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April 3, 2024 - Doug Collins Podcast
26:50
What Does Wisdom Look Like?
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You want to listen to a podcast?
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Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
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The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
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In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Doug Collins.
Welcome back to the Doug Collins Podcast.
Glad you're here.
Today's going to be a sort of a special sort of sit back learning day.
I like to do these occasionally.
And for my longtime listeners of the podcast, you know that we don't always just do politics.
We don't always just do current events, things that are going on.
And of course, we have our wonderful Friday's Finest with Chip and Joel, Chip and James.
And we have guests on with that.
At times, hopefully.
But, you know, moving forward, I always like to have times in which we just sort of sit back.
And this is the self-improvement part of the Doug Collins podcast.
Things that I've seen, articles that I've seen that I want to just pass along and say, you know, here's some interesting stuff.
And this is a summarization of things.
And this one really struck my eye.
The article came out of Psychology Today.
Yes, I read widely.
But it came out of Psychology Today.
And the title of the article is Seven Do's and Don'ts for Becoming a Wise Person.
I've heard a lot of things.
Wisdom is an interesting thing.
And right after the break, we're going to dive into it.
Give you these seven, let you take it.
Do as you will.
But we got a lot to just dive into here.
So be back right after the break.
We'll dive into it.
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All right.
As I stated before we went to break, the article is entitled Seven Do's and Don'ts for Becoming a Wise Person.
It's by Ray Parker.
It was a book review by Ray Parker of a book by Robert Sternberg, What is Wisdom?
It's just a brand new book that's out.
And, you know, think about this.
How many of us want wisdom?
Knowledge, wisdom, and the characteristics between the two.
I know a lot of people with knowledge, but not a lot of wisdom.
I've known people with wisdom who obviously have a lot of knowledge, but maybe not from the traditional sources.
In looking at this in discussion, I want to take it, Tripp, I've said this before, my dad often talked about when I was, you know, going through school and, you know, a college graduate, and he would just talk about sometimes people can be educated idiots.
And what he meant by that was is that life revolves around more than just education.
It's more than just reading books.
It's more than taking the black and white of reality and saying everything fits that narrative, that monochrome narrative.
The interesting part here is, and I made mention of this on a previous podcast a little while back, that it's frustrating for me to see how everybody becomes experts in times of Interesting events or sad events, tragic events, however you want to put it.
As we look back over the last few weeks, I mean, I've talked about this in the Baltimore bridge crash and then all of a sudden people who have never possibly been on a merchant ship or vessel who are not engineers, who are not, you know, ever served, you know, maybe they went on the Thunder River ride at one of the Six Flags amusement parks, but they all of a sudden become experts On how machinery and like ships ought to operate.
You see this in the other one, which we've not ever really discussed.
And I got to maybe get James and Chip to discuss this on a Friday's finest.
Maybe this is always up.
Is this issue with the obsession with the Royals?
And now the Royals don't help themselves in the Royals.
Of course, I'm speaking of which I'm a British Royal family.
Um, when Kate Middleton and it's all this issue around, uh, Her condition, her illness, her cancer diagnosis, the prince.
Actually, I think the king did it well as best they can.
He said, look, I've got cancer.
He wouldn't exactly say it was prostate cancer.
What kills me is they don't say what it is.
But, you know, this is the kind of things that they do.
Sometimes I think they want the speculation and attention, and other times I just think they're so insulated from the world that they don't know how to talk to the world.
But again, go on to social media, go on to any websites that do new stuff, go on to watch TV, and everybody is a Royals expert.
I guess they've watched all the seasons of The Crown, and they understand now all of the background going into it.
I say all of that to say wisdom and knowledge being two different things in my mind.
This is Doug Collins' interpretation.
Knowledge is having the...
Information that you have read, you have learned.
Now, I believe that application takes knowledge to wisdom.
Now, this may be a little deep for you, and you may not want to delve into it, but I'm going to make you think about what we're talking about here.
Because I believe this is correlating between politics and life.
And this is the reason you've heard me say it many, many times that we've divorced politics in real life.
I think a lot of it is because we gain knowledge out of an article that we put trust in And then we spout the words of that trust because we've not examined it for ourselves.
There's a difference in knowledge that is regurgitated and a difference in knowledge that is then taken, processed, filtered, and looked at, which can turn into wisdom.
And why this article got me a seven do's and don'ts for becoming a wise person, I wish it could be broken down that simply.
Now the article, and I'm going to talk about these seven branches of philosophy.
They sort of base this on the tree of philosophy and the seven key areas of philosophy.
This is how this whole article is broken out.
So if you want to read, like there's a Psychology Today article about this book review on this, author by Robert Sternberg.
And if you want to go read it, go read it.
This is a review of it.
But I think when you go to...
The saying of wisdom, you know, I want you to think about age doesn't always equate wisdom either.
Let me raise this back.
I have seen 22 year olds have vast wisdom that 70 year olds do not.
I have seen younger people that have wisdom that you would go to, that you would seek their insight, that you would want to know what they believe about something.
And I know 60 and 50 year olds that I wouldn't trust, you know, With a simple direction.
That doesn't mean they're bad people on either side.
It just means that wisdom is a different scale of knowledge.
Think about that person in your family or that person in your church, your synagogue, your workplace, that business.
Maybe it's the person in your business that you know who's been there for a long time.
They have the institutional knowledge and you go for them for wisdom.
Now, they may not leave the company.
In fact, they may have had their own department.
They may just be happy where they're at, but they look and they see and they see wisdom because they've acquired it.
They know.
They don't worry about how to do their job.
They know how to do their job.
They have now taken that knowledge and seen many years of experience go to that knowledge and then has brought forth a tree of wisdom.
That doesn't mean that everybody in that same company will have that.
Some just go on what's before them, they move on, and they don't think about it.
But maybe you have them.
Maybe you have them in your family.
Maybe it's that grandmother.
Maybe it's that father.
Maybe it's that uncle or aunt that you go to in times of When you need an answer.
Maybe it's that pastoral friend.
Maybe it's your pastor.
Maybe it's your rabbi.
Maybe it's your imam.
Maybe it's whoever you go to for spiritual advice.
It can be a best friend.
A lot of us are blessed with friends who have a lot of wisdom.
And it doesn't mean you're always going to agree with them.
And really, a lot of times, the best way to tell friends the wisdom that you know or people who have wisdom is they will tell you what they believe.
They tell you the facts of what they're seeing that has been synthesized through the learning that they have had and the life experiences that they have accumulated and the actions that they have taken previously.
And they're not going to be upset if you don't agree with them.
They may be frustrated, and they may say something like, well, if you weren't going to take my advice, why did you come?
Which is a valid, fair discussion.
But in looking at this, the real issue becomes, they will give it their wisdom.
The question is how you synthesize it and process it through knowledge.
So again, a lot of pictures here for understanding...
It is why, you know, I will say this, though.
There's the discussion of older, you know, you're older and the wise old men.
The reason is, you know, frankly, it's also fair.
Wisdom is a gain through the knowledge of life and that synthesization of what they've done, the mistakes they've made, the successes that they've had, they've learned by doing.
And yeah, a lot of your wisdom is going to come at older age because simply you've taken what you've learned and applied it.
That doesn't necessarily, like I said earlier, wave off young people having wisdom, but this is a part of that.
Now, breaking that down, if I'm telling you something, if you deem me to be wise in a certain area and I tell you information, then you take it as a truism or a truth, but also it is still up to you to sort of apply it and prove it to yourself.
Now, it may help you out in a momentary decision, and it may help you out in a momentary discussion to solve a certain problem, but then you're going to take and you're going to work that advice, you're going to massage that advice, and you're going to be in a position to where you can actually then go out and use this advice, again, then making it your own wisdom.
So let's look at this.
There's seven of them.
And they break it out, as I said, off the tree of philosophy, which, you know, epistemology, ontology, ethics, you know, logic, this kind of thing.
I'm not going to really break it down to that.
If you want to read this article, I'd encourage you to go find it in this book review or go buy the book, you know, if you want to go buy the book.
But I'm going to read sort of their headlines of sort of how this breaks out.
And this first one is probably the best that you can have.
I would rather go to somebody that the example of this first one, which is knowing what you know and what you don't know.
You come to me and ask me a question about politics.
You come to me and ask me a question for the most part about legal issues, religion, especially from the Baptist faith tradition and others.
I can offer you my knowledge and wisdom from those perspectives.
Can you ask me questions that I may not know?
Yes.
If you ask me a question about how a nuclear reactor works, I could look it up.
I couldn't tell you.
And I think the interesting issue here is what is this discussion of wisdom is knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know.
How many times have you had somebody on TV or somebody in your life, business, whatever, they know everything.
They know it all.
Or they got an opinion on it all.
I think opinions and knowledge and wisdom are three different distinct categories.
I can have an opinion on a lot of things.
I may not have knowledge about anything of what I'm having an opinion on and definitely don't have wisdom and built in from years of experience, but, you know, I can give you my opinion.
You know, do you like a painting?
Well, yeah, it's okay.
But I don't know anything about the painting.
I don't know the artist.
I don't know who it is.
I can tell you an artist, a painting that was done by a five-year-old, compare it to a Picasso or some other great painter, supposedly.
And I can't tell you the difference.
I just say, I like that one.
I don't like this one.
That's an opinion.
You know, my knowledge, well, if I learned that this was a four-year-old, I learned the background of this one, maybe it would change my mind.
I still may or may not like it.
Again, this is a process.
But how many times do you see on TV, you see it in, you know, podcasts, you see it everywhere, I don't have the answers.
If you come to the Doug Collins Show and say you want answers to everything, sorry, you're on the wrong podcast.
But I'm also going to tell you, you go to any podcast that doesn't give you, that gives you direct, quote, answers to everything, stay away from that podcast.
I think it's one of the things that's made Joe Rogan podcast as popular as it is.
Joe just sits there and asks questions.
He talks about it all the time.
He said, I'm just a guy, a dumb guy who asks questions.
I'm a comedian.
But he asks questions.
And I think that's where most of our folks in life...
He doesn't claim to know.
And if he was in jujitsu or if it was UFC, yeah, he's got a comedy.
He's got a vast knowledge and wisdom of how that operates.
But again, his podcast has, I think, been built around The educational, funcational, if you would, the educational idea that we're going to ask people questions that we may or may not agree with, but you then can take that information and do whatever you want with it.
That's why, you know, any given day you're listening to, he helped people on discussing, you know, ancient ruins in Africa to, you know, the UFO crisis to whatever else he wants.
But he asked the questions.
That is something...
But he knows his limitations.
You know, it's like the old Clint Eastwood quote, every man must know his limitations.
So in this pursuit of wisdom, you can make a, you know, opinion or a guess or think, but at the end, be careful to not claim to know everything.
And I know this sounds basic to some, but it's just not as basic as we want it because in a society of social media and of Twitter and X, whatever you want to call it, Facebook, Instagram, all these other things, people are well equipped to give their opinions pretty quick.
The next thing is keep the good of others at the forefront of your decisions.
This goes back to sort of...
The wise person understands that the...
Problem of today could be the benefit of tomorrow.
Or put another way, in a political way, the opponent that you have today and on issue and then be the Best friend you have on the next issue.
Wisdom looks long-term.
Wisdom is not a short-term issue.
Knowledge is something you gain over time.
Wisdom is something you can look back on and realize, okay, I may firmly, and I've had this happen many times in political life, that I disagree with someone greatly on a policy position, but know that I've got another issue coming up later that I need them on.
And we may disagree here, but we agree here.
This idea of looking out for others, looking out for greater good, understanding that mending fences and not staying in enmity with other people, there's also a biblical role as well coming off of Easter recently.
This idea of forgiveness, this idea of moving forward, this idea of saying we may have disagreed here and had a problem, let's come back together, is one that I think From our perspective of wisdom have to deal with.
The third one is an ethical kind of issue and it's having a clear sense of right or wrong and stick to it.
Wisdom gives you the, it has its gravitas, if you would, it has his standing in the fact that it's come from a principled position.
I've never had a person that I thought was wise that constantly changed their mind.
I just didn't.
Now, have I had wise people who, after learning something else, modified a position or had a different idea about a position?
It was not from what I call a categorically moral foundation.
No, that doesn't happen.
There's moral rights and wrongs.
You don't kill, you don't harm children, you don't, you know, the idea of those are just off the table.
Those are moral clarity, right and wrong kind of issues.
But there are certain things that in politics, even in life, that I've learned that I had wisdom on, but then have learned by, you know, other things that have come up that have modified my position or changed it.
But yet there are principle positions that certain things matter, certain things will always matter, and that right and wrong are valid, you know, positions.
And you can be wrong.
So you try to be right, but those right comes with a clear sense of right and wrong.
Wisdom is not ambiguity in many ways.
Wisdom is not Not knowing something, is being amorphous about something.
This is why pastors, and I've used this term before, and I don't know if I've ever used it on this podcast, but I've said this before.
I heard it from an old preaching professor that I had one time, that a mist in the pulpit is a fog in the congregation.
In other words, if you're not clear from the pulpit on the articles and dynamics of your faith, then it's going to be a fog to the congregation.
They're not going to know what you mean.
And they will take what they believe and go with that instead of, here's the moral truth that the scripture actually says.
So again, keeping that in mind, going forward.
The article also goes on to talk about logic, and it makes one of the statements that says, be able to make decisions based on analytical judgment, not gut feelings.
I wish I could do this one.
This was probably the hardest for me.
How many of you have been saying, just trust your gut?
And we've made decisions on trusting your gut.
The Gladwell books, there's been so many out there discussing on how we make decisions.
And really, how many times have you had that discussion, the first thing that you thought of ended up being the right one?
Your brain is an amazing thing.
God is an amazing God who made a brain that processes beyond the capacity of any computer out there in different ways.
I mean, you may think with this AI technology and everything else, it gains knowledge, but your mind has a 360 look.
I mean, your mind can do things and when challenged, can come up with ideas and thoughts that no man-made device can do right now.
And if you're offended by that, I'm sorry.
It just can.
Now, we can't do the processing of mathematical equations or things like that.
If you want to be specific, well, Doug, I can do math and do all these big mathematical problems and spit it out in a minute.
Okay, fine.
But the diametric thought Of...
Making a decision in a split moment without input is something that the mind can do.
And you say without input.
Well, no, it's with input of knowledge that everything that has come together is something of wisdom.
So again, I necessarily, yes, use all the logic you can, use all the reasoning you can, discuss it, but I'm not going to rule out wisdom is also not based on some experience and also emotional gut checks.
So check that out.
Well, a couple of other things that I thought was, you know, sort of analysis, using logic in decisions, you know, because again, this is psychology today.
They downplay the obvious of religion, of faith in your decision-making, that everything should be more Spock-like.
You know, I'm Mr. Spock.
It's only logic.
It's only reason.
I don't understand, Captain Kirk.
You know, it's this.
Emotions and faith also play a great deal into this as well for wisdom.
Again, wisdom found in people show that result.
They show it from a moral backing, as we discussed earlier, that there is moral boundaries to look at, and that comes from a belief and a religious belief that sometimes logic can't explain.
Faith, Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not a logical thing for people who do not believe.
The story and believe the outcome of the fact that Christ rose from the dead and was seen by many, many, many people.
And that's the story of Christ's redemption and for us is in that story.
Again, if you downplay religion and say religion or faith have no view in this, then you're counting out, I believe, from my belief and my faith perspective, you're counting out a great deal of wisdom that can glean to there.
The last thing on wisdom, though, is this is true, is be honest.
And I call it this one.
They call it hermeneutics.
They, you know, based on facts and not wishes.
We wish things to happen, but factually they won't.
Okay, and I think this is where wisdom kicks in.
I've said this all along.
This is my one.
Even when I was going back to high school, I mean, our basketball team, our football team, we were okay.
We're not great.
And if we came up against a very good basketball team or a very good football team, I would be honest with you and say, you know, we're not going to win that game.
Alright, now a miracle may happen and we do it, but the facts tell me that this is, you know, what is going to be true.
We talk about this on Friday's Finest when we make predictions and everything else.
Facts will tell you one thing, your wishes could lead you astray in wisdom.
So I'm going to leave that there because I think too many times we have in political life today, we have too many people wishing.
For things to happen without looking at facts.
We have people who run for office, who don't want to raise money, who don't understand digital, they don't understand campaigns, they just think that they can go out there and I'm spilling the truth and people will just flock to me.
I wish that was true.
Guess what?
It's not.
And it also messes up a lot of where we're at right now with people who have unrealistic ideas about what their state legislators can do or what their U.S. congressman can do.
And this affects the wishes against facts.
Now, the sad part about it is many times what they're wanting can be done But it has to go through the process of knowledge and wisdom to gain it, not just wishing it can happen and not just going off of a gut feeling that it can happen, but listening to people who you may disagree with, who may not give you the answer that you want to hear.
They may not do it on the timeframe that you want to hear.
But when we go back to reasoning and taking in knowledge, gleaning knowledge, sticking to stuff we know and knowing what we don't know, those are the things that will gain you wisdom.
Wisdom is what we seek.
And with that, that ends another Doug Collins podcast.
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