The Vision of the Anointed

Thomas Sowell argues that a prevailing social vision held by intellectual and political elites has become dangerously insulated from empirical reality. He calls this framework "the vision of the anointed," a coherent set of assumptions shared across academia, the media, and politics, whose adherents see themselves as not merely factually correct but morally superior to those who disagree. Those who oppose the vision are cast as deficient in compassion or virtue, a stance Sowell calls "differential rectitude." This moral self-conception, he contends, makes the vision resistant to correction by evidence, because abandoning it would require the anointed to surrender their sense of special wisdom and virtue.

Sowell identifies a recurring four-stage pattern in policies based on this vision. In Stage 1, a "crisis" is proclaimed, often when the relevant conditions are already improving. In Stage 2, a "solution" is proposed, and critics are dismissed. In Stage 3, the policies produce the very detrimental results critics predicted. In Stage 4, proponents refuse to acknowledge failure, instead redefining goals, invoking good intentions, or claiming things would have been worse without the programs. He illustrates this pattern with three case studies.

The first is the War on Poverty launched during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Its stated purpose was to reduce dependency, not merely transfer resources. Yet when these programs began, poverty rates and dependency had already been declining for years. After enactment, the downward trend reversed: The number of people receiving public assistance more than doubled from 1960 to 1977, and federal social welfare spending rose from 8 percent of gross national product in 1960 to 16 percent by 1974. Urban riots, which the programs were supposed to prevent, raged during this era but declined sharply under the Nixon administration, which opposed the War on Poverty approach. Proponents responded by redefining the goal from reducing dependency to reducing poverty through government transfers.

The second case study is sex education. Promoted as a tool to reduce teenage pregnancy and venereal disease, the crusade intensified in the late 1960s when both teenage fertility rates and venereal disease rates had already been declining. As sex education and federally funded family planning clinics expanded through the 1970s, the pregnancy rate among 15- to 19-year-old females rose significantly, the rate of teenage gonorrhea tripled, and the percentage of unmarried teenage girls who had engaged in sex increased at every age. Advocates continued to call for more sex education, and opposition was dismissed as threatening democratic values.

The third case study concerns criminal justice. When figures such as Chief Judge David Bazelon and Attorney General Ramsey Clark promoted a therapeutic approach to crime in the 1960s, the murder rate was near historic lows. Landmark Supreme Court decisions expanded defendants' rights and made convictions invalid if specified procedures were not followed. Crime rates then skyrocketed: The murder rate more than doubled from 1961 to 1974, and citizens' chances of becoming victims of major violent crime tripled between 1960 and 1976. Proponents initially denied that crime was increasing, then equated discussions of "law and order" with racism, and finally selected misleading base periods to obscure the connection between their reforms and rising crime.

Sowell devotes extensive analysis to the misuse of statistics in service of the prevailing vision. He introduces the concept of "Aha!" statistics, in which data are selectively extracted from larger sets containing contradictory evidence. He describes the "residual fallacy," whereby researchers control for some variables and attribute the remaining statistical gap to discrimination, ignoring that qualitative differences persist at every level of disaggregation. He also argues that statistics on "the rich" and "the poor" misleadingly treat transient positions as permanent classes: Studies tracking specific individuals showed that more than four-fifths of those in the bottom 20 percent of income-tax filers in 1979 had left that bracket by 1988.

The book examines what Sowell calls "Teflon prophets," prominent figures whose predictions failed spectacularly without damaging their reputations. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith predicted a decline of interest in inequality just before decades of intense preoccupation with it. Biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted hundreds of millions of starvation deaths that never occurred and lost a public bet with economist Julian Simon when every natural resource Ehrlich chose declined in price over a decade. Sowell also challenges what he calls "fictitious history," such as attributing Black family breakdown to slavery when census data showed higher marriage rates among Black adults than white adults from 1890 through 1940, with the sharp decline beginning only in the 1960s.

At the philosophical level, Sowell contrasts the vision of the anointed with what he calls "the tragic vision." The tragic vision sees human capability as severely limited for everyone, social outcomes as the product of systemic processes rather than deliberate design, and policy as a matter of painful trade-offs rather than categorical solutions. The anointed, by contrast, assume that their own knowledge and virtue are sufficient to redesign social institutions and that unhappy outcomes reflect the failures of a benighted society rather than inherent human limitations. Sowell argues that the most fundamental difference between the two visions is this orientation toward trade-offs versus solutions. He illustrates with the case of a proposed law requiring babies to have separate airplane seats: Economists estimated this would save one infant life in airplane crashes over a decade but cause nine additional deaths in ground transportation, at a cost of $3 billion.

Sowell analyzes the "mascots" and "targets" of the anointed. Groups disdained by the general public, including vagrants, criminals, and carriers of contagious diseases, become mascots whose adoption symbolizes the anointed's superior virtue. He examines how AIDS was approached in a manner opposite to other contagious diseases, with anonymity laws protecting carriers rather than the public. Meanwhile, groups respected by the general public, including businesses, families, and religious communities, become targets through expanded tort liability, government interventions undermining family autonomy, and judicial stretching of the First Amendment's establishment clause far beyond its historical meaning.

The book examines the distinctive vocabulary of the anointed, arguing that terms like "crisis," "greed," "public service," and "rights" serve to preempt debate rather than advance it. Sowell contends that declaring health care or housing a "right" avoids the argument for why others should be compelled to provide these things, and that verbal inflation of terms like "violence," "discrimination," and "harassment" undermines social trust.

Sowell argues that judicial activism represents the most consequential institutional expression of the anointed's vision, because it allows judges to substitute their own social philosophies for the historical meanings of laws and the Constitution. He contends that advocates of judicial restraint have consistently defined "original intent" as the public meaning of words at the time of enactment, not the private mental states of legislators, and that this position has been consistently distorted by opponents.

In the concluding chapter, Sowell warns that the vision's greatest achievement and greatest danger are one and the same: It has become self-contained and self-justifying, impervious to empirical evidence. He notes that the mass media reinforce this insularity because television can dramatize immediate visible effects but cannot show the unseen alternatives forgone. He catalogs the social degeneration that followed the vision's ascendancy from the 1960s onward, including declining educational standards, rising crime, broken homes, and soaring teenage pregnancy, characterizing these as self-inflicted wounds occurring during a period of rising material prosperity. He warns that as traditional moral and philosophical constraints erode over successive generations, the pure logic of the vision will operate more fully, concluding: "Seldom have so few cost so much to so many" (260).