The Future of Capitalism is Sageism

The wave is coming: either grab a surfboard or drown.

Capitalism has been incredible. It has aggregated and distributed the collective intelligence of mankind.

Capitalism has also been terrible. It has aggregated and distributed the collective stupidity of mankind.

Our tragic flaw as a species is the inability of our raw intelligence to grasp its own limitations. We therefore constantly destroy complex systems we pretend to understand. So we’ve ended up with a food-industrial complex poisoning its own consumers, social media companies driving their own users insane and an economic system that is seemingly precision-engineered to destroy the very environment we inhabit.

But you knew that already.

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So what’s next?

Capitalism literally means “headism.” Our next evolutionary stage is Sageism. Sageism transcends that narrow cerebral intelligence and aligns with the higher wisdom of attractor forces.¹ For all its “intellect,” the competitive, limited head cannot perceive these forces nor understand that it benefits from this relationship. But sages can. They’re perfectly aligned with the intelligence of the system they inhabit. So, like a black belt, minimal effort produces maximal results.

Sageism means shifting from relying on static intelligence to dynamic wisdom. By some measures, IQ peaks in your 20s then slowly declines. Wisdom has no such limits. Nor are intelligence and wisdom strongly correlated, which explains how many “smart” CEOs continue to do such dumb things. Most of Capitalism’s previous winners have been high IQ masters of abstractions: Wall Street’s static spreadsheets and Silicon Valley’s sterile coding. Sageism’s winners will embody wisdom: knowing precisely what to do and when, even in completely novel and chaotic circumstances.

Because it’s emergent by definition, we have no idea what this new system will ultimately look like.² Anything we consciously design will inevitably include the same flaws. So the only person you need to worry about is yourself.

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What should you do?

1. If you’re in the wrong job, quit. If you are out of integrity in your career, you know it. So stop lying to yourself and find a new one. No amount of security is worth your soul. [This transition is not easy, I know from brutal personal experience].

2. Find a wisdom community. People need time and space to find a new career path that’s more aligned with their niche. This is why intimate communities dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom and personal evolution are the necessary intermediary stage between capitalism and sageism. This is why I founded The Leading Edge, and why it’s been such a huge early success.

3. Invest in personal development. People spend fortunes on financial advisers and accountants to optimise their assets to be resilient and antifragile. And yet they spend virtually no time, money or attention on making themselves dynamic and adaptable. It’s more important, and the industry barely exists. Yet.

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What if I’m wrong?

An entirely rational approach is to try to extract enough out of the system before it collapses or you die. The risk here is that your zero-sum approach runs out of energy before either of those things happen, leaving you stuck and lost. Sages instinctively transcend win-lose dynamics in favour of energetically infinite win-win games.

Most importantly: wisdom correlates with practically everything desirable.³ A recent study found that wisdom is the best predictor of life satisfaction in both men and women, and can offset the negative influences of aging.⁴ We focus on having enough saved for retirement, but wisdom has a greater influence on life satisfaction in older adulthood than health, socioeconomic status, financial situation, environment, or social engagement.

Even if the system doesn’t change, the existing forces of capitalism are currently driving an incomprehensible evolution of artificial intelligence. It seems to be coming for most of capitalism’s prized left hemispheric skills. Winner-takes-all models are only appealing when you’re sure you’re going to be the winner. If you don’t cultivate your uniquely human right-hemispheric traits, you are going to be left behind.

In my conversations, small numbers of investment banks, hedge funds and financial advisors are just starting to figure this out. But they’re not writing or talking about it yet. I’ve spent all of this year working on the Accelerating Wisdom Series. So far I’ve interviewed 8 world-class experts across a wide range of topics. All of them proposed practical tools for pursuing wisdom.⁵ It’s free to read, watch or listen to. There’s much more to come.

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”

- Andy Dufresne, The Shawshank Redemption.

1. This “transcend and include” sequence is how most complex systems evolve, described here. If you want to learn more about what I mean by “attractor intelligence”, over the course of the Accelerating Wisdom series I was fortunate enough to interview the father of attractor theory, Ervin Laszlo and the author of Syntropy, Ulisse Di Corpo. In our interview Di Corpo discusses the prospect of us moving from a zero-sum, energetically limited “entropic” system to an unlimited “syntropic” system as soon as the next few years.

2. One of the more interesting ideas is that people at lower levels of development cannot understand or anticipate frameworks from a higher level. This includes people who are conventionally intelligent. In fact, left brained intellectuals will be among the last to anticipate this transition to sageism. People already on the wisdom path will have an intuitive understanding, when it will look impossible and nonsensical to others. Here is master coach Brian Whetten explaining the concept in 3 minutes.

3. Thirty years of wisdom research has shown that it correlates with how good you feel and how much you’re growing.

4. Source: Wisdom affinity in the general population.

5. I’ll be publishing a comprehensive list in the next few weeks.