# The Wisdom Pyramid

## Metadata
- Author: [[Brett McCracken]]
- Full Title: The Wisdom Pyramid
- Category: #books
## Highlights
- Our world has more and more information, but less and less wisdom. More data; less clarity. More stimulation; less synthesis. More distraction; less stillness. More pontificating; less pondering. More opinion; less research. More speaking; less listening. More to look at; less to see. More amusements; less joy. There is more, but we are less. And we all feel it. ([Location 130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=130))
- This book proposes that we need a better diet of knowledge and better habits of information intake. To become wise in the information age—where opinions, soundbites, diversions, and distractions are abundant, but wisdom is scarce—we need to be more discerning about what we consume. ([Location 143](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=143))
- We need a diet comprised of lasting, reliable sources of wisdom rather than the fleeting, untrustworthy information that bombards us today; a diet heavy on what fosters wisdom and low on what fosters folly. ([Location 145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=145))
- The Food Pyramid was a brilliant visual guide for healthy eating habits, offering guidance for how many servings of each food group helped form a balanced diet. We need something similar for our habits of information intake. We need guidance for how to daily navigate the glut of information available to us, an ordering framework for navigating the noise and the mess of our cultural moment. We need a “Wisdom Pyramid.” ([Location 148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=148))
- The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic exposed the severity of the epistemological crisis we face in the digital age. As the new virus spread globally, public health experts and government leaders naturally struggled to understand the nature of the contagion and how best to contain it. But the speed with which information—good, bad, and ugly—spreads in today’s world meant that imperfect data, errant projections, hastily written analysis, and contradictory recommendations were spread confidently and quickly, resulting in a disaster of information every bit as dangerous as the disease itself. Whatever you wanted to believe about the pandemic and the “stay at home” restrictions issued by governments, there were articles, studies, and experts you could find online to defend your view. The result was a deepening cynicism and uncertainty about pretty much everything. ([Location 155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=155))
- It was really 2016 when the extent of our epistemological crisis became apparent. That was the year Donald Trump’s election to president in the US and “Brexit” in the UK stunned experts and accelerated feelings that the world was entering a new, unpredictable phase driven more by rage than reality, more by fear than facts. ([Location 162](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=162))
- As a result, Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” the international word of the year in 2016, defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”1 ([Location 165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=165))
- The new “post-truth” normal was underscored in early 2017 when Time posed the question, “Is Truth Dead?” on its cover, designed in such a way to mirror a Time cover from 50 years earlier which posed a more foundational question: “Is God Dead?”2 These two covers, a half century apart, tell an important story. Without God as an ultimate standard of truth, all we have are “truths” as interpreted by individuals. To each their own. You do you. It’s no wonder we are now as confused as we are. Do away with God, and you do away with truth. ([Location 168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=168))
- Twenge shows in her book how rising rates of mental-health challenges among iGen started spiking in the years following the debut of the iPhone in 2007. The lines on various mental illness graphs became steeper when smartphones became ubiquitous. Surely that is not a coincidence. And it’s not just iGen who is increasingly sick from the toxins of our digital age. Mental illness is rising across the board. The number of Americans diagnosed with major depression has risen by 33 percent since 2013, as shown in a report from Blue Cross Blue Shield in 2018.4 ([Location 184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=184))
- People are also increasingly lonely. Cigna’s “2018 U.S. Loneliness Index” found that just under half (46 percent) of Americans always or sometimes feel alone, with the highest levels of loneliness among Generation Z and Millennials. Loneliness “has the same impact on mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, making it even more dangerous than obesity”7 and is increasingly regarded as a public health crisis by governments around the world. ([Location 196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=196))
- We must examine our daily diet of knowledge intake. It can be nutritious, making us wise and shrewd, more able to ward off intellectual infections and spiritual afflictions. But it can also be toxic, making us unwise and more susceptible to the lies and snares of our age. ([Location 225](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=225))
- Just as eating too much of anything makes us sick—stomachaches, indigestion, or worse—too much information makes us sick. And nothing characterizes the Internet age quite like “information overload.” ([Location 230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=230))
- In theory, the vast repository of information at our disposal is a wonderful thing. In practice it’s often paralyzing. Even with Google’s algorithmic “ranking” of search results, it’s overwhelming to sift through the glut. ([Location 235](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=235))
- The lure of the all-knowing Internet promises to clarify, but often it just complicates. ([Location 238](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=238))
- It’s the problem of limitless space. Whereas physical stores and communities are bound by limitations—a supermarket can only stock so many brands of coffee, and a family only has so many opinions about what to cook for Thanksgiving—the Internet does not have any of those limitations. For coffee, Thanksgiving recipes, and anything else, the options are extensive. Again, in theory, it’s freeing! In practice, it’s frustrating. ([Location 239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=239))
- In the competitive landscape of the digital age, the “food” of information is not getting more nutritious; it’s veering in the direction of junk food. Doritos and Skittles will always get more clicks than spinach. And so we walk down the buffet line of social media snacks and online junk food, daily gorging ourselves to the point of gluttony. Unsurprisingly, it is making us sick. ([Location 248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=248))
- Whether in hot-take clickbait or well-timed Twitter threads, fortune favors the fast on the Internet. It doesn’t favor wisdom. ([Location 260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=260))
- “In a culture that rewards immediacy, ease, and efficiency,” writes literacy advocate Maryanne Wolf, “the demanding time and effort involved in developing all the aspects of critical thought make it an increasingly embattled entity.”10 ([Location 264](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=264))
- If the New York Times can fall into the Internet speed trap of too-hasty and inaccurate reportage, who can be trusted? If the Centers for Disease Control doesn’t provide reliable information on the dynamics of a contagion and how best to contain it, who does? Over time our skepticism about all sources leads us to turn inward, trusting only in ourselves—which ([Location 270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=270))
- The Internet is built around you. Google search; social media algorithms; recommendations from Siri, Alexa, Netflix, and Spotify; and even the creepy artificial intelligence that now finishes your sentences in email writing: all of it is tailored to you. In theory this is amazing! What’s wrong with a world that revolves around you and your particular preferences and proclivities? A few things. ([Location 278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=278))
- Part of the reason society is increasingly divisive is that we can’t have productive conversations when everyone comes to it with their own set of “facts,” “experts,” and background biases, having been shaped by an information diet completely different from anyone else’s. ([Location 292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=292))
- Rather than avoiding the leper, the prostitute, the opioid addict, and the homeless schizophrenic, Christians have moved toward them. Rather than saving themselves in escape, they sacrificed their safety in service. ([Location 311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=311))
- This is what The Wisdom Pyramid is about. It’s a plan for stabilizing a sick society by making Christians wiser: God-fearing, trustworthy truth-tellers and truth-livers. Salt and light. This is what we are called to be. This is what the world desperately needs us to be. ([Location 320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=320))
- The exponential explosion of information in the “information age” is mind-boggling. Consider a sampling of the numbers. In 2019, a single minute on the Internet saw the transmission of 188 million emails, 18.1 million texts, and 4.5 million videos viewed on YouTube.1 By 2020, there were 40 times more bytes of data on the Internet than there are stars in the observable universe. Some estimates suggest that by 2025, 463 exabytes of data will be created each day online—the equivalent of 212,765,957 DVDs per day.2 What even is an exabyte? Well, consider this: five exabytes is equivalent to all words ever spoken by humans since the dawn of time.3 In 2025, that amount of data will be created every 15 minutes. ([Location 334](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=334))
- Too much of anything causes problems for our health. This is as true of the information we take in as it is of the foods we consume. The information bombardment we increasingly face—characterized by nonstop swiping, scrolling, viewing, listening, reading, texting, and multitasking from morning to night—is creating stress in our brains and contributing to rising levels of anxiety. Our brains are shockingly adaptable and resilient, but they have limits. Today’s frenetic information landscape is making our brains busier than ever: the information triage that our over-burdened brains must constantly perform naturally drains huge amounts of energy. Constant multitasking also drains energy: making a dinner reservation on Yelp between replying to mom’s text, sending a work email, and watching a “must-see” video a friend just shared on Facebook within the span of five minutes. This sort of extreme multitasking, notes neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, overstimulates and stresses our brains: ([Location 348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=348))
- The information bombardment we increasingly face—characterized by nonstop swiping, scrolling, viewing, listening, reading, texting, and multitasking from morning to night—is creating stress in our brains and contributing to rising levels of anxiety. ([Location 349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=349))
- It’s not that information of this sort is always bad or unhelpful. It’s just that the cumulative effect of too much information—so easily and constantly accessible to us—creates a burden that our minds and souls were not created to bear. ([Location 370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=370))
- In addition to causing cognitive dizziness, this indistinguishable array of information erodes our ability to distinguish between the trivial and the truly important. ([Location 380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=380))
- Ironically, as much as the information age (and its “global village”) promises to broaden our horizons and create healthy, integrated, well-informed global citizens, in reality it has had the opposite effect. The hyper-connection and over-awareness of a space-conquered world renders us fragmented and disconnected from place—the local contexts where we can know and be known and effect change to the greatest degree. As Ellul states, “The paradox is characteristic of our times, that to the abstract conquest of Space by Man (capitalized) corresponds the limitation of place for men (in small letters).”7 ([Location 400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=400))
- Our broader exposure to space, coupled with a diminished connection to place, leaves us feeling over-stimulated but under-activated. On any given day we are left inflamed by whatever grievances the Internet has exposed us to, yet we are impotent to do much, if anything, about it. ([Location 407](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=407))
- The endless conveyor belt of content puts more things on our radar in a day than people a century ago would encounter in a year—often about places we’ve never heard of and issues we didn’t know were issues.8 ([Location 409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=409))
- Historically, Postman observes, information was deemed valuable insofar as it had the potential of leading to action. But the telegraph and later technologies rendered that relationship abstract and remote: “For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and political potency.”9 ([Location 414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=414))
- We can easily come to the point where we spend hours attending to headlines about things that will never affect us, debates about things we know little about, and problems we cannot solve. ([Location 420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=420))
- Social media, of course, gives us permission to “reply”—but to what end? We may have a sense that our participation is meaningful action, that it is doing something, but more often than not we are only adding to the noise, getting needlessly angry, and contributing more irrelevant information to our already overloaded, exhausted brains. ([Location 426](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=426))
- Another symptom of the sickness of information gluttony is a debilitating overabundance of choices. With literally everything at your digital disposal, how do you choose? ([Location 433](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=433))
- These questions can be debilitating, adding to the anxiety that comes from what Alvin Toffler coined as “overchoice,” in his 1970 book Future Shock.12 ([Location 439](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=439))
- The effects of overchoice also pose problems beyond digital information. Wherever there is an abundance of options, we can struggle with commitment to anything. I see this often with church, for example. With a church “option” out there for every taste, preference, political leaning, and aesthetic (not to mention the option to just not go to church), the Christ-follower is positioned as a consumer whose attachment to a church is only as strong as a shopper’s attached to a brand. When our tastes change, so do our commitments. ([Location 449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=449))
- Philosopher Charles Taylor calls this abundance of spiritual choice “the nova effect”—an “ever-widening variety of moral/spiritual options”14—and it figures prominently in his account of secularity in his monumental work, A Secular Age. Riffing on Taylor, Alan Noble observes that “decision overload is as much a problem for spirituality as it is for digital multitasking . . . A distracted and secular age does this to us: we are cognitively overwhelmed by the expanding horizon of possible beliefs.”15 ([Location 455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=455))
- We are so overwhelmed with possible paths, possible sources of truth and theories of the good life, that we don’t pick any path. Or we switch paths every few months. Or we cobble together our own just-for-me spiritual path, pulling bits and pieces of theology, philosophy, morality, and aesthetics from all manner of disconnected sources. Because we can. ([Location 461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=461))
- We’re all susceptible to the path of least cognitive resistance: selecting sources that harmonize with our existing beliefs and don’t complicate our paradigms or rile us up. ([Location 467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=467))
- Maryanne Wolf puts it this way: We need to confront the reality that when bombarded with too many options, our default can be to rely on information that places few demands upon thinking. More and more of us would then think we know something based on information whose source was chosen because it conforms to how and what we thought before.16 ([Location 470](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=470))
- Recognizing the twenty-first-century person’s struggle to sift through the information glut and incentivized to make their platforms pleasant and not toxic spaces, social media companies make the confirmation bias problem worse through personalized algorithms. The result is unique-to-every-user feeds that create a world where no two people see the same information. We all live on islands of algorithm-fueled fantasy and confirmation bias. It’s no wonder tribalism is on the rise. It’s no wonder everyone is talking past each other. ([Location 477](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=477))
- It’s easy to imagine the devil delighting in all this: angry tribalism, addictive triviality, amusing ourselves to death. As humans become more stressed, numbed, disoriented, distracted, and paralyzed by the impenetrable glut of information, chaos reigns. As chaos reigns, sin thrives. ([Location 488](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=488))
- It’s interesting that the fall of man in Genesis 3 came about because of temptations of knowledge: fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In our age too, the lure of infinite, godlike knowledge wreaks havoc. ([Location 490](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=490))
- This presentist orientation is particularly toxic (and all too common) in evangelical faith communities, where obsessions with “relevance,” an uncritical embrace of technology, and a disconnection from history leave many churches vulnerable to being molded more by the ephemeral spirit of the age than by the solid, time-tested wisdom of ages past. ([Location 584](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=584))
- Presentism is toxic not only because it rejects the resources of the past, but also because it has little discipline to stay on course for the future. Orientation around the new is by definition unstable, because the “new” quickly becomes “old” and passé. The presentist world burns through fads and ideas at an alarming pace. ([Location 587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=587))
- Good reporting takes time. Sources must be verified. The fuller picture of out-of-context quotes, images, and videos must be sought. But the “fortune favors the fast” nature of journalism today often skips these essential steps. Further, we consumers are often eager to share things on the spot. Our quick-draw posture on social media is often “post first, think later” (if we think at all). This is disastrous—not only because it makes us easy to manipulate, but also because it erodes our credibility and can do great harm to others. ([Location 631](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=631))
- Kevin DeYoung noted recently that one of the distinguishing marks of a “quarrelsome person” is that he or she has no unarticulated opinions. “Do people know what you think of everything?” DeYoung asks. “They shouldn’t. That’s why you have a journal or a prayer closet or a dog.”15 ([Location 637](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=637))
- Or there is James 1:19—a verse that, if heeded, would prevent all manner of grief in today’s world (but would also probably put social media out of business): “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” ([Location 645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=645))
- “The real strength of the good soldier of Jesus Christ,” wrote Jonathan Edwards nearly three hundred years ago, is simply the steadfast maintenance of a holy calmness . . . sustained amidst all the storms, injuries, wrong behavior, and unexpected acts and events in this evil and unreasonable world. The Scripture seems to intimate that true fortitude consists chiefly of this: “He that is slow to anger, is better than the mighty; and he that rules his spirit, than he that takes a city” (Proverbs 16:32).16 ([Location 649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=649))
- When you go online, ask yourself what you are going online to do. Is there a specific goal? When you open YouTube, is it to watch a specific thing? When you reach for your phone as you wait in line or walk from one place to another, is it for a purpose or just out of habit? When we aren’t going somewhere, we’ll go anywhere—and the “anywheres” of the Internet are rarely good for us. ([Location 670](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=670))
- During the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone with a Twitter account became strangely confident in their grasp of epidemiology and virus containment strategies. ([Location 706](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=706))
- We assert as facts what we feel to be true, and when someone challenges us, we turn it back on them, because how dare they question the validity of our feelings? To have one’s felt truth invalidated is to have one’s very identity dismissed. ([Location 741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=741))
- Facts and rationality simply become inflictors of “trauma” (an increasingly weaponized word); not objective evidence in any agreed upon sense. “In a post-truth age,” writes Abdu Murray, “if the evidence fits our preferences and opinions, then all is well and good. If it doesn’t, then the evidence is deemed inadmissible or offensive, with offense being a kind of solvent against otherwise sound arguments.”3 ([Location 745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=745))
- But perhaps the most flagrant example of body/person dualism is the rise of the LGBTQ movement and the larger division of “sex” and “gender” into two separate categories that have little (if anything) to do with biology. Gender theory today says your identity is what you feel, not what your biology suggests. Now the only standard for identity is one’s assertion: “I identify as . . .” ([Location 776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=776))
- Even as we empathize with those who truly do experience gender dysphoria (feeling psychologically or emotionally opposite from your biological sex), we must recognize that unhitching “gender identity” from bodily reality is not only a Pandora’s box of subjectivism, but it’s a sad diminishing of the physical. To sever the connection between the physical and the mental is really just a new form of gnosticism—a brazen denial of the goodness of God’s creation and the intended harmony and interconnectedness between body and mind/soul. ([Location 783](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=783))
- This sort of digital gnosticism deceives us into thinking we are limitless because we supposedly aren’t tied to our bodies. It makes possible such fields as “transhumanism”—the notion that technology will eventually enable humans to fully overcome the limitations of the body. Coupled with a centuries-long philosophical trajectory that has gradually liberated the “self” from the confines of all external authorities, the digital age now makes it acceptable to, among other things, “identify” as a woman even if you are biologically male. ([Location 795](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=795))
- her lifetime achievement award acceptance speech at the 2018 Golden Globes, Oprah Winfrey said, “What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.”8 Your truth. Those two words are so entrenched in our lexicon today that we hardly recognize them for the incoherent nightmare that they are. Among other things, the philosophy of “your truth” destroys families when a dad suddenly decides “his truth” is calling him to a new lover, a new family, or maybe even a new gender. It’s a philosophy that can destroy entire societies, because invariably one person’s truth will go to battle with another person’s truth, and devoid of reason, only power decides the victor. ([Location 809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08CS46222&location=809))