What do you do, when a Pied Piper who has established a charismatic hold over a bewildered majority, starts to lead this majority towards a state which can only end (in the long run) in cultural meltdown?  Or to put it in a different way:  What do you do when a demagogue dangles dazzling ends which sound highly desirable, while using  lax, unethical means which are known to be self-destructive?

The answer can rest on the classic observation that, in an open society, only good ideas can wrest the grip from deluded ideas.  Our problem today is to find a rich vein of hopeful new ideas which can take over from the pessimistic, exhausted, cynical, semi-nihilistic mindsets which have dominated Serious Western Conversations (SWCs) for more than a century.

A whiff of intellectual decay and impotence surrounding SWCs is in the air. Some savants, who should know better, are forecasting that AI will take-over and reduce us to underlings —slaves under the harsh thumb of an alien, supposedly intelligent microchip-hegemony.

(As genuine, rigorous, thinking wilts, AI is a form of market response, which rushes in to try to fill the void.)

The trouble began with Michelson-Morley’s and Russell’s Contradictions. They were body blows out of the blue in the 1880s and 1901.  They have effectively destroyed the intellectual confidence of the West, because nobody could find even the merest hint of a solution to either contradiction.   The beleaguered physics and maths elites then decided —inexcusably— in the 1920s to turn to fudging. The relativity of light was brazenly papered-over by adopting a 100% paralysed view of the human condition (spacetime) and Russell’s Contradiction was cancelled by declaring pointedlythat (a particular verdict of) the membership criterion for a set must be disregarded. (This was insisting that maths must break its own rules.)  So we have some of our ancestors —experts who were active in the 1920s— to blame for the mindset of total defeat and intellectual impotence which has now settled over the civilised world for more than a century.

The good news is that the two dreadful problems which created it, have, very quietly, very belatedly, now been solved.  A spectacular way has been found to reduce both these extraordinary facts to commonsense.  So the sticking-point is no longer impotence. Instead Obstinacy, Ossification and Timidity have taken over.  Obstinacy —stemming from deep pessimism— is preventing this exciting news from being widely known. Gatekeepers are perversely actively banning it from the eyes of the public. Ossification— is apparent, too, in a groupspeak… which is desperately reasserting former, now clearly broken, knowledge —like the howler that most sets are mathematical objects, when it is patently obvious that most sets are not mathematical objects… like the howler of Cantor’s exotic notion of transfinite sets —which can’t be defined because the totality of possible definitions is countable—  and the howler built-into the axioms of ZF restricted set theory (which generate zet theory, not set theory.  ‘Zet theory’ = a bowdlerised, clipped version of set theory). Timidity—  a fallback condition arising from an ominous lack of confidence and the fear of making a fool of oneself,  a mental condition similar to that of the misguided wretches who decided to stay on the deck of the SS Titanic when it was about to sink.

These are the main pillars propping up the paralysed Western status quo which is still in place today.

Good news ceases to be good news when it is suppressed. If it is obstinately kept off the media it never gets onto the platforms which count as news.

It is the elites —or rather the now-questionable expert circles which used to be accepted as “elites”— which are blocking the way ahead.  It is a sad, depressing fact that energy and imagination have deserted these downbeat camps.  In an outside world bristling with innovations and new perspectives, these ex-elites are sticking obstinately to their failed, flawed, bankrupt notions of yesteryear.

There is a not-unexpected response to this quagmire:  the emergence of slick demagogues pandering to the illusions of the populace.

So it is paradoxical to the nth degree that these die-hard attitudes are serving to empower a worldwide wave of outlandish demagogues… in Russia, N. Korea, Hungary, Turkey, Italy, Romania, and now… even the USA. They are hell bent on blinding the masses with their delusions.

Good sense will of course eventually prevail. Whether we face a long period of obstinent, last-ditch disbelief remains to be seen.

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CHRISTOPHER ORMELL around 1^st December 2024