How are wisdom, knowledge, and truth related? Wisdom is the 'how' and 'what' we do by using the tools of knowledge and experience to express truth with love in the world. As wisdom is not just intelligence, truth is not simply facts and information. Applied information and technology has advanced civilization. But only by seeking Truth through wisdom can we escape from our tendencies and increasing power to self-destruct in the age of the Anthropocene.

Twenty-One Lessons for the Twenty-first Century is one of three books written by Yuval Noah Harari on the history and future of humanity. In it, he writes (perhaps tongue-in-cheek), “Truth becomes defined by the top results of the Google search.” But he affirms the knowledge illusion that Steven Sloman describes in his book by that title. We know less than we think. Instead, we think in groups and depend heavily on our collaborative intelligence. As “organizing masses effectively is difficult without relying on some mythology,” Harari concludes, “the most powerful scholarly establishments — whether of Christian priests, Confucian mandarins, or Communist ideologues — placed unity above truth.” He then further comments that sacred texts, therefore, are beneficial, but fictional. It also means that “truth” reinforced by “guardians of the old order” form large-scale structural biases that cause modern injustices more than individual prejudices. Ironically, Harari’s advice for us is to devote time and effort to uncover our biases and verify our sources of information. Likewise, Sloman encourages people to learn in a diverse community where individuals can excel in their specific roles of competence — the total opposite of echo chambers.

In antiquity, Socrates and Lao-zi already spoke of intellectual humility as a necessary virtue. They stressed the importance of knowing what we don’t know. Donald Rumsfeld adds that our greatest danger comes from the things we don’t know that we don’t know. In contrast, David Christian states in his book, A Big History of Everything,

“Most versions of the modern origin story no longer accept the idea of a creator god because modern science can find no direct evidence for a god. Many people have experiences of gods, but those reported experiences are diverse and contradictory, and they cannot be reproduced. They are too malleable, too diffuse, and too subjective to provide objective, scientific evidence. Most change is like shuffling a pack of [10 raised to power of 80] cards to find all the aces next to each other. That’s an inconceivably rare pattern, so rare…unlikely for many times the age of the universe. So how did the very first structures emerge? Science does not yet have complete answers…”