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In a democracy what do politicians have to do? Do they have to do good thinking or can they get that from advisors and committees? Is their job to present matters well and agreeably? What do people expect from President Obama in the USA?

Perhaps they expect inspiration. Perhaps they expect good thinking. Pehaps they expect confidence. The role of a politician is never clearly defined. The task is to get elected and to continue to please people. Is that the same as making progress? Possibly, not.

Politics is mainly made up of wordy people such as lawyers, teachers, journalists and trade unionists. Such people do not have much experience of constructive thinking – of making things happen. There are many engineers, architects, scientists or executives. Such people do not want to take the risk. If you are not elected the second time you cannot go back to where you were.

The human brain is designed to recognise. I described in detail how the brain does this in my book “Mechanism of the Mind” which was published in 1969. The leading physicist in the world liked my book and commissioned a team of computer experts to simulate what I had described. They reported that the system worked exactly as claimed.

So the brain is a recognition machine. This means that most of our thinking is judgmental. This has serious consequences – especially in international affairs.

Climate change is not the biggest problem facing humanity. The biggest problem is inadequate thinking. In fact there is an even bigger problem in our ability to see this.

We are hugely complacent about our thinking because we have achieved so much in science and technology. Yet we have achieved very little in human affairs. Our existing thinking, logic etc is indeed excellent but it is not enough.

Some while ago I invented a new word ‘ebne’. This means excellent but not enough. Each of the wheels on a car with three wheels may be excellent but three wheels are not enough.

There is a fundamental flaw in Democracy which is that certain people such as architects, scientists, engineers etc do not want to enter politics because if they are not re-elected they cannot go back to where they where.

So the people who are in politics are teachers, journalists, lawyers and trade unionists. Such people have no life experience in design and constructive thinking. There is a greater emphasis on argument.

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“Nothing is more damaging to the arrogance with which an idea is held than partial agreement.”

Perhaps our real problem is not so much our deficient thinking as I indicated in the last message, but our complacency. We do believe that our thinking is wonderful. Our existing thinking has indeed been wonderful in science and technology – and getting to the moon and beyond.

Yet our poor thinking has been responsible for most of the human disasters such as wars conflicts, persecutions etc. The reason is obvious. We rush to use judgment rather than to design the way forward.

There is no natural limit to traffic – which is increasing everywhere. There is no natural limit to communication which is also increasing rapidly.

The excellence of the communications channels does not ensure that what goes through the channels is of high value. Perhaps we need some simple code for communication. This might distinguish five areas: reply; vital; important; useful; fun.

Our existing thinking is based largely on recognition and judgement. This leads to logic and the search for the truth. While education has promoted analysis, information, logic and argument we have never promoted the thinking concerned with creating value.

This is a huge defect which is only slowly being recognised. Design is as important as analysis. Design is not just making things look beautiful. Design is putting together what we have in order to deliver the values we want. Education is very old fashioned and much too influenced by medieval ecclesiastic thinking.

Many organisations have shown that using my CoRT Thinking Lessons as a separate subject in schools raises performance in every other subject by between 30 and 100 percent.