I'll cherry pick out some of the main points to "boil it down" a bit:


The two visions differ in their respective conceptions of the nature of man, the nature of the world, and the nature of causation, knowledge, power, and justice.


These differences are not random happenstances. They are systematic differences that follow logically from fundamental differences in underlying assumptions, beginning with assumptions about the nature of human beings and the range of possibilities open to them.


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.


Liberalism in America and worldwide has great faith in modifying human behaviour by adjusting "underlying social conditions" to make people desire the right thing instead of the wrong thing. In its clearest form, this is the response to crime control by liberals, who are not much interested in tougher sentences, improved security devices, better-armed and equipped police, more escape-proof prisons - they seek to change society or the malefactors, so that people will not want to commit crime.


Not only today, but for more than two centuries, both crime and war have been seen, by those with the vision of the anointed, as things to be deterred by changing peoples dispositions rather than by confronting them with retaliatory capabilities that provide incentives against crime or war.


Similarly with war. The way for a country to avoid war, according to Godwin, is to behave with "inoffensiveness and neutrality" toward other countries and to avoid the kind of "misunderstanding" that leads to war.



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 are attempting.



The refrain of the anointed is we already know the answers, there's no need for more studies, and the kinds of questions raised by those with other views are just stalling and obstructing progress. "Solutions" are out there waiting to be found, like eggs at an Easter egg hunt. Intractable problems with painful trade-offs are simply not part of the vision of the anointed.


....a whole mind-set in which omnicompetence is implicitly assumed and unhappy social phenomena are presumed to be unjustified morally and remediable intellectually and politically. Inherent constraints of circumstances or people are brushed aside; as are alternative policy approaches which offer no special role for the anointed. The burden of proof is not put on their vision, but on existing institutions.


traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before. Moreover, the applicability of past experience is further discounted in the vision of the anointed, because of the great changes that have taken place since "earlier and simpler times."


His website:

Thomas Sowell | Home