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1 · Front cover: the plain typographic version, for any paper without its own art
Seeds of RenaissanceNo. 6

Wisdom and Wanting What's Good

Collective wisdom for a time of crisis and renewal

Wisdom · Part 1

Against a backdrop of global crisis, wisdom emerges as a vital capacity for a regenerative future.

Rufus Pollock & Rosie BellLife Itself Sensemaking Studio
2 · Title page (recto, page i; the inside cover before it is blank)
Seeds of RenaissanceNo. 6

Wisdom and Wanting What's Good

Collective wisdom for a time of crisis and renewal

Wisdom · Part 1
Rufus Pollock & Rosie BellLife Itself Sensemaking Studio
2b · Imprint (verso of the title page, page ii): small print at the foot, the rest left empty

Seeds of Renaissance is a series of papers on civilisational crisis and renewal, and the shifts in views and values that might support a wiser, more regenerative society. Numbering continues from the Second Renaissance series.

Edition
First published October 2026 by the Life Itself Sensemaking Studio
Authors
Rufus Pollock and Rosie Bell
Thanks
[Acknowledgements]
Credits
Figures by the authors. Woodcuts by Seeds of Renaissance. Set in Polyamine, Restora, Bricolage Grotesque and Apfel Grotezk.
Licence
© 2026 the authors. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0): you may share and adapt this work for any purpose, provided you credit the authors and link to the licence. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cite as
Pollock, R. and Bell, R. (2026). Wisdom and Wanting What's Good: Collective wisdom for a time of crisis and renewal. Seeds of Renaissance No. 6. Life Itself Sensemaking Studio.
Online
secondrenaissance.net/papers
3 · Annotated contents (recto, page v)
Wisdom and Wanting What's GoodContents

Contents

  1. ·
    Summary
    iii
  2. ·
    Preface
    vii
  3. ·
    Introduction
    1
  4. 1
    Decision-making the modern way: questions of quantity
    • (Post-)modernity ♡s measurement
      Modern industrialised societies have come to privilege quantitative knowledge, marginalising values like beauty and goodness which are seen as “subjective”. The resulting crises demand a reintegration of qualitative judgement and broader ways of knowing.
      7
    • GDP and financial proxies for happiness
      Government fixated on Gross Domestic Product exemplifies modern reduction of value to measurement, neglecting essential aspects of the public good.
      10
    • Scapegoating money: the rise of extrinsic values
      Money itself isn’t the problem. But our distorted relationship to it, valuing symbols over substance, is corrosive.
      11
    7
  5. 2
    Knowing beyond measurement: wisdom’s intuitive dimension
    • Extra-rational choosing: hiding in plain sight
      Restoring wisdom may depend less upon learning something new than upon reviving a dormant human faculty for sensing what truly matters.
      13
    • Case study: the work of Christopher Alexander
      The ‘timeless way’ of architect Christopher Alexander is a theory of design that embodies decision-making beyond measurement.
      17
    13
  6. 3
    Cultivating civic wisdom: experiential factors
    Wise decision-making is cultivated through lived experience in a collective setting, and attunement to an embodied ‘inner compass’ shaped in part by that experience.
    21
  7. 4
    Who’s wise and how do we know? Self-selecting networks
    Society’s wisdom is collective and contextual. Peer-selected networks offer a model for empowering the wise, albeit imperfect and vulnerable to corruption.
    24
  8. ·
    Conclusion
    28
  9. ·
    Further reading · Bibliography · Appendices
    30
v
4 · Body spread, pages 4–5: figure as plate, pull quote, footnotes. The introduction ends here; page 6 is blank so chapter 1 opens on a recto
4Wisdom and Wanting What's Good

The wisdom that orients collective action

Addressing the wisdom gap

Amid the decline of modern industrialised society, we are obliged to trace the shape of wisdom in negative space. Manifold crises, the threat of systemic collapse, and a general inability to change direction suggest a profound lack of collective capacity to choose action for the greater good. At the same time, with societal complexity escalating faster than our capacity to manage it, our technologically enabled power to inflict catastrophic harm upon ourselves, each other and our world likewise continues to grow: a disconnect known as ‘the wisdom gap.’7

Two rising curves over time: technological capability climbs steeply, wisdom rises slowly, and the widening space between them is marked as the wisdom gap
Seeds of Renaissance
secondrenaissance.net/papers
Fig. 1The wisdom gap. A rapidly growing gap between society’s technological and social complexity and our “wisdom”, our capacity to manage that complexity well.8

It’s uncontroversial to associate wisdom with rational understanding: with the capacity to grasp what’s going on in a given context, and apply knowledge and analysis to interpret events and guide action. The complexity of our times plainly overwhelms understanding, and it’s tempting to suggest that this shortfall alone explains our ‘wisdom gap’. Still, most would intuitively agree that there’s more to wisdom than analytical skill.

This essay imagines wisdom as a composite capacity formed of at least three interwoven dimensions. The first, valueception, is a capacity to sense and respond to what is good or worthwhile.9

  1. 7
    E.g. Pollock & Mulgan (2020), “Bridging the wisdom gap”.
  2. 8
    Diagram illustrates a growing gap but does not depict precise trajectories, which are uncertain. Where the curve suggests a slow, gradual increase in wisdom, in reality wisdom might equally be declining, the gap growing even faster.
  3. 9
    Valueception has roots in the philosophy of Max Scheler, who argued that values are not subjective projections but real, non-material features of a meaning-saturated world, apprehended through feeling and intuition rather than constructed by reason.
Introduction5

The second, call it sense-making, is a capacity to understand how things are and how they work, and so to discern skilful ways of moving towards the good. The third is will, in the everyday sense of political will or good will: the capacity, individual and collective, to act on what we've discerned. Each can draw on rational analysis, but each also relies on intuitive, embodied discernment operating beneath or beyond it.

Integrating ways of knowing

Diminishing and even denying intuitive skills like valueception, modern societies have come to prioritise two other processes for directing choice: rationality, understood as logical derivation of outcomes, and empiricism which seeks ‘objective facts’ about the world of things, through material evidence and typically via measurement.

Without setting out to vilify these useful ways of knowing, this essay explores what is lost through modern over-reliance upon them. Taking for granted the already-legitimate forms of rational sensemaking that play a part in wise collective choices, we advocate a rehabilitated respect for ‘wisdom’ as a missing pillar of collective choice-making.14

Countless ancient traditions hold insight into the nature of wisdom and its cultivation, from indigenous cultures to religious traditions and beyond. A wiser future society might recognise the respect due to such traditions, but guard against looking to them for ready-made answers. Wisdom arises in context.

“I don't believe Indigenous knowledges can give us the instructions of how to swim in our world… But they can remind us that it's possible to swim.”Vanessa Andreotti16
  1. 14
    Importantly, this enquiry isn’t centred on the empirical field of wisdom research. Intuitive knowledge of the measureless is not fundamentally at odds with the scientific method, only with the current assumptions that shape it.
  2. 16
    Andreotti (2024), transcript, TGS episode 125.
5 · Chapter opening (recto, page 7): epigraph, summary box
1
Chapter 1

Decision-making the modern way

questions of quantity

“The meta-crisis is a profound misunderstanding of the nature of what is valuable… pursuing an abstract definition of value, quantitative, financialised… to the detriment of the actual, living field of embodied, intrinsic value.”

Zak Stein17

(Post-)modernity ♡s measurement

In briefModern industrialised societies have come to privilege quantitative knowledge, marginalising values like beauty and goodness which are seen as “subjective”. This reductive approach shapes everything from public policy to education, distorting our shared sense of what truly matters. The resulting crises demand a reintegration of qualitative judgement and broader ways of knowing.

In large societies, decision-making (what we cultivate and restrict, award and punish) is co-ordinated by powerful institutions. Built into these institutions are particular value judgements, often arising from a deeper cultural worldview: a set of foundational assumptions about reality, including what counts as valid knowledge.18 Modern industrialised cultures tend to privilege empirical knowledge, based in observation, evidence and measurement, and rational knowledge, based in logical analysis and calculation.

7
6 · Back cover: blurb, the mark, colophon

Modernity has staged a heist: the field of legitimate knowledge has been stripped of all that’s good and beautiful, leaving only what can be measured.

Wisdom can be framed as a capacity for choosing what’s good and acting skilfully towards it. This paper asks how modern systems dulled the inner compass that knows value, and how reintegrating intuitive capacities with other ways of knowing might close a potentially deadly ‘wisdom gap’.

Rufus Pollock and Rosie Bell work at the Life Itself Sensemaking Studio.

Seeds of Renaissance markSeeds of
Renaissance
Seeds of Renaissance · No. 6Wisdom · Part 1 · 2026Life Itself Sensemaking Studiosecondrenaissance.net/papers