Naturally, there are far too many aspects of this conflict than can be explored in a short paper, but let's examine a few of them.
First, please notice that things like evil are less "defeated" by wisdom than "precluded" by it. In short, where wisdom reigns, evil is simply absent. "Warring" with evil is a secondary phenomenon and a symptom that collective wisdom is fragile and impotent.
Another way to say this is that "moral imperatives" are a kind of holding action to compensate for the relative absence of wisdom. No one lives by "should's" when their lives are grounded in wisdom. Where morality is King, evil too is usually King. Only defective life forms obsess about morality.
The same is even truer for the "stupidity" explanation of human chaos or misery. This mutual exclusion is more obvious since authentic wisdom is necessarily consummated intelligence. Indeed, wisdom and intelligence are virtually synonyms -- even though intelligence can "specialize" itself away from wisdom.
This is why science, for all it value and challenge, does not now and never has been a force for wisdom.
"Transcendence" however, is symptom of wisdom, since it can mean transcending the collective human mind set. Said differently, it’s transcending the arbitrary and socially conditioned mind set of our species. This is approximately what the Hindu/Buddhist tradition calls "Maya" (the world illusion). Another turn of phrase is "consensus reality", since it's the "unexamined living our lives from place" for around six billion Homo sapiens.
Notice again this doesn’t have to conflict with the responsible explorations of science, even though wisdom is grounded in profoundly different dimensions.
The First Noble Truth of the Buddha (perhaps somewhat arbitrarily assigned to him after his death) is that life is Dukha, and dealing with Dukha is where wisdom begins. Dukha basically means anguish or suffering; thus for the Buddha, beginning where you are, means beginning with anguish and suffering.
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