Knowledge Overabundance and Wisdom Famine

Abstract Humanity in the 21st century is ensnared in a vertiginous epistemological paradox: knowledge emerges exponentially, while wisdom famishes systemically. Academic papers proliferate at zettabyte scale; artificial intelligence has fully penetrated the knowledge production pipeline. Yet accelerating alongside this knowledge explosion are ecological collapse, rising nuclear risk, deepening social polarization, and spreading technological alienation — an integral civilizational crisis. This paper's central argument is that the fundamental pathology of modern civilization is not a scarcity of knowledge, but a structural decoupling of knowledge from wisdom. The peer review system — which bore three centuries of scientific achievement — has been alienated into a centralized prestige machine built from citation indices, impact factors, and academic capital. When the goal of knowledge production shifts from understanding nature and seeking truth to the expanded reproduction of prestige and scholarly capital, knowledge loses its high-dimensional positional sense within the civilizational system. Drawing on Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory, dissipative structure thermodynamics, the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), and the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology, this paper argues that knowledge certification systems are irreversibly undergoing a third civilizational iteration — from peer review toward open validation. The paper's ultimate ambition is to shatter the modern myth that knowledge growth equals civilizational progress, to establish a three-tier epistemological hierarchy of data–knowledge–wisdom, and thereby to catalyze a civilizational paradigm shift from Knowledge Revolution to Wisdom Revolution. [Methodological Note] This paper's deployment of the Lao-Yang framework does not claim that Laozi predicted arXiv or open peer review. It argues that the cosmological structure Laozi identified — cascading hierarchical validation, ultimate appeal to natural process — is deeply isomorphic with conclusions that complex systems theory reached independently. This is a structural resonance argument, not a claim of historical causation.