The wisdom of the ages is carried to us by people who sometimes, because of vanity, ignorance, or some deviant agenda, manage to twist that wisdom into something that its originator never intended and perhaps would find strange or even ugly. The most reprehensible examples are those who twist the wisdom of sacred texts such as the Bible or Qur’an to justify all manner of bizarre thinking and heinous acts.

A lower order twisting of wisdom also happens in our workplaces. It happens when a manager who has heard something about empowerment says that he or she has “empowered” others. That isn’t empowerment but delegation: one can’t empower someone else. It happens when an organization has heard something about the value of a compelling vision and then creates one that is really a marketing slogan. It happens when an organization pretends to embrace wisdom about service but shows its real stripes in confounding phone menus and messages that tell us how much they value us while also keeping us on hold until we give up.

A lower order twisting of wisdom also happens in our personal lives. It happens when we use aphorisms such as “to thine own self be true” to justify selfish behavior. It happens when pushing our own agenda masquerades as “just telling the truth.” It happens when we read a book about how to change our circumstances and then try to change them without changing ourselves; a sure recipe for creating the same circumstances over and over.

Ah well…this has taken on the tenor of a rant, hasn’t it? It didn’t start out that way, but I suppose I am greatly ticked off by the twisting of wisdom. It seems sometimes that all of the wisdom that we need is available to us, and has been for a very long time, but we (the collective human “we”) can’t grasp it because our fingers (minds?) are…well…twisted.