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

Here is why inquiry is such a powerful tool when compared to simple advocacy.

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.

A marriage based on full confidence, based on complete and unqualified frankness on both sides; they are not keeping anything back; there’s no deception underneath it all. If I might so put it, it’s an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of sin.

There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.

Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely. But one must know the limitations of force; one must know when to blend force with a maneuver, a blow with an agreement.

Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.

I have a respect for manners as such, they are a way of dealing with people you don’t agree with or like.

Some of my father’s fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, ‘I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.’ We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.

The earliest English attempts at rhyming probably included words whose agreement is so slight that it deserves the name of mere ‘assonance’ rather than that of actual rhyme.

But there’s certainly only one thing I could never agree with George Galloway on. He’s a teetotaller and wants to close all the bars in the House of Commons. That is just not on.