The Personal Website of Mark W. Dawson

Crusades of the Social Justice Warriors and Activists

Since the activism of the 1960s and onwards, the Liberals, Progressives, and Leftists social justice warriors and other activists have undertaken many crusades to reform and make America better. All of this was undertaken for the good of Americans and America, and sometimes for the good of the world (i.e.., Environmentalism and Global Climate Change). They have self-anointed themselves as more intelligent, better educated, and morally superior, and therefore they are, of course, always correct and in a better position to determine what is best for America and Americans. In doing so, they have uncritically and selectively relied on expert opinion from academics and the intelligentsia as to the problems and solutions within America. However, they have not remembered:

"The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best."
- Thomas Sowell

When the best is determined by the few and implemented by the government, it often degenerates into despotism of governmental actions and a ruling class of government bureaucrats. The question then becomes, how do they achieve and maintain their goals and policies? In America, we have disparate differences of opinion and ideology that divide us. Trying to understand these differences is difficult, as they are based on the closely held viewpoints of human nature and the role of government in society.

As Dr. Sowell, the distinguished economist, and social commentator, examines in three books of his that the differences of opinion and ideology in America stem from; “The Quest for Cosmic Justice”, “A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles”, and “The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy”. These three books by Thomas Sowell should be considered a trilogy and should be read in order to have a fuller understanding of the disparate visions that divide us in America. Although these books were written more than a decade ago, the issues and concerns that he illuminates are even more apropos today.

In the description of the book “The Quest for Cosmic Justice”:

“This is not a comforting book -- it is a book about disturbing issues that are urgently important today and enduringly critical for the future. It rejects both "merit" and historical redress as principles for guiding public policy. It shows how "peace" movements have led to war and to needless casualties in those wars. It argues that "equality" is neither right nor wrong, but meaningless.

The Quest for Cosmic Justice shows how confused conceptions of justice end up promoting injustice, how confused conceptions of equality end up promoting inequality, and how the tyranny of social visions prevents many people from confronting the actual consequences of their own beliefs and policies. Those consequences include the steady and dangerous erosion of the fundamental principles of freedom -- and the quiet repeal of the American revolution.”

This book is the slimmest of the trilogy but sets the predicate for the other two books. It contains only four lengthy but readable chapters that the eminent jurist Robert H. Bork praises as “In the Quest for Cosmic Justice Thomas Sowell once again displays his distinctive combination of erudition, analytical power, and uncommon sense.” These chapters are:

1. The Quest for Cosmic Justice
2. The Mirage of Equality
3. The Tyranny of Visions
4. The Quiet Repeal of the American Revolution

In the chapter ‘The Quest for Cosmic Justice’, Dr. Sowell examines the differences between the “Cosmic Justice” of the social justice warriors and other activists and the “Tradition Justice” of the benighted. He then discusses the difficulties, if not impossibilities, of obtaining Cosmic Justice. He also assesses the societal impacts of the quest for Cosmic Justice and how it harms society and often does not help those persons or groups for which they seek Cosmic Justice.

In the chapter ‘The Mirage of Equality’, Dr. Sowell examines the concept of “Equality” and the difficulty of determining what equality means and how to determine the inequalities, and the weight of the inequalities, between persons and groups of people, let alone the Herculean task of trying to address these inequalities. He then looks at the societal costs of social justice warriors and other activists' attempts to correct inequalities to achieve equity.

In the chapter ‘The Tyranny of Visions’, Dr. Sowell examines how social justice warriors and other activists operate to achieve their goals. By appeals to emotion rather than intellect, by the non-examination of empirical data, to the use and misuse of science and statistics, to selectively relying on expert opinion from academics and the intelligentsia, to demonizing, denigrating, disparaging their opponents, these social justice warriors and other activists utilize the tools of propaganda to achieve their goals.

In the final chapter, ‘The Quiet Repeal of the American Revolution, Dr. Sowell looks at how the efforts of the social justice warriors and other activists run counter to our American Ideals and Ideas as expressed in The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States. This is being accomplished by the rise of Federal government power for The Quest for Cosmic Justice with the proliferation of laws, rules, and regulations and the delegitimization of the institutions and traditions that produced the enormous social and economic fortune of Americans. He concludes this book by saying:

“Much of the world today and down through centuries of history has suffered the terrible consequences of unbridled government power, the prime evil that the writers of the American Constitution sought to guard against. Judges who ‘interpret” constitutional safeguards out of existence for the sake of some ideological crusade, presidents who over-reach their authority for personal or political reasons, and a Congress whose powers are extended  into matters that the Constitution never empowered them to legislate about are all part of the quiet repeal of the American revolution.”

It is a warning all too prescient in our current times of the COVID-19 Pandemic governmental responses and the actions of President Biden and his administration.

In the description of the book “A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles”:

“Controversies in politics arise from many sources, but the conflicts that endure for generations or centuries show a remarkably consistent pattern. In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes this pattern. He describes the two competing visions that shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power: the "constrained" vision, which sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the "unconstrained" vision, in which human nature is malleable and perfectible. A Conflict of Visions offers a convincing case that ethical and policy disputes circle around the disparity between both outlooks.”

“Visions differ both morally and intellectually. Moreover, social visions differ in some respects – though not all - from visions that play an important role in science. A central question from a moral perspective is the extent to which different social visions reflect difference in value premises. A central concern from an intellectual perspective is the very different history of visions of society and visions underlying scientific theories of natural phenomena. It is also useful to understand whether social issues represent conflicts of values, or visions, or of interests.”

These two visions, the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision, are both interested in the betterment of America but differ on how to achieve a more equitable society. While there are many variations of how to achieve this goal by each vision, each variation has a basis in either the constrained vision or the unconstrained vision. The proponents of each vision rarely understand the basis of the vision of the other, and as a result, the two sides often talk past each other because their visions and understandings differ.

Both visions are concerned with the betterment of society and humankind. However, the constrained vision hopes to accomplish this goal by assuring an equitable process that allows everyone to achieve their individual needs, while the unconstrained vision hopes to accomplish this by assuring an equitable outcome for everyone to achieve their needs. The constrained vision accepts human nature as it is and attempts to utilize human nature to better the process of achieving a better society, while the unconstrained vision believes that human nature can be molded and perfected to achieve a better society.

The constrained vision restrains governmental actions and sets boundaries of marketplace activities to allow each individual to make their own decisions within the restraints and bounds, while the unconstrained vision requires the government to make (many) unrestricted governmental actions and direct marketplace decisions for the good of all, as I have explained in my Article, "Greater Good versus the Common Good". The constrained vision believes that no person or groups of persons have the knowledge or wisdom to direct the economy or should have governmental control of the economy or society, while the unconstrained vision believes that an intellectual and moral person or persons can make better economic decisions for the individual and should have governmental control of society to institute their decisions. The constrained vision believes in a republican constitutional interpretation, while the unconstrained vision believes in a democratic constitutional interpretation, as I have explained in my Article, "A Republican Constitution or a Democratic Constitution".

These two different visions lead to two different modus operandi of society and government. Equality, Power, and Justice mean two different things in each vision. When one side speaks of these terms, the other side does not understand their side's meaning, and the other side often interprets them with their own meaning of these terms. Thus, the two sides often talk past each other by not having a common meaning and understanding of these terms.

In the description of the book “The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy”:

 “The Vision of the Anointed is a devastating critique of the mind-set behind the failed social policies of the past thirty years. Thomas Sowell sees what has happened not as a series of isolated mistakes but as a logical consequence of a vision whose defects have led to disasters in education, crime, family disintegration, and other social pathology. In this book, "politically correct" theory is repeatedly confronted with facts -- and sharp contradictions between the two are explained in terms of a whole set of self-congratulatory assumptions held by political and intellectual elites. These elites -- the anointed -- often consider themselves "thinking people," but much of what they call thinking turns out, on examination, to be rhetorical assertion, followed by evasions of mounting evidence against those assertions.”

Dr. Sowell starts by examining the ‘Key Elements in Common’ and the ‘Patterns of Failure’ of these crusades:

“What all these highly disparate crusades have in common is their moral exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their very different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed by the power of government. 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 great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
2. The 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.”

In doing so, they often rely on appeals to virtue or to fear, and an expectation of a Herd Mentality" in response to the appeals to virtue or to the fear. Rarely do they rely on evidence and reasoning in the formulation of their policies, and seldom do they employ persuasion but usually attempt to instruct the American public on the correctness of their opinions. But they do make assertions, and they hardly ever consider "The Law of Unintended Consequences" of their solutions. We should all remember that:

"Assertions are not facts, as they often contain Presumptions and Assumptions; Improper Facts, Faulty Reasoning; Logical Fallacies; Cognitive Biases; and the problems of Unintended Consequences that may be inherent in any assertion."
 - Mark Dawson

We should also remember that when evaluating their proposals, we ask the hard questions that Thomas Sowell has recommended:

“The three questions that will destroy most of the arguments of the left:
  1. Compared to what?
  2. At what cost?
  3. What hard evidence do you have?”

Nor do they evaluate the results of their policies. They do, however, make excuses for the failures of their policies or change the criteria for the success of the policies after they have been implemented, as stated in this book:

“A very distinct pattern has emerged repeatedly when policies favored by the anointed turn out to fail. This pattern has four stages:

Stage 1. The “Crisis” …
Stage 2. The “Solution” …
Stage 3. The “Results” …
Stage 4. The “Response” …”

This vision of the anointed often runs counter to the experience of the benighted masses and empirical data. However, experience and data have little impact on the vision of the anointed as they believe that as they are more intelligent, better educated, and morally superior, they are, of course, always correct. Their tenets are best expressed from a passage in this book:

“The central tenets of the prevailing vision can be summarized in five propositions:

1. Painful social situations (“problems”) exist not because of inherent limits of knowledge or resources, or inequalities inherent in human beings, but because other people lack the wisdom or virtue of the anointed.
2. Evolved beliefs represent only a “socially constructed” set of notions, not reflections of an underlying reality. Therefore the way by which “problems” can be “solved” is by applying the articulated rationality of the anointed, rather than by relying on evolved traditions or systemic processes growing out of the experience of the masses.
3. Social causation is intentional, rather than systemic, so that condemnation is in order when various features of the human experience are either unhappy or appear anomalous to the anointed.
4. Great social or biological dangers can be averted only by the imposition of the vision of the anointed on less enlightened people by the government.
5. Opposition to the vision of the anointed is due not to a different reading of complex and inconclusive evidence, but exists because opponents are lacking, either intellectually or morally, or both.”

The anointed have forgotten or never knew that no side is morally right nor intellectually superior. As these are complex issues of morality, and it is impossible to have a comprehensive knowledge of any subject, nor does anyone have the wisdom to access the societal impacts to achieve the goals, the visions of the anointed are the impossible dreams of a utopian society.

The Quest for Cosmic Justice, The Unconstrained Visions, and The Vision of the Anointed are a hallmark of the Liberals, Progressives, and Leftists social justice warriors and other activists, and are the tactics of the Democrat Party to pass legislation and increase funding for these policies of social justice warriors and other activists. They also utilize the stratagem of improper "Dialog & Debate" to achieve their goals, and all of this leads to the erosion of "A Civil Society" and "Divisiveness in America".

The latest book by Victor Davis Hanson, “The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization are Destroying the Idea of America”, is another attempt to explain the disparate ideologies in America. In an excellent review of this book by Michael Cozzi, “The Dying Citizen”, he states that this book: “is a prescient account of how the American conceptualization of citizenship has been eroded by progressive ideologues and those who wish to undermine the original intent of the Framers. He focuses on the categories of pre-citizens and post-citizens”.

These four books are an excellent explanation of the ideological differences that exist in America today and are well worth the read to understand the deep divisions in America. The Unconstrained Visions, The Vision of the Anointed, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, and The Dying Citizen are a hallmark of the Liberals, Progressives, Leftists, social justice warriors, and other activists, and are the tactics of the Democrat Party to pass legislation and increase funding for these policies. They also utilize the stratagem of improper "Dialog & Debate" to achieve their goals, and all of this leads to the erosion of "A Civil Society" and "Divisiveness in America".