IMAGINE AN INVESTMENT MODEL DESIGNED NOT just for financial return but for cultivating wisdom at local and societal scale—one that provides the equivalent of roads, plumbing, power grids, and public spaces for human and ecological development that can be built upon for centuries to come. An investment model that integrates real estate, human and ecological development, culture, and research to create higher education ecosystems where individuals and ecologies evolve together. 

Instead of merely funding individual projects or ventures, we could create an approach to building decentralized yet interwoven Wisdom Infrastructure—a set of developmental spaces, cultural narratives, communities, ecologies of praxis, and economic engines designed to foster discernment, depth, and relational intelligence at scale.

This is what Zak Stein might call "a decentralized education system for a time between worlds"—the necessary architecture for cultivating life-affirming local and planetary wisdom. 

What is Wisdom?

In its simplest definition,

Wisdom = knowing what to do, and when.

Within that simple definition lies a deeper, multidimensional process which involves not just the individual, but also the ecology in which an individual exists. John Vervaeke describes wisdom as relevance realization—the skill of filtering information to uncover meaningful patterns and insights. True wisdom requires overcoming self-deception, seeing beyond biases and illusions that distort perception.

Vervaeke identifies four ways of knowing that shape wisdom:

Wisdom is not just intellectual—it is lived, embodied, and cultivated through virtue, dialogue, and deep connection. It is not an abstract ideal but a practical necessity, shaping individuals, communities, and entire civilizations.

An Accelerating Wisdom Gap

Our world is transforming rapidly, yet the infrastructures needed to cultivate wisdom—ethical discernment, embodied insight, and relational depth—are missing. Despite unprecedented access to information, society is increasingly fragmented and disconnected from meaning.

Once anchors of deep learning, traditional institutions now function more as bureaucracies than catalysts for transformation. Modern education sharpens intellect but neglects relational intelligence, emotional regulation, and ethical action, leaving many informed but unprepared to navigate complexity.

Meanwhile, technological progress has outpaced our collective capacity for wisdom and sense-making, widening what the Center for Humane Technology calls The Wisdom Gap—the growing divide between rising global complexity and our ability to meet it with coherence.

As the Center for Humane Technology illustrates, technology not only accelerates the complexity of global challenges but also erodes our ability to process and integrate information meaningfully. The rise of artificial intelligence, deepfakes, and algorithmic manipulation makes it harder for individuals and societies to discern truth from misinformation. This manifests in:

This widening wisdom gap isn't just a theoretical concern—it’s driving a tangible shift in behavior, as people seek out practices, communities, and frameworks that offer deeper integration and meaning. The market reflects this shift, revealing a growing demand for structures that cultivate wisdom, not just knowledge.

Declining Investment in Higher Education 

The world is starving its intellectual commons. Across the Global North, public investment in higher education is in steady decline, reflecting not just shifting budgets but a deeper crisis of cultural foresight.

In the U.S., public funding for higher education has dropped from 11.4% of state budgets in 2000 to 8.7% in 2023, with another $1 billion in cuts looming. France has slashed nearly a billion euros from university budgets, jeopardizing research and scholarship. In Germany, rising defense spending threatens social investments, while in the UK, 75% of universities are projected to be in deficit by 2024.

This is not an isolated trend—it’s a global pattern. As governments divert resources toward military expansion, the space for intellectual and cultural development contracts. The long-term risks are existential: without sustained investment in education, we erode the very foundations of adaptive, resilient societies.

For systemic investors, this shift has profound implications. As the state retreats, the burden falls on philanthropy, private capital, and new institutional forms. This moment calls for a rethinking of higher education— an alternative to the dominant mode of rote learning - creating alternative, resilient learning ecosystems. Modern monasteries, regenerative learning hubs, and networked wisdom centers must rise to fill the void. If we fail to act, this is not just a budgetary crisis—it is a civilizational failure.

But, There is a Clear Market Demand

The surge in wellness, self-help, eco-tourism, and related industries over the past decades signals a deeper, unfulfilled longing. This growing demand reflects a widespread impulse to reclaim neglected ways of knowing. Modern education has privileged propositional and procedural knowledge, leaving participatory and perspectival ways of knowing underdeveloped. In response, people are gravitating toward alternative modalities—meditation, therapy, yoga, plant medicine, transformational travel, and wisdom traditions—seeking the relational depth and embodied intelligence that formal systems have failed to cultivate.

Rather than merely chasing personal growth, mindfulness, or therapy in isolation, I propose that they are—whether consciously or not—attempting to piece together a more integral understanding of wisdom, albeit in fragmented ways.

This shift is evident in the rapid growth of key markets, all signaling the same core need:

However, despite this surging demand and clear market signals, current solutions are falling short of addressing the fundamental need for wisdom development (the integration of of multiple ways of knowing). Understanding why these existing approaches fail is crucial for designing more effective alternatives.

Yet, Most Offerings Fall Short

Most existing programs fail to deliver the depth and coherence required for true transformation. The landscape is crowded with fragmented, shallow, or misaligned solutions that struggle to create lasting impact:

Without a coherent foundation, these efforts remain scattered, fragile, and often incapable of providing the kind of enduring transformation people seek. The solution is not to create yet another program or platform—it’s to build the underlying infrastructure that can connect, support, and deepen these initiatives in a meaningful way.

The key question becomes: What would it look like to create a comprehensive system that addresses these shortcomings while meeting the rising demand? How might we design an infrastructure that fosters genuine wisdom development at scale—without losing depth, rigor, or coherence?

So, What Could Wisdom Infrastructure Look Like?

We often think of education as something that happens in classrooms, confined to a specific phase of life. But what if we viewed learning as a lifelong process, woven into the fabric of everyday existence? Zak Stein argues that our educational models must evolve beyond industrial-era schooling to support human development across an entire lifespan. This means shifting from a narrow focus on formal education to creating wisdom infrastructure—an interconnected system of spaces, practices, and institutions that foster continuous growth, deep inquiry, and societal transformation.

Instead of treating wisdom as a personal pursuit, we could embed it into society by investing in the infrastructure that enables collective cultivation. From this perspective, imagine four interwoven domains, each reflecting a fundamental aspect of how societies are built:

These domains don’t function in isolation—they form a reinforcing cycle. In startup terms, this could be seen as a growth loop, where each element strengthens and expands the others over time.

Imagine the journey from an individual’s perspective:

The above is of course a highly oversimplified an linear illustrative example, of course, real growth is never a straight line. It’s iterative, nonlinear, and shaped by personal and societal conditions. But the key idea is that by providing the infrastructure to support development over a lifetime, we can make wisdom more accessible—not just through isolated experiences or content, but through a system designed for long-term transformation.

So, what does this mean for how we invest in it?

A Hybrid Capital Approach to Portfolio Creation

Building wisdom infrastructure requires a blended financial strategy—one that balances market-driven innovation with mission-protected stewardship. Just as thriving cities rely on both private investment and public goods, wisdom infrastructure must integrate for-profit capital to drive growth and philanthropic capital to experiment with new structures, safeguard depth, equity, and long-term resilience.

When thoughtfully deployed, these forms of capital don’t just coexist—they reinforce and amplify each other.

For-Profit Capital: Scaling Sustainable Wisdom Infrastructure

Investing in developmental real estate, wisdom-aligned businesses, and media platforms creates financially sustainable pathways for wisdom infrastructure, ensuring long-term scalability and continuous innovation. While not exhaustive, the following areas illustrate key investment opportunities:

Nonprofit Catalytic Capital: Seeding and Safeguarding Public Wisdom

Philanthropic capital plays a critical role in funding research, fellowships, and cultural initiatives—ensuring wisdom infrastructure remains a public good beyond the constraints of market forces.

The above is not an exhaustive list, but merely a pointer towards a high level architecture. Much of this work is already in motion, and future writing will explore these components in greater depth, including potential governance structures, market mapping etc. For now, this serves as a broad orientation—a starting point for thinking about how capital can be structured to support a resilient, regenerative wisdom ecosystem. 

The question then arises: are there historical precedents that we can learn from? Can they help provide the guardrails that can disable bad actors from weaponizing such an infrastructure?

Historical Precedents: Learning from the Past

This is not the first time in history that we face the challenge of cultivating wisdom at scale. Many societies—across vastly different cultural contexts—have systematically invested in wisdom infrastructure during periods of profound change. These investments were not incidental; they were deliberate responses to societal transformation, creating institutions that shaped human development for generations.

With this broader lens, we can still learn from historical precedents where societies made deliberate investments in integrated knowledge cultivation:

While these institutions may have stagnated or introduced new challenges over time, they were the right solutions for their era, offering valuable lessons on both success patterns and failure points. Their legacy proves that investing in wisdom development is not only possible—it has been foundational to thriving civilizations.

Yet, limiting our perspective to educational models rooted in a single societal framework ignores the deep wisdom embedded in Indigenous traditions, where learning is interwoven with land, kinship, and lived experience. These traditions hold vital insights for designing more decentralized, embedded learning ecosystems suited to our time. The goal is not to privilege one model over another, but to recognize that each holds essential pieces of the puzzle—together contributing to the solutions we now need.

The question is not whether to invest in wisdom infrastructure, but whether we have the foresight to build developmental ecosystems capable of carrying us beyond today’s crises into a future worth living.

Will we choose short-term expedience or long-term flourishing? History shows what is possible—the future is shaped by what we do now.

The Path Forward: A Call to Action

History shows that investing in wisdom infrastructure isn’t just an idealistic pursuit—it’s a proven strategy for societal flourishing. Time and again, civilizations that prioritized wisdom cultivation created enduring legacies of innovation, resilience, and prosperity. Today, we find ourselves at a unique crossroads, where unprecedented technological capabilities, market demand, and historical necessity converge to create a rare window of opportunity.

The crises we face are not just technological, economic, or environmental—they are failures of sensemaking, relationship, and cultural transmission. We need more than education; we need a reconstitution of the conditions for learning itself. This means integrating an ecological worldview, leveraging technology without being enslaved by it, and reintegrating the wisdom traditions that have guided human development for millennia. 

It’s about shifting from extractive models of knowledge to generative, life-affirming practices that cultivate coherence and syntropy—within individuals, in ecologies, between communities, and across systems. This is, I believe, the needed architecture and infrastructure of wisdom: the spaces, tools, and cultures that enable humans to grow in complexity, wisdom, and relational depth.

This future is still unwritten. The question is not whether transformation will happen, but what kind—will we drift further toward dystopianism, or will we cultivate a Renaissance of Regeneration, where wisdom shapes the next era. 

Nico (Nicolas) Michaelsen is a co-founder of Basin Collective, a wisdom studio enabling the creation of cultural and physical infrastructure for a more regenerative and coherent future. Through projects and companies spanning developmental programs, land-based projects, and open-source commons, Basin supports systems where wisdom becomes a lived and structural force.

This post was originally written on Nico's Ecologies of Wisdom substack, and has been edited and published here as part of Emerge's work as part of the Cohere+ project.