In the past, one often found the Latin phrase, Sapientia vis vera (wisdom is true power), as the motto of some educational institutions. In the sixties, the world started turning its back on knowledge and embraced emotion as the solution to everything, as the popular Beatles song, All you need is love, proclaimed.
As the end of the twentieth century approached, and the Reverse Flynn Effect ate away at the average intelligence of those born after the mid-seventies, the world became hostile to knowledge and embraced ignorance and celebrated stupidity. Carl Sagan is supposed to have said, One trend that bothers me is the glorification of stupidity, that the media are reassuring people it’s all right to know nothing, that in a way it’s cool. Carl Sagan’s nightmare is our present reality.
Knowledge and Wisdom
What is knowledge? What is wisdom? How can they help us?
Knowledge
Knowledge is simply knowing things. Of course, at different times, different pieces of knowledge are far more critical than others. For instance, if your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, knowing how to fix it can be a lifesaver.
Wisdom
Wisdom is simply the ability to apply your knowledge in such a way that it solves a certain problem. Without knowledge, there can be no wisdom. Applying knowledge correctly is reasoning correctly. To do that, you need to apply the rules of logic. To apply them, you need to know them. A word or two about logic.
Logic
There are two kinds of logic:
- Deductive logic. Using known truths to arrive at unknown truths. This is mostly done in the mind and does not require much research. But it needs to be done correctly or the conclusion will be wrong.
- Inductive logic. Making many observations (research), looking for a pattern in the observations, arriving at a conclusion (hypothesis) based on the discovered pattern, rigorously testing your hypothesis with more research to see if it always holds true.
Logic is a topic on its own, and I won’t go deeper into it in this post.
Examples of applying the above
In Australia, politicians are the considered the least trustworthy people. How did those in the survey arrive at this decision? Over 90% of people base their beliefs and decisions on emotions and personal preferences. So, what these people believe may not be fact. How can we test their belief?
One will need to do research on every profession in the list, assign each a score and see if politicians come last. That's more work than I’m willing to do. Let’s just see if they’re, by and large, a bunch of corrupt rotters, as the survey holds them to be. I’ll use something I already know (knowledge).
Alcohol (also tobacco smoke, diesel exhaust fumes, processed meat, etc.) is a Group 1 Human Carcinogen. That means it certainly causes cancer in humans, among others, breast cancer. It also kills people in other ways; one of the most common being liver cirrhosis. Alcohol kills about 5,500 people per year in Australia. That’s just over 15/day. Yet, alcohol is sold with no warning, unlike tobacco. The WHO says there’s no safe limit one can drink, and even the Australian Government says, It’s never completely safe. So, how come alcohol is sold with no warning labels? Everything in this paragraph is factually true, therefore knowledge.
Do the booze barons maybe reward the politicians to look the other way? Let’s see. Do you really think there’s no connection, as the politicians will claim? Does this smack of corruption?
The above strips politicians of any trustworthiness. Maybe one can trust them to look the other way if one lines their hands with silver. Based on known facts and applying sound logic to these facts, one can conclude those in the survey were right to hold the trustworthiness of politicians in low regard.
Another example
When I was at university in the seventies, we (males studying the sciences) regarded the arts and humanities as jokes. It was OK for a girl to do a BA, which even they called a BA Husband Hunting. After all, we males believed—you might disagree—that true happiness for a girl was finding a husband. But a man doing a BA? If he was not intelligent enough to do something worthwhile (studying the sciences), he should dig ditches or drive a truck. Were we right in holding males doing the arts and humanities in such low esteem? Let’s see.
We know by far the majority with university qualifications in any government will be from the arts and humanities. So, if we were right, they would often do really, really stupid things. There are so many governments and they do so many things, one can't examine them all. So, I'll deal with one government and one thing.
Australia gets 70% of its electricity from burning coal. Coal-fired power plants have by orders of magnitude the highest mortality rate per unit of electricity produced compared to the only other viable form of 24/7/365 electricity production on a city, state, and country level—nuclear power. About seven times more people die in Australia yearly from coal-fired power station pollution than the total direct and cancer deaths of Chernobyl and Fukushima combined.
Yet coal power production is legal in Australia and nuclear power production is illegal. If that is not stupid, what is?
This last example does not establish governments, and by extension arts and humanities monkeys, as really, really dumb. We will need many more examples and much more research. But it’s one step along the way. One can also mention trying to build a submarine locally, which ended as a debacle, and then trying it again, which again was a debacle. Will they never learn?
A rare example of government wisdom
In 1969, they discovered oil in the North Sea. In 1990 the Norwegian Government established the Government Pension Fund and in 1996 transferred the first money into it. In 2019, the fund was worth US$950 billion. This fund made Norway fabulously wealthy. They avoided splurging the money and instead opted to delay gratification. The world over, this is used as an example of wise government money management. Most other countries spend money earned through raw materials as soon as they have it. And raw materials don’t last indefinitely.
In conclusion
It’s long been known that knowledge and wisdom are of great value. 3,000 years ago, Solomon said: 1 My son, if you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, 2 making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding; 3 yes, if you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding. (Proverbs 2) Knowledge and wisdom will help you discover how the world really is and guide you to the right decisions and beliefs.
