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The Mystics of Progress (2023)

By the 1960s, progressivism had reached a new ascendancy.

This idea of incorporating evolution into the narrative of progress and a distant, indistinct entity in God’s place is a common thread throughout all of Sci-Fi. In the movie Contact, this role is occupied by a galactic community that judges humanity worthy to join them after a set time has passed. Fourteen-year-old me put down the book at the moment and asked, “okay, but what if there wasn’t Salvor Hardin?” There is some argument for the Second Foundation and Seldon predicting the rise of great men, but individuals are precisely the antithesis of psychohistory.

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