Pick Up Wisdom From The Ground

I.

My parents are pretty great. They have always been very caring and generous towards their only child. Even when I was younger, I recognized that on a general level.

But I had moments up into my late 20s when I just couldn’t stand them. My mom or my dad would say or do some insignificant thing and it would be so infuriating that I wanted nothing more than to get away from them. This led me to feelings of confusion and guilt. I thought: my parents are objectively very decent and I recognize that I have obligations of filial piety¹ towards them, and yet sometimes I really dislike them. Am I an ungrateful child? Am I bad at loving and honoring my mother and my father?

I knew that this was probably a normal experience, yet I was still bothered by it. But then one day I came across this passage from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations:

The best physician is not the one who feels the greatest sadness at his patients’ illness, but the one who cures the greatest number thereof, likewise, the best soldier is not the one who feels the greatest hate for his enemies, but the one who defeats the greatest number thereof. So it is with fathers and sons. A good father feeds his son before feeding himself, he teaches him virtue sternly but patiently; a good son gives obedience to his father; later, when the father is old, he instead gives him care. Whether you experience joy in your father’s company, as you would in the company of a good friend or lover, is unimportant; it is only when you fulfil the aforementioned duty to him that you can say truthfully, “I love my father”.

And it just clicked for me. Indeed, I thought: I am there for my parents when they need me, and I am living my life in a way that seems to make them proud. This means that I am a decent son, even if I don’t enjoy every single moment I spend with them. Thanks, Marcus!

II.

I hereby provisionally define wisdom as “truth that is hard to internalize”.

We may contrast this with knowledge, which is a kind of truth that may be hard to comprehend, or to remember, but once you do, internalization is trivial. You may mistakenly think that Toronto is the capital of Canada, but once you learn that it is actually Ottawa, your mind updates immediately; there is no need for a complex process where your mind struggles to gradually replace Toronto with Ottawa.²

On the other hand, you may hear a claim like “if the only real cost of a failed attempt is a hurt ego, you might as well ignore the cost and make the attempt, even if odds of success are low”³, understand it, understand the reasoning behind it, agree with the reasoning and the conclusion, agree that it is important (relatively), but then spend years without really understanding it and being able to apply it to your own life. Once you do — once you get it, you grok it, it clicks — that’s when you become wiser. My Marcus Aurelius story above is one example of an instance of such acquisition of wisdom.

And the reasons why wisdom is hard to internalize are kind of mysterious. Perhaps there is some psychological explanation⁴, but I’m not sure if learning it would help one on a personal level.

Some things that may help different people acquire wisdom may be literature, philosophy, art, religious or spiritual practice, psychotherapy, psychedelics, reading my blog, good role models, good personal relationships etc. We may call these sources of wisdom.

And we may notice that different sources of wisdom seem to work for different people. A source of wisdom that lets you internalize an insight might completely fail to do that for your friend, but later your friend might get that same insight from another source.

You may have heard some author receive the stock criticism that sounds something like this: “there’s much about his writing that’s new and good; unfortunately, what’s new is not good and what’s good is not new”⁵. But, because wisdom internalization is so mysterious, maybe sometimes what’s good-but-not-new for you is good-and-new for your friend.

So, given that you are aware how hard wisdom is to find and to transmit, and how scarce it is, think twice before dismissing a potential source of wisdom as redundant - it might be redundant for you, but not for someone else. Also, and perhaps more importantly, consider if it is actually redundant for you - it might have something new to offer that you’re not noticing.

III.

The above idea seems pretty unobjectionable in theory. The problem, as it often is, is in the application.

Remember when I said that I got the insight about loving your parents despite them sometimes annoying you from Marcus Aurelius? I lied! I wish I could say that that’s where I got it, but I have never actually even read him. I made the quote up.

I actually got it from a Family Guy episode in which Peter wants to earn the respect of his intolerant Catholic father, so he kidnaps the Pope (transcript link, emphasis mine):

The Pope: Oh! I have never met such an infuriating man! You must have the patience of a saint.

Peter: Well, he’s my dad. And I just want him to love me.

Francis: Peter, how could you say such a thing? I love you with all me heart.

[Sentimental music playing]

Peter: You do?

Francis: Of course. I just don’t like you. I don’t like anything about you!

[Music stops]

Peter: Keep playing, you guys. I think this is as good as its going to get. Dad, to be honest, I don’t like you, either. Aw, jeez, that’s a terrible thing to say. I guess I am going to Hell.

The Pope: Peter, the good Lord said to honor thy father. He never said anything about liking him.

Peter: Well, in that case, Dad, I’m gonna eat meat on Fridays, golf on Sundays, laugh at Jewish comedians, and yes, sleep with my Protestant wife. But I won’t enjoy it. And she hates it.

In the early 2010s, it wasn’t cool to like Family Guy. It had a reputation for being cheap and dumb; South Park criticized it for relying on random, nonsensical humor. I had decided to give it a chance anyway and I wasn’t very impressed. Aside from some genuinely good gags, the show really was very mediocre.

I did not, overall, think the episode quoted above was good. Looking back on it now, I don’t think even that particular scene is well-written. And yet this is where I got the insight.

Most people understand why the ad hominem fallacy is a fallacy. Indeed, ideas can be true or false regardless of their author. Just because an evil or stupid person says something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not true. If Hitler says 1+1 is 2, you should agree with him on that issue.

Needless to say, I don’t admire Hitler; he was a truly evil ruler.⁶ But if I got the parent insight from Hitler, that might not have bothered me. Perhaps I’d even congratulate myself. Me, an enlightened intellectual who can recognize truth even when it comes from Hitler!

But Family Guy? What would people think if they found out that I am not only watching Family Guy but learning life lessons from it? Surely the enlightened intellectual that I aspire to be wouldn’t do such a thing!

Thinking about this made me realize that I almost missed the insight because of my snobbery. Which would have been bad!

IV.

So this is the main message of this post: make sure you do not ignore wisdom when it comes from a source that, to you, appears to be tacky, uncool, distasteful, lame, embarrassing, basic, cringe; anything that associating yourself with risks making you appear to have less wit, erudition and good taste than you’d like people to think you have.⁷

Some examples: Facebook posts from your aunt; TikTok influencers; dumb blockbuster movies; stoner T-shirts; daytime TV talk shows like Dr. Phil; that one really annoying person at work; popular self-help books, any quote-captioned image that contains glitter/Minions/a skull/the Joker/the guy from Peaky Blinders...

I call this picking up wisdom from the ground. Yes, you’d rather have wisdom served to you on a nice tray, but it’s right there, under your feet. It doesn’t look very appetizing, but you should still bend over and pick it up. Five second rule!⁸

I feel a bit bad comparing the list of examples above to trash lying on the ground. Even as a hyperbolic criticism, it might be undeserved. But I want to drive home the point just how aesthetics- and vibes-based this is. It involves a visceral reaction, not rational analysis. Deserving or not, it certainly feels like trash to you the moment you see it. Doesn’t matter, you owe it to yourself to pick it up!

V.

Three caveats:

One, I am not arguing for relativism in wisdom-seeking here. Not all roads are equally good; reading Kant is probably more likely to make you wiser than scrolling through sigma male quotes on Instagram.

Even using aesthetics as a heuristic for quality of content you’ve already been exposed to is probably fine. You could never possibly analytically chew through every single dumb meme you see online, and you shouldn’t try.

All I’m saying is that, if you’ve already inadvertently chewed through one of them, and found it meritorious, resist the urge to spit it out based on aesthetics alone.

Two, some cringeworthy things do actually cross the line into being actually nefarious, like if there was a Family Guy episode written by Hitler. Indeed, it might be that your negative aesthetic reaction to them is not just an arbitrary preference, but a worthwhile manifestation of your moral intuition. What then? Should you still accept any wisdom found therein?

This brings up the entirety of the spirit-of-free-speech/bad faith actor/deplatforming/propaganda resistance/etc. discourse. I’m not happy to admit that I don’t have very coherent views on this subject matter, and discussing it in detail falls outside the scope of this post.

Suppose, though, that you err on the side of ideological quarantine, and think it’s generally harmful to engage in public discourse with people and ideologies you’ve deemed evil. Should you still, in private, allow yourself to accept any small, unrepresentative kernels of wisdom that originate from said people and ideologies?

I’m leaning towards yes. If you’re doing it with awareness, you can probably separate the good ideas from the bad without any real risk of cross-contamination. You may, perhaps warrantedly, write this off as “what’s new here is not good and what’s good is not new”, or “even a broken clock is right twice a day”, or “even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while”. But do accept the acorn!⁹

Three, and this is a counter-caveat to the two above, if your blind squirrel does keep consistently surprising you with acorns, maybe reconsider if it’s really so blind.

VI.

You may be reading this in the future, when this blog has accrued its many detractors who are now saying: “Ha! Daniel B. says we should sometimes listen to people who are cringe, while he himself is cringe! No wonder!” Well, hopefully I’m not, but maybe.

It is written: “do not kill the part of yourself that is cringe, kill the part that cringes”. So be it. To embody this principle, here’s a gif with this post’s central message that I made on PicMix.com:

1. In a general, modern Western sense, not the specific Asian religious sense.

2. What about complex, subtle subjects like quantum physics or postmodernism - where do they fall under this knowledge/wisdom distinction? I’m not sure. As I said, this is a provisional definition. But either way, I don’t think it changes the upcoming point.

3. Or, as Michael Scott puts it, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. --Wayne Gretzky”

4. A good place to start might be this post by Adam Mastroianni.

5. Frequently misattributed to Samuel Johnson, this type of criticism actually originates from a 1781 letter by Martin Sherlock, an Anglican priest.

6. Here I was going to quip how Marcus Aurelius might also be considered a truly evil ruler by today’s standards, but actually that doesn’t seem to be obviously true and I don’t know enough about Roman history to say for sure.

7. Scott Alexander talks about a similar idea in Right Is The New Left; his essay focuses more on social signaling while mine emphasizes aesthetic preferences, though it’s possible that signaling is a major cause of said preferences.

8. Not actually a real rule.

9. Is it dishonest to apply “evil” people’s wisdom in your private life without ever making it public where you got it? Aren’t you depriving them of well-deserved credit? I don’t know. Either way, I think falsely convincing yourself that their wisdom is worthless is also dishonest.