What has gone wrong?

What has gone wrong with the human race… that has landed us in a situation where WW3 might break-out at any moment, massacres are constantly happening around the world, in the Middle East , Ukraine and Sudan —-and the world’s leading democracy (the USA) is in a state of unprecedented intolerance, polarity, violence and political turmoil?

We seem to have fallen into a condition in which the thing-sensibility of the human race is bounding ahead —few questions asked— while our psyche-sensibility is in a state of dreadful, widespread, chronic neglect. This gross imbalance seems to be at the root of today’s abysmally unsatisfactory forward thinking…a condition which has incubated ridiculous “solutions” such as a supposed need to colonise Mars.  Unless we can face the music and see clearly and thoroughly what has gone wrong on Plant Earth, there is no point trying to inhabit Mars.  Even if such an immensely difficult, costly, dangerous colonisation could happen, the most likely result would be only a transfer of today’s sick sensibility imbalance to a few hardy survivors trying to live on the Red Planet.

So what has gone wrong?  Well, the 20th century was the “Century of the depressive Intellectual”, and this came about because the Leading Thinkers of the early 1900s had to face two inherently incomprehensible dilemmas… how to explain the disconcerting relativity of light, and the equally baffling contradiction at the heart of maths, i.e. set theory?  These daunting dilemmas first appeared in 1887 and 1901  respectively, but they were bristling with difficulties of the most elusive kind.  (Russell spent three years trying to understand his contradiction about the set of all sets which were not members of themselves: but he got nowhere.)  It was not until the 1920s that it was realised that a solution had to be found. Procrastination wasn’t doing any good.   Mankind’s intellectual confidence was draining away, like a leaking Oil Tanker.  Doing nothing had ceased to be an option.

So the elites of physics and maths decided to settle for some “solutions” they could find. The physicists settled for spacetime, and the mathematicians settled for Zermelo-Fraenkel (ZF) set theory. Unfortunately these “second best solutions” weren’t convincing enough.  It would be hard to think of a more dirigiste, unsatisfactory “proposed explanation of tangible, physical relativity” than spacetime. It was a paradigm which shouted “timeless absolutism”. It was like a doctor offering the prognosis “an infection” as an explanation for a patient’s tiny frozen hands.

ZF set theory was even more simplistic. The mathematicians managed somehow to convinced themselves… that they could validly adopt axioms which would simply legislate the contradiction out of existence.  They were trying to fudge the answer by using a familiar ploy which is universally condemned by ordinary maths teachers when they are marking scripts. The maths gurus were rule-following-aholics, and this was the rule they were determined to follow: <<Avoid sets which are members of themselves>>.  Frank Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein rumbled that this was no more than an imposed “Party Line” to which the maths hierarchy was trying to compel their professional members.

But these half-baked “solutions” stuck. They were treated as slightly provisional remedies… which, in the circumstances, would “do”. There appeared to be no stomach for anyone to delve more deeply… into these agonising, dangerous, bottomless pits of incomprehension.  They were hushed-up, talked down, but above-all, almost never, mentioned.

After a 100 years of imperceptive, quiet decline, we have now ended-up at a place where intellectual confidence is on the floor. The arrival of computers in the 1960s has had the effect of a drug addiction.  It has led to more and more “shallow success”: in a narrow branch of thing-sensibility… one which will presently usher us towards extinction unless we take drastic action.

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CHRISTOPHER ORMELL around 1^st October 2025

Best regards, Chris chrisormell@aol.com