3rd Serving - How Do We Become a Wise Species?
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
By Ray Fisk, Founder and President of ServCollab
In prior Servings, we explored the core concepts of serving and collaboration. This third Serving explores the core concept of wisdom and explains why ServCollab seeks to help humanity become wiser.
The learning path every human takes toward achieving wisdom begins amid the ignorance of childhood. Each child begins life with no ability to feed or care for themselves. Such dependency at birth is common for all mammals, but humans are unique in the length of our childhood.
The fawns I see being born each spring in my Texas Hill Country neighborhood are standing and walking in a few minutes, running almost immediately after walking, and eating solid food within a few weeks. Within two to three years, they are adult deer.
Ignorance
Of course, humans require decades of learning to become adults. Our native ignorance and extended childhoods give each of us the opportunity to learn an amazing range of ideas and skills. Our native ignorance also means that learning to share information with each other is essential to our social needs. Fortunately, across the long history of our social species, we have evolved the cognitive offerings of language and culture to serve our learning needs.
Until written languages were invented, oral storytelling was our learning method. Oral storytelling remains a fundamental art in every human culture. Storytelling occurs in families, in schools, and in all other human systems.
Knowledge
The invention of education systems has enabled the preparation of children for adulthood in every human culture. In such education systems, children learn language and cultural skills. I started my learning journey in a two-room school in the small mining town of Cordero, Nevada. My first-grade teacher focused on the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Entering an education system is the first step to becoming an educated adult. Education is our most transformative service. This transformation is why education systems are essential to every human culture.
Education has enabled the creation and sharing of vast amounts of knowledge. By the 20th Century, radio, television, satellite, and computer communications made it possible to vastly expand knowledge and to quickly share knowledge.
However, each new communication technology enabled the spread of new forms of deception and misinformation, undermining the credibility of knowledge. The fog of misinformation has grown worse in this century, with the rapid spread of social media and artificial intelligence.
In the 21st century, humanity has more knowledge than ever, but that knowledge cannot stop the contagious spread of distrust. If knowledge cannot solve the chronic problems imperiling humanity’s future in the 21st Century, how can wisdom help us solve them?
Wisdom
Wisdom is much harder to learn than knowledge. Reading a book on wisdom cannot make anyone wiser. Wisdom is commonly described as a learned practice. Knowledge can inform our minds, but wisdom is needed to guide our decisions in life.
To solve the hard problems facing humanity, we need to learn wisdom at the societal level, not just the individual level. Specifically, wise decision-making at the societal level is needed to solve global inequality and environmental degradation.
ServCollab seeks to serve humanity by developing wisdom research that fosters wisdom practices. We believe that the most universal wisdom practices can be grouped into three essential categories, which we included in our mission statement: “… relieving suffering, improving well-being, and enabling well-becoming.”
Our search for timeless truths and universal wisdom practices led ServCollab to develop universal wisdom principles for serving humanity. I shared the first two wisdom principles in prior Servings. Now I will connect them.
Serving Each Other enables humanity to practice sharing information with each other and work together. This reduces our ignorance. Serving the Truth enables humanity to practice collaborating to discover and test knowledge. This improves our knowledge.
We developed a third wisdom principle for achieving wisdom, one based on life itself.
ServCollab offers the third universal wisdom principle for serving humanity:
3rd Wisdom Principle - Serving the Future.
Serving the future is the third step to achieving fairness in human systems.
Anyone can practice these wisdom principles in their daily lives. They are testable principles for better living at the individual and societal level!
In the next ServCollab Serving, we will explore how the core concepts of serving, collaboration, and wisdom can enable profound human progress.
If you like this offering, please serve it to others who might like it.
Please Donate to ServCollab to Help Us Grow Our Ability to Serve Humanity
