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Wisdom and Relationships
In our last blog, we talked about the basics of the Wisdom Paradigm. The better you understand the Wisdom Paradigm, the happier and more successful you’re going to be in life.
Let’s review some of the anchor points from our last session.
In the Wisdom Paradigm, culture and times may change, but human nature has remained the same throughout history.
Life is about pursuing Happiness—the fulfillment of our human nature. What brings us Happiness in life? The answer: Good relationships.
If our destination or purpose in life is Happiness, then we use our reason to figure out how to get there. Reason tells us that it’s a fact that practicing virtues like honesty, justice, courage and love, will make us good people ready for good relationships and Happiness.
This combination of purpose and reason—purpose tells us our destination, Happiness, and reason tells us how to get there—is the critical foundation for everything in the Wisdom Paradigm.
Finally, your life is your story of how you use your gifts and talents to pursue Happiness.
In this session, we’ll talk about more anchor points in the Wisdom Paradigm—especially relationships, truth and morality. Here’s a summary.
The Wisdom Paradigm teaches that all people are basically social beings. That’s why we find Happiness and fulfillment in relationships.
The purpose of every community—of every organized group of people—is to become good. Communities pursuing goodness help the people in the community become good. That puts everyone on the path for good relationships and Happiness.
We’re going to use the word “team” for all types of communities or groups of people ranging from families and neighborhood groups to businesses and political communities.
In the Wisdom Paradigm, the good of the individual and the good of the team are the same. We call this a covenant relationship. The more you put into the team, the better you get. The more the team invests in you, the better the team gets.
Covenant relationships are high-trust, high-stability and high-performance relationships.
In the Wisdom Paradigm, it’s a fact that practicing virtues like honesty, justice and love make us good people, ready for good relationships and Happiness. That means there is an objective morality with moral facts. Morality is not just a matter of personal opinion.
The Wisdom Paradigm also teaches that there is objective Truth. The pursuit and discovery of the Truth about life is a fundamental part of our pursuit of Happiness.
In the Wisdom Paradigm we don’t just pursue knowledge, we pursue wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge of the Truth combined with the character to live that Truth.
When you know and practice the Truth over and over in life, you develop wisdom. This process of developing wisdom is called formation.
What is the proper motivation in life? Not money or social status, but the pursuit of Happiness.
That means that we don’t measure success in life by our bank account or social media followers. Success in life is measured by the goodness, honor and Happiness we achieve through the good relationships we have.
Let’s dive in.
Humans are Social Beings
The Wisdom Paradigm teaches that human beings are fundamentally social beings.
Being human means relationship is a fundamental part of our human experience.
From the very beginning, we are born into a family relationship. Children who have good, healthy relationships with their parents have the best chance of turning out well in life.
Relationship is a critical part of our lives. Think about the importance of relationships in grammar school and high school.
We want to share our good times with friends. We need the support of friends when times are difficult.
Sharing experiences with friends is deeply fulfilling. Being bullied is devastating.
You become who you hang around.
Our deepest joys include friendship, marriage and family.
One of our deepest fears is being left alone. Solitary confinement in prison is considered to be cruel punishment, even torture, because it deprives us of something we so deeply need: relationship.
Our desire to love and be loved is at the very core of our human nature.
We cannot fully understand a person unless we also understand their social relationships. What is their family life like? What is their ethnicity, culture and religion? What are their interests, activities and sports? Who are their friends?
We can’t understand a person until we answer these questions because we are so deeply impacted, shaped and formed by the communities in which we grow.
The Purpose of All Teams is to Become Good
The purpose of all communities is to become good and help each of us us—as individuals—to become good.
Community means any group of people organized for just about any reason including teams, families, companies, organizations, churches, neighborhoods, community service groups, schools, etc.
To keep things easy, we’ll use the word team to refer to all these different types of communities.
A good team is just like a good person. A good team has virtues like honesty, justice, courage, wisdom and love.
Goodness brings teams the same benefits it brings any person. When your team is honest, just, wise and loving, you will have better, more fulfilling relationships. Good relationships mean your team will perform much better—whether your team is your family, company, athletic team, non-profit, church, or whatever.
We’ve all seen teams outperform expectations because they were deeply committed to each other. We’ve all seen teams fail because they are torn apart by vices like selfishness, unfairness or dishonesty.
A team becomes good the same way a person does: practicing the virtues as it pursues its mission.
That means a sports team becomes good by practicing honesty, justice and courage by trying to win games.
Your family becomes good by practicing the virtues as you try to raise good children.
A company, a non-profit, the military and a church all become good while practicing the virtues as they provide products and services, defend the nation or help people understand God.
Good teams have better, higher-trust and higher-performance relationships than teams who lack virtues. That’s why good teams outperform poor teams.
Remember that the purpose of all teams is the same—to become good—though they pursue goodness through different missions.
Covenant Relationships
In the Wisdom Paradigm, the good of the team and the good of the individual are the same. This is called a covenant relationship.
A team is only as good as the people who make up that team. The better the teammates are, the better the team will be.
To get the best team possible, the team must invest in its people. The more the team invests in each of the teammates—in their skills, teamwork, character and leadership, the more successful the team will be.
On the flip side, if you want to become a good person, joining a good team is the best way to practice developing the virtues that will make you good.
You become what you do. The more effort you put into the team, the more you will grow in your skills, teamwork, character and leadership. And the more successful you’ll become in all aspects of your life—family, work and community.
It is almost always better to practice the virtues as part of a team than it is to practice them on your own because your teammates will push you harder than you will push yourself. Some virtues—like love and justice—require relationship and can only be developed as part of a team.
So, the good of the team and the good of the individual are the same. The more the team invests in each member, the better the team gets. The more the individual invests in the team, the better the individual gets. The more you put a covenant team under pressure, the tighter the team gets.
This isn’t a relationship based on power or transaction. This is a relationship grounded in a promise—a covenant—between the team and each teammate. That’s why it’s called a covenant relationship. The deepest covenant relationships are grounded in love.
If you’ve been part of a championship sports or work team, or been in the US military, you have probably experienced this type of relationship. A relationship where everyone is close, trust is high and the commitment to each other is very deep. No one is in it for the money. Everyone is in it because they care about it each other. You put your life on the line for a teammate.
Covenant relationships are the highest-trust, highest-performance and most stable relationships possible.
In the Wisdom Paradigm, all relationships—including friends, family and work—should be practiced as covenant relationships.
For example, when you do a business deal, you should make it a covenant relationship with the other party.
In a covenant relationship, what’s good for you and client are the same. Use the deal, the relationship, as an opportunity to become good by practicing the virtues. This will create a high-trust, stable relationship with your client. That high-trust, covenant relationship itself is valuable because it increases performance and efficiency, and reduces risk.
Objective Morality
Today, people—especially younger people—tend to believe that morality is a matter of opinion, not fact.
In contrast, the Wisdom Paradigm teaches that there is an objective morality with moral facts. Like it’s a fact that the Holocaust and slavery are wrong.
That means there is a right and wrong that are not dependent on personal opinion or a particular culture, but are facts that are true for all people throughout history.
For example, the Wisdom Paradigm teaches that it is not just a matter of opinion, but a fact that honesty, justice, courage and love are right and true.
How can we know there are moral facts and not just opinions?
Let’s go back to that foundation of purpose and reason.
Our purpose, our destination, in life is Happiness and Happiness comes from having good relationships.
It is a fact that if we practice honesty, justice, wisdom and love, that we will become good people who can have good relationships and achieve Happiness.
It is also a fact that being dishonest, unjust and cruel will make us bad people who will have very poor, low-trust relationships, that prevent us from achieving Happiness.
In the Wisdom Paradigm, it is a fact that honesty, justice, wisdom and love are good because they help move you to Happiness, and it’s a fact that dishonesty, injustice and selfishness are bad because they lead you away from Happiness.
Truth
The Wisdom Paradigm teaches that there is objective Truth, though we may disagree on how we understand the Truth.
Knowing the Truth about life is an important part of our search for Happiness. We seek to know the Truth about who we are, what reality is, where we fit in our community, and where we fit in the cosmos. The search for meaning in our lives is a search for the Truth.
The Wisdom Paradigm is focused on pursuing a special kind of knowledge—knowledge about life—wisdom.
Wisdom is knowledge plus character. Wisdom is knowledge of the Truth combined with the character to live the Truth in our lives.
The more we practice knowing the Truth and living the Truth, the more wisdom we gain about life.
Wisdom is the knowledge you need to become good and achieve Happiness in life.
The highest degree in college, the PhD, is the Doctor of Philosophy. The word doctor comes from the Latin—docere—which means to teach. The word philo comes from Greek and means love. Sophia also comes from Greek and means wisdom.
So, a PhD is one who teaches the love of wisdom. A PhD is supposed to teach us the wisdom we need to achieve Happiness in life.
Today, PhD’s are very smart about a very narrow section of knowledge. One dissertation I read in graduate school was “Slavery in Tidewater Plantations of Colonial Virginia from 1620 to 1640.” That’s a history PhD studying a very narrow part of history.
In earlier times, PhD’s studied the quadrivium and trivium—the seven liberal arts of the time—because they wanted to develop a broad understanding of the whole of life.
Later, we’ll talk about how that change came about.
What is the book of wisdom? Scripture, of course.
Scripture was not written as a history or science book. Scripture is the book that teaches us about our destination—Happiness or Salvation—and tells us how we must live to get there. Scripture is not about science and history—its about wisdom and life.
How do we develop wisdom about life? We go through a process called formation.
In formation, what you learn academically is very important. We must learn how to think correctly and critically.
But just as important, formation also focuses on character development. We have to learn what is true and how to use that knowledge to do what is right.
It is just as important for kids to be part of athletic and performing arts groups where they develop character and learn how to perform as part of a team under pressure, as it is for kids to focus in the classroom.
Instead of the contemporary focus on education for academic knowledge, the Wisdom Paradigm focuses on formation for wisdom and Happiness.
Motivation and Success in Life
In the Wisdom Paradigm, what is our motivation in life? The answer: Happiness.
You do want Happiness in life, don’t you?
Remember that in the wisdom understanding of the world, everything in our lives is either helping us become good or not. We are either practicing the virtues as we live our daily lives, and progressing towards Happiness, or not.
So, the primary motivation in life is the desire for fulfillment—the pursuit of Happiness. That is true of our personal lives and work lives. Everything we do should help us move towards Happiness.
If your primary motivation in life is something other than Happiness, you will have a difficult time.
Other motivations, other desires—whether it is money, power, sex, drugs, etc.—can never be fully satisfied. They will never fulfill you. You will always want more, and more will never be enough. As you pursue more of that desire in your search for fulfillment, you risk addiction. You won’t achieve goodness or Happiness.
Again, this may seem obvious, but we will find that the Modern Paradigm is going to say something very different. The Modern Paradigm is going to tell us that our primary motivation in life is money.
Honor
How do we measure success in life? Honor.
How good are you? What virtues do you possess? Are you honest, just, wise, courageous and loving? Do you have integrity? How much of each of these do you have?
Are you worthy of honor?
Honor is the respect you are owed for the character that you possess. We honor good people because they are good.
Honor is a word that has lost its meaning in our society, but in the Wisdom Paradigm it goes to the very core of what is meaningful in life.
Success in life means that you are worthy of honor. That you are a good person with good relationships who has achieved Happiness.
So, let’s recap.
The Wisdom Paradigm teaches us that all people are basically social beings. That’s why we find Happiness and fulfillment in relationships.
The purpose of every organized group of people—of every team—is to become good. When a team seeks goodness, it helps the people on the team become good.
In the Wisdom Paradigm, the good of the individual and the good of the team are the same. We call this a covenant relationship. The more you put into the team, the better you get. The more the team invests in you, the better the team gets.
Covenant relationships are high-trust, high-stability and high-performance relationships.
In the Wisdom Paradigm, it’s a fact that practicing virtues like honesty, justice and love make us good people, ready for good relationships and Happiness. That means there is an objective morality with moral facts.
The Wisdom Paradigm also teaches that there is objective Truth about reality and life.
We don’t just pursue knowledge, we pursue wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge of the Truth combined with the character to live that Truth. Wisdom is knowledge about life to help us achieve success and Happiness in life.
When you know and practice the Truth over and over in life, you develop wisdom. Formation is the way we develop wisdom. Formation means knowing the Truth about life and developing good character by practicing the Truth.
What is our motivation in life? Not money or social status. We should be motivated by our natural desire for Happiness in life.
That means that we don’t measure success in life by our bank account or social media followers. We measure success in life by the goodness, honor and Happiness we achieve through the good relationships we have.
Stay tuned for the next session.
I’m Pete Bowen.
