The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulations as a Basis for Social Policy
This month we’re taking a look at political thought, starting with this weeks book, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulations as a Basis for Social Policy by Thomas Sowell. So let’s do this.
Now….not everyone knows who Thomas Sowell is. THIS is Thomas Sowell, and he is one of the premier economists, economic historians, and social theorists to come out of the 20th century. His career starts way back in the 1960s, after he completed his college degree and got a little of the real world. And since he cut his teeth pre-degree in Washington DC before earning his doctorate in Economics in Illinois and then going to teach at Stanford, it should come as no surprise that by the time he published this book in 1995, the prose is fairly dripping with disdain for the anointed.
And I am HERE FOR IT.
For those of you who don’t know, Sowell comes down right of center. Which, in the eyes of the anointed, makes him very benighted. And that’s the language he uses in the book. Our political overlords who believe in their own vision and are legends in their own minds are the anointed. And those of us who don’t fall in line with their vision are benighted.
So what do the anointed believe, that the rest of us fail to grasp.
First off, those of us who don’t see things their way are guilty of sin. I think Hilary Clinton used her outside voice when she called us a basket of deplorables...that is EXACTLY what they think of us. Benighted sinners, living in a deplorable state of darkness for the crime of not SEEING.
And Sowell spells out the formula and once you see it, you can’t NOT see it. Stage 1 is the crises. Some situation pops up that the anointed determine they have the solution for. Stage 2 is the solution. The anointed propose their solution and anyone who protests that the solution is in some way flawed is dismissed as being absurd, simplistic, or dishonest. Stage 3 is the results. The solution is implemented just as the anointed outlined, leading to the exact results the benighted said would happen. Stage 4 the response. Those who say I told you so are again dismissed as simplistic because they ignore the complexities involved. And then the goal post is shifted so that the anointed can claim a victory.
If all of that sounds familiar...well, remember about 6 years ago, when we were told two weeks to flatten the curve? And masks, and endless vaccination schedules….and then we started seeing headlines like this?
Now, that’s just in recent history. The facts and statistics Sowell uses are for The War on Poverty, Sex Education, and Criminal Justice. And he includes all the grisly details of the backlash of each of these. Prior to Johnson’s declaring the War on Poverty, poverty had been on a ten year decline, and poverty rates skyrocketed afterwards, and have continued to increase every decade ever since.
Statistics for Sex Education and Criminal Justice were just as dismal. Once we started outsourcing Sex Education to the high schools, teen pregnancy and STD rates...well, skyrockted. Off the charts. Criminal Justice was the other side of the coin for me. When he talks about the failure of the Warren courts, with Miranda v AZ, which gave use the famous Miranda warnings. Crime went up. Criminals walked.
Now earlier this year I read many books highlighting the importance of Miranda and asking for an attorney if you find yourself under arrest. And this is true. The problem of corrupt and/or lazy cops strong arming innocents into prison is a completely separate problem from experienced criminals now being made aware of their right to an attorney. Miranda, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. Activist judges have been rewriting the laws from the bench since FDR’s hand picked appointees greenlit all his New Deal legislation. And it’s only gotten worse from there.
He even includes information on a program out of California...because of COURSE something this stupid could only come out of California, the Alternatives to Incarceration program. This was a federally funded program...so, you know, ALL OUR TAXES paid for this...sent selected prisoners to colleges to complete their sentences. Under the belief that if we just TOLD them rape was bad, they would stop raping. Not everyone was on board. Shockingly enough, local law enforcement advised against this. The police chief in question, when he pointed out that stalking and rapes were up on the campuses where the convicts were enrolled reported:
“When I complained, the project director said the “clients” were screened and that California had declared it an exemplary program. Actually, we later found out that the program screened applicants only on the basis of academic scores. Federal rules prevented consideration of their criminal records. And California had declared the program exemplary only because it submitted quarterly reports on time.
When my complaints about the program became public, I was censured by the students and faculty and advised by my superiors in city hall to go easy. After all, this was an exemplary, federally funded program to reduce recidivism.”
Stalking and rapes continued at San Jose State University campus and it wasn’t until a few months later when the police “arrested an honor student in the program for brutally torturing, raping, and murdering two women near the university,” that the program was ended.
For some reason, because the murderer was “articulate and the project had often used him to show how wonderful it was that bright people could get a college education instead of languishing in prison.” this is still seen as a successful program by the anointed.
He includes a break down of fun with numbers, aka statistics, explaining how the anointed twist the numbers to tell the story they want to tell. This was particularly interesting because...well, again, this book was written in 1995. As this world renowned economist breaks down how the anointed forced banks to reconfigure how they determine mortgage risk, you can see the groundwork being laid for the 2008 housing collapse.
One of the most telling “statistics” he covers, as if the housing collapse preview wasn’t enough, was the statistics on hunger in America. One of the hunger activists during the Hunger in America campaign determined how many people were hungry by “determining how many were eligible for food stamps and then subtracting those who in fact received food stamps.” Seems like simple math, right? Only of the 150 hungriest counties in America, most of them were farming counties. The income of the farmers technically qualified them for food stamps. Only they had no need of food stamps because they were GROWING THEIR OWN FOOD. The activist would have been more honest if they had removed all farms from their numbers. But that would have told a very different story...one that went against…The Message.
And no matter how much evidence you throw up to the contrary, the anointed plays verbal games to explain why they’re right, and your ignorant. In their eyes at least. Sowell calls them Teflon Prophets, citing specifically John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Ehrlich, Ralph Nader as specific prophets who have made prophecies that failed to come to fruition and yet remain beloved. We could add Al Gore, Anthony Fauci, Greta Thunberg to that list. Not a single prediction right, yet people still quote them as harbingers of knowledge and wisdom who can do no wrong.
But it’s really fun when he points out the fictitious history...like the legacy of slavery. Again...this is Thomas Sowell. When he puts “legacy of slavery” in quotes, you know his take down is gonna be good.
Sowell walks us through the verbal sleight of hand the anointed like to use, and the specific vocabulary they use AND HOW THEY USE IT. It’s not just that they twist the meaning of capitalism so that even people who directly prophet and survive off of capitalism….like, for example, certain recently famous authors who just penned deals for shows off of their work, decry it as a basis of living. But as Sowell points out “Despite the name, capitalism is not an ism. It is not a philosophy but an economy. Ultimately, it is nothing more and nothing less than an economy not run by political authorities.”
Put in my own words, capitalism is nothing more than the exchange of goods for services. The most common “good” has been cash for literally millenia...like whatever a peoples has decided is valuable. But at it’s most fundamental, that’s all capitalism is. The exchange of goods for services.
I do want to throw a shout out to one of my favorite YouTube historians who threw out this fantastically sarcastic tweet in defense of Capitalism the other day….if you’ve never heard of The Fat Electrician, you don’t know what you’ve been missing. And also, HOW have you not heard of him, he’s definitely more famous than I am.
The biggest problem is that the anointed think in terms of solutions. Only, there are no solutions. Only trade offs, a fact which they coveniently sweep under the rug when discussing the fallout from any of their “good for you” schemes.
Let’s take it back to the beginning, since pandemics are being bandied about again with the recent outbreak of hanta virus on a cruise ship has been causing panic among the mindless masses of the anointed.
Not a single one of the “solutions” offered by the anointed 6 years ago worked. And yet the same people who openly decry Walmart and Amazon as symbols of all that is wrong with capitalism...see above on capitalism… fail to grasp that it was GOVERNMENT overreach, GOVERNMENT “solutions” to the pandemic, that led to the direct and permanent closure of hundreds of thousands of small businesses...you know, the only places that you COULD shop that wasn’t Walmart or Amazon.
There are no solutions in life. Only trade offs. And the reality is, the only way a pandemic ends, is to ride it out. Death comes for us all in it’s time, and rather than acknowledging that, the government pandered solutions that were no solutions at all, and specifically designed to remove critical thought across the board. Which is exactly what the anointed want.
I dare say this is why the anointed are so very anti-free speech. And very pro-”let the government regulate the internet.” As Sowell says in his closing chapter “our exploration of the vision of the anointed will begin with its greatest achievement and its greatest danger, which are one and the same: That vision has become self-contained and self-justifying—which is to say, independent of empirical evidence. That is what makes it dangerous, not because a particular set of policies may be flawed or counterproductive, but because insulation from evidence virtually guarantees a never-ending supply of policies and practices fatally independent of reality. This self-contained and self-justifying vision has become a badge of honor and a proclamation of identity: To affirm it is to be one of us and to oppose it is to be one of them.”
I loved this book, but I’ve also been a long time admirer of how Sowell handles himself in confrontation, always maintaining a calm demeanor while politely yet firmly issuing a verbal smackdown. But if you want to know more about the inner machinations of the anointed, I highly recommend The Vision of the Anointed.
