What Sowell calls the 'anointed' are the psuedointellectuals who believe they are very smart and who alone know the solution to society's problems. Sowell's anointed are reasonably similar to Nassim Taleb's concept of the Intellectual-Yet-Idiot. The anointed believe that problems such as inequality between groups are caused by society's attitudes rather than things intrinsic to the the groups and individuals themselves. In contrast to the view held by the anointed ones, Sowell puts forward the 'tragic' vision, in which human capability is limited, solutions involve trade-offs rather than being categorical, causation is systemic, knowledge consists of the unarticulated experiences of the many, freedom is absence of coercion from others, justice is following rules rather than equalising outcomes, and so on. Sowell's arguments are pretty strong, and he provides examples to support his view, such as how changes to the justice system resulted in significantly increased crime. An issue with this book, common to all Sowell's work, is that it is very dry and not the most entertaining thing to read.

- The rise of the mass media, mass politics, and massive government means that the beliefs which drive a relatively small group of articulate people have a great leverage in determining the course taken by a whole society. px
- Today, despite free speech and the mass media, the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality. p1
- Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, foolish, a dope. Disagree with someone on the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, a sell-out, insensitive, possibly evil. p4
- Despite the great variety of issues in a series of crusading movements among the intelligentsia during the twentieth century, several key elements have been common to most of them:
- 1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
- 2. An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.
- 3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
- 4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes. p5
- …the test for whether a program was good for the country as a whole was the whether those who personally benefited from it found it beneficial. P 14.
- In short, no matter what happens, the vision of the anointed always succeeds, if not by the original criteria, then by criteria extemporized later-and if not by empirical criteria, then by criteria sufficiently subjective to escape even the possibility of refutation. Evidence becomes irrelevant. P15
- Here is an almost textbook example of the vision of the anointed, preempting the decisions of parents as to when and how their own children shall be introduced to sex and dismissing out of hand those with different views. P20
- Anyone who looks through enough statistics will eventually find numbers that seem to confirm a given vision. Often, the same set of statistics contains other numbers that seem to confirm diametrically opposite conclusions. The same is true of anecdotal "facts." That is why evidence is different from mere data, whether numerical or verbal. P31
- …the fatal fallacy is to assume that all factors left unexamined must be equal, so that all remaining differences in out. come can be attributed to discrimination. P40
- Much the same implicit assumption of unchanging constituents underlies many discussions of "the rich" and "the poor." Yet studies that follow particular individuals over time have shown that most Americans do not remain in one income bracket for life, or even for as long as a decade. 19 Both the top 20 percent who are often called "the rich" and the bottom 20 percent who are called "the poor" represent a constantly changing set of individuals. A study of income tax returns showed that more than four-fifths of the individuals in the bottom 20 percent of those who filed income tax returns in 1979 were no longer there by 1988. Slightly more had reached the top bracket by 1988 than remained at the bottom.50 For one thing, individuals are nine years older at the end of nine years, and may well have accumulated experience, skills, seniority, or promotions during that time. P44
- When the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control examined people from a variety of income levels, they found no evidence of malnutrition among people with poverty-level incomes, nor even any significant difference in the intake of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients from one income level to another. P46
- **What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are given "class" labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing "class" makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms, just as they constantly speak of the deliberate actions of a personified "society" when trying to explain the results of systemic interactions among millions of individuals. P48
- Although the poverty rate among blacks in general is higher than that among whites in general, the poverty rate among families headed by black married couples has for years been consistently lower than the poverty rate among white, female-headed families, the latter liv. ing in poverty about twice as often as black intact families, With infant mortality as well, although blacks in general have about twice the infant mortality rate of whites in general, black married women with only a high school education have lower infant mortality rates than white unwed mothers with a college education. 86 In short, race makes less difference than whether or not there are two parents. The real-life Murphy Browns are worse off economically than if they were black married women with less education, and their children are more likely to die in infancy. P58
- This rationalistic picture overlooked what is so often overlooked, that different kinds of people have different values and behavior patterns and that these values and behaviors have enormous impacts on outcomes. But to say this would be to get into the forbidden realm of personal responsibility and away from the vision of a benighted "society" needing to be reformed by the anointed, who reject "consensus romanticism about the family,"11° as it was put by Hillary Rodham (later Clinton). P63
- If there is any single moral to the Galbraith story, it might be that if one is “politically correct,” being factually incorrect doesn’t matter. P66
- What the Nader approach boils down to is that third parties should preempt the consumer's choice as to whether he wants to sacrifice a comfortable ride in order to make a remote danger slightly more remote. p75
- Anyone can be wrong about the future. Often the variables are so numerous, and the interactions so complex, that the only real mistake was to have predicted in the first place. P79
- As of 192. more than half of all black adults had never been married, quite aside from an additional 16 percent who had been either divorced or wid. owed. By contrast, only 21 percent of white adults had never been married.79 More than half of all black children 57 percent--were living with only one parent and another 7.5 percent were not living with either parent.3 Thus, only a little more than a third of black children were living in traditional two-parent households. P80
- This assessment of Reagan [that he was an ‘amiable dunce’] remained, even after he defeated President Carter in a landslide in the 1980 elections. This view of him remained unchanged as he got major legislation- the "Reagan revo-lution"- through Congress over the opposition of those who disdained him, despite the fact that the Republicans were never a majority in both houses of Congress during the first Reagan administration and were not a majority in either house during the second. P84
- Sometimes there is an underlying assumption that complex social phenomena cannot have simple causes. Yet many of the same people who reason this way have no difficulty accepting a theory that a giant meteorite striking the Earth- -a very simple event, however catastrophic could have had ramifications that included dust clouds obscuring the sun, leading to falling temperatures all over the planet and expansion of the polar ice cap, resulting in migrations and extinctions of whole species. P88
- All-or-nothing arguments are not mere intellectual errors. They are tactics which free the anointed from the constraints of opposing arguments, discordant evidence, or - in the case of judicial activism - from the constraints of the Constitution. Most important of all, they are freed from the feedback of uncooperative reality. P94
- Everyone is for a beneficial outcome; they simply define it in radically different terms. Everyone is a "progressive" by his own lights. That the anointed believe that this label differentiates themselves from other people is one of a number of symptoms of their naive narcissism. In academic circles, the equally vast generality is "diversity," which often stands for a quite narrow social agenda, as if those who reiterate the word "diversity" endlessly had no idea that diversity is itself diverse and has many dimensions besides the one with which they are preoccupied. Advocates of diversity in a race or gender sense are often quite hostile to ideological diversity, when it includes traditional or "conservative" values and beliefs. P95
- Truth is honored precisely for its value in interpersonal communication. If we each have our own private truths, then we would be better off (as well as more honest) to stop using the word or the concept and recognize that nobody's words could be relied upon anymore. P98
- Be it ever so humble, someone has to build a home, which requires work, skills, material resources, and financial risks for those whose investments underwrite the oper-ation. To say that someone has a "right" to any kind of housing is to say that others have an obligation to expend all these efforts on his behalf, without his being reciprocally obligated to compensate them for it. Rights from government interference - "Congress shall make no law," as the Constitution says regarding religion, free speech, etc. - may be free, but rights to anything mean that someone else has been yoked to your service involuntarily, with no corresponding responsibility on your part to provide for yourself, to compensate others, or even to behave decently or responsibly. P100
- One of the most important questions about any proposed course of action is whether we know how to do it. Policy A may be better than policy B, but that does not matter if we simply do not know how to do policy A. Perhaps it would be better to rehabilitate criminals, rather than punish them, if we knew how to do it. Rewarding merit might be better than rewarding results if we knew how to do it. P109
- As Jean-François Revel put it, in a free society "there is no single just cause, only just methods. P113
- It is widely taken as axiomatic that ordinary people's lives lack meaning, which must be brought to them by the anointed via various political crusades or social activism. P121
- "Hard cases make bad law" is another way the tragic vision has been expressed. To help some hard-pressed individual or group whose case is before them, judges may bend the law to arrive at a more benign verdict in that particular case- but at the cost of damaging the whole consistency and predictability of the law, on which millions of other people depend, and on which ultimately the freedom and safety of a whole society depend. There cannot be a law-abiding society if no one knows in advance what law they are to abide by, but must wait for judges to create ex post facto legal rulings based on "evolving standards" rather than known rules. P130
- When a baby was killed in a tragic airplane crash in 1989 by being ripped out of its mother's arms by the force of the impact and being sent hurtling through the cabin, a political "solution" was proposed by having a federal law requiring babies to be strapped into their own seats on airplanes. But a study by economists indicated that such a law, requiring parents to purchase an extra seat, would divert a portion of the traffic to cheaper alternative modes of transportation on the ground - most of which have higher mortality rates than airplanes. Over a period of a decade, there would be an estimated saving of one baby's life in airplane crashes, a loss of nine lives in alternative ground transportation, and an additional cost of $3 billion. P136
- …to minimize the overall dangers to human life and health is to accept specific, preventable dangers rather than follow policies which would create worse preventable dangers. P141
- During Judge David H. Souter's confirmation hearings to become a Supreme Court justice, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee urged him to be a "champion" of "the less fortunate," declaring this to be "the role assigned to the Court in our system.”…Those who urge such championing or taking sides are suggesting something for which even an umpire would be considered disgracedbeyond redemption. An umpire cannot become a "champion" pitchers, except at the expense of batters and vice versa-and in either case at the expense of the integrity of the game. P149-150
- Many of the same people who spread alarm over remote possibili-lies of dangers from pesticides or nuclear energy are among those most willing to accept dangers from AIDS carriers. P167
- But the preservation of the family as an autonomous decision-making unit is incompatible with the third-party decision making that is at the heart of the vision of the anointed. P172
- **The pervasive preference of the anointed for collective and third-party decision making (“solutions" by "society") takes the form of promotion of "day care" for children. Enabling families to take care of their own children at home by allowing the income tax exemption to keep pace with inflation and the real cost of raising children has no such support among the anointed. Indeed, this is an idea often pushed--in vain--by conservatives. While the anointed are often ready to spend vast amounts of government money on families, especially in ways which allow outsiders to intrude into family decisions, they are by no means equally willing to let families keep money that they have earned and make their own independent decisions. P175
- Men have an all but incurable propensity to try to prejudge all the great questions which interest them by stamping their prejudices upon their language. - James Fitzjames Stephen P183
- Phrases like "the peace movement," used to describe disarmament advocates, preempt the whole momentous question as to whether peace is more likely to be achieved through disarmament or through military deterrence. P184
- The vision of the anointed is one in which such ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from "society," rather than from individual choices and behavior. To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by "society." P203
- **Since capitalism was named by its enemies, it is perhaps not surprising that the name is completely misleading. 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. There are no capitalist institutions; any number of institutional ways of carrying out economic activities may flourish under "capitalism"-that is, in the absence of control from above. You may get food from a restaurant, or by buying it from the supermarket and cooking it yourself, or by growing the food on your own land and processing it all the way through to the dinner table. Each of these is just as much "capitalism" as the others. At any given time, caravans, supermarkets, or computerized shopping methods may be used, but none of these is anything more than a modality of the moment. They do not define capitalism but are simply one of the innumerable ways of doing things when choices are unconstrained by authorities. Many have argued that capitalism does not offer a satisfactory moral message. But that is like saying that calculus does not contain carbohydrates, amino acids, or other essential nutrients. Everything fails by irrelevant standards. P207
- The crowning irony is that no empirical data are collected or sought as to how often these "scientists" are wrong. A psychiatrist or psychologist whose testimony has freed a hundred criminals, who have committed dozens of violent crimes after being released, will be listened to the one hundred and first time with no record available as to how much havoc he has already contributed to. Nothing could be less scientific. P215
- …while saving some innocent individuals from a false conviction is important, the question is whether it is more important than sparing other equally innocent individuals from violence and death at the hands of criminals. Is saving one innocent defendant per decade worth sacrificing ten innocent murder victims? A hundred? A thousand? Once we recognize that there are no solutions, but only trade-offs, we can no longer pursue cosmic justice… p224-225
- Judicial activism in effect allows the vision of the anointed to veto the legally imposed decisions of the community, even when those decisions do not conflict with the written Constitution. Moreover, this veto is exercised in the name of the Constitution and even in the name of the community, meaning by the latter those who presume to consider themselves the "conscience" of the community. P235
- As Justice Antonin Scalia put it: "It is difficult to maintain the illusion that we are interpreting a Constitution, rather than inventing one, when we amend its provisions so breezily.” The “freedom to abort her unborn child" is of course "a liberty of great importance to many women," he said, but the "issue is whether it is a liberty protected by the Constitution of the United States. P238
- Moreover, the pervasiveness of the vision of the anointed at all levels of the American educational system ensures future supplies of people indoctrinated with this vision and also convinced that they should "make a difference" that public policy-making is to be seen as ego gratification from imposing one's vision on other people through the power of government. P241
- …while polarization is to others something to fear, to those with the vision of the anointed it is a confirmation of their own superiority to the benighted. P246
- Such an approach [the reluctance to say that people are responsible for the consequences of their action] is part of a more general pattern among those with the vision of the anointed, a pattern exemplified by the use of the word "epidemic" to describe chosen behavior, including drug use and such consequences of sexual behavior as pregnancy and AIDS. P249
- …no given human being knows enough to make even a simple lead pencil.? No single person knows how to mine the graphite, process the wood, produce the rubber, manufacture the paint, and make all the investment, marketing, inventory, and distribution decisions required to put a pencil in the hands of the ultimate consumer. P254
- What makes the built-in bias of the mass media so dangerous is that it adds leverage to a similar bias in political decision making toward doing good right under our noses, without regard to wider and longer-run implications. Conversely, visible harm sustained immediately is easier to dramatize than the long-run benefits for which it is endured. Could slavery have been ended by the Civil War if television cameras had shown daily scenes of the horrors of Sherman's march through Georgia or the appalling sufferings of civilians in besieged Vicksburg? The televised sufferings of the war in Indo-China helped bring it to an end- leading to even more suffering and even more deaths after the Communists took over that region, but these sufferings (including the killing fields of Kampuchea) were not televised. Not being able to televise the horrors under totalitarian regimes is another built-in bias of the media, which can only show suffering in a free society thereby making such societies easier to undermine. P258
- The media are less a window on reality than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions. - Paul Weaver

This book is a must read for anyone interested in delving into a deeper understanding of politics. Thomas Sowell articulately picks apart many "facts" and "statistics" commonly stated by the intellectual elites in defense of their social policies and cosmic view of social justice.

Ótimo livro e incrivelmente atual!

I found that this book's first four chapters seemed dry, given Sowell's defining of the vision of the anointed and demostrating his definitions with concrete examples, but established the fundamentals in discussing the detriments of anointed social policies. He articulates, with startlingly lucidity, the pernicious ramifications of the leaders' hubris and social policies that result from dogma and ideology, rather than decisions that reflect reality and included cost/benefit analyses. In other words, Sowell's novel imparts to his readers cognizance of the underpinnings of how social policies fail from their inception.

well where do I start? This is for me a very
cerebral book. But also one that I thoroughly enjoyed. no but I don't ordinarily enjoy cerebral books. there are a few of my favorite passages:

"if we are candid enough to say that such right nearly boil Down To What We would like to see and there is no need to restrict the statement to Americans or the housing that is merely decent surely we would all be happier to see every human being on the planet living in palatial housing it desire which has no fever and no more arguments behind it than the right to decent housing however modest a goal decent housing does not produce itself anymore than palatial housing does be it ever so humble someone else to build a home but which requires work skills Daryl resources and financial risks for those whose Investments underwrite the operation to say that someone has a right any kind of housing is to say that others have an obligation to expend all these efforts on his behalf without his being reciprocally obligated to compensate them for it right from government interference Congress shall make no law as the Constitution says regarding religion Free Speech Etc may be free but rights to anyting mean if someone else has been yoked to your service involuntarily no corresponding responsibility on your part to provide for yourself to compensate others or even to behave decently or responsibly. hear the language of equal rights is conscripted for service in defense of differential privileges. More important from our current perspective all this is done without arguments but merely by using the word rights which arbitrarily focuses on the beneficiary and ignores those whose time and resources have been preempted. That's for example Healthcare was declared by Bill Clinton during the 1992 election campaign to be a right not a privilege and eat dichotomy would verbally eliminate the whole of a strange of things for which we work precisely because they are neither right snore privileges. For society as a whole nothing is a right not even bear sub subsistence which has to be produced by human toil. Particular segments of society can of course be insulated from the necessities and pinching on society as a whole by having someone else carry their share of the work either temporarily or permanently. But however much those others received into the background in the verbal picture painted by the words like writes the whole process is one of differential privilege. This is not to say that no case can ever be made for differential privileges but only that's such a case needs to be made when privileges are cleaned at the arguments required for such a case or avoided by using words like rights. Healthcare is only one of innumerable things for which tactical evasions have been used. Housing college and inumerable other costly things have been proclaimed to be rights. New York Times columnist Tom wicker and compassed all economic Goods by proclaiming a right to income."

"the vision of the anointed divorces effects from causes. the very possibility that many inequalities of result are due to inequalities of causes is often sweepingly dismissed by those with the vision of the anointed, so that statistics on unequal outcomes become automatic indictments of "society." there is much discussion of the haves and have-not, but very little discussion, of the doers and the do-nots, those who contribute and those. who merely take."

"one of the ominous consequences of such attitudes is that there is no logical stopping place in creating poarizations that may tear a society apart or lead to a backlash that can sweep aside not only such policies but also the basic institutions of free society....fascistic strong men have historically emerged with public support from those disgusted or alarmed by the breakdown of law and order and of traditional values. there is nothing in the prevailing mission to make the anointed stop before thong reach that point. ...the anointed are constantly seeking exciting and new things and liberation from the constraints imposed by lesser beings.... and social life the more fundamental of Truth is the more likely it is to have been discovered long ago do have been repeated in a thousand ways to the point of utter boredom. In this context to make excitement and I will do the touch tones of an idea it's or engrave risks of abandoning the truth or ideological trinkets. It the truth is boring civilization is irksome. The constraints inherent in civilized living are frustrating and innumerable ways. It goes with the vision of the anointed often see these constraints his only arbitrary and positions things for which day and we all can be liberated. The social disintegration which has followed in the wake of such Liberation has seldom promote any serious reconsideration of the whole set of the vision which led to such disasters that vision is too well insulated from."

" those what the vision of the anointed armor especially reluctant to see human nature as a source of the evils they wish to eradicate. Instead they seek special causes of particular evils. Nothing so exemplifies this approach as The Perennial attempts to get it through causes the root causes as it is phrase of crime. There seems to be no awareness that people commit crimes because they are human beings. That is People's Natural impulses are to favor themselves over others and to disregard the harm they create and trying to satisfy their own desires in the easiest way. Most people do not behave this way with complete shamelessness and most things it is because they have been through a long process of becoming civilized and because this process is but rested by law enforcement. Civilization has been a play called if then crossed over volcano. The anointed are constantly picking at that crust."

" the dangers in a vision come not simply from the answers that gives but from the very way it frames the questions. The concept of income distribution for example causes statistics to be looked at with certain preconceptions so that the transient positions of individuals are seen as the enduring relationships between classes. The habit of looking at policy issues in terms of the goals they Proclaim in the values they represent not to mention the constrained options they assume leads in a wholly different direction from an analysis of the incentives being created within the constraints that exist and the probable outcome of such and sent his own constraints... cultural Wars are so desperate because they're not simply about the merits or demerits of particular policies. They are about the anointed told conception of themselves about whether they are in the heady role of the Vanguard or in the pathetic role of pretentious and self-infatuated people."

" that's pretty visions of discordant evidence and the denigration and even demonizing those presenting such evidence are indicative of the high-stakes and contemporary culture wars or not about alternative policies but alternative worlds and of alternative roles of the anointed in these worlds. Because differential rectitude is pivotal to the vision of the anointed opponents must be shown to be merely not merely a mistake and not but morally lacking. As jean-francois Ravel has a plea put it this approach replaces the intellectual discussion of arguments by the mall. List integration or demonizing of those opposed to their views. Only has the desired effect of discrediting the opposition but also has the intended effect of cutting off the path of retreat from positions would become progressively less tenable with the passage of time and the accumulation of discarding evidence the very thought that those dismissed isn't simplistic or Moline might have been right even if only on a single issue is it best calling and potentially devastating... the last refuge in this situation are there good intentions. For the anointed it is desperately when porting to win not simply because they believe that one policy or set of beliefs or values is better for society but because their whole sense of themselves is at stake given the high stakes it is not hard to understand The All Out attacks of the anointed on those who differ from them and their attempts to stifle alternative sources of values and beliefs with campus speech codes and political correctness being Prime examples. Here they are not content to squelch contemporary voices they must also silenced history and traditions the national memory as well."

radio television Motion Pictures can readily dramatize an individual situation in a way in which the larger relationships and the implicit assumption behind that situation cannot be traumatized. For example the media cannot identify much less dramatized all those individuals who would have come down with some deadly disease if it were not for their being vaccinated. But nothing is easier to dramatize than the rare individual who caught the disease from the vaccine itself and is now devastated by illness physically or mentally crippled or dying. When the government creates some new program nothing is easier than to show whatever benefits that program produces. But it is virtually impossible to trace the taxes that paid for the program back to their sources and destroy the alternative uses of that same money that could have been far more beneficial. The media or less a window on reality than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self script and self-serving fictions"

Review to come...

Sowell is a legend and rightly so. The man is a true genius, a true sage, almost a prophet -- every book i read by him, no matter how long ago it was written, feels like it was written for the moment in which I am reading it. Every other sentence is a mic-drop moment, especially this book in this decade.

Though written in the mid-90s, this book foresees today's "I'm-on-the-right-side-of-history!" shrieks, the progressive "white savior" self-understanding, the W.E.F.'s conviction -- baldly stated in their own meetings & website & book -- that they have the power, the right, and the mandate to change the world in accordance with their whims. Again, Sowell is almost a prophet -- but I suppose, it's inevitable that perceptive men will seem prophetic when humanity is so determined to repeat the same failures again and again and again... Warn us however they might, we just won't listen.

Legitimately one of the most piercing books I've ever read. Although The Vision of the Anointed was written in 1995, I believe it's more relevant than ever.

People/ideas we in our 2020's "culture war" currently call "woke", Thomas Sowell refered to in his book as "The Anointed": A self-congratulatory, morally posturing cultural elite who typically make up political and legal leaders, directors of large multinational corporations, heads of academic and cultural institutions (Churches, media, libraries, councils, the military etc).

Whilst the main focus of Sowell's book focuses on its American origins being seen in the activist judges in the criminal justice system in the 1960s, the book ultimately shows how "the anointed" vision is totalitarian in its thinking, and asserts the right to ultimately, dictate reality.

From the careful use of language to assume their superiority (eg calling their ideas "progressive") to the use of quick, easily understandable emotions over boring, calculated facts, the power of "The Anointed" is all encompassing, and completely insulated from even considering being mistaken.

I urge you to read this book for a "big picture" view of the situation we currently see ourselves in.

First of all this book is cerebral - the writing is clear and plain but requires thought on almost every page. Therefore, most of those who need it most will not be able to wade through it because to do so would force you to think. Thomas Sowell has dived deep into the muddy waters of the thought patterns of the left (vision of the anointed) and the right (tragic vision). He wants to understand the true motives of the left not just the results of their actions. I will not insult you any further with my word since they will only subtract from this awe-inspiring book. Instead enjoy a few words from the tome itself.

"The focus here will be on one particular vision - the vision prevailing among the intellectual and political elite of our time. What is important about that vision are not only its particular assumptions and their corollaries, but also the fact that it is a prevailing vision - which means that its assumptions are so much taken for granted by so many people, including so-called "thinking people," that neither those assumptions nor their corollaries are generally confronted with demands for empirical evidence. Indeed, empirical evidence itself may be viewed as suspect, insofar as it is inconsistent with that vision."

"(T)he vision of the anointed is not simply a vision of the world and its functioning in a causal sense, but is also a vision of themselves and the moral role in the world. It is a vision of differential rectitude. It is not a vision of the tragedy of the human condition: Problems exist because others are not as wise or as virtuous of the anointed."

"Factual evidence and logical arguments are often not merely lacking but ignored in many discussions by those with the vision of the anointed. Much that is said by the anointed in the outward form of an argument turns out not to arguments at all. Often the logical structure of an argument is replaced by preemptive rhetoric or, where an argument is made, its validity remains unchecked against any evidence, even when such evidence is abundant. Evidence is often particularly abundant when it comes to statements about history, yet the anointed have repeatedly been as demonstrably wrong about the past as about the present or the future - and as supremely confident."

"Those with the vision of the anointed are particularly prone to think of their own philosophy as new, and therefore as adapted to contemporary society, but their framework of assumptions goes back at least two centuries - as does the framework of those with the tragic vision."

"But one of the crucial differences between those with the tragic vision and those with the vision of the anointed is in what they respectively assume that we know how to do. Those with the vision of the anointed are seldom deterred by any question as to whether anyone has the knowledge required to do what they attempting."

"The hallmark of the vision of the anointed is that what the anointed consider lacking for the kind of social progress they envision is will and power, not knowledge. But to those with the tragic vision, what is dangerous are will and power without knowledge - and for many expansive purposes, knowledge is inherently insufficient.

In their hast to be wiser and nobler than others, the anointed have misconceived two basic issues. They seem to assume (1) that they have more knowledge than the average member of the benighted and (2) that this is the relevant comparison. The real comparison, however, is not between the knowledge possessed by the average member of the educated elite versus the average member of the general public, but rather the TOTAL direct knowledge brought to bear through social processes (the competition of the marketplace, social sorting, etc.), involving millions of people, versus the secondhand knowledge of generalities possessed by a smaller elite group. Moreover, the existing generation's traditions and values distill the experiences of other millions in times past. Yet the anointed seem to conceive the issue as one of the syllogistic reasoning of the past versus the syllogistic reasoning of the present, preferring to believe that improvements in knowledge and reason permit the former to be dismissed."

"What is seldom part of the vision of the anointed is a concept of ordinary people as autonomous decision makers free to reject any vision and to seek their own well-being through whatever social processes they choose. Thus, when those with the prevailing vision speak of the family - if only to defuse their adversaries' emphasis on family values - they tend to conceive of the family as a RECIPENT institution for government largess or guidance, rather than as DECISION-MAKING institution determining for itself how children shall be raised and with what values."

"The anointed do no simply HAPPEN to have a disdain for the public, Such disdain is an integral part of their vision, for the central feature of that vision is preemption of the decisions of others."

"Perhaps the most fundamental difference between those with the tragic vision and those with vision of the anointed is that the former see policy-making in terms of trade-offs and the latter in terms of `solutions'."

"The point here is not simply that some people were mistaken in their beliefs and hopes for this particular program, but that they barricaded themselves against all beliefs to the contrary and morally condemned those who express such beliefs. It is this pattern which has been all too characteristic of the anointed, on this and other issues, over a very long span of time."

I hope this woefully small smattering of quotes has helped enlighten you about this great book.

Wow having been written in 1996 one might say a prescient book laying out our society's self inflicted wounds. Mr Sowell has given us a in detail and fact providing lessons on how "we" fail time and again in common sense and not learning or correcting from past mistakes. Lessons in how trying to do the right thing irrespective of reality has so monstrously backfired and hurt the very people they (the Anointed) purported to help. Here it is 2016 and nothing has been learned... so very sad for us.

I do not think history will look back and say "they were such a compassionate society"
The more likely will be " the fools were incapable of learning from their mistakes"

This was really excellent and I feel guilty for not having read it until now. In a way, it's reassuring, so much of the culture war nonsense that is so vexing today you can see has been going on since the mid-1960s at least, and was well documented in the 1990s. The disturbing thing about reading it is how pervasive and immune to evidence the "vision of the annointed" or "woke" has become in the intervening 30 years. It does touch on many of the themes I noticed working in politics the last few years except that to some extent the need for political validation has begun to seep into the right as well and the co-optation of even Sowells language of "systemic" factors by the left. All in all an excellent book.