I spent time this morning watching online videos of Californian politicians speechifying about the deepening budget crisis.

At one news conference Schwarzeneggar, ever the macho posturer, hammered away about "fiscal responsibility"--he meant not taxing the wealthy, an obvious source of revenue--and backed off when questioned about his threat to veto every bill on his desk. He seemed to be unaware or uncaring of the loss of the trust of his colleagues this implied. The hard negotiations don't succeed inside sealed government buildings: they unfold in small, informal conversations between people who know each other and who can come together in spite of their differences. Our action-hero governor seems not to have learned about or acquired this important skill. His worldview rests on a belief in will power like the sky sits on the shoulders of Atlas.

The Democrats responded not singly but in a group clustered around the mike as though huddling for shelter. I sometimes think the Republicans and Democrats ought to rename their parties the Bullies and the Bullied.

Most would agree that the system is broken, but public discussion about why nearly always focuses on the surface immediates: regulation versus deregulation, this law or that stopgap.What no reporter asks out loud is: Why so little wisdom among our leaders and experts?

"Wisdom" comes from words that mean "to see" and "to know."  Through education of the widest kind--not just test-taking but lifelong love of learning--wisdom sees up ahead and around corners. It knows multiple perspectives and levels of discussion: not just the financial and political but the ethical, social, cultural, psychological, and even spiritual. A wise person is one who goes beyond surface explanations in order to address the problem at its roots.

Unwise leadership has over time produced a fiscal crisis in California so tremendous that solutions which hurt no one are no longer possible. If we expect to prevent this from happening again--as it has for the past several years--we had better be ready to question the basic premises under which money is managed: what it's for, who manages it, whom it serves.

Further cuts in education have been proposed by some of the same "leaders" who throw the word "socialism" around whenever the kind of redistributions of wealth advocated by Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King come up for discussion; but a glance at history reveals that organized selfishness has never worked as a philosophy for anything but controlling the masses from the top down.  Our purposes might be better served by a recruitment campaign for wise leaders who spend more time educating themselves and us about how to see farther and deeper than at feuding and fiddling while Sacramento burns.