Wisdom is the making of shrewd, appropriate decisions (problem-solving); it is the USE to which knowledge is put.

• Mentally mature people make better decisions than children. Many people grow old but do not grow up.
• Mental maturity can be defined by using thirteen attributes
• All the attributes are learned characteristics.
• Some children begin to exhibit mentally mature characteristics at age six.
• Mental maturity is a learned condition
• We select what we learn. We select what we relearn.
• Wisdom is a do-it-yourself project.

People who are mentally mature are the happiest. They make the best neighbors, friends, employees, and bosses. They do best work and make best products.

Note: 1) As mental maturity increases, wisdom increases. However, a successful bank robber may be wise, but that person is mentally immature. A mentally mature person would not rob a bank. Converses are not reliable.

2) Mental maturity is separate from chronological age, income, academic achievement, socioeconomic class, or "intelligence." For various reasons, most of which include mental immaturity, geniuses and "experts" are fallible.

3) All of humanity’s miseries are traceable to mental immaturity on some level of influence. As humanity adopts the notion that most of its miseries are caused by mental immaturity, it can adopt new avenues of politics, jurisprudence, counseling, and restructuring lives.

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Most long-term decisions made for humanity are panel (corporate) resolutions

The wisdom of corporate judgement is only as good as the combined mental maturity of the members of the panel

Committees (panels) are fallible. They have great influence (CEOs rely on them), but have little responsibility (they disband soon after the decisions are made).

The next frontier: raise humanity’s aggregate mental maturity level and adopt a functional system of logic, for cultural problems.

A functional system of logic: Establish pertinent self-evident truths, based on precise definitions and obvious inferences;then list them in logical order until a conclusion can be drawn. Challenge every step by the Attributes.

Note: No statement is perfectly self-evident. Philosophy will establish the statement, science will establish how true it is. Self-evident truths are based upon cogent and unchallengeable definitions.