There are potentially dangerous trends abroad which might lead to the abandonment of democracy in politics —unless the leadership of the genuine democracies wake up and start furiously retrenching their fragile estate.

How could this happen?  Well, the whole influential class seem to be quite “blind” to the damage a hopelessly substandard kind of schooling is actively inflicting onto youth.

It is an astonishing fact that the Tory party tried to pass-off the “state of schooling” during the 2024 General Election as one of relatively few signs of recent Tory success.  A scheme of education tacitly based on the bankruptcy of thinking in maths and science cannot lead to a healthy school system.  The common notion that children will be “educated” if they have learnt some facts is a howler of the nth degree. The principal task of education nowadays is to get children to understand the deeply counter-intuitive knowledge which has been used to mould the modern world.

The humanities’ based education of the past clearly caused much less distress to learners than the dry, dreary “instructional” regime which took over in the 1980s.

Anyone who has taken the trouble to acclimatise themselves to the state of schools, knows that schools are not in the right mode to prepare young people for the immensely daunting conceptual challenges of the future. This is a much overlooked quagmire, and its neglect is a scandal of the first order.

Some of the impoverished, substandard thinking which is being fostered in schools is already affecting central government.

Half-baked initiatives such as the phasing-out of petrol cars have not been underpinned by laying down a substructure of charging facilities remotely near the size needed.  This is a serious lapse of governmental thinking which must be remedied… very urgently.

Every democratic society which hopes to survive needs to make serious efforts to involve youth actively in the responsibility and meritocratic leadership needed in the modern state.  The Conservative Party of the UK frequently boasts that it is the longest-lasting political party of government in Europe.  One of its major tenets has been minimal government… the point being that as much freedom as possible should be set aside for the public to create the economic initiatives of the future.

We do need an approach which offers this freedom.

But the hyper-complexity which started to overtake most areas of science, technology, IT, business, etc. since 1960, means that there is an unprecedented amount of sharp attention needed on the part of government. The mantra <<Minimal government please!>> won’t, any longer, do. It becomes an excuse for sitting back and letting crises burgeon.

The intellectual climate is not benign.

Unfortunately the Gloom of Incomprehension which settled over civilisation after the cognitive shocks of the 1900s, was effectively cemented into place by the fudged solutions passed-off as valid by the maths and physics elites in the 1920s. This was the end of Enlightenment, and also the end of any assumption about the inevitability of Progress. At the time it was treated as a tiresome-but-necessary “mature adult reset”. But it thoroughly wiped-out the sense of any hopeful future for generation after generation during the 20^th century (The Century of the Depressive intellectual). We are paying the cumulative price of this ominous rolling bankruptcy today.

A Distinctly Depressive Century such as the 20th, takes a huge toll on the idealism of youth. The door has been slammed-shut on any hopefulness.  Any mini-resolution to try to rescue positivity inevitably turns sour.  Cynicism takes over.

This fortified cynicism is toxic to the nth degree.  The price being paid is the misery of thousands of young people with mental and physical conditions.

We must insist that the previous elites of maths and physics become acutely aware that they are leading us down a garden path which is turning into sand.  The status quo cannot be “more of the same”: sets are not the basics of mathematics, time is not another quasi-spatial dimension. Transfinite sets do not exist, because there are insufficient potential definitions to identify more than a countable set of objects.The prevailing mindset is one of low-hopefulness… and it lacks the drive, energy and inspiration to infuse the resolution needed —to create a decent future.

The ex-elites of higher maths and mathematical physics need —and very urgently— to wake-up and take-inthe new hopeful perspectives derived from anti-maths.  They must ditch the pathetic paradigms they are still clinging onto.

The author of these blogs has contributed 19 essays to the newenglishreview (NER) outlining the logic of these new perspectives since 2021: he is now aged 95 and is determined to go on shouting from the sidelines that civilisation is effectively blindfolded and is living dangerously.   You can read the back-numbers of the NER essays free on the internet.

YOU CAN COMMENT on themes on this website: email your thoughts to  per4group@gmail.com  CHRISTOPHER ORMELL around 1^st January 2025  chrisormell@aol.com