An Unbiased Life is the Opposite of Wisdom

It is trendy in supposedly intelligent circles to maintain a constant awareness of one’s biases. As though the elimination of bias will bring forth an objective wisdom, untarnished by one’s unique hubris and assumed capabilities.

The problem, aside from the impossibility of such erasure of personality, is that a removal of all bias would expunge the contrast necessary to learn.

One does not obtain wisdom by sustaining a perfectly objective and open mind, they achieve insight through repeated juxtaposition between naïveté and reality.

It takes contrast to illuminate truth. There is no elucidating distinction in the unbiased life. Our biases, for better or worse, are the colors of our experience, that penetrate the veil of opaque nature, revealing truth through the punishment of being wrong.

Biases are the lightening through the clouds, that sudden, jarring and uncomfortable event that lightens the entire landscape.

There is a cost to obtaining wisdom. These are moments of embarrassment, failure and shame wrought by the predilection, preference and disposition of our experienced life.

There is nothing intelligent about denying the mechanism of discovery. Nothing intellectual about imagining oneself an unmessy automaton of perpetual objectivity.

Truth arrives because we all have within us the naive hubris to believe we are right, and only through that audacity does nature teach us her painful lessons.

The currency of wisdom is not objectivity, but presumption and temerity.