The Wisdom Gap

 


In the course of history, the rush of progress eventually excedes
the speed of communications and assimilation, and the wiser elders 
of a society will fail to communicate their controlling wisdom to 
that generation which succeeds them. 

The succeeding generation, like children with working parents, learns 
not from the parents in the home but from the environment imposing on 
them from the outside.  These 'orphaned' children, are seduced into 
'playing with matches' by their neighbor's children and from others 
similarly not wisened by the proceeding generation. The child, in 
this manner is not matured gradually into the understanding of 
control and its implications, but ages rapidly into adulthood
with no more than an adolescent understanding of the world. 
The society then becomes a world of emotionally immature children 
complete with adult rights; rights that they haven't earned but 
which society grants them none-the-less in it laws, based only on 
the age of their physical bodies.

In such cases, the static nature of the societal law has a 
deterministic metric, and that is the age of the defendants
_body_. The static law does not define a "mind-body" metric
which is more dynamical, but instead, incorporates the judicial
process in an attempt to effectively determine such a metric.
It may call upon psychiatric authority, or rely on the wisdom 
of the judge and jury to this end. But the law itself does
not have a deterministic process for deciding if a defendant
is emotionally mature in its actions nor for deciding whether
the actions of that person were mature in the spatio-temporal 
(both subjective and objective) context of their alleged crime/s. 
There has always been good reason to never reduce the judicial
process to the level of determinism that a computer could carry
out, and that is essentially that is in part because we
ourselves never really understood that process well enough to
deterministically write it down, but also because there is
an inherent uncertainty built into it that cannot be left
to a decision based on the mere flipping of the coin. 

A quantum computer may be able to run the planet in this sense, 
but it would be essentially be a deterministic dictator basing 
its decisions in a large sense on non-determinism. We would never 
agree with each other with the definition of its eternal 'sanity'
unless it conformed to our own individual levels of 'sanity' or
maturity; and with such a large dispersion of individual maturity
levels, such an idealism of perfect sanity is a unlikely as
a world with one god that everyone was agreed upon.

This gap in wisdom, creates a society not unlike a chicken with 
it's head cut-off; thrashing, flailing in the wind, and spine-less. 
Such a society is demolished and eventually replaced by a new-born
immature one which must relearn from scratch all the wisdom that
was lost in the preceeding society. 

This has happened many times, and it seems we have recovered 
promptly from each recent occurance, in a relative sense; quickly 
recovering that controlling wisdom from the recorded documents of 
the preceeding generations. 

Whereas in earlier times this information was verbally recorded, 
the transition to recent times has placed the essential wisdom 
onto more permanent forms like books and even CD-ROMs;
though with a great loss of bandwidth that only verbal dialogue
it seems, can provide. 

The controlling wisdom which has been handed down in this manner has 
become somewhat noisy and diffuse as a result; suggesting that any 
such future wisdom gaps, will not be easily recovered from. 

When the seductive practical value of empiricism drives a society's
decisions, the wisdom in theory that is much slower to convey,
looses its appeal and influence. People that are rushed to generate 
results, do not see very far into the future. They do not make
the associative connections essential to warning them of long-term
dangers. 

We could lay part of the blame on the elders for being overly protective
of their children and withholding the wisdom from them until it
is too late or, for purposely withholding that wisdom from them
in order to subjugate them. There is nothing intrinsically 'good'
about 'wise' people; evil or mentally ill people can be wise and
use wisdom to inflict ills on others. The controlling wisdom is a 
double-edged sword.

It is usually the case that trophies are made in the kill
of the fundamentalists of a species. The corporation largely composed
of tangible assets and with little or no speculative investments 
into the future is a prime target for a corporate take-over with
the intent to liquidate. The fatted cow is slaughtered.

Pure fundamentalism in this manner is not an asset. 
For this reason, the elders of a society should not hoard their
wisdom which though, idealistically yields a traditional society,
cannot lead to a society which is safe from the slaughter from
the inevitable outside invaders. All potential sources of energy 
are eventually exploited and depleted by life.

The key to 'survival' seems not in pure fundamentalism, nor in pure
pragmatism, but in a more dynamic and fluid combination of these
two extrema. A battery is useless outside of a circuit, and a  
short-circuit that releases all of the energy in a battery 
in an instant, is equally pointless. 

Longevity or survival is in terms of building of a 'slow' but 
'meaningful' circuit which seeks to replenish its lost energy 
from outside sources without excessive greed.