The TYRANNY OF NUMBERS

Nick,is a wonderful,wonderful friend. She is so passionate about Mathematics that she teaches children the subject through interactive video sessions.

She agrees, as well as I do that Maths is simple for the child in primary school.

2 plus 2 equals 4

Take 1 biscuit away from 4 biscuits and you'd be left with 3 biscuits. One for Daddy, one for Mummy and Best friend.

Easy!The child gets 100% in primary school arithmetics!

At this stage in life, Numbers don't lie. Neither did its teachers.

4 is always bigger than 3. Additions always brought an increase.

It was secondary school that brought the complications about Mathematics that most of us got befuddled with.

Teachers began to twist the VALUE of numbers. Four(4) under special circumstances could be less than one(1). In binary systems, One and zero can mean a zillion other things! In algebra, it is worse. Numbers even get married to alphabets!

What was once straightforward now grew branches. It became a 'dubious' subject and questioned our trust in figures. Kids get confused how numbers work, since they stopped being as trustworthy as they always knew them to be.

We often take our primary school understanding of numbers with us all life long,sadly. We judge the value of nearly ALL things by naive digits and most of us don't evolve in how we see figures.

Someone says "he is more successful than I am"

"Why is that?" I ask.

"He has 3 houses. I have 1. He has 5 businesses. I have 1. He has a fleet of cars. I have just one car."

So, in the forest of that comparison, we feel inferior because in primary school mathematics 3 houses is always more than 1...etc

At the height of BlackBerry's success, I told a few friends that the brand would flatly crash. They laughed. Called me ignorant.

"How could you know about business prediction from your big medical books?"

Well, except broke people, no one uses BlackBerry anymore! Our kids will probably not see it ever existed. In black berry's case, like in how we judge most things, their progress was only written in numbers and as we found by its shocking extinction, numbers do LIE.

More young people today slip their necks through a rope in suicidal attempts because they have less social media followers than they expect. They know this judging by the NUMBER of 'likes' each post attracts and get psychotic when numbers fall.

Their self worth has been completely understood by numbers. It is as we bury this unfortunate first year student that we get condolences from about 1000 folks who were touched by his life.

"Isn't loneliness the reason this chap killed himself?"

Unfortunately, his death once again reveals something dubious about the authenticity of numbers.

It is not my wish to make you disregard the beauty of numerical science. Rather, I want you to be skeptical of its purity and its honesty. Numbers change in character from perception to perception and if you rigidly trust something that readily changes, you risk missing the point of your life absolutely.

Numbers, for all its might, cannot truly approximate love, hate, intellect, happiness or even peace? How does one give a number to Justice or Mercy?

These soft characteristics of life are seemingly the most crucial in a world governed by numbers and yet not fully grasped by it.

Life's most precious elements are boundless and timeless. You increasingly know little of it when you bring it under the complete authority of numbers and measurements.