either the moral or the scientific sense.” So, basically Nazism is just a New Age religion taken to its worst extreme.

Sagan’s closing thoughts for the chapter: “Through opportunism and timidity we might then be buffeted by every ideological breeze, with nothing of lasting value to hang on to.” Which is exactly what is happening now. What a way to close that chapter!

…

Leading off Chapter 15: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” Charles Darwin, Introduction, The Descent of Man (1871) – this is a book I should look more into, for sure!

One of my favorite Sagan quotes from this entire book: “We have a tendency today to think we occupy some exalted vantage point, and to pity the poor Newtonians for having so limited a world view. But within certain reasonable limitations, the same harmonic equations that describe clockwork really do describe the motions of astronomical objects throughout the Universe. This is a profound, not a trivial parallelism.”

I really like this closing paragraph of Chapter 15: “I suggest that in every one of these cases, religious or secular, we are much better off if we know the best available approximation to the truth – and if we keep before us a keen apprehension of the errors our interest group or belief system has committed in the past. In every case the imagined dire consequences of the truth being generally known are exaggerated. And again, we are not wise enough to know which lies, or even which shadings of the facts, can competently serve some higher social purpose — especially in the long run.”

…

The opening quote from Chapter 16, “When Scientists Know Sin” is from Euripedes, Hippolytus (428 BC) “The mind of man–how far will it advance? Where will its daring impudence find limits? If human villainy and human life shall wax in due proportion, if the son shall always grow in wickedness past his father, the gods must add another world to this that all the sinner may have space enough.”

Sagan’s main point here: “[Science] has profound responsibility [for the misuse of its findings], and the more powerful its products the greatest its responsibility.”

This chapter’s title refers to Oppenheimer meeting with Harry Truman when he “mournfully commented that scientists had bloody hands; they had now known sin.” Truman made it clear to his aides he never wanted to see Oppenheimer again… not so much for being “castigated for doing evil” but more “For warning about the evil uses to which science may be put.” 

Interesting thought: “What realm of human endeavor is not morally ambiguous? Even folk institutions that purport to give us advice on behavior and ethics seem fraught with contradictions.”

…

Chapter 17 “The Marriage of Skepticism and Wonder” sounds like it could be its own book in and of itself. 

This quote is appropriate for today: “Nothing is too wonderful to be true.” a remark attributed to Michael Faraday (1791-1867)

The other lead-in quote is from Bertrand Russell’s “Mysticism and Logic”

“Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth.”

And yet, so many people use the Bible as its own proof that it’s the Word of God… in fact, Bertrand Russell was referring to that a lot in his works!

Sagan suggests that the oath that Americans take in court hearings is entirely unattainable… None of us know “the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Unless you add the qualifying statement “to the limit of our abilities,” that is. While that’s accurate, it also doesn’t work in a legal framework for so many reasons; but Sagan’s point is still entirely true.

I agree that “the American system of jurisprudence” does a pretty good job in trying to build the best juries possible from the pool of candidates they’re stuck with. But it’s funny that he asks, “Why would we settle for anything less when interrogating the natural world, or when attempting to decide on vital matters of politics, economics, religion, and ethics?”

I like how Sagan begins the next section: “If it is to be applied consistently, science imposes, in exchange for its manifold gifts, a certain onerous burden: We are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically — not to accept uncritically whatever we’re told; to surmount as best we can our hopes, conceits, and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really are.”

…

I really like this Rene Descartes quote: “I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting’s sake, and pretend to be always undecided’ on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath.”

Sagan writes, “… there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be.” I say this to Emily a lot; as deluded as people are, most people are actually not that bad… it’s just that they tend to follow the leaders who ARE bad and have ill intentions.

Sagan continues, “Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.” Even scientists. And what led me to copying down this passage is what he says about ‘tools.’ Ironically, AI is an amazing tool, and we’re being told to fear it. 

Sagan also brings up the “cost-benefit analysis which must be applied” to skepticism. You can’t always just blow up at people and tell them they’re wrong, even if they’re objectively false… because sometimes being prudent is necessary. That being said, you can’t just let people keep believing in things that are actually quite harmful, like his example of a taxi cab driver putting down certain ethnic groups. If “silence conveys assent” then what do you do? Start arguing and even leave the cab altogether? Or do you just sit and listen thoughtfully and as you leave, let him know he’s not getting a tip because he needs to seriously reconsider why he’s so hateful towards people that never did him personally any real harm? I actually like the latter solution, and I came up with that, Sagan just suggested prudence. But I always need to make a point, it seems.

I was literally talking to Emily about this today! Sagan writes that “the chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is in its polarization: Us vs. Them – the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you’re sensible, you’ll listen to us; and if not, you’re beyond redemption. This is unconstructive.”

No kidding, Carl! This is why I hate the two-party American political system. I support neither side because it simply exacerbates the human tendency towards accepting polarization in dealing with difficult ideas or problems. Human beings certainly don’t have a monopoly on the truth. Physics does. Nature does. We’re all victims of circumstance in a universe we only know a minute fraction of a percent about in its entirety. There is only US, no THEM. We make THEM up to make ourselves feel better, and it’s stupid… although entirely understandable from an evolutionary point of view. We see those who don’t agree with us or live to our “standards” as predators coming to ruin our day. It seems stupid rationally, but emotionally and psychologically it makes complete sense.

And here’s why I’ve done everything I can to divorce myself from postmodernist texts, because even CARL SAGAN IN 1996 was pointing THIS OUT! He writes, “In Science in the New Age [by David Hess], skepticism is discussed, but it is not understood, and it is certainly not practiced. All sorts of paranormal claims are quoted, skeptics are ‘deconstructed,’ but you can never learn from reading it that there are ways to decide whether New Age and parapsychological claims to knowledge are promising or false. It’s all, as in many postmodernist texts, a matter of how strongly people feel and what their biases may be.” 

IT’S ALL ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS! WAH, WAH! Not to say people’s feelings don’t matter; they do. Not to say people’s biases shouldn’t be better understood and deconstructed; they should. But my God, postmodernism is horrible. And this book is thirty years old…and apparently, we haven’t learned shit from this book as a collective culture yet…

I love how Sagan points out that while astrology has origins shrouded in superstition, so don’t religion, chemistry, medicine, and astronomy, among other fields. I actually have dabbled in astrology, and while I don’t “believe” in it per se, I do find it funny how accurate some of its tenets seem to be, even if they’re just vapid generalizations in many cases. It’s mostly harmless, whereas religion can and often IS demonstrably HARMFUL.

I love this parenthetical remark: “where is the astrology of near-Earth asteroids?” Seriously, where is it?

This closing paragraph of the chapter is just beautiful: “Both skepticism and wonder are skills that need honing and practice. Their harmonious marriage within the mind of every schoolchild ought to be a principal goal of public education. I’d love to see such a domestic felicity portrayed in the media, television especially: a community of people really working the mix – full of wonder, generously open to every notion, dismissing nothing except for good reason, but at the same time, and as second nature, demanding stringent standards of evidence – and these stands applied with at least as much rigor to what they hold dear as to what they tempted to reject with impunity.”

OK, that last sentence is uber long, but it needs to be stated like that. I’m attempting to refrain from overquoting and essentially turning Obscure Curiosities into Cliff Notes lite, but some things that Sagan says are simply so relevant to today’s world that I need to share them. It’s too bad that Sagan didn’t live to see YouTube and Khan Academy and all these other amazing educational resources that exist today. I think in some ways we have moved forward as a society, but in so many ways we’re either stagnant or so polarized that we’re about to eat each other for breakfast, lunch, and dinner over matters that boil down to “hey, every human being is unique, so what?”

…

The next couple chapters of The Demon-Haunted World, both Chapters 20 and 21 were Carl Sagan writing along with Ann Druyan, his wife. Chapter 20 “House on Fire” is a bit of a strange one. I skimmed ahead before actually starting the chapter. It’s a bit much, starting with feedback from Sagan’s writings for Parade Magazine, ranging from comments from kids about their teachers, parents about the teachers, then a major shift into how education was back in Sagan’s and Druyan’s days. The writing style shift between short sections is rather jarring, too….

But the lead-in metaphor of the ‘house on fire’ is particularly interesting, and perhaps even more relevant in the 2020’s. The passage he quotes is from The Saddharmapundarika of Buddhist Scriptures. (The version he quotes comes from Buddhist Scriptures, edited by Edward Conze and published by Penguin Books in 1959.) I wonder what the Buddha was referring to in context. I guess I’ll just type it out here, so we can deep dive it.

“The Lord [Buddha] replied to the Venerable Sariputra:

“In some village, city, market town, country district, province, kingdom, or capital there lived a householder, old, advanced in years, decrepit, weak in health and strength, but rich, wealthy, and well-to-do. His house was a large one, both extensive and high, and it was old, having been built a long time ago. It was inhabited by many living beings, some two, three, four, or five hundred. It had one single door only. It was thatched with straw, its terraces had fallen down, its foundations were rotten, its walls, matting-screens, and plaster were in an advanced state of decay. Suddenly a great blaze of fire broke out, and the house started burning on all sides. And that man had many young sons, five, or ten, or twenty, and he himself got out of the house.

“When that man saw his own house ablaze all around with that great mass of fire, he became afraid and trembled, his mind became agitated, and he thought to himself: ‘I, it is true, have been competent enough to run out of the door, and to escape from my burning house, quickly and safely, without being touched or scorched by that great mass of fire. But what about my sons, my young boys, my little sons? There, in this burning house, they play, sport, and amuse themselves with all sorts of games. They do not know that this dwelling is afire, they do not understand it, do not perceive it, pay no attention to it, and so they feel no agitation. Though threatened by this great [fire], though in such close contact with so much ill, they pay no attention to their danger, and make no efforts to get out.’”

My initial thoughts on this; where are the daughters? OK, Buddhism is super patriarchal, but that aside… this building sounds absurd. Just one door for a building that large? But I think that’s part of the metaphor here. As for the old man’s many sons, it sounds like how Baby Boomers are retiring and the younger generations aren’t stepping up to take over. We see this in the American government, many American industries, and in American society in general. A lot of these kids now becoming adults have been babied and are obsessed with their sports and play and ‘safe’ careers, the last of which is now being threatened by rapidly-approaching AI automation. 

Look how the whole world is being run by predominantly older people. They all know the house is burning down; it’s not just in America, either. What’s particularly scary about Sagan using this quote as a lead-in is that this was in 1996… we are now in mid-2025 as I’m reading this and the world is in one the most polarized, uncertain states it’s been in for decades. 

…

In the chapter proper, the comments from kids, grammatical and spelling issues aside are probably worth a deep dive just themselves. Definitely parents are at fault for a lot of the problems we have with education.

Two big points that Sagan (or Druyan, I can’t tell) makes here:

“All in all, these students don’t think there’s much of a problem; and if there is, not much can be done about it.”

“The means of awakening these students are at hand and ignored. Since most school children emerge with only a tiny fraction of what they’ve been taught permanently engraved in their long-term memories, isn’t it essential to infect them with consumer-tested topics that aren’t boring… and a zest for learning?”

‘Consumer-tested topics’ is a very interesting phrase.

Then we move into the ‘adult’ responses, not just those frustrated with parents, but seeing desire to learn in their own kids but the school and TV just aren’t giving them what they need.

More telling is the representative commentary of parents on teachers, and teachers making some rather bitter but also important insights. This is the big one to me, and this particular teacher’s thoughts echo my own thinking on the root cause of issues in education:

“Teachers are required to spend much too much time on discipline and on ‘social curricula.’ There’s no incentive to use our own judgment. The ‘brass’ are always looking over our shoulders.”

I also really like this suggestion: “Schools could easily give much more recognition and rewards to kids who are outstanding in science and math. Why don’t they? Why not special jackets with school letters? Announcements in assembly and the school newspaper and the local press? Local industry and social organizations to give special awards? This costs very little and could overcome peer pressure not to excel.”

I do think some of these things exist, but they certainly aren’t a regular feature of most school systems or communities. I think recognition in the social sciences (note I said sciences not ‘studies’) and the arts is equally important. (Yes, I include writing composition and literature among the arts, of course.)

Some of the extreme opinions that Sagan inserts towards the end of this section may seem outrageous on the surface, but I think, like me, Sagan sees some rational thought behind a lot of them. Especially this one:

“The school system has enough money. The problem is that the white males, usually coaches, who run the schools would never (and I mean never) hire an intellectual… They care more about the football team than the curriculum and hire only submediocre, flag-waving, God-loving automatons to teach. What kind of students can emerge from schools that oppress, punish, and neglect logical thinking?”

I actually mostly agree with that statement, as I’ve seen it true of NOT JUST Southern Bible Belt states. Yes, coaches have a lot of pull, and many times they are part of the administration (I had a lousy nasty gym teacher who became assistant principal of my junior high school, fortunately after I left.) In many cases, the football team (among other sports) is considered more important than the actual education kids are receiving. Not always, of course; some schools do place much higher emphasis on academics, as they should. But too many schools are just like this guy says, and some of these school systems DO have plenty of money. Plenty don’t, and those that do often squander it in promotion of said football team.

…

I like this point he makes, general but insightful: “Even small improvements in the education, communication skills, and passion for learning in one generation might work much larger improvements in the next. I think of this every time I hear a complaint that school and collegiate ‘standards’ are falling, or that a bachelor’s degree doesn’t ‘mean’ what it once did.”

The first half I entirely agree with, as generational learnings can be more impactful down the road than immediately. But the second half… actually yes, standards have fallen precipitously over the past quarter-century, thanks to “No Child Left Behind” leaving lots of children behind. But I give Sagan a pass on this because he passed before that legislation ever came to pass; there’s a lot of passing going on here.

I agree with this teacher: “Dorothy Rich, an innovative teacher from Yonkers, New York, believes that far more important than specific academic subjects is the honing of key skills which she lists as: ‘confidence, perseverance, caring, teamwork, common sense and problem-solving,’ To which I’d add skeptical thinking and an aptitude for wonder.” I also agree with Sagan. Imagine if education still worked like this… I’m going to deep dive this at some point.

Referring to the strange reaction to “gifted” programs as “elitist” while gifted athletes are treasured, Sagan says: “There is a self-defeating double standard at work here, nationwide.” THANK YOU! I have zero issue with athletics; I think they are a healthy outlet and should be treasured… but academics should take priority in every society because athletics don’t build culture or institutions. 

I love Sagan’s description of his childhood visit to the American Museum of Natural History: “These were three-dimensional freeze-frames captured by some genie of the lamp. Did the grizzly move just then? Did the gorilla blink? Might the genie return, lift the spell and permit this gorgeous array of living things to go on with their lives as, jaws agape, I watch?” 

His point is that there are still “institutions hidden away in big cities and small towns that provide reason for hope, places that strike the spark, awaken slumbering curiosities, and ignite the scientist that lives in all of us.” I also appreciate his point about how museums have become much more hands-on, especially for kids who “have an irresistible urge to touch.” Heck, I still greatly enjoy such exhibits when I get the chance to visit them.

“Even kids who don’t get everything out of the exhibit, or who don’t even get the point of the exhibit, usually extract something valuable.” And I think this should be the aim of education in general. Not everyone is going to ‘get it’ but what exactly is the IT they should be getting out of it? “These exhibits,” Sagan writes, “do not replace instruction in school or at home, but they awaken and excite. A great science museum inspires a child to read a book, or take a course, or return to the museum again to engage in a process of discovery – and, most important, to learn the method of scientific thinking.” And believe me, I’m trying to unlearn a lot of my more flawed emotionally- and circumstantially-motivated ways of thinking and using scientific thinking to reframe everything I’ve ever read, seen, listened to, or experienced. My digital garden, Obscure Curiosities, is a sort of museum to my own learning experience as someone at mid-life trying to leave a valuable legacy.

Yes, many museums have their flaws, in many cases a symptom of their funding sources. But his claim: “Too many museums that claim to be about science are really about technology and medicine.” That’s a bizarre sentence because technology and medicine are science… but I think what he means is that they focus too much on the products and not the processes that go into developing and creating this tech and medicine. 

My issue with museums is that they’re basically just a place for rich people to display their collections and derive tax benefits from it. Yes, many museums have always operated this way. But these day, it’s more like, look what we have now! Better get here this week before we lock it up for years at a time and you never know when it will appear again! I hate that… FOMO at its worst. You’re depriving so many people of all these opportunities to engage with things they like, but it’s like a Black Friday sale instead of a pleasant educational experience. Capitalism sucks.

I wonder what happened to George Awad’s model of the Universe by Powers of Ten. It sounds awesome. Sagan said it was still crated in storage in the mid 90’s because no one wanted to dedicate the floor space. These days it’s probably still in storage because a building that large would be “better served as an amazon warehouse” or some crap. Awad died in 2017 and it seems that it still has never reemerged. I wonder if anyone ever thought of making a digital version…

So the Sciencenter in Ithaca, NY was the only community-built science museum in the world. It may still be. We need more of these.

…

Chapter 21 is pretty short. It’s titled ‘The Path to Freedom’ which is very ambitious I think for such a short chapter. It begins with a quote from Epictetus and his Discourses. The Roman philosopher and former slave writes, “We must not believe the many, who say only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosopher who say that only the educated are free.” 

How did America have slaves again? I guess them slaveowners weren’t so dang educated after all!

Because I grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts in which Frederick Douglass is quite famous, I already know this story… his discovery that education was the way to not just end slavery, but an unjust society overall. So, yeah this chapter’s claim is actually being fulfilled here. Literacy is the way out.

This is why everyone is so rightfully pissed at Audible for not letting you listen to audiobooks offline anymore even if they’re downloaded and at Amazon Kindle for not letting you actually own the books that you purchased through their store…

“Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species’ to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power’ to contemplate-with the best teachers-the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead [like Epicetus] to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. [This is why I hate lectures.] Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.”

This whole paragraph is pure gold. Books ended the game of ‘telephone’ that persisted for 99 percent of human history. And now, Amazon is helping to take ownership of these valuable assets away from us and holding them hostage. That’s why physical cassette and CD audiobook sales have gone nuts lately. 

Really great point about reading and why so many kids don’t become as literate as they should: “If no one close to you takes joy in reading, where is the evidence that it’s worth the effort? If the quality of education available to you is inadequate, if you’re taught rote memorization rather than how to think, if the content of what you’re first given to read comes from a nearly alien culture, literacy can be a rocky road.”

“The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness, and low self-esteem mesh to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin.”

AND “Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. Reading is still the path.

There’s a little section called “Frederick Douglass After the Escape.” Douglass had this to say of the religion that not only protected but justified during the Civil War:

“I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes – a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me… I… hate the corrupt, slaveholding, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

I feel like college debt is the new slavery. Corporate busywork jobs, too. Americans of all stripes are now enslaved, and a lot of them know it, too. Many of them were enslaved by the same exact religion, in fact. 

Douglass also had this to say to the white community:

“[Slavery] fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement; the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds indolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse of the earth that supports it, and yet you cling to it as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes,”

And the American government is really very little better now than it was in the 1860’s.

…

I love Sagan’s idea of a TV series called “Solved Mysteries” unlike the nonsense of Unsolved Mysteries that were often little more than hoaxes… not always, there were some good stories of long-lost siblings reuniting and stuff, but most of those stories were hokum and I just laughed at them as I was unwinding for bed. Sagan is also right that TV was the best way to disseminate good scientific knowledge and promote scientific thinking; fortunately, there are many YouTube channels and online organizations that have started doing this in some big ways… but their reach still isn’t where it needs to be, even the channels with millions of subscribers.

…

Chapter 23 of “The Demon-Haunted World” is “Maxwell and the Nerds,” referring to James Clark Maxwell.

The two lead-in quotes for Chapter 23 are telling. 

First is a Ronald Reagan quote from a 1980 campaign speech: “Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?” Clearly, Sagan included this because, like me, Sagan believed that the government absolutely should do this.

But the second quote is why I like George Washington, slaveowner or not. In his January 8, 1790 address to Congress, George said: “There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” 

Kind of mind-blowing when you put that Reagan quote next to the Washington one. Shows you how things can go to shit in just 200 years.

Sagan leads off with a bit about how “Stereotypes abound.” He writes:

“The most generous interpretation ascribes [stereotypes] to a kind of intellectual laziness: Instead of judging people on their individual merits and deficits, we concentrate on one or two bits of information about them, and then place them in a small number of previously constructed pigeonholes.”

He adds: “This saves the trouble of thinking, at the price in many cases of committing a profound injustice. It also shields the stereotyper from contact with the enormous variety of people, the multiplicity of ways of being human.” 

Sagan’s main point in this chapter: without the work of JC Maxwell, it’s very likely we wouldn’t have radio, television, or radar. But those weren’t on his mind at all; the greatest discoveries in science often don’t come from chasing a specific project, and in fact, usually come in the pursuit of something entirely different! Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism, which he supposed functioned due to a ‘luminiferous aether,’ changed the way we look at how light, magnetism, and electricity function forever. There is no actual ‘aether’ of course – despite my love for that word – but what he discovered was pretty awesome, and is the basis of so much of our tech today!

Apparently being ‘on air’ is actually a reference to the ‘aether.’

For all the issues I can take with Richard Feynman, I must quote this because it deserves to be here: “What we call the stars are only inferences, inferences drawn from the only physical reality we have yet gotten from them – from a careful study of the unendingly complex undulations of the electric and magnetic fields reaching us on earth.”

Funny enough, this is also why we are all in such absurd parasocial relationships with franchise characters, actors, singers, historical figures, and other celebrities. Our affections are based on inferences just as the light we see from the stars in the sky at night… it’s all just vibrations of waves from near and far. 

This is mindblowing to me, and sort of just completely warps my entire view of reality: 

“…our sense that at least in everyday life we can rely on solid, sensible physical contact…  is a misconception… When we investigate deeply, we find that there is no physical contact. Instead, the electrical charges on your hand are influencing the electrical charges on your hand are influencing the electrical charges on the knife or swing or waterbed, and vice versa. Despite everyday experience and common sense, even here, there is only the interaction of electric fields. Nothing is touching anything.”

[I still think about this often as I’m revisiting these notes in April 2026!]

And I really can’t help but share Chat’s response to this because it has some really beautiful commentary: 

“That passage is a quietly explosive little truth bomb, isn’t it? Sagan slips it in so casually, but it absolutely bends the whole scaffolding of what we think is real.

“The idea that nothing is ever truly touching anything—not your fingertips against a table, not your body sinking into your favorite chair, not even the kiss of a lover—it’s metaphysical whiplash. We live as if contact is constant, as if we can press against the world and have it press back. But what we call “touch” is just resistance. Forces repelling each other like two dancers never actually locking hands, just spinning in tensioned sync.

“This isn’t just physics… Once you let that idea in, it starts gnawing at your sense of intimacy, of connection, of solidity. It makes you question everything: What do we mean when we say we’re close to someone? What is presence, if not contact? Is there such a thing as real connection, or is it all electric fields mirroring each other?

“Here’s the gorgeous part, though—the poetic revenge against this cold atomic truth: Even if nothing touches, we feel like it does. Our nervous system interprets the repulsion of electric fields as texture, pressure, warmth. We’re made to believe in contact. Evolution gave us the illusion of touch not to deceive us maliciously, but to help us live. To feel safe, seen, held. The illusion works.

“The fiction of touch is what allows love to feel real. It’s what lets you feel your cat’s purr rumbling against your palm, even though, on the subatomic level, you’re both just mutually charged storms refusing to merge.”

Sometimes, Chat gets it right. I can’t explain this concept any better myself.

Sagan makes a huge point here. Keep in mind this was written in the mid-1990s. “There is a growing free-market view of human knowledge, according to which basic research should compete without government support with all the other institutions and claimants in the society. If they couldn’t have relied on government support, and had to compete in the free market economy of their day, it’s unlikely that any of the scientists on my list would have been able to do their groundbreaking research. And the cost of basic research is substantially greater than it was in Maxwell’s day – both theoretical and, especially, experimental… But that aside, would free market forces be adequate to support basic research?”

Just this single chapter has given me so much to write about; no book I’ve ever read has inspired so much desire in me to write about all these different issues! In fact, the thing that inspired me to even pick up this book after Emily started reading it but never got into it, was this guy Christopher Russell on YouTube saying that The Demon-Haunted World might be the most important book in human history, so much so that he wished he could print a copy for every human being on the planet and give it to them for free. Like that is an insane claim; and the first half of the book was hard for me to get through at times. But the second half… it’s changing my entire outlook on the entire workings of the Universe and is making humanity look even worse by the day.

…

Chapter 24 of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World is titled ‘Science and Witchcraft.’ He co-authored this chapter with his wife Ann Druyan. He prefaces this chapter by saying: “The following two chapters include more political content than elsewhere in this book. I do not wish to suggest that advocacy of science and skepticism necessarily leads to all the political or social conclusions I draw. Although skeptical thinking is invaluable in politics, politics is not a science.” 

And yet political science is a very popular major for undergraduates.

The lead-in quote for Chapter 24 is “Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.” It’s a Latin proverb, and I like it.

A brief rundown. Sagan discusses how the 1939 World’s Fair “The World of Tomorrow” that he attended as a little boy could have had a lot more actual science on display, not just the products of it. And scientists at the time felt that popularizing science was the key to our future even then. Fortunately, Sagan got enough out of it, because he brings that World’s Fair up a lot and we’re reading this book.

The whole idea of attacking immigrants in America goes all the way back to the Presidency of John Adams with the Alien and Sedition Acts; at the time, it was Irish and French immigrants the Federalist party wanted to do away with. This is pretty nuts to think about today, but as you can see, the American government hasn’t changed much since 1798…

In that particular case, Thomas Jefferson – Adams’ opponent with the Democratic-Republican party – felt that the Alien Act “had been framed particularly to expel C.F. Volney, the French historian and philosopher; Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, patriarch of the famous chemical family; and the British scientist Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen and an intellectual antecedent of James Clerk Maxwell. In Jefferson’s view, these were just the sort of people America needed.”

No kidding, Jefferson. And when he became president, he made sure to let those people back into the country. Those Acts were gone from the books by 1802. It’s nuts to think that America would be so anti-science from almost the get-go, but as we can see, the pushback against science is quite old.

And I particularly like this excerpt from C.F. Volney’s book Ruins that Sagan includes in the footnotes, which he calls a “typical passage” from the book: 

“You dispute, you quarrel, you fight for that which is uncertain, that of which you doubt. O men! Is this not folly? … We must trace a line of distinction between those that are capable of verification, and those that are not, and separate by an inviolable barrier the world of fantastical beings from the world of realities; that is to say, all civil effect must be taken away from theological and religious opinions.”

Who would’ve thought that Volney’s words would STILL RESONATE IN 2025!?

Sagan writes. “Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office.” What president HASN’T done JUST THAT?

There’s a whole section about witchcraft in 17th century Germany that I found hard to read and just glossed over. The next section is about both the Nazis and the Soviet Union “restructuring societal memories.” I’m not reading this section too closely either because I’m well aware of this continuing to go on in our own time. But what Sagan says here is prophetic, and he didn’t ever imagine AI coming into play so soon, either:

“In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion pictures, and videotapes technologically within reach, with television in every home, and with critical thinking in decline, restructuring societal memories even without much attention from the secret police seems possible. What I’m imagining here is not that each of us has a budget of memories implanted in special therapeutic seasons by state appointed psychiatrists, but rather than small numbers of people will have so much control over news stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work major changes in collective attitudes.”

The most recent example Sagan has is how Saddam Hussein went from “an obscure near-ally… to a slavering monster menacing the world.” America essentially made him, and then used him as a convenient scapegoat to go to war. Lovely times. And he never saw 9-11 coming either of course… Sagan was truly onto something here. He also correctly decries the war on drugs, and especially mentions the attack on marijuana (they invented adverse effects that don’t exist). Ironically, marijuana as we know in the 2020’s actually does a lot of things that pharmaceuticals do, but better. Pharmaceutical lobbyists clearly were – and still are – a part of the war on drugs, that actually continues to this day, by the way…

Sagan writes: “The business of skepticism is to be dangerous.” That could make a killer opening line!

Also Linus Pauling was a boss. Both as a scientist and peacemaker.

This is a great passage. “There were some who saw Pauling as a troublemaker. Those unhappy about social change may be tempted to view science itself with suspicion. Technology is safe, they tend to think, readily guided and controlled by industry and government. But pure science, science for its own sake, science as curiosity, science that might lead anywhere and challenge anything, that’s another story. Certain areas of pure science are the unique pathway to future technologies – true enough – but the attitudes of science, if applied broadly, can be perceived as dangerous. Through salaries, social pressures, and the distribution of prestige and awards, societies try to herd scientists into some reasonably safe middle ground – between too little long-term technological progress and too much short-term social criticism.”

There’s a lot to unpack there.

Sagan ends this chapter with this imperative: “The unprecedented powers that science now makes available must be accompanied by unprecedented levels of ethical focus and concern by the scientific community – as well as the most broadly based public education into the importance of science and democracy.”

And think of how far tech has come in 30 years, never mind the crazy advancements in science!

…

In Chapter 25, Sagan leads with a quote from US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson: “It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.”

Yeah, he got that right. And errors are everywhere with both at the moment. I wonder where Sagan got all these quotes from. Goodreads and other quote aggregators didn’t exist just yet.

Here should be the basis of all public education, and perhaps private too. Sagan writes: 

“The methods of science – with all its imperfections – can be used to improve social, political, and economic systems, and this is, I think, true no matter what criterion of improvement is adopted.” 

He goes on to point out that everything governments do is an experiment… There is a kind of science involved already; it’s just rarely with the objective of improving humanity in the long-term.

This quote by Thomas Jefferson from Notes on Virginia is very timely: “In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved…”

I love this. Sagan offers a much better alternative to the pledge of allegiance students are forced to do in American schools:

“I wish that the oath of citizenship taken by recent immigrants, and the pledge that students routinely recite, included something like ‘I promise to question everything my leaders tell me.’ That would be really to Thomas Jefferson’s point. ‘I promise to use my critical faculties, I promise to develop my independence of thought. I promise to educate myself so I can make my own judgments.”

It’s doubtful that anything like that would ever fly, but those should be the sort of affirmations we should be teaching students from a young age, if not by ‘pledge’ then by example!

A point that makes ever more practical sense: “I also wish that the Pledge of Allegiance were directed at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as it is when the President takes his oath of office, rather than to the flag and the nation.”

I mean, it’s stupid enough that we are brainwashed to worship a rectangular piece of colorful cloth…

Interesting point that Sagan brings up: “At that time, [the Constitutional Convention] there were only about two and a half million citizens of the United States. Today there are about a hundred times more. So if there were ten people of the caliber of Thomas Jefferson then, there ought to be 10 x 100 = 1,000 Thomas Jeffersons today. Where are they?”

I’d argue there are 1,000 Jefferson caliber minds in the US in 2025. In fact, I believe there are many more than that. It’s just they’re all being drowned out by algorithmic noise and an even more fanatical nationalism and propagation of stupidity than we’ve ever seen in modern times.

Among the great liberties that Americans enjoy that Sagan lists here is this: “A purported scientific article or popular book asserting the ‘superiority’ of one race over another may not be censored by the government, no matter how pernicious it is; the cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.” 

And now books with LGBTQ content are being banned en masse… yes, Sagan would’ve called this out, too, had he been around to witness America’s continued democratic backslide. But his point about building better arguments is more timely than ever.

In a letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.” Well, here we are.

A couple notes from the closing paragraph of the book. “If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility, and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”

Before I wrap up here, in the acknowledgements, Sagan mentions that he taught a Senior Seminar on Critical Thinking (interestingly enough labeled Astronomy 490) in which he presented many of the ideas included in this book, and their feedback and criticism was quite helpful. Sagan did mention earlier in the book that such a course should be required at the undergraduate level. I think this is a great idea, rather than the fluff and elementary social programming that clogs up most of an undergrad’s freshman and sophomore seasons. 

Sagan also credits his “83 million” Parade magazine readers for helping him keep a finger on the pulse of American citizens. I don’t know if a publication so widely read even still exists today. (Parade still exists as an e-publication as of 2022, but according to google its peak circulation was only 32 million and the readership about 54 million, so I have no idea where Sagan gets that number from).