“It was the best of times, the worst of times, it was the age of the wisdom, the age of foolishness… the season of light, the season of darkness.” How true the words of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities rang – more like the clanging chimes of doom – throughout 2016.

Never before was a voting population more equipped with facts and yet hoodwinked by uncanny showmen, trading facts for glitzy soundbites, using proverbial smoke and mirrors to defeat undeniable truths collected over years of painstaking work and careful measurements.

Never before have we had more conclusive evidence that our earth is warming up and yet ‘we’ vote for a climate-change denier who will undoubtedly reverse much of the work that climate-change scientists have been striving to achieve over the past decades. It is a time when opinion and fact hold the same weight and sway in debate, where the art of debate and the construction of an argument has been reduced to some strategically-timed ‘tweets’ and well-placed ‘status updates’.

Two ‘shining’ examples of the triumph of these theatrical tactics are undoubtedly the Brexit vote and the US presidential elections. Never before have I seen a community so polarised by the pantomime that was played out before them, exacerbated by a media baying for blood at every turn.

The voting public is no longer suitably equipped to make reasoned decisions, the pace of the electoral campaign has become too quick

But who’s to blame? The candidates, all too willing to pull the wool over voters’ eyes, or the voting public so taken in by the glittering show presented to them? We had candidates serenading the public with legends of euro-brats deciding on the number of bananas in a bunch. Others, unashamedly discussing their atrocious behaviour towards women and their thoughts on minorities in their country, building walls albeit ‘metaphorically’ it now turns out between the people of their own country.

The truth, however, is that the common man has become dis-enfranchised with the ‘establishment’. The very establishment he saw rescue the likes of the big banks while he struggled to pay off his mortgage peddled to him by some two-bit salesman keen to make an even larger Christmas bonus. What happened following the bank bailout? Two years later, the banks were turning profits, the bankers pocketing their bonus while the man in the street is still burdened under heavy debt.

What this has led to is a deep-seated resentment to an establishment that has capitalised profits and socialised debts for far too long, so that when the common man heard the messianic messages from the state-to-state salesmen, he was finally given the chance to ‘stick it’ to the establishment. Never mind that the messages were plain wrong, based on half-truths (half being a very kind percentage).

In my opinion, the bigger problem is that the voting public is no longer suitably equipped to make reasoned decisions, the pace of the electoral campaign has become too quick and the deluge of information we are flooded with is too high for us to be able to analyse it for what it really is.

Previously, we had one encyclopaedia (the Brittanica for those who remember it) with cogent descriptions of the information we were looking for.

Today, with the advent of Google we get millions of hits and separating the wheat from the chaff has become a real skill.

So when I hear The Sunday Times of Malta columnist Michela Spiteri and the Education Minister talking about reforming the education system, this is what they should be talking about. Providing both an ‘equal’ and ‘equitable’ system where students are immersed in information from the earliest stages and trained to distinguish between deep truths based on facts and measurements and those that are the musings of raving lunatics.

Now, how can we ever hope to achieve this if our grasp of both the language and the mathematics behind the facts is only rudimentary. Of course, you could argue that it is up to the exponent of the argument to ‘dumb’ it down for the layperson, but is that really good enough or are we eroding our education system to cater to a common denominator that will be deceived time and time again by those wheedling our votes.

The day after both the Brexit vote and the US presidential elections, my ‘news feed’ was filled with people applauding the democratic process, discussing that we should respect the people’s vote and in the words of the current US President, that the sun will also rise.

To which I can only refer him to the book from which the opening lines of this piece is taken: “Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.”

Kristian Zarb Adami is an astrophysics professor at the University of Malta.