What, in his earlier work Sowell called "the constrained vs the unconstrained vision," and what Steven Pinker renamed "the tragic vs the Utopian vision, in this book Sowell discusses as "the tragic vision vs the vision of the anointed." Of course, the "vision of the anointed" IS a Utopian vision uncompromised by the constraints of "Tragic" realities.
Why would anyone choose tragic constraints over Utopian possibilities? Think back to American civics classes. The Constitution is framed to "constrain" the corruptions and limitations of human nature in the exercise of power. Government of-the-people is based in trade-offs and compromises that always fall short -- that are subject to criticism and grievance from one or all sides.
Why do "the Anointed" choose an "unconstrained" or "Utopian" vision? I will try to summarize by saying that the Utopian vision gives "the Anointed" an edge over the "unenlightened." Utopian policies are the evidence of their moral superiority over the "less caring," or frequently "angry" masses. In this 1995 book, Sowell even goes so far as to say that the Elites even relish the outrage their policies may elicit from the masses, because the opposition increases the distance or the heights from which the Elites can look down upon the masses! (p.248) I am sure that were he writing today (over 20 years later), Sowell would point to Angela Merkel vs the common people of Germany. Merkel and other governing Elites of the EU have opened the borders of Europe to millions of unvetted Muslim refugees. Consequently and inevitably, Europe is plagued with riots, gang rapes and mass murders. Citizen opposition is mobilizing street protests and media mockery of Angela Merkel. Yet she is doubling down on her open borders policies. Insane?? or "the vision of the Anointed"?
"Consistent with this pattern of seeking differentiation at virtually all cost has been the adoption of a variety of anti-social individuals and groups as special objects of solicitude--which is to say, special examples of the wider and loftier vision of the anointed." (p.248) This explains to me the parade at the 2016 Democratic National Convention--mothers of cop killers, transgenders and victims of social injustice.
To rise above the masses, the Anointed espouse views more advanced than the norm; they must "progress" beyond the Founders, and purify society of the prejudices and superstitions of traditions. They are "change agents." Sowell quotes historians Will and Ariel Durant from their "Lessons of History:"
"No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history." (p.112)
The reckless change in social, economic and foreign policy we see transforming our world today is the result of the Anointed exercising power. But the anarchy and ruin of civilization is necessary in order to install a new, better world order -- the Utopia of the Anointed.

Thomas Sowell pulls no punches in this classic. In this classic gem, Sowell catalogs the efforts of the anointed, or rather cultural elites who believe they know better than the rest of us, to make society more just for those who they perceive to be victims. According to the vision of the anointed, equality can only be achieved using the power of the legislature and the courts because society is naturally broken. Sowell explains how their assumptions about society are inaccurate and have led to disastrous consequences. This book covers social policy from the 1960s to the 1990s and is still just as relevant as when it was when it first came out in 1995.

In his book Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell offers key insights into how and why the American left has run wild in it’s attempts to change America.

As the subtitle suggests, “Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy,” Sowell posits that the American left’s policies are egocentric exercises meant to establish themselves as saviors and their opponents as villains. Sowell shows that historically the left has been far more willing to condemn their opponents as evil even though the people they’re condemning will be more likely to tag them as merely mistaken.

Sowell points out the history of the left’s willingness to move the goal posts for policy proposals. When the War on Poverty was passed, the stated goal was to reduce poverty federal welfare roles through “hand ups not hand outs”, when sex education was introduced the goal was to reduce teen pregnancy. However when the programs were enacted and had the opposite effect, the liberals invented new goals to justify the programs saying things would have been worse had these programs not been implemented despite the fact that both poverty and teen pregnancy were headed down prior to the introduction of liberal efforts to fix them.

Sowell also gives a great clinic on how liberals will often manipulate statistics. He shows how liberals manage to magnify and exaggerate concerns over “income inequality” by failing into consideration simple factors such as the fact that younger people tend to make less than older people and that poverty tends to be much more of a transient state in America.

Sowe’ll’s wide-ranging treatise covers such items as the number of the people who manage to be ridiculously wrong without losing one iota of credibility such as Paul Ehrlich who made the bold yet very wrong predictions of a population bomb. He also cites many of the falsehoods behind leftist crusades including how the car that served as the basis for Ralph Nader’s “unsafe at any speed” campaign wasn’t so unsafe after all.

Sowell contrasts the vision of the anointed with what he calls the tragic vision, which many Christians would equate to our life in a fallen world. Because we live in an imperfect world, Sowell posits “there are no solutions only trade offs.” One example he cites was a proposed regulation that was offered after a baby was sucked out of an airplane when a cabin depressurized. The regulation would have required parents to purchase a seat for children under two when flying on planes. A study found that to pass a regulation that would prevent the death of one baby on an airplane would actually lead to the deaths of nine others due to parents who would be unable to afford the extra seat and be forced to take less expensive and less safe transportation, in addition to high economic costs.

Because the left fails to recognize this and because they shut themselves off to the impact of reality through moving targets and ignoring inconvenient facts, Sowell argues that the unquestioned predominance of the vision of the anointed is a danger to America’s economic and political freedom. While the book written nearly twenty years ago, the book feels as if it could have been written today as we’ve seen much of the same phenomena in the debates over same sex marriage and Obamacare.

If the book can be faulted, it’s that Sowell is great at pointing out problems and the strategies of the Anointed must has no suggestions for overcoming them. He points that, in many cases, the very nature of media (even more than the bias of those who work in the media) works against conservatives. We saw this during the Obamacare debate. While most Americans were satisfied with their health care and receiving the care they needed, it’s very hard to make a dramatic emotional point about that.

Still, the book is great for those who want to understand the polemics of the left and how a small minority has succeeded in an aggressive culture war. The Vision of the Anointed is a solid read that offers keen insights into how we got where we are today.

Positives from the book:
- fairly representative of the American right-wing in their stated public policy dimension.

Negatives from the book:
- ideological in nature, but presenting itself as a fact based guide to policy issues.
- black and white thinking, with no room for nuance.
- frequent straw-man of liberal viewpoints. Liberal arguments in this book are almost a caricature, so they can be more readily debunked.

Some views found in the books:
- Homosexuals are a danger to others due to the AIDS epidemic (p.216-217).
- Reagan tax cut for the rich didn't cause the budget deficit, because we had more in revenues under his administration than previous administrations (as if other taxes could not be increased during the same period).
- Black/white disparities are only due to falling marriage rates among African Americans, and not because of slavery, Jim Crow, or systemic discrimination.
- welfare is the root of all evil

All in all, I think there are strong conservative arguments out there. But this isn't it.

A primer for understanding political correctness. Sowell brilliantly exposes the progressive mindset and methodology, and its cohesive dynamics in the irrational social system it propagates, including its psychological appeal to self-flattery, its lack of accountability or corrective feedback, and its special suitedness to media proliferation. The chapter “The Vocabulary of the Anointed” is particularly good and exposes the anointed’s successful mainstreaming of its language and all its in-built fallacies. My minor quibble is a few subtle notes of social conservatism. I recommend it to all those wanting, or merely willing, to question the established zeitgeist.
Rating: between 4 and 5 stars.

Basically a case against woke-ism. Really important ideas. I read as audio and need to reread in print.

This was a pre-read for me, as it’s part of Ambleside Online’s Year 11. This type of reading is the most difficult for me because it can’t just be skimmed, I had to read carefully and with a pencil marking the ha up so I could follow Sowell’s arguments. I can tell he is brilliant, and he has a knack for throwing a memorable alliterative phrase into a sentence, though I sometimes felt he was a bit repetitive, and occasionally wondered if he wasn’t falling into some logical fallacies himself, but no, I’m not going to cite examples here.

It was rather fascinating though. In the beginning when he is discussing the tactics of the Anointed he uses examples of policies that were somewhat before my time. I know of them but didn’t really have first hand knowledge of living through the times when those policies were put into place. But because they were just examples of the overarching principles/tactics he was discussing, I could see how exactly these ideas are still playing out in current events - and it was eerily on point. So, though published in the 90s, I’d say this is still a highly relevant read, and though it may not initially interest everyone, it’s very close to a Must Read, in my opinion.

A must read. As apropos for today as when it was written in the 90's. If you tire of the lightweight stuff from the talking heads like a Hannity, a Rush, or an O'Reilly, then read Sowell's Vision of the Anointed. Watch Sowell fillet mostly leftist-type thought chapter after chapter, page after page, even paragraph after paragraph. Sowell brings to bear so many of his skills as a sociologist and economist that the reader cannot possibly master all of Sowell's arguments after just one read. So, not only does this book proved laughes-a-minute seeing Sowell trounce liberalesk positions on poverty, racism, sexism, crime, government, family, religion, etc., it could also serve as a non-technical textbook on how to do good sociological work. Thus, multiple reads are probably needed for maximum benefit. However, one read will do just fine in allowing you to knock around the majority of anointed you run into on the street, at the water cooler, or even at the next family Thanksgiving.

(P.S. Many Republicans, neocons, and even many evangelicals of the so-called Christian right fit into the camp of anointed; or so I say. So, Sowell's not a talking head for the Republican party. In fact, he's a brilliant Stanford sociologist and economoist who also happens to be black, which has to just grate on the nerves of many anointed, which I might in other circumstances be ashamed to admit gives me some mild sadistic pleasure.)

This is a superb book if you want to know precisely how statistics are manipulated, ignored, or misinterpreted in order to support social/political visions that are impervious to empirical evidence. It's wonderful for debunking a plethora of doomsday economic and social myths, and it provides a thorough outline of the type of specious arguments used to avoid addressing specific objections to specific policies and programs. Any student of economics, politics, or sociology should read this book and heed its call to intellectual honesty by committing to examining policies on the basis of their actual outcomes as indicated by empirical evidence rather than evaluating them according to their philosophical conformity with a pre-existing set of assumptions.

The book contrasts the two primary visions held by people: "the vision of the anointed" and "the tragic vision" and how these visions affect policy approaches. To the anointed, there are solutions, but, to the tragic, there are only trade-offs. "To those with the vision of the anointed, the question is: What will remove particular negative features in the existing situation to create a solution? Those with the tragic vision ask: What must be sacrificed to achieve this particular improvement?" For the anointed, "costless" solutions abound, requiring only their discernment to discover and their informed third-party decision making to implement. The vision of the anointed does "not…incorporate constraints as the central feature and ever-present ingredient in its thinking, while the tragic vision does." To those with the tragic vision, says Sowell, "the central question is 'Who is to choose? And by what process, and with what consequences for being wrong?'" Sowell bemoans how easy it is "to be wrong - - and to persist in being wrong - - when the costs of being wrong are paid by others."

Sowell has a bone to pick with "anointed" politicians: "political attempts to 'solve' various 'problems' ignores the costs created by each 'solution' and how that exacerbates other problems. Much of political rhetoric is concerned with presenting issues as isolated problems to be solved - - not as trade-offs within an overall system constrained by inherent limitations of resources and knowledge."

I've been reading Thomas Sowell for awhile, and I know he has long been disturbed by the way "anointed" politicians and bureaucrats enact policies in the United States: "To a remarkable extent…empirical evidence is neither sought beforehand nor consulted after a policy has been instituted. Facts may be marshaled for a position already taken, but that is very different from systematically testing opposing theories by evidence." Having worked as an economist for the government, he knows what it is like to be asked to ignore or gloss over data that doesn't support a particular policy. Having systematically studied the actual affects of policies throughout the world, he knows how little politicians care if the evidence does not support the theory. His frustration is palpable, and he makes me feel it in this book, just as he did (in a different way) in his autobiography. As always, he can be a little slow plodding at times, but I never leave his books without learning something new and being greatly impressed by his quest for empirical reality.

Naturally, those who do not share the "vision of the anointed" will ask: Why cling to a vision without regard for reality? Why promote policies regardless of whether or not they actually achieve the end you claim to wish to achieve? Because, Sowell says, the vision offers "a special state of grace for those who believe in it. Those who accept this vision are deemed to be…morally on a higher plane. Put differently, those who disagree with the prevailing vision are not merely in error, but in sin." Confront the vision with empirical evidence, and your evidence is not labeled a bad argument; rather, you are labeled a bad person. The evidence itself is not engaged: your character is engaged (and questioned). This is why words like "compassion" and "concern" are so often used by the anointed; such words imply that opponents of the prevailing vision are unconcerned and callous. To admit that opponents might be equally caring is an impossibility, for it "would mean that opposing arguments on social policy were arguments about methods, probabilities and empirical evidence—with compassion, caring, and the like being common features on both sides, thus canceling out and disappearing from the debate."

It would be nice indeed if words like compassion, concern, and patriotism could dissolve from the U.S. political debate, if we could acknowledge that both sides care about both our nation and about the suffering masses of the world, and if debates on policy could therefore be directed toward the actual costs, actual benefits, and actual long-term affects of actual policies on actual people. It would be nice, but I don't see it happening anytime soon - - on either side.

This is such an excellent book that after the 1st read I'm going to buy it.

You have to know my copy was library loan and it has a cracked spine and has been in constant circulation for about 20 years. For good reasons. He has defined in precise terms and logic the "anointed" elite's social constructions set into their new religion of social "goods". And that he did this decades ago and saw where it was progressing! And foresaw that they would ultimately accept no other opinions but their anointed own.

The book is held together at this point with a rubber banding for shipping. I'm going to make sure it gets replaced. This year.

But I need to buy this for myself and slowly reread to understand the issues that I have actually seen with my own eyes (especially in the outcomes of dire, dire situations for the poorest and those who have lived for generation upon generation within social welfare ghettos)- in order to completely understand what he observed in such cause/ effect description.

What a superb work. What a clear and clairvoyant perception! Some only feel, some only think. Few are those who can think in such quantity to understand the onus of where the "feel" doesn't begin and end within wishes and hope filled theories. But instead common sense that takes plans only as a starting point.

Good, but needed more detail

Thomas Sowell, a noted conservative thinker and a genuinely interesting person (I've heard him as a guest on a local radio station several times) writes an effective book against the actions of those whom he calls 'The Annointed.' The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy is effective, but not a great work.

Who are The Annointed?

He uses the term in a sarcastic way here to illuminate those 'Teflon prophets' (he uses that term because some of them are still considered credible despite no evidence that their predictions have ever come true) that scream doom and gloom and offer the direst of predictions unless we immediately give them the power to save us - since we are too simple to see the problem for ourselves and take the actions needed to save ourselves.

Read more at: http://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2011/...

Ok I admit it I am a liberal and I read one of Sowells books, so sue me. I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about and to be honest I was fairly pleasantly surprised. I am generally one of these that believes in the "root cause" of social problems as he puts it, perhaps I even have some of this anointed mindset "gasp". I like to think we can change people by changing behavior and circumstances, but I think he made a good number of points about when we should say enough is enough, does that mean I personally think these programs are not beneficial? Actually I don't but I do believe that we have to take into account the loss/benefit spectrum as there is always a trade off for what we determine to put our financial resources in to. I don't know if eliminating these programs is the answer, nor can I comment on the statistical aspect of it other than I think we can all agree that a lot of these "social problems" are getting worse. I think Liberals and Conservatives alike are fairly frustrated with the legal/prison system, at least I have always been fairly miffed by it. I hope we are able to elect leaders that are not so blinded by their vision as Sowell calls it that they can't see the other side of the issue. I think Liberals and Conservatives are possibly more alike in many of their goals than we all admit, perhaps none of our current approaches are good enough, perhaps we need a third perspective to put something completely new in place. A lot of what we are currently doing is not working and its true that this "self congratulatory" vantage point for viewing the world is not helpful at all.