Political polarisation, cancel culture, false narratives, tribalism, institutional chaos, public shaming, despicable disinformation.
They’re rife. And they’re more insidious than ever.
To me, the growing prevalence of these patterns across society gives us good reason to believe that we have found ourselves in a time where we are more foolish than we are wise.
So, naturally, I’ve started thinking about thinking a whole lot more.
We’re all aware that AI seems to be promising us some kind of "abundant future". While I don't know what that future will look like (and neither does anyone else, no matter how many AI for Ubers they build), I do know that to continue deriving meaning in such a future, we will all require a profound sense of identity, self-awareness and, most importantly, collective wisdom.
Alas, as the legendary Alain de Boton says:
"We have collectively left to chance some of what is most important to know; we have denied ourselves the opportunity to systematically transmit wisdom." [emphasis is mine]
My question today is: how, while existing in an exponential state of technological and scientific innovation, has our ability to transit wisdom across cultures and generations been so dramatically stunted?
Let’s start with the arguable root of the problem: our brains.
As Tim Urban outlines in his recent book What's our Problem: A Self-help Book for Societies (and to be honest, who better to diagnose us?), we basically have two "minds". The primitive mind forces us to leap to conclusions, and the higher mind deals with rational processing. This is nothing new. We've known for ages that there are two distinct “levels” to our brain. The problem is, the primitive mind is a bit of a narcissist (note: it's also the thing that keeps us alive a lot of the time, but that's beside the point right now). It always thinks it's right and loves to mess with the higher mind, infiltrating the higher mind's rationalism with cognitive biases and emotional responses to aid its own self-serving purposes. It's okay, I'm thinking it too. The primitive mind and the higher mind have a bit of a *whispers*…toxic relationship. This relationship poses a real challenge to the quality of our thinking. How can we think straight when our own mind is literally trying to sabotage us?
Put simply, these are the main differences between the primitive and higher mind:
Urban argues that when the higher mind is in control, we're engaging in "high-rung" thinking, whereas when our primitive mind has the edge, we're caving in to "low-rung" thinking.
Naturally, high-rung thinking is what we should be aiming for. In an ideal intellectual culture, we would work to interrogate our ideas, versus our ideas ruling us. Truth would be prioritised over tribalism. Humility would be given more weight than idea supremacy. Independent and divergent thinking would be prized over a fear of being outcast. I'm not saying that any of this is an easy culture to create (that's for another time), more shedding a light on how we've got to this state in the first place.
When it comes to wisdom, the most concerning problem with the primitive mind becomes clear. True wisdom demands multi-dimensional thinking. But the primitive mind forces us to take a linear approach to thinking that neglects the rich, multi-faceted nature of reality. This is what allows us to understand the intricate interplay of various facts, ideas and perspectives, particularly when they seem at odds with each other or with our previous beliefs. You may have noticed that we loooove a horizontal spectrum. Gender, politics, sexuality, you name it. But the vertical? Not so much. And you can just forget about the diagonal. It ain't happening.
Now, this is the hard pill to swallow.
Our collective consciousness has fallen prey to the very same primitive biases that rule our brains.
In It's time to rip up the contract society forced us to sign, I talked about how very few of us make our own decisions.
“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”
~ René Girard
A classical example of this lies in the Keynesian beauty contest, a concept developed by John Maynard Keynes in 1936. It describes a hypothetical beauty contest in which judges are rewarded for selecting the most popular faces among all judges, rather than those they personally find most attractive. Keynes applied this idea to the stock market, claiming that investors price shares not based on what they think an asset’s true value is, nor based on what they think other investors think is the asset’s true value, but on what they think other investors believe is the average opinion about the value of the asset. I had to read it three times, too, don’t worry.
This shows that, ultimately, we are a mimetic species. It’s in our genes. It’s our survival mechanism. The problem, as Benjamin Franklin once so eloquently put it, is that:
“If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.”
A quick recap of where we’ve got to so far:
But there’s another 2024-infused layer to lather upon this already crumbling cake. We are witnessing a generation of young people who cling to their identities and opinions as protective shields that guard them from being outcast from their communities or overwhelmed by the complexity of the world. This defensive posture hinders open dialogue and the free exchange of ideas, both of which are essential for the cultivation of collective wisdom.
Things get even more troubling when we examine this generation in a broader context. Our youngest generation’s tether to their ancestral, religious and cultural history has been severed by a sharp lack of belief in the integrity of the institution, while their connection to the future is ultimately unknown, given radical advancements in artificial intelligence and longevity science.
We are left with few spaces in which intergenerational relationships and community can develop and flourish. The conclusion?
Intergenerational wisdom is existentially at risk.
The fascinating (and frustrating) thing about wisdom, of course, is that wisdom lessons don't really stick. Rather than building upon previous progress in the same way scientific breakthroughs or technological innovations do, we don't update our model of the world to account for new philosophical or sociocultural revelations. It usually takes something really Bad with a capital "B" to happen, before we intuit the wisdom our ancestors learnt during the previous really Bad event.
Tackling this problem requires us to be highly intentional about how we cultivate and transmit collective wisdom. In another piece, I’ll discuss how we might go about this.
For now, the next time you’re asked to give your opinion about something, pause, and take a deep breath. Forget what Jerry and Amanda think. Forget what you think they think.
What do you think?
