"Wisdom is a state of the human mind characterized by profound understanding and deep insight. It is often, but not necessarily, accompanied by extensive formal knowledge. Unschooled people can acquire wisdom, and wise people can be found among carpenters, fishermen, or housewives.
Wherever it exists, wisdom shows itself as a perception of the relativity and relationships among things. It is an awareness of wholeness that does not lose sight of particularity or concreteness, or of the intricacies of interrelationships. It is where left and right brain come together in a union of logic and poetry and sensation, and where self-awareness is no longer at odds with awareness of the otherness of the world.
Wisdom cannot be confined to a specialized field, nor is it an academic discipline; it is the consciousness of wholeness and integrity that transcends both. Wisdom is complexity understood and relationships accepted."
Joseph Meeker "Wisdom and Wilderness")
(The Basis of Genius, http://www.meaning.ca/articles/basis_of_genius.htm)
'Integrative Thinkers'
"Both integrative thinkers and "normal" people use the sequential, analytical abilities of their left-brain to gather information about something. But geniuses and systems thinkers use the "synthetical" abilities of their right brain to integrate the information into complete pictures that show the relationship between the pieces of data. This reveals what the information actually means. That's the source of their insight, deep understanding, and unique comprehension. Normal people don't create these pictures. They typically use data quantitatively, to measure things, not qualitatively, to understand their nature." (The Basis of Genius, http://www.meaning.ca/articles/basis_of_genius.htm)
'Our Social Systems Prevent Genius'
"Our social systems, by their nature, work to prevent genius. They
actively prohibit creative, holistic, integrative thinking. Our
education system leads the prohibition. To understand what's going
on, we have to understand a bit about systems.
[...] A normative system is built for repetition - doing the same things
the same way, under the same conditions, day after day. To do this,
it discards the system's specific originating purpose, the reason it
exists in the first place. Whether the system's originating purpose
was open or closed, it now becomes closed. People in the system lose
sight of its original purpose, or, more likely, the people who
understood the purpose leave the system.
[...] To maximize efficiency and predictability, people now pursue
conformity to established "norms" of form and process. They seek to
eliminate diversity and variance. Thus, normative systems overtly
punish creativity, because creativity produces variance and decreases
predictability. The normative phase is about control and conformity.
Its dominant criteria are quantitative.
(The Basis of Genius, http://www.meaning.ca/articles/basis_of_genius.htm)
"The folks who rise to the top of highly normative organizations are the ones who have demonstrated the greatest fervor for not only upholding the norms themselves, but for making sure everyone else does, too. They are the enforcers of the norms - rigid, mechanistic - the "supernormal". They are not concerned with outcomes. They are literally blind to the effects the forms and processes they stringently enforce have, not only on the people inside the organization, but on those who receive the output of all this activity." (Meaning - The Secret of Being Alive, http://www.unquietmind.com/dontwork.html)
"Obsessed with control, we begin to see both our principal partners in
the exchange for mutual benefit - customers, students, patients - and
people within our own system who 'vary' from the norms, as enemies,
not assets for survival. Philosophers call this "dualism", light
against dark, good against evil. Dualism gives normative systems
their 'either-or', 'win-lose' character. 'Either you're with us or
against us.'"
(The Basis of Genius, http://www.meaning.ca/articles/basis_of_genius.htm)
"When the system's objective is to increase predictability, that is,
consistency of repeatability, deviance and diversity are "out".
Therefore, talented, creative, original thinkers are also "out". They
refuse to "check their brain at the door", to mindlessly abide by
unexamined assumptions. Organizations, whether companies, school
districts or government agencies, actively push them out the door
until no one is left to ask, 'Why are we doing this in the first
place? And is what we're doing really working?"
[...] Normative systems, intent on perpetuating the status quo, actively
persecute everything required for "genius'. [...] By the time most students become adults, they have been thoroughly conditioned out of their ability to think integratively. Geniuses and other holistic thinkers are the ones who have "escaped" our educational system."
(The Basis of Genius, http://www.meaning.ca/articles/basis_of_genius.htm)
