“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.”
-a mass extinction event talking to itself (sic)
Enough with the ‘isms’ already! The next few entries are gonna be less about abstract conceptual shit, and more about well, stuff that takes up a lot of mental space and prevents you from thinking. Wisdom is all that and more!
Wisdom is simple to spot – it’s usually stupid enough to directly label itself. We can thank wisdom for that much, at least.
When wisdom tries to be sneaky, here’s how to detect it: wisdom always comes from the same position of enunciation. Wisdom ‘thinks’ that it is outside of time. Wisdom ‘thinks’ it is ahistorical or even transhistorical, and it sneers at politics. Wisdom ‘thinks’ that it’s non-ideological. Wisdom ‘thinks’ that it’s neutral. Wisdom ‘thinks’ that it’s universal.
Wisdom ‘thinks’ these things because wisdom just doesn’t think at all!
Wisdom can’t think, because wisdom is the absence of thought.
Wisdom is one of the purest examples of oligarchic brainwashing out there, and that’s something that probably is transhistorical. Shit is prepackaged platitudes for people who can’t or won’t think for themselves – a mass produced simulacra of thought for mass produced minds. Wisdom wants you to stop thinking and float away on a cloud of contrived self-satisfaction. Wisdom is a drug for people who think they’re too pure for drugs.
Wisdom wants you to check out.
There are many sources of Wisdom – religion is an obvious one, but it is the mystical, esoteric branches of religion that tend to generate wisdom more than their more socially organized and active exoteric sectors. Exoteric religions do have to, you know, actually try to do something socially in the world, so these practices tend to generate a little more intelligence.
Wisdom thinks it is outside of time because mysticism experiences itself as such.
Religion is not the only source of wisdom tho – there are plenty of Pre-Modern, Pre-Kantian philosophers that wield wisdom. The Stoics in particular come to mind here, what with their nature fetishizing and static valuation heuristics – but any edifice that reifies a transcendent elsewhere or ‘reality’ behind the curtain of phenomena will necessarily generate some amount of wisdom. De-reification of the plane of immanence and deprioritization of biospheric integrity logically follow from these conceptual operations.
Wisdom doesn’t care.
Thusly – wisdom can be used to say anything, support any point, make any claim, back any power grab. When it comes to wisdom, it doesn’t really matter if it makes sense or has any truth-content – it just matters that it feels right, and gives you the warm fuzzies in your belly.
Wisdom is popular and influential precisely because it’s amorphous and empty of substantial content. It’s for people who desperately want to stop thinking, but still want to appear profound. If you feel morally superior to others but don’t have anything interesting to say, never fear: wisdom’s here! And if you’ve somehow flunked the nonexistent bar of entry into acceptable postmodern discourse, well then have I got something for you: wisdom.
Wisdom is a conversation ender, a thought stopper, the wellspring of nihilism’s eternal fount, the idealist’s last line of defense before he flips over the board and storms home in a huff.
Apropos of wisdom, take a gander why-dontcha at this here dog:
Just look, take a real goddamn look at that fucking dog.
Notice: that is one stupid dog!
That dog just might be the stupidest dog that has ever dogged.
Look at how stupid that dog is!
Fuck me, is that dog ever stupid.
We can be very precise here:
this stupid ass dog is being wise.
Wisdom looks at the mass extinction event, and thinks that the ‘wise’ response is to pretend that everything is a-ok. ‘Life will find a way’, says wisdom wisely, as we brutally exterminate millions of species, trillions of organisms, 3.8 billion years worth of evolutionary differentiation. ‘The planet will be fine, it’s just the end of people’.
Wisdom!
Wisdom accepts every outcome – because wisdom is for losers.
It just doesn’t give a fuck!
And so! – we don’t have to give a fuck about wisdom either, and we lose nothing of any value when we do this.
Against wisdom we humbly insist:
we are not wise,
nor do we want to be wise,
nor will we ever be wise.
If you can summon the courage to think for yourself,
you have no more need of the rank pestilence of wisdom.
Would you like to know more?