A Contradiction I Can’t Resolve
The Wisdom Problem Series 1 of 7
I believe something that is getting harder to believe
I believe that most human beings — maybe all of us — carry an inherent wisdom. Beneath the anxiety, the reactivity, the striving, and the noise, there is something steady and clear. Internal Family Systems calls it the Self, and describes it through eight qualities: calm, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, courage, creativity, and connectedness.
I’ve spent years nurturing and discovering these qualities in myself, and in the lives of clients. I’ve watched people access them in moments of genuine crisis — and watched those moments change everything.
I also believe this wisdom is not merely personal. When I studied world religions in college, the thread I saw was interdependence. Christians: we are one in Christ. Buddhists: Thich Nhat Hanh’s “interbeing.” The Lakota sacred hoop that holds all living things.
The mystics of every tradition point, in their different languages, at the same reality — that we are not separate, the ground of being is something like love…and that we know this, somewhere inside, already.
I find this genuinely beautiful.
And I find it increasingly difficult to square with the world we are in.
Spoiler: this is not the age of wisdom
The world is being shaped by fear dressed as strength. By wealth hoarded as security. By power confused with domination. By the compulsive self-preservation of individuals who have everything and somehow it’s not enough.
I spent years working in philanthropy — close to money, close to power, trying to help both of those things become useful. It was an honor to do that work, and it was disheartening.
I watched brilliant, well-intentioned people adopt the attitudes of the systems they were trying to change. I watched institutions built to do good become primarily interested in their own perpetuation. I saw lots of celebrated activity, but little change.
The fundamental and overarching problems of ecological, social, economic, and political fragmentation have gotten more entrenched. Anand Giridharadas gave this dynamic its sharpest analysis in Winners Take All. When I read it I recognized the truths he describes. Lots of expensive social investment, little difference. Lots of thought leaders, little self-critical reflection.
The Epstein revelations gives this all a grotesque sheen, revealing the corrosive social architecture of elite networks — the mutual protection, the silence, the way proximity to power becomes its own kind of moral paralysis.
Most people in those networks are not monsters. But many looked the other way, didn’t ask questions, didn’t tip off police. Apparently that would have been too risky, even for people wrapped in the world’s thickest layers of financial and social security. (Please listen to this exceptional interview of Giridharadas by Ezra Klein for more on this.)
And we have Trump. I don’t write his name to score points — I write it because he is the most vivid embodiment of what happens when wounded self-protection reaches the apex of power. Every move is domination. Every relationship is transactional. Every critic is an enemy. There is no inner life on display that indexes as “wisdom.”
There is only the compulsive management of threat and projection of dominance.
This is what is steering the ship.
And the ship is about to go really really fast
Into this moment arrives something truly transformative for our species.
I’ve been listening to Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave, which tries to describe what artificial intelligence — and the broader technological transformation it represents — is actually going to do to the world.
The ideas he returns to are amplification and containment.
AI can amplify both individual and social intent in ways that are mind-boggling. This holds great promise, and is gravely disconcerting. Humans have never fully contained a transformative technology. If AI’s amplifying powers are aimed in the wrong direction – even with good intentions – our failure to contain it will bring civilization-level consequences. Perhaps species-level.
I’ve had a small, personal taste of what he’s describing. Working with AI tools** has genuinely accelerated how I think and create — in ways I find exciting and sometimes disorienting. I regularly have the sense that I’m doing weeks’ worth of mental work in a day or two.
But capacity is not wisdom. Amplification is not neutral.
AI will not determine the future. It will accelerate whatever trajectory we give it.
The question AI forces is not a technical question. It’s a moral and psychological one:
Who is steering the AI ship, and from what interior place are they operating?
Given everything I’ve just described — the elite capture, the accountability deficit, the Epstein silence, the Trumpian domination — it is genuinely hard to feel assured that the answer to that question is a good one.
Meanwhile something happened in Minnesota
When ICE raids escalated in the Twin Cities, people showed up.
Not organized by any single institution or leader, not waiting for permission, not calculating the political optics. Neighbors protected neighbors. People stood in doorways and on sidewalks. A community that had been bombarded with fear and division acted, quickly and at personal risk, from something that looked a lot like the wisdom I described at the beginning of this piece: compassion, courage, creativity, connectedness.
The instances of protestors breaking the law were few and painfully regrettable.
The instances of simple Good Samaritan behavior were countless, didn’t make the news, and advanced no one’s personal brand.
There were a lot of everyday people doing the right things, for the right reasons, in the right ways.
I’d call that wisdom.
It’s the only thing I’ve seen that feels like a genuine counter-force to Trumpsteinism — not a reaction from the same wounded place that created the problem, but something actually different in kind.
I’ve been sitting with all this heavy on my heart
Here is the contradiction I cannot resolve:
I believe that the wisdom is there — accessible, widely distributed, waiting. I believe the 8 Cs are not a personality type or a spiritual achievement, but a description of something fundamental to human consciousness, available with some simple “inner life” tools. I believe this is why every contemplative tradition points at it.
And yet I believe we are running out of time for it to matter. The problems are too large, the systems too entrenched, the technology too fast, and the people with the most leverage too captured by their own fear to want to overcome it.
Rebuilding the kind of social capital that could shift our culture would take years.
We do not have years.
I don’t know how to hold these two things
I’m not sure they can be held, exactly.
But I think the attempt to address them honestly — to resist the temptation of naive hope or sophisticated despair or willful ignorance — might be the most important work available right now.
This is the first essay in a series where I’m going to explore all this. I don’t have a resolution. But I have a question, a set of related questions, some hard-won experience, and a genuine desire to think alongside people who want to find a way forward too.
So: where does the wisdom go from here?
I don’t know yet. But I’d love to find out with you.
Next week: What inner wisdom actually is — and why it’s not what most people think.
**A note on my process:
I develop these essays in collaboration with AI, which helps shape content that begins as my own reflection, experience, and direction. The thinking is mine, the sensibility is mine, the precision is mine. The AI “partnership” accelerates my ability to turn a complex (sometimes dense!) personal thought landscape into clear communication.
I feel conflicted about this. I understand the massive, negative ecological impact of data centers that power AI.
Am I “adopting the attitudes of the systems I am trying to change,” as I bemoan others for doing ?
Is it possible to live in modern society without benefitting from and contributing to social and ecological harm whenever we use a resource–put on socks, fill a gas tank, book a flight, send a text?
Do we need to use AI to help try and shape its amplification?
Does refusing to engage simply leave the field to those least likely to use it wisely?
These questions represent the conflict I feel inside about using AI.
I wanted to be transparent about it.
There is something quietly powerful in naming a contradiction without rushing to resolve it.
What you’ve written feels less like an argument - and more like a mirror.
One that reflects both the truth we sense… and the systems we continue to build in spite of it.
Perhaps the resolution doesn’t begin out there—but in the subtle ways we choose to live, lead, and build from within.
Thank you for your refreshing courage to nudge us to think about it more honestly.