One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
This quotation is from page 230 of Carl Sagan's book "The Demon-Haunted World", a prescient warning of a future we now inhabit, where fake news and Internet conspiracy theories play to a disaffected populace.
As told by Sagan, demons are not supernatural creatures that swarm around us like insects. Rather they are the inherent weaknesses of the human condition. They are the unfixed bugs in our human operating system, moral and intellectual flaws that can at any time pull our behaviour and our thought processes out of shape.
Our demons manifest themselves in individual choices and also in the communities in which we live. The witch trials of the 17th century, Nazism, cults, slavery and the bloody reign of the Khmer Rouge are all examples of humans collectively losing any sense of what is right or wrong and embarking on incredibly destructive courses of action.
I wonder how many Americans have read "The Demon-Haunted World" as they cast their votes in the next presidental election? You can read it here.
