The Wisdom Deficit: How Very Intelligent People and Our Own Wishful Thinking are Leading Us to Disaster

We have many intelligent people in the highest positions of power. Some are less intelligent, but are quite cunning fellows. You cannot achieve the highest positions without a large dollop of one or both of these attributes. What is lacking almost entirely in the people at the top is wisdom. We need to fix that.

Wisdom is the ability to recognize and accept truth. Ignoring or denying reality, clearly, makes you unwise. Most of us have had the experience of being told by another: “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” And we did it anyway. And lived to regret it. Some people don’t have the chance to regret their mistake, because it turned out to be fatal; see: Darwin Awards.

Sometimes we repeat whatever it was that caused the warning and subsequent regret – and regretted it again. Some of us are slow learners. (I’ll admit to having been one at times, although I’m much quicker on the uptake now. After numerous repeated and very costly blunders, I finally “wised up” and made the decision to listen to wiser people and to make reality my touchstone, rather than wishful thinking.)

Unwise: Ignoring the Lessons of History

One of the values of history is that we can learn from the mistakes of others. Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is an examination of prior civilisations that collapsed, and why. That we are repeating many of the same mistakes is a sign of our lack of wisdom – and is rather alarming.

Diamond detected some common patterns that led to the the downfall of those who went before, despite building remarkably advanced societies in some cases. One common theme is detachment from reality, especially among those at the top. The Easter Islanders provide the clearest example, cutting down every tree on their island in order to roll those giant stone heads to their display location. The trees were also used to make canoes that permitted deep sea fishing, and were their only means of visiting other islands – or escape. Nobody had the wisdom or courage to ensure that no more trees were cut than regrew each year. Presumably the Easter Islanders put their ultimate faith in the god(s) represented by heads, rather than in their own effort.

Joseph Tainter, in his influential The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) also found that prior civilisations never really considered sustainability – planting as many trees as were cut, maintaining a stable population, and so on – particularly important…and paid the ultimate price. Our current leaders are no different: Endless growth is the goal of every politician and CEO. [The Chinese leadership may be the only exception, at least with population if not with energy and other resource use, with their "one child" policy.]

This pattern is repeated over-and-over by different civilisations – and we are making the same mistakes. The previous cultures did not have the advantage of knowing what befell other civilisations; we do. This is unwise.

Wishful Thinking

In our case, we have chosen certain beliefs over reality, and any one of them could be our undoing:

• Belief: We cannot alter the planet such that it no longer supports us. Climate change, pollution, deforestation, desertification, over-fishing….
• Belief: Oil will never run out, or if it does, we will come up with substitutes in time to carry on the project of our civilisation.
• Belief: There is no such thing as overpopulation.

The first is rapidly being proven incorrect. We are altering the earth and we are starting to see the consequences now. Were we paying attention to history, the evidence is plain that some prior civilisations did themselves in through altering their local environment in such a way that it no longer supported them. Usually this is combined with populations expanding to the limits of the local environment. Disaster strikes when either that environment collapses, say through deforestation followed by soil washing down from now-denuded hills and burying fertile valley farmland, or when the climate changes. If population expands to the limits of what can be grown in a good year…and then there is a drought…some people are going to have to die.

This often results in a collapse of that civilisation. People generally don’t die quietly or watch their children starve to death. They lose faith in the leaders and systems that brought them to this point, and internal fighting breaks out.

Our civilisation is literally built on readily available energy in the form of oil. Reduce the supply of oil, or even simply increase its price significantly, and down we go. James Howard Kunstler has described this well in The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. Yes, we can substitute other fuels, but that takes time – and we aren’t moving quickly at all in this area while demand continues to increase. It is not hard to imagine more oil wars coming. Gwynne Dyer interviewed Pentagon officials for his recent book Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats, and the prognosis is not promising.

The Wisdom Deficit at the Top

We are an intelligent species, but we are not very wise. Worse, we don’t have the sense to at least choose the wisest among us as leaders. In many cases, we prefer people who tell us what we want to hear, true or not.

Climate deniers are a example: they are often very intelligent people – and also very unwise. They reject science in favour of what ‘feels right’ and what supports the status quo. Some deniers are paid by people with a vested interest in the status quo, but what kind of fool rejects science and reality in favour of lies and money? Deniers are like the Mayan priests who made sacrifices to the fertility god for a good harvest. The sacrifices did not prevent drought, and nor will all the money and press releases in the world prevent climate change.

If you have not lost faith in the leaders and systems that govern us, you should. They are paid to maintain the status quo, not to protect us.

Intelligence is no guarantee of wisdom. Neither is education, or even experience, if you don’t learn from your mistakes or those of others. And when the top dogs are not wise people, the whole society is in danger. We must replace these intelligent fools with people who value truth and who accept reality – no matter how inconvenient it may be. We still have some time to do this before a collapse, but time is running very short.

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Resources referenced in this post