“Our characterization of collective folly is that sound judgment is not feasible when there is forced or false agreement in groups.”

Whether for efficiency or profitability – can lead to disasters in the long term in financial, ecological, political, social, and spiritual spheres.

Our language and symbols are always incomplete versions of a greater reality.

They are essentially commitments and attitudes that foster collaboration and positive collective action.

For an understanding that our immediate actions have long-term consequences, and for an appreciation that there are different ways of knowing and understanding situations.

How we navigate between false agreement and polarization is the kind of mastery that collective wisdom represents.

We also show how group polarization sets the stage for risky and even dangerous decisions to be made.

These stances are not abstract rules but tangible practices that must be renewed each time we are in groups.

Wisdom in groups emerges as a product of commitments we make with ourselves and to each other.

We seek guides and guideposts to ease the anxiety of the journey. But we also need to depend on our own insights and imagination to cultivate, from our own experience, a way to move forward.

Wisdom involves our accumulated knowledge about a subject but also a reverence for life.

Developing wisdom in community is to constantly learn and relearn that expedience in the short term.

Inquiry allows us to discover what might be outside the cave instead of arguing about the shadows on the wall.

Uncertainty engenders real opportunity as well as misleading choices, great leaders as well as false messiahs, and new ways of understanding the world alongside hollow maxims and deceptive promises. Understandably

We know that uncertainty creates anxiety and sometimes desperate attempts to find something to believe in.

Wisdom is not developable, as if it’s a matter of luck or personality or genetics. Well it’s just not the case.

The image is a great reminder how we create our world through interpretations made up of language and symbols.

Writers should provoke disagreement.

There are things they tell us that sound good to hear, but when they have accomplished their purpose they will go home and will not try to fulfill our agreements with them.

Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also.

If I agree to dispose of any part of our land to the white people I would feel guilty of taking food away from our children’s mouths, and I do not wish to be that mean.

The beginning of thought is in disagreement – not only with others but also with ourselves.

I could really try new things. That was satanism, it works really well, I made a pact.

Whether we are New Dealer, Old Dealer, Liberty Leaguer or Red, whether we agree or not, we still have the right to think and speak how we feel.

We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.