Robert Anton Wilson would vehemently disagree with you and Sagan here. I’m not saying who’s right but I think criticizing a reality tunnel like astrology is a waste of time when there are drastically worse ‘slippery slopes’ in existence
I’m sure Mr. Wilson would indeed. I was not familiar with him until your mention, and upon researching him briefly, I would hedge that Sagan (and certainly myself) would disagree with him as well.
Firstly, I would ask how, or rather who, determines what misinformation is worth advising against and what isn’t? The relative harm of astrology is indeed low compared to say, Capitalism, but then again, the effort to write my initial comment was also low. I don’t expect it to do much, but on the off chance it steers someone away from magical thinking, it was worth writing.
As to why I would disagree with Wilson: I could never subscribe to his concept of trying to get people to become ‘agnostic about everything’ because the minute you take a hard stand on a single thing, you discover that to be agnostic about everything is just harmful. I think it’s good to be open-minded, and I’m not one of the dogmatic religious-level scientific fanatic he describes who blindly follow the AMA or any other scientific institution that insists they have everything figured out and demands you not question the sacred gospels, but his method seems like the ultimate cop-out: “We can’t truly know anything with certainty, so it’s all possibly right, just with different probabilities!”
I don’t buy into that one bit, because otherwise one could use such a worldview to justify saying “Hmm… I guess maybe eugenics could be right? I’ll give it a low probability, but can’t be too sure!”
It also could be used to justify belief in Scientology, literally any debunked scientific theory, climate change denial, radical religions, etc.
I think it far healthier to have an open-mind to new concepts that can be proven good, and to have an active and healthy skepticism for anything that makes claims without evidence. But that’s just my 2 cents.
I should mention that I don’t mean to strawman your argument, as you didn’t mention Wilson’s ‘agnostic’ concept, but that seems to be at the heart of this philosophy, and why he prescribed to mysticism and would likely find astrology harmless.
I give you a lot of credit for looking into RAW, I’d encourage you to look into more of his work and the work of Greg Hill and Kerry Thornly and how easily reality can be subverted.
I’ll also say it’s cool for us to agree to disagree on this issue as I imagine there are a lot of more important things going on in this world we’d agree on
I personally find pan agnosticism to be the correct path but that’s my reality tunnel and I’m happy with you having yours
Edit: just to address your critiques, you can make any ideology or worldview into eugenics without much effort. ‘Maybe logic’ doesn’t encourage it any more than any other ideology.
And I just find it hilarious that my original criticism was that it was a waste of time to criticize astrology, which you never addressed in your comment back that undoubtedly took away a lot of your time
Have you read Jailbird yet? It’s some writings of Kerri Thornley towards the end of his life compiled by Reverend Onan Cannobite of The Church. It’s mostly about his time in NOLA and how he thought (maybe correctly) he was being groomed by E. Howard Hunt to be a patsy on Nov. 22 '63, fucking great read, but kinda sad, highly recommend specifically to you (since you know of Kerry already). PRA’BOB!
I’m familiar with Kerry Thornly from Adam Curtis’ film Can’t Get You Out of My Head, where it’s made pretty clear that Thornly suffers from pretty severe paranoia in his later life, and succumbed to the very same wild conspiracies he unwittingly created as a parody earlier in life in Playboy magazine. I would actually point to him as a prime example of what Sagan was warning against. To go down that road earnestly, in my experience, leads only to an endless spinning of wheels, no conclusions, and a very confusing self-delusion with no useful end in sight.
I think it’s good that Thornly and RAW were anti-authoritarian and leaned toward Anarchism, but their mental states and delusions are far too offputting for me to give them any significant merit. I’ve lived in that world before where reality is based on fantasy and not hard fact, and it did me no good, only harm.