I was saying to someone the other day, in a moment of uncharacteristic pessimism, that our whole situation in the United States is a bit ‘daunting’ at the moment.
It’s easy for any of us to slip into that quiet and afraid space and assume all the people around you are scary, trigger-happy, conspiracy theorists.
Our environment, economy, political institutions, and other major support systems seem to have disappeared up the swanny.
But I want to remind us of two things that can break us of the spell that everyone has gone mad and we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.
First of all, it really is a small minority of nut jobs. We are many, many, many times more than them, and we are in both parties, and in all parts of the country and world. Most people don’t want dictators, don’t want to spend their lives paying off medical debt, don’t want smog, do want decent-paying jobs, civility, and trees. And pandas. Everyone loves pandas.
Secondly, there IS such a thing as collective wisdom and we already have more of it than we think. But I think it’s worth running through the diagram below (plus, I spent time on powerpoint making it, so please humor me), to see what will make that even stronger….at least in my view.
Let’s start from the inside out.
If we want to develop more collective wisdom, there are at least three things that define it: knowledge of what is true and how things work, the application of that knowledge in real world situations, and the sharing of that knowledge with others. The sharing is crucial to the ‘collective’ part of wisdom.
When I say knowledge, I don’t mean science or data, though those should play important roles, but there are many ways of gaining knowledge. If you feel better when you spend more time outside, that’s knowledge you get from experience (which also brings in the application piece). You can know that trees and dirt play an important role in your wellbeing even if you’ve never seen a single bit of research to support that. Sometimes, listening to our bodies and paying attention to our environment are two of the most important areas of knowledge (and individual wisdom) we gain.
If we go out another ring from the middle, the way we get knowledge is by learning - this can be from books, from stories, from observation, from experience etc. But not all knowledge is created equal; some of it is interesting but not necessarily useful…not applicable. Wisdom is, in part, knowing the difference.
So experimentation is usually part of developing a sense of what knowledge is worth applying. Any parent will know this intuitively. You can read all the books ever written on parenting, but it is not until you put it into practice that you will know what works. And what works on one kid might be (will be) completely different to what works for another kid. It requires some experimentation.
The point of this experimentation as a parent of course, is to optimally balance short-term care-taking with long-term ‘shaping’ of a happy, responsible adult, while trying to avoid, in the process, losing the small amount of sanity you still have. You are experimenting with how to meet multiple goals over multiple timeframes and for it to be a sustainable effort. The same is true for our collective wisdom - it has to involve both short and long-term benefit for the maximum number of people, if we are truly to call it ‘wisdom’.
So finally, discovering and supporting ways to share what we know and what’s applicable, is critical. We cannot know all the things individually, so we must trust that other people (in the present or the past) have learned something different and useful for us.
There are lots of ways to access this ‘wisdom of others’. A library is a way of accessing wisdom, but a yoga class is also a way of sharing applied health wisdom. So is youTube, or your local gardening club, or a bookclub, or professional conferences, or a museum, or a history class, or magazine articles, etc. Not all of these methods or sources are always reliable, so discernment is a key part of the cycle as well.
If we are receptive to new information though - including from outside our normal spheres and groups or awareness - then we will be exposed to different kinds of knowledge, application, and ultimately wisdom. The key here is ‘if we are receptive’. All wisdom starts from a place of questioning what we know and whether what we know is as useful or beneficial as we think it is. What we understand to be beneficial changes if we are open to new information as it becomes available.
For example, new things we’re learning in recent years include: weight training is beneficial for women, renewable energy is safe, reliable and scalable, a corporate tax rate of 21% is too low, kids with lots of screen-time are anxious, being too busy doesn’t make us happy, service workers are ‘essential workers’.
We have this collective wisdom already. Even those of us who have never read anything about any of the items on this list, could look at this list and ‘feel’ the truth of this wisdom.
What we sometimes lack is the collective courage to acknowledge it and USE this wisdom in service of society and ourselves.
The problem with developing a new level of wisdom is that living in alignment with it requires us to change our actions. THAT’s the hard part. It’s much easier to claim we don’t have the wisdom in the first place.
But we do.
Yes. We do... ❤️