Book Review: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

While Republicans are hysterically wringing their hands over the irresponsible and dangerous actions of the elite in this country, no one seems able or willing to stop them. Thomas Sowell recognized the problem decades ago, detailing the beliefs of the elite, “the anointed,” and shedding light on how deadly and destructive their vision is. This review will focus on some of the most egregious beliefs of the anointed and will consider the necessity for ousting them from power.

The anointed will not abdicate their positions willingly:

What a vision may offer, and what the prevailing vision of our time emphatically does offer, is a special state of grace for those who believe in it. Those who accept this vision are deemed to be not merely factually correct but morally on a higher plane. Put differently, those who disagree with the prevailing vision are seen as being not merely in error, but in sin.

How did this “vision” show up and eventually dominate the political landscape?

For one, the anointed tell us that they have a special understanding that the general masses don’t comprehend. They present an issue as a crisis—climate change is an example—and insist that action must be taken quickly. As a result, the government must act, such as trying to eliminate fossil fuels and perpetuating the myth that solar power will sufficiently replace them. If anyone disagrees with their conclusions, they are denigrated and dismissed.

Sowell also uses the War on Poverty to illustrate the misguided attempts by the anointed to eliminate poverty in this country. Despite their commitment, they refused to recognize the facts on the ground, before new laws were implemented or when the program began to fail:

Although the number of such dependent people had been declining for more than a decade before the ‘war on poverty’ programs began, this downward trend now reversed itself and began rising within a few years after that program got under way.

[snip]

The number of people receiving public assistance more than doubled from 1960 to 1977. The dollar value of public housing rose nearly five-fold in a decade and the amount spent on food stamps rose more than tenfold. All government-provided in-kind benefits increased about eight-fold from 1965 to 1969 and more than twenty-fold by 1974.

The anointed simply ignored the outcomes and never looked back. And they changed their original goals—rather than working to make people less dependent on the government (which they were making worse), they characterized the War on Poverty as an effort to eliminate poverty. Of course, that could take a very, very long time.

Sex education was also targeted as a goal to implement in the schools. The anointed again created a “crisis.” You might ask, “What crisis?" In fact, fertility rates for teenage girls had been declining for ten years. So had venereal disease, gonorrhea and syphilis. Rather than considering these facts, the educators came to the following conclusion:

A typical comment from ‘experts’ is that ‘sex and sexuality have become far too complex and technical to leave to the typical parent, who is either uninformed or too bashful to share useful sexual information with his child.’

The absurdity underlying this observation is that the experts believed they knew better than the parents what the children needed to learn about sex, that parents were incapable of teaching their own children, and that the anointed were better prepared to take over sex education.

On the other side of these positions are those of us who hold what Sowell calls the tragic vision. Unlike the anointed, those who hold the tragic vision suggest that social problems should be addressed gradually, if at all, by a process that allows adjustments, adaptations and even cancellations to take place if strategies aren’t working. The anointed much prefer to rely on blanket solutions that are free of facts, discussion, and accountability. Careful studies to determine the facts about an issue are just a waste of time, since the anointed already have solutions to the problems they perceive (which may or may not be real).

The criminal justice system is another institution that the anointed want to tackle. Their understanding of criminal behavior has nothing to do with reality. For example, the efforts of I.C.E. and those who hamstring them provide an excellent example of the misguided anointed. This elite group chooses to protect illegal aliens, even criminal aliens, from the law. They prefer to support the aliens, who may have been here for many years, and protect them from being detained or deported. The anointed have decided that I.C.E. enforcement officers are the enemy, the criminals, and the aliens must be protected from them. And finally, the anointed don’t believe in demanding personal responsibility from offenders—if criminals, including criminal aliens, have committed crimes, those actions are society’s fault.

Sowell’s description of the anointed is precise, filled with many examples. My only disappointment is that he didn’t provide ways to disempower them. The anointed, through their arrogance and naivete, are condemning our society to a chaotic and dystopian future. They don’t worry about the truth, about facts, about being practical or responsible. And those of us who hold the tragic vision have allowed them to take power and move us to the margins.

We can no longer stand by and allow the anointed to destroy our society. We must protest their assumptions that facts are not important and that they can simply dismiss our input. We must protest by electing people who respect tradition, who understand that science is a legitimate process (not merely a slogan). We must celebrate every parent, teacher, legislator and public figure who discounts the anointed and insists on telling the truth.

It is time for the anointed to be dethroned and for the rest of us to take back the power of running our country.

[originally published in 1996 and reissued in 2019]