People:
Wise people are a good source of wisdom sometimes. You’d think wise people should be a good source of wisdom all the time, but truly wise people are the ones who know that they’re not good sources of wisdom all the time. Religious and spiritual leaders are good sources of wisdom, because they’re the people who generally know the most about their particular systems of thought. Spiritual heroes or chiefs (see the Tribalism chapter), people who don’t go looking for followers but who end up attracting them anyway, are even better sources of wisdom in some ways. They’re people for whom glory and power aren’t top priorities, they’re just people who are so successful at doing what they do that other people can recognize it and want to learn from them and/or put the heroes in charge.
Followers are not good sources of their own wisdom—that’s why they’re followers and not leaders or heroes. However, they are a good measurement of how good the leaders’ and heroes’ ideas are. Obviously, if nobody could attract followers, then nobody could be a leader, could they? If leaders do attract followers, there must be a reason for it. If one leader has good ideas and then another leader has even better ideas, the followers are going to start following the second leader instead. In so doing, the followers contribute by helping to ensure that the best ideas are carried out. Another way they can contribute is by helping to carry good ideas to other follower so that good ideas spread and followers continue to have choices of good ideas. Another excellent contribution followers have made is to carry good ideas to me, so that I can find new directions to look for good ideas.
If there were no followers in the world, six billion people would all have to compete and/or figure out how to cooperate with each other to get what everyone needed. That would be anarchy, and it would never work. I didn’t live in England in the late 1970s, but to look at how popular Anarchy in the UK, the Sex PistoLs’ most notorious song, became, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea at the time. If one band can attract that many followers with one controversial song, it sure doesn’t say much for the government they had! Unfourtunately, the long-term drawback to anarchy is that it could never last. Government is inescapable. As long as there are guns in the world, or even swords, somebody will always be telling somebody else what to do. With democracy, at least we get to vote for those people. And then hope our votes actually get counted…
Old people are good sources of wisdom oftentimes because they’ve had the opportunity to see first hand how ideas work or don’t work over long periods of time. They’ve also had the chance to relate different ideas to each other, to judge which ideas are more important than other ideas, and which ideas are less important. One drawback to dealing with old people is that they’ve also had the longest time to get set in their ways, even if their ways don’t work as well as they could—or the world has changed and their ways no longer work as well as they used to.
Young people are just the opposite. They have a wisdom all of their own, because they’re the ones who are the least removed from basic thought. They’ve had the least amount of time to stack bad ideas on top of each other. They’re still in the process of building their foundations and trying to figure out, as everyone does, how to build the best houses they can. The best way to build any kind of house is to start with a good foundation, not with a bad foundation. Lots of people, in spite of their best efforts and intentions, live in giant Jenga towers built on bad foundations and young people are the least likely to have that problem.
Sometimes young people actually realize that they don’t know everything there is to know in the world (hey, I was that age once too). While that youthful innocence/ignorance can lead them to make all kinds of decisions that, well, let’s just say “don’t turn out to be quite as good as the young people thought they were going to be”, that also means that, in addition to having the least amount of time to stack bad ideas on top of each other, the young people have also had the least amount of time to forget basic evolutionary ideas. If you don’t look at what young people are literally doing but at the spirit of what they’re trying to do, you can learn a lot. For instance, if your teenager goes out and gets into trouble all the time, does that mean he’s just trying to piss you off, or does that mean he feels like he’s missing something from his life? Young people are the best at knowing what they want, the worst at knowing where to look for it, the worst at being able to recognize it when they see it, and the best at getting into trouble trying to find it. But hey, we all need to get into trouble from time to time, because it keeps us from getting lazy. Young people have the most time for that, so just like everyone else, they’re drawn to doing what they’re best at.
One other benefit to young people is that they learn the fastest, because they are by far the most in touch with what the world is like right now. Out of everyone, they’re the only ones whose vision isn’t clouded by “the way things used to be”. That’s not to say that everyone should forget about the past, that is to say that the future is going to happen whether anyone wants it to or not, and nobody can keep up with the future by clinging desperately to the past.
People in between those age ranges, say, between 20 and 60, give or take, in all fairness, are the least valuable as sources of independent wisdom. (Remember, I am speaking of trends here, not stereotypes, and in case you need proof of that, I’m somewhere in that age range, and I’m the one writing this book, aren’t I? So don’t take that too seriously…) You can’t really hold that against those people though, because if you look at those ages I mentioned, people between those ages are in the working-for-a-living part of their lives. They generally have the least amount of time to think about things, because they’re the ones who carry the most responsibility for doing things. But that in itself gives them a wisdom of their own, because it means they’re best at putting ideas into practice. Let’s just hope they’re good ideas…









