Ground Zero Minnesota: Center for the Study of Intelligence and Wisdom

Center for the Study of Intelligence and Wisdom

The Fundamental Concept Behind a Center for the Study of Intelligence and Wisdom

Official "intelligence" is sometimes bereft of wisdom. Bureaucracies often insist on this.

That must change. Changing this will be quite difficult.

Intelligence can mean "intellect," the machinery of reason, or it can mean the official products of national intelligence agencies (estimates, assessments, warnings, options, and recommendations). These are quite different meanings for the same word. We intend to pursue both at our center in the interests of human survival. Some of our effort will be devoted to improving conventional education. But some of our effort must also be devoted to spies and other secret power systems.

Exotic problems can attract more attention than the daily work of universities. So we want to stress that interns and fellows sponsored by our center will spend almost all of their time working on conventional education about ordinary but important problems facing humankind today — war, hunger, human rights, and the environment — with some emphasis on what makes for wiser solutions or policy options. But our director, and our annual international conference will devote some time and effort on the special challenge of how to get more wisdom into the intelligence agencies that have such large influence over the real decisions, and the most consequential decisions, of national leaders.

Wisdom is defined by Webster as being sagacious or wise, which does not help us much. We polled our international advisory board, asking: "What is the essential difference between intelligence and wisdom?" We learned a lot, but one thing was clear: there is no consensus whatever regarding what, exactly, wisdom is.

We consider this a problem because we have also seen national governments spending tens of billions of dollars every year gathering "intelligence" to serve their security interests and concerns, yet the word "wisdom" is almost never found among the millions of pages produced by intelligence professionals every year. So problems grow.

In fact, civilization is careening toward a crisis of growing demand and declining resources, with significant environmental problems and organized, armed conflicts over access to the means of survival. Yet even highly educated people often seem trapped by the paradoxes of our time. In our opinion, human survival itself is at risk. So we act.