Love is a trainable skill, and luck is an inevitable ingredient in our lives. Our current science challenges the notion of the sovereign individual, the importance of love, and the need for a paradigm shift. The Harvard Study of Adult Development goes together with other data to invite us to question the nature and the role of love, luck, and the true wealth of nations. The Harvard Study also supports the need for a new kind of science.

Love, Luck, and True Wealth: The Gaia Scienza

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends. Today we consider love and luck, and their role in true wealth, happiness, and a meaningful life.

In the past two contemplations, we have reflected on the massive Harvard study of adult development. We tried to change the headlines about this study, to reflect the revolutionary implications of the data.

We have emphasized that these revolutionary implications accord with the wisdom traditions, and that we need those traditions in order to make both the stated findings and the more radical unstated findings of the study a reality.

The stated findings were summed up best by George Vaillant, the study’s previous director. Ten years ago, he said that the 75 years of work on the study, and the 20 millions dollars spent on it, boil down to a single five-word conclusion: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”

We pointed out last time that the study points to the ecology of love, and then leads us to recognize our need for a love of ecology.

But we also pointed out that, if happiness really is love, the cultural practices of the dominant culture are ill-equipped to maximize our happiness—in part because the dominant culture doesn’t teach us how to love.

But Plato gave us the word philosophy precisely because he wanted us to understand that the wisdom traditions see love as a trainable skill. We can learn to love, and as we walk the path of love, we simultaneously walk the path of wisdom and beauty.

If we can actively engage with holistic teachings and practices of love, we will arrive at what the Harvard study has verified as most essential for our health and happiness. In short, we will cultivate and enjoy the true wealth of nations.

The wisdom traditions have many teachings on love and its relationship to both wisdom and beauty, but something about Nietzsche’s expression of certain aspects of this seem relevant for us right now—in part because Nietzsche so effectively diagnosed the soul sickness of the dominant culture, and maybe also in part because so few people would think of him as a philosopher of love.

But there’s another good reason to bring Nietzsche to mind. The passage we will consider comes from Nietzsche’s book, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, which we might think of as “Joyful Holistic Science” or maybe “Joyful Wisdom”.

Nietzsche associates his intended meaning with the gai saber, the art of the troubadours. We may call that “Gaya Scienza,” and even “Gaia Scienza”. Either way, it includes diversity and joy, and relates to the activity of love—science as a love poetry written to ourselves, each other, and the world we share.

Here are some of Nietzsche’s reflections on love from that book—specifically, section 334:

One must learn to love. — This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to· isolate it and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, anu kindhearted about its oddity. Finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing; and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.

But that is what happens to us not only in music. That is how we have learned to lave all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange: gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way; for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned.

The Harvard study doesn’t teach us how to learn to love, how to learn skillful relationality and cultivate minds of ecology and vitalizing ecologies of mind, so that we live and love in service to life. The wisdom traditions teach that far better than the contemporary science of the dominant culture. That includes Indigenous traditions, because Indigenous science is much more of a Gaya Scienza (or Gaia Scienza) or Joyful Science than the science of the dominant culture.

Nietzsche’s a good philosopher to bring to mind here, because he tried to cultivate a nondualistic, relational LoveWisdom. Love is relational—like the Cosmos itself.

It’s not an object we can hand over to someone. That’s why some wisdom traditions teach that, in giving a gift, there is no giver, no receiver, no gift given.

In practical terms, when we try to offer love and support to someone, they actually have to have the capacity to receive it—and many of us have encountered people who at first demonstrate a lack of skill in doing that. What we offer thus depends on the one to whom we offer it, as well as depending on us and our entire practice of life.

Love depends on my practice in offering it, and your practice in receiving it. It only exists in the moment, as a function of a dynamic ecology of mind—a flower that bursts into bloom, and then fades. We have the capacity to conjure this blooming again, and again, and again, and again. In some cases, it becomes more subtle and profound each time, deepening, expanding into the whole Cosmos. Indeed, each moment of love is the Universe.

As part of his diagnosis of the dominant culture’s soul sickness, Nietzsche recognized how thoroughly unequipped the dominant culture makes us to receive the findings of a study like this. We have gotten ourselves so stuck in the dualities of individual versus collective, self versus world, culture versus Nature. In general, we have embodied so much ignorance that we can’t really understand (let alone wonderstand) how our interwovenness could constitute our individuality in a way that doesn’t scare us.

Relational philosophies present challenges, paradoxes, and demanding practices. Nietzsche never managed to develop a fully nondualistic, relational philosophy, but he did notice some of these deep challenges and paradoxes.

For instance, he realized that the interwovenness of the Cosmos overthrows our naïve notions of “the sovereign individual”. No one could accuse Nietzsche of failing to revere the sanctity of the individual in relative terms. That’s what can make it so hard to understand how he nevertheless criticizes the notion of the sovereign individual—ultimately criticizing it in a way that would force us to rethink much of our personal and cultural lives if we could receive his critique with an open heart.

Ultimately, Nietzsche realized that our acceptance of reality—our acceptance of love, relationality, luck, dynamism, and the great mystery that will forever outstrip our ego—that our acceptance of, and turning toward, all of this would not necessarily arise as our first response. Rather, we would instead revert to nihilism. We all know the spirit of this: Informed of the incredible role of luck in our lives, including the good fortune of loving parents, we sense how tempting it feels to shrug our shoulders and give up. Like the great sages of the wisdom traditions, Nietzsche understood that such a reaction lacks insight.

We live in a culture—we live in a style of consciousness—that bombards us with personal responsibility in such a way that it can seem completely unrealistic if we make any suggestion that our success or failure is due to forces to transcend the ego. The culture we now perpetuate doesn’t know how to handle this reality.

Nietzsche warned us that we have no idea how to embody truth. If we all cooperate in creating and perpetuating a culture deeply rooted in the practice of blaming people for their every failure, while praising the wealthy and powerful for every single success, we will have a major challenge when it comes to recognizing how interwovenness actually functions in our lives.

The regime we have depends on a cycle of praise and blame. It’s integral to the insanity. We have to blame everyone who lacks wealth, power, and conventional success, and all those who have wealth, power, and conventional success need to take full credit for it.

As a consequence, the society firmly believes in the image of the sovereign individual that Nietzsche himself critiqued. Any challenge to that, any suggestion that the stubborn pattern of praise and blame lacks reality—that leads people to react as if the conclusion must be nihilism. We either have praise and blame, or nothing matters.

But that claim lacks wisdom, and we must get beyond our reactivity and fears on this issue. Interwovenness demands that we do so.

We could go rather deeply into the issue of nihilism and related considerations, but we should move on to something else Waldinger and Schultz discuss. They end their book by acknowledging that the good life is not a life of leisure or comfort:

“Thousands of stories from the Harvard Study show us that the good life is not found by providing ourselves with leisure and ease. Rather, it arises from the act of facing inevitable challenges, and from fully inhabiting the moments of our lives. It appears, quietly, as we learn how to love and how to open ourselves to being loved, as we grow from our experiences, and as we stand in solidarity with others through the inevitable string of joys and adversities in every human life.”

It seems necessary to emphasize the fact that none of these things come from capitalism. Capitalism does nothing for us here.

On the other hand, this expresses the basic spirit of wisdom traditions around the world. They have always trained us to face the challenges of life as gateways to wisdom, love, and beauty, and they have always taught us how to live well together, in attunement with spiritual and ecological realities.

Capitalism has nothing to do with the essence of the good life. But capitalism does have to do with offering supposed comforts and leisure. It offers junk-comforts—junk food, junk goods, junk ease. And it steals a lot of our leisure time. But it certainly presents itself as offering us comforts that it wants us to see as valuable.

But Adam Smith himself recognized that we need no more comfort and leisure than we could adequately establish for ourselves working with the most basic technologies. He understood, at least intellectually, that what capitalism can give us we have no real need for.

And the Harvard study seems to tell us that, at best, capitalism will only confuse us. We needn’t worry so much about comfort.

As far as leisure, we need to demand our lives back from the capitalist regime. Leisure is a potentially complex topic, but if it means unstructured time for which we have the energy to do whatever most genuinely inspires us, then capitalism doesn’t do very well delivering that either, and we tend to have to force the capitalists to even provide 5-6 weeks of paid vacation, to say nothing of a 3- or 4-day workweek, in which we work a maximum of 4-8 hours per day for full time wages.

Adam Smith could draw from the wisdom traditions more easily than some of us today. But we need to turn to them. We have come to a point at which we need to recognize that, although capitalism promises comfort and leisure, it doesn’t do a great job at giving us comforts that matter, and it now robs a great many of us of leisure time. Worse yet, as the wisdom traditions teach and as the Harvard study reinforces, comfort and leisure in a narrow sense aren’t what life is about.

Even this rather important bit about comfort stands out as yet another case of science in general verifying things the wisdom traditions have told us for a very long time. This has become increasingly tragic, because we keep failing to learn the lessons.

It doesn’t help that we sometimes treat the ancients as if they were idiots, and as if we know more than they did. I used to see this all the time in the university, and I still see it today, among both academics and scientists outside of philosophy, as well as among many citizens of the dominant culture.

It’s all well and good to have our own opinion about a philosophical question. But philosophy is not about opinion, and we often fail to understand that.

Students studying philosophy, as well as many typical citizens, seem to think their opinions have as much or even more sense to them than the considered reflections of people like Plato and Aristotle. Many people today seem to behave as if they think themselves more intelligent than the ancient sages.

It’s as if we have to have some incredible suspicion about the wisdom traditions because we think that science is some somehow superior. And yet science isn’t superior in any broad sense that matters to our true peace and happiness.

The wisdom traditions have the same basic epistemic commitment that scientists claim to have today. The philosophers and sages, the saints and priestesses and others we would have listened to if we lived in their cultures, would have insisted that we not accept their teachings as a matter of mere dogma or belief, but that we verify those teachings and make them real in our lives.

Moreover, we see that the wisdom traditions have long understood things our science continues to spend huge sums on verifying, without thereby helping us make the cultural changes we need to make.

As far as the Harvard study, we can get all the basic insights it offers in just about any of the venerable wisdom traditions of the world. We can take our pick: The various forms of Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Platonism, Indigenous traditions . . .

None of these are monolithic, and none of them lack the basic insights we find in the Harvard study. We don’t even have to turn to the sages of these and other venerable traditions. Even some of the more intellectual philosophers will do.

For instance, Aristotle’s teachings on ethics express his understanding of the importance of our childhood environment on our moral character and our success in life. He holds out some degree of optimism, but he recognizes that certain kinds of life circumstances will make it nigh impossible for some of us to become truly good and successful people.

When we look at the Harvard study, we see that a warm childhood correlates with an income that might be double that of another Harvard graduate of similar capacity and potential who experienced a relatively cold childhood. Vaillant has a word for the worst off of that latter group: the Loveless.

He has a word for the other people too, the ones with the warmest and most supportive of childhoods: the Cherished. The ancient Greeks also had a word for that group: the Lucky.

But we’re not allowed to talk about that, because we suffer from the delusion of meritocracy—the delusion that everyone gets what they deserve, in a system designed not on the basis of justice but on the basis of ignorance. That delusion goes completely together with the myth of the sovereign individual.

Something in us might feel a little cheap in thinking about the income figures reported in the Harvard study, but it’s an extraordinary idea—that we could somehow make a quarter million dollars a year or more, in some sense primarily because we had a warm childhood.

We don’t want to call that luck because we want to say that the person who achieved whatever they achieved, deserved it. And we have a general myth of meritocracy and sovereign individuals that functions to support the perpetuation of a system that doesn’t care about our merits as human beings.

We further want to minimize the good fortune of having had a parent who attended an Ivy League school, and then having the opportunity for ourselves to make lifelong connections at such a school. Legacy admissions were likely significant when the Harvard study began, and we know that an Ivy League education provides significant advantages that have nothing to do with some peculiar level of hard work on the part of the students who attend these schools.

Just going to Harvard means a roughly 58% increase in annual earnings a decade after graduation, which we can hardly attribute to intelligence and hard work alone. And overall wealth can become rather significant in relation to the Ivy League ecology.

And what does one derive from such a premise? The study found that, “35% of the centi-millionaires in the USA today are graduates of just eight schools, namely Harvard, MIT, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Yale, Cornell, and Princeton.”

Given the acceptance rate of these colleges, we know that millions of exceptionally talented, hard-working people don’t get into them. Acceptance isn’t measured on effort alone, and luck plays a crucial, and in some cases a decisive role.

Moreover, as we noted, those who gain entrance to Ivy League schools develop relationships that they can draw from for life. Again, we are relational beings, and the Ivy League is an ecology of mind.

We can recall here that Facebook started as a goofy game for Harvard students. Literally, it was just a stupid game for bored Ivy League students.

Then that game took a step into digitizing something Harvard already valued: Their student and alumni network—the Ivy League ecology of mind.

It wasn’t visionary genius that created Facebook. Rather, Facebook emerged as a relational game for rather fortunate people who knew very well the value of social connections. In the context of the dominant culture, we can refer to it as an aspect of the ecology of money, and it has more to do with our success than hard work alone. It has a heck of a lot to do with luck.

This doesn’t mean no wealthy people ever worked hard. It means that, if any of us became wealthy, and we met a comparable human being with a fraction of our material success—maybe even someone a whole lot like us, but someone who largely failed in their attempts at conventional success—we might naturally attribute our success to some slight edge in intelligence and hard work.

Wouldn’t that feel natural? Why did we succeed while they failed? We would imagine that we had been just a little more bold, just a little more creative, courageous, and smart.

But the Harvard study, together with some critical thinking, leads us to conclude we’re fooling ourselves. We do that at a cultural scale when we think of people like Zuckerberg, Gates, or Musk as visionary geniuses with capacities both rare and of the kind we actually need.

Much of our politics, economics, and self-help-industrial complex would find it very uncomfortable to acknowledge that we should attribute a significant degree of our success to a massive dose of good luck—including the incredible good luck of having a warm childhood—and that we must likewise attribute a good bit of our failure to a significant dose of bad luck, including the bad luck of having a crappy or even just a relatively unstable and cold childhood.

These facts serve to keep studies like this limited in a variety of ways, including what the scientists themselves will discover, conclude, or recommend, as well as what we as individuals and as a culture will accept, acknowledge, and incorporate.

One way we could interpret the Harvard study results would be to say that we have an obligation to make the world feel luckier, and to empower people to create more luck where they have encountered some bad luck. If we understood our relational nature well enough, we could begin to maximize the auspiciousness of our interbeing, by means of a holistic philosophy of life. A healthy culture can gift all its children a truly fortunate life, one rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty.

We tend to minimize luck as an explanatory factor because our minds get co-opted into the immune system of capitalism. We don’t see how we’ve become captured, how we become pawns in a pattern of insanity, machinery in a massive engine of ignorance. We fancy ourselves as thinking independently, but the Harvard study shows us the truth: Our thinking, our imagination, our success, and our experience have an ecological nature. We are relational beings, and no one realizes success “on their own”. Philosophy means attunement to this essential relationality, liberating its fullest positive potentials.

The nurturing some people receive in childhood arises as a lived philosophy of life. Philosophy is first and foremost how we do things. If we love our children and we practice love as far as possible for us, and if we support our children and we practice support and mutuality as far as that’s possible for us, then we have a fairly decent philosophy of life, and we convey that to our children, body to body. We don’t have to be perfect. We just have to be genuinely caring.

Those children might then go to a university like Harvard, where they would have the same exposure their parents might have had to the teachings of philosophy. Those children can go to Harvard and read Plato and the Stoics and other philosophers. It ends up being a sadly limited exposure, but even small fragments of wisdom can empower great action in the world. That, in fact, stands out as a terrible danger of fragmentary wisdom.

And we know that Socrates would have questioned the Loveless and the Cherished alike. Though the Cherished might have at least come across as less burdened in some ways, we should keep in mind that Socrates would have found them, perhaps in varying ways, lacking in true wisdom.

We all know these things. Our culture has a collective awareness of it. That’s why, when people get unhappy in ways that begin to make their lives seem more obviously dysfunctional, they go to therapists. The therapists then apply therapies derived from the wisdom traditions. We know the teachings of these traditions have happiness, well-being, and the good life as their aim—and we know the teachings work.

We should keep in mind the caveat that these men in the Harvard study would have made the same mistakes that people in the dominant culture in general make: We don’t really study and practice the ancient wisdom tradition so that we can fully inherit the spiritual riches they offer us.

But they would have gotten enough exposure to help them—in the context of having experienced warm childhoods which themselves embodied some degree of love, mutuality, support, and so on. They would have enjoyed enough helpful education and indoctrination to become relatively healthy—to achieve or realize a relatively healthy mind.

The experience of health here remains constrained. What the wisdom traditions would teach us as the true sanity and true vitality of body, mind, soul, and world—that remains off the table for most people in the dominant culture. But the Harvard study shows that, within the context of this culture, if we can at least achieve some modicum of mental wellbeing, then we can be successful in the culture, and arrive at a sense of happiness and meaning.

Excellence and true success have always been the promise of the wisdom traditions. Excellence meant something holistic—not merely excellence as a lawyer or a CEO, but becoming a truly excellent being, with skills in relative domains emerging from that holistic excellence. Success meant something holistic as well—a successful life, spiritually considered, even Cosmically considered.

We could call this the Sophianic reversion. Conventionally, we think like this: When I become successful, then I will be happy. The Sophianic reversion says: When we become happy, then we will realize true success. Even a relatively happy childhood makes us demonstrably more successful as adults, and on such a basis we can perhaps imagine what the sages wanted to teach us.

The Sophianic aspect marks out a difference between a blessed childhood in the context of the dominant culture and a blessed childhood according to the view of the wisdom traditions. Ideally, we emerge in a culture rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty. That would make wisdom, love, and beauty a real presence in our childhood. We cannot succeed on the basis of ignorance, hatred, and ugliness. The truest happiness has wisdom, love, and beauty as its cause. The most blessed childhood is a childhood rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty.

Discussions of the Harvard study fail to clarify any of the most crucial issues we have considered here. We deserve to know about our fuller potentials.

Indeed, the whole world depends on our unlocking our supreme inheritance, an inheritance both spiritual and ecological. We need to know that happiness is possible, but most authentically and vibrantly possible only on the basis of wisdom, love, and beauty—and not on the basis of anything the capitalist marketplace can offer us, and not on the basis of anything that accords with the main streams of the pattern of insanity that constitute the dominant culture.

We don’t fully understand how much health and vitality get excluded by the system we keep perpetuating. We don’t fully understand how much wisdom, love, beauty, peace, and justice we lack simply because a pattern of insanity keeps us cut off from our own supreme spiritual and ecological inheritance.

In spite of what it takes from us, we always try to rescue capitalism from reality. Capitalism’s immune system takes over our bodies and minds, and we begin to rationalize over the objections of our own soul.

We might think, “Why can’t we have a relational capitalism?” But that’s the wrong question. Everything is already relational.

A better question is, “Given that everything is relational, what is the most skillful, realistic, and creative way to organize our culture so that it best attunes with this relationality? What wise, loving, and beautiful ways can we live in harmony with spiritual and ecological realities, so that we cultivate the whole of life onward—gifting ourselves and future generations as much good luck, as much auspicious interbeing as possible?”

Capitalism has to do with turning relationality into abstraction, and cutting us off from the intimacy this relationality demands from us. Capitalism invites distance by means of abstraction and extraction. Relationality, on the other hand, invites entrance into intimacy and wonder.

By the time we would arrive at a capitalist marketplace that knew what to properly value and how to properly value it, we would have at that moment left the bounds of capitalism—escaping its fetters and chains.

Because capitalism can’t perform the functions we most need. It’s precisely antithetical to the relational intimacy that grounds happiness, success, and meaning.

When we understand what capitalism tries to do, and we understand what reality is, we see that capitalism is antithetical to reality.

Capitalism doesn’t properly fit with reality, it doesn’t accord with it—like a wobbly wheel that will never give us anything but a bumpy, noisy ride. That’s why the capitalist marketplace gets things so wrong: it’s always out of whack from reality.

What value we should put on the caring relationship between a mother and their child?

We actually understand that it’s priceless. We sense in our own bodies the tension between real values and the value process of the capitalist system. The good life is beyond pricing, but capitalism tries to put a price on everything.

One of the most tragic things about our situation is that we all know what’s important. Most of us hold values that don’t accord with the capitalist system, and almost all of us, on reflection, can understand why the processes of capitalism cannot make us happy or give us a fully satisfying sense of the meaning of life. It’s not as if somebody really revealed a deep surprise in these books about the Harvard study, and it’s no shock that the findings of the Harvard study reveal so many of the misguided notions and practices of a capitalist regime.

We may find it somewhat surprising in the sense of believing in a certain level of magic or sacredness in the world, and then finding actual evidence that we were right. We might believe telepathy is possible, but experiencing it or seeing real evidence can still come across as surprising.

Similarly, we may believe in the power of wisdom, love, and beauty, and yet it can seem rather magical to come across the empirical findings of the Harvard study and find them affirming what wisdom traditions the world over have told us, teachings most of us already profess to agree with.

Why, then, do these books keep coming out? It may seem we’ve dragged out our contemplation a bit, but we needed the time to really get at the importance of that question: Why did we need another book on the Harvard study?

George Vaillant published his book only ten years ago, and the latest findings haven’t revealed such novel insights that we really had to hear about all of this again. Why did Waldinger and Schultz think they had to write their own book?

I don’t think it’s because they were trying to get money or fame. I think it’s because the core lessons seem difficult for us to receive, and they sensed that we haven’t yet received them as a culture.

The core findings already exist as basic teachings in all the wisdom traditions. The genuine surprises of the study may come to this: We still haven’t learned the most obvious lessons, and, worse yet, we still won’t really focus on the more subtle and profound lesson of the study—that we are fully relational beings arising in a Cosmos that seems relational all the way down.

We seem unwilling to found our culture on the insight that happiness is love—which means happiness is also wisdom and beauty.

Ironically, we have all become so starved for these insights that, in our hunger, we tragically double down on ignorance, and pour more of our life energy into the money machine.

And, unfortunately, I don’t think these books do a very good job of helping people grapple with the most important aspects of our situation. They don’t make an argument for how this study adds to the mountain of evidence we have for our need to attempt a renaissance in the dominant culture, including a paradigm shift in science and our philosophy of life.

I don’t really expect the authors of this study to embark on a mission to create a culture more in accord with the findings of science and the wisdom traditions. That’s what you and I can do. That’s the role of dangerous wisdom.

If you have questions, suggestions, or stories about love, luck, and the true wealth of nations, send them in through dangerouswisdom.org and we might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.