The Getting of Wisdom – Part Two
Overcoming Obstacles to Evolution
The obstacles to achieving wisdom at global scale aren’t just challenging—they’re civilisational features so deeply embedded that removing them would probably require reimagining humanity itself. We’ve constructed a global operating system that systematically rewards precisely the opposite of wisdom, then wonder why wisdom remains so elusive. Let me map the machinery of our collective stupidity.
The first and perhaps most intractable obstacle is the temporal mismatch between evolutionary psychology and technological capability. Our brains evolved to respond to immediate threats—a rustle in the bushes, the stranger from another tribe, coming winter. But climate change, biodiversity loss, and technological risk operate on timescales that trigger no visceral response. By the time dangers become psychologically real, they’re overwhelming and often irreversible. We’re using hunter-gatherer cognitive equipment to navigate spacecraft Earth, and the control panel makes no intuitive sense.
This connects to what I call the “proximity delusion”—our inability to emotionally process events beyond our immediate spatial and social sphere. A single dying child on our doorstep moves us to action; a million dying children on another continent become statistics. Social media promised to collapse distance, but instead created filter bubbles that reinforce existing biases whilst providing the illusion of global awareness. We mistake information for understanding, tweets for action, awareness for wisdom.
The incentive structures governing global civilisation constitute another massive obstacle. Every system we’ve ever built—capitalism, democracy, academia, media, the law—operates on timescales radically shorter than wisdom requires. CEOs maximise quarterly earnings while destroying centuries of ecological capital. Politicians blithely optimise for election cycles while creating millennial-scale problems. Journalists chase daily clicks rather than developing deep understanding. Even scientists, once irreproachable, now pursue publication metrics rather than pursuing truth. In effect we’ve created a civilisation-wide Olympics that rewards those who excel at short-term games, then placed these winners in charge of long-term outcomes.
Just look at the specific pathology of capitalism as currently practiced. It doesn’t just ignore wisdom; it actively punishes it. A CEO who sacrifices profits for long-term sustainability will get replaced. A fund manager who invests based on 50-year outcomes gets fired for underperforming quarterly benchmarks. A company that internalises its true environmental costs gets undercut by competitors who externalise them. The market doesn’t just fail to select for wisdom—it systematically eliminates those who do.
The knowledge-wisdom paradox presents another obstacle. We’ve confused the accumulation of information together with an occasional insight, with the development of wisdom, building vast repositories of data while our capacity for wise action atrophies. Every smartphone contains access to more knowledge than entire civilisations possessed, yet we seem less capable of wise collective action than ever. Information abundance creates noise that drowns out signal, confidence that masks ignorance, the illusion of understanding that prevents actual comprehension.
Power concentration actively opposes wisdom distribution. Those who control resources, narratives, and institutions have no incentive to foster collective wisdom that might challenge their position. Wisdom democratisation threatens existing hierarchies. Why would fossil fuel companies promote understanding of climate dynamics, except if they were in their favour? Why would surveillance capitalists encourage critical thinking about data privacy? Why would authoritarian governments foster systems thinking that reveals their failures? The powerful benefit from collective ignorance - actively maintain it.
The complexity explosion, too, makes wisdom increasingly difficult to achieve. When supply chains span continents, when algorithms determine fates, when synthetic biology meets artificial intelligence meets nanotechnology, even experts can’t predict outcomes with any degree of accuracy. We’re creating systems whose behaviour emerges from interactions no human can fully comprehend. How can we act wisely when we can’t understand the full consequences of our actions? We’re not just flying blind; we’re flying blind at exponential speed through n-dimensional space.
Cultural relativism, despite its obvious benefits, also creates obstacles to planetary wisdom. When all perspectives are considered equally valid, how do we converge on shared understanding? Indigenous knowledge about sustainable living deserves respect, but so too does someone demanding their right to conspicuous consumption. The tolerance that enables multicultural cooperation also enables the perpetuation of destructive mindsets. We need meta-wisdom about which forms of wisdom to privilege, but who decides? Not the incumbent power establishment I hope!
The fragmenting effects of specialisation compound these challenges. As knowledge domains become increasingly complex, experts know more and more about less and less. The climate scientist doesn’t understand the economic system they’re trying to influence. The economist doesn’t grasp the ecological systems they’re modeling. The technologist doesn’t comprehend the social systems they’re disrupting. Wisdom requires integration across domains, but our institutions reward narrow expertise. The generalists who might provide synthesis are dismissed as dilettantes.
Psychological defence mechanisms protect us from confronting uncomfortable truths. The scale of our predicament triggers cognitive dissonance so severe that denial becomes psychologically indispensable. Climate scientists report depression from understanding what’s coming. Those who grasp our trajectory often retreat into nihilism or false optimism. The wisdom to see clearly becomes a knowledge burden that few can bear, creating incentives for maintaining ignorance.
The speed of change itself becomes an obstacle. Wisdom traditionally accumulated across generations, encoded in culture, refined through practice. But when the world transforms within a single lifetime, and when children grow up in fundamentally different realities than their parents, traditional wisdom becomes obsolete before it can be transmitted. We’re trying to develop wisdom while the ground shifts beneath our feet.
Educational systems, rather than fostering wisdom, actively suppress it. We still teach students to compete rather than collaborate, to specialise rather than synthesise, to accept rather than question facts or instructions. Critical thinking gets lip service while standardised testing rewards conformity. We produce graduates excellent at playing institutional games but incapable of questioning whether such games should even exist. The wisdom to challenge systems gets drummed out of us at an early age.
The addiction economy presents a massive obstacle. We’ve built industries dedicated to hijacking our attention, triggering dopamine, creating dependence. Social media, gaming, pornography, consumption—all optimised to exploit psychological vulnerabilities. How can wisdom emerge when our attention is constantly captured, our desires manufactured, our anxieties monetised? We’re trying to develop collective wisdom while powerful forces profit from keeping us distracted and divided.
The narrative warfare surrounding every issue prevents convergence on shared understanding. Climate change isn’t just scientific fact but a political football. Pandemic response becomes culture war. Every issue gets weaponised for tribal conflict. When basic reality becomes contested, when every fact has an alternative, when expertise itself is dismissed as elitism, the common ground necessary for collective wisdom erodes. To be frank, we’re not just disagreeing about solutions; we can’t even agree on the problems.
Technological mediation increasingly separates us from direct experience, and direct experience has traditionally been wisdom’s teacher. We experience nature through screens, food through packaging, community through platforms. The feedback loops that once taught consequences—plant wrong crops and starve, destroy soil and suffer—are buffered by global supply chains and technological fixes. We can remain unwise longer these days because technology temporarily shields us from folly’s consequences.
The agency illusion—the feeling that someone, somewhere, is in control—prevents the development of collective responsibility. We assume governments and corporations, or possibly technologies, will solve all our problems, thus absolving ourselves from developing wisdom, or any kind of involvement other than complaint. But those institutions are composed of humans as confused as we are, following scripts written by previous generations facing different challenges. Nobody’s driving the bus, but everyone assumes someone else has the wheel.
Geopolitical competition makes planetary wisdom nearly impossible. While climate change demands cooperation, nations compete for resources. While biodiversity loss requires coordination, countries prioritise sovereignty. While technological risk needs global governance, power politics prevails. We’re trying to develop planetary wisdom while organised into competing tribes with nuclear weapons. I struggle to find a fitting analogy, but it’s like trying to perform surgery while arm wrestling.
Moreover, the sunk cost fallacy operates at civilisational scale. We’ve invested so heavily in current systems that changing course seems more costly than continuing toward catastrophe. The wisdom to abandon failing strategies conflicts with the psychological need to justify previous investments. We’d rather double down on folly than admit we’ve been wrong.
Intergenerational trauma also perpetuates patterns that prevent wisdom development. Colonisation, slavery, genocide, exploitation—these historical wounds shape much present behaviour. The colonised often internalise coloniser values. The traumatised traumatise others. Cycles of violence, extraction, and domination continue because healing requires acknowledgment that perpetrators vehemently resist. We can’t develop collective wisdom while carrying unprocessed collective trauma.
Measurement is another problem that fundamentally distorts our priorities. GDP counts cancer treatment as growth but not caregiving as value. Academic impact counts citations but not actual impact. Social media counts engagement but not enlightenment. What gets measured gets managed, or at least cursory attention, but wisdom can’t be measured. So we optimise for quantifiable metrics while what really matters most remains invisible.
As I’ve labored on many occasions, language is also an obstacle. The words we use shape what we can think. “Natural resources” implies nature exists for exploitation. “Sustainable development” suggests we can continue growing forever. “Artificial intelligence” implies machines can think. Our vocabulary is sloppy, but it embeds assumptions that prevent wise understanding. We’re trying to solve problems using the conceptual tools that created them.
Then there’s comfort - another trap that can’t be ignored. Those with the resources to drive change are insulated from consequences that would motivate wisdom. Elites can easily buy their way out of climate impacts, escape pollution, and avoid social breakdown. Why develop wisdom about systemic risks when you can afford private solutions? There’s no incentive to do so.
Perhaps most fundamentally, we lack agreement on what wisdom even means. Is it indigenous knowledge or scientific understanding? Emotional intelligence or rational analysis? Individual enlightenment or collective coordination? Without a shared definition, we can’t develop shared anything. So in this case we’re trying to solve for a variable we haven’t yet defined.
The convergence of these obstacles creates what systems theorists call a “wicked problem”—one where every solution creates new problems, where stakeholders can’t agree on problem definition, where constraints are constantly shifting and where unintended conseqences remain a mystery. We’re not facing a challenge that wisdom could solve; we’re facing a predicament that wisdom might help us navigate.
And yet—and this is crucial—identifying these obstacles is itself a form of wisdom. Understanding why wisdom remains elusive is the first step toward fostering it. The very fact we can map our impediments suggests the possibility of addressing them. Not solving them—that’s utopian thinking—but working with and around them.
The obstacles to global wisdom aren’t bugs in the system; they’re features. We’ve built a civilisation that systematically selects against wisdom because, historically, other traits—particularly aggression and expansion—provided competitive advantage. But those advantages become liabilities when a species reaches planetary scale as we have. The obstacles to wisdom are the legacy codes of our evolutionary and cultural history, running on hardware they were never designed for.
So I’m not too bothered on whether we can overcome these obstacles—we likely cannot, at least not completely. The more apposite question is whether we can develop sufficient wisdom despite them, working within and around these constraints to navigate the transition from growth to stability, from competition to cooperation, from unconscious to conscious evolution. Time will tell. But time, as always, is running out.