On Attaining 80 Without Wisdom
Why Donald Trump has missed all the important lessons in life.
by Rich Herschlag
The volume of the Talmud known as Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) celebrates attaining 80 years as a lifetime of accumulated wisdom. Recently we witnessed something special—even more special than a series of dramatic comeback wins for the New York Knicks in the NBA finals. We witnessed a man turning 80 having achieved no wisdom whatsoever. Let’s put this accomplishment into perspective, as it’s virtually unheard of. This is a Halley’s Comet type of event that was possibly lost on the crowd gathered on the White House lawn to watch a bunch of guys beat each other up.
If you talk to virtually anyone who has reached 80 or is anywhere close, they are almost always ripe with wisdom, both espoused and in most cases lived. The various forms of such wisdom are too numerous to run through here, so we’ll touch on just a few. There is often mention of knowing when to walk away from a fight. This is attributed to everything from recognizing it’s not worth it, to understanding one’s own ego is potentially bottomless no matter how much it is fed, to seeing that the matter will eventually wither of its own accord, to sensing when your opponent believes he has nothing to lose. The common denominator is the profound recognition that actual life and death is not a playground or a video game. Perhaps the greatest fighter of all time, Muhammad Ali, while still a young man remarkably told a close friend of mine one of the most important skills in life is knowing when to simply turn and walk away from a conflict.
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Closely related to intelligent pacifism is understanding how to take an L. Formal instruction on how to do this starts as early as Little League and continues unabated throughout life. While typically mastered on playing fields and in classrooms by adolescent girls and boys, the private struggle continues for decades where mature arenas of defeat consist of job losses, divorces, seemingly unfair court rulings, foreclosure, the absence of career validation, or perhaps something as simple as losing a barroom argument. The confidence that you’ve done your best or close to it along with the recognition that beating the matter to death will extend its life while shortening your own is learned rather than innate and evolves into the ability to take previously inconceivable L’s with a measure of grace that must be honed over great spans of time.
Because we’re not perfect and will naturally harbor ill will in a wide variety of nuanced instances, we often develop the capability in adulthood, even in the most jarring of times, to fake it. In situations where we know pure, devout, unadulterated grace is beyond our current capacity, we can reach back to the Little League field and shake hands if only for the show of it. Here, enlightened self-interest is palpable, because unless there is clear and direct culpability, when people blame other people for their own losses they look like fools.
Until the orange clown arrived on the scene, every last U.S President and major party presidential candidate understood the concept of grace in defeat at least as a practical matter, and where it mattered most was in conceding a national election and handing over power with a smile, whether a painted one or not.
And that brings us to probably the pinnacle concept of human wisdom—the recognition that it is not all about you. The Universe is inconceivably large, and on a planet that barely ranks in that Universe as a grain of sand, we are each merely a spec within a spec no matter how our lone, whining, self-involved voice protests.
The greatest minds who ever occupied this grain of sand—Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Hillel, St. Augustine, Martin Luther, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Gandhi—were all in one way or another, whether in the abstract or the concrete, the spiritual or the physical, concerned with reconciling the paradox between appearing infinitely large to oneself and appearing infinitely insignificant to the Universe. They all overlapped on the philosophical Venn diagram in at least one way—recognizing we are not alone and are in fact connected to each other. Therefore, when considering action, inaction, or anything in between, we have a moral and irrevocable responsibility to consider more than just ourselves.
I remember an epiphany I had over 30 years ago when a famous American mobster, after beating the jury system multiple times, was finally convicted for murder and racketeering and headed off to prison for a life sentence. At least publicly, he didn’t blame anyone and took his sentence with impeccable stoicism, reflecting as if in The Godfather that this is the life he had chosen. Yes, the aging, ailing, and legally vanquished John Gotti displayed wisdom.
A final cherry atop this abbreviated relatively low calorie bakery window display cake of timeless wisdom is the simple, unforgettable adage that you are only as good as your word. This bit of sagacity is oft delivered by any aging man or woman on any park bench, in any nail salon, and within any chat group. It is increasingly evident to any sentient human being that with every successive trip around the sun we are here just for a visit and other than children the only thing we leave behind is our substance.
And yet the scoundrel in the Oval Office has become an octogenarian while both loudly and quietly defying every last proviso, stipulation, ramification, sign and symptom of anything we might remotely label wisdom. Aged as he appears, in the self-knowledge department he has defied Father Time. Less prudent than an alcoholic teen behind the wheel of a Maserati, less reverent than a five-year-old raiding a cookie jar, less observant than an armed robber hurriedly cleaning out a bank vault, the leader of the Once Free World is not only less wise that any random miscreant, he is probably less wise than he himself was at middle age, when he still knew a thing or two about projecting humility, however transparent.
To be clear, learned self-preservation tactics at any cost do not constitute wisdom. For instance, starting a war to distract from a child abuse investigation is not wisdom. Nor is siccing the U.S. Department of Justice on your enemies for the very sort of crimes you have committed. Nor is reading the room to spot the venal, the vain, the weak-minded, and the easily impressed in order to co-opt these beleaguered souls via flattery, cash, sex, power, or simple juxtaposition. This is, rather, blunt weaponry that ultimately attains nothing other than mutually assured destruction.
Yet there must be some set of guidelines, some semblance of coherence behind the 200 proof anti-wisdom that is the 80-year-old 47th President of the United States. For this proposition my mind raced right to the American 1980s, a time when celebrating anti-wisdom became fashionable. But I quickly struck out. The “Greed is good” quote from the movie Wall Street captures the scent of anti-wisdom without grasping the essence of Trump’s complete and relentless will to harm for both dominance and spectacle. The Malcolm Forbes quote from the same era, “He who dies with the most toys wins,” cynical as it is, nonetheless delivers an element of humility in both its cheeky reference to playthings and its explicit acknowledgment of mortality. Forbes was in on the joke and seemed to invite us in as well.
The closest I could come to capturing utter lack of wisdom at the late night writing of this essay was not a famous adage itself but rather a famous adage stood on its head. There is a legendary quote often attributed to the great German philosopher Goethe that goes something like this: “Act boldly and mighty forces will come to your aid.” While not a direct designation of a Creator, it is more or less a tip of the hat to something those of us with a sliver of wisdom have observed repeatedly—the notion that any courage we can muster for a worthy cause will be handsomely matched by a “donor” whom we can’t see but who can see us. This is one of the most reassuring aphorisms in recorded history as it dares us to think beyond ourselves while also recognizing our darkest fears of helplessness. And so, with a twist or two, here is its inane, insipid bastardization: Act cruelly and sadistic forces will come to your aid.
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You only name men, many white, in your description of great thinkers. Perhaps this is part of why humanity knocks at deaths door now. The keepers of the creative life, women, have been continuously undervalued, in fact dismissed for millennia. So unconscious. And, continuous.
Malignant narcissists know everything already so they never learn.