Thomas Sowell. Again.
An excellent interview with Thomas Sowell.
The point he makes reminds me of the following, one of my favorite quotes from the work of Czech novelist Milan Kundera:
For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat.
I wonder how a candidate for election would do if he/she spoke of the opportunities Americans have (and using specific examples) instead of what they don’t have and what they’re owed or entitled to from the govt. (and using for examples made-up or individual’s sad stories evoking the experience of one or a few — out of 300 million citizens.)
Note: this is not to say I don’t feel badly for people who have unfortunate experiences economically, healthwise, or any other way. Lord knows we all have unfortunate experiences during our lives — that’s life. But even while help or sympathy is often welcome, no one is owed this — and certainly not from the govt. In fact, the notion that the govt. CAN fix all ills in people’s lives is completely misguided. The expectation that govt. SHOULD fix everyone’s problems is, well, absurd.
There are a lot of conservative writers I follow and enjoy, but there is only one with whom I have never (so far as I can remember) disagreed and that is Thomas Sowell. In my opinion, he is the smartest commentator out there. But more importantly, he has got a huge dose of common sense, which is sorely lacking in our world and almost completely absent in our government and in public discourse in America these days.
Of course, Neo-neocon and her commenters aren’t subject to this lack of common sense. This is a great place for good comments from thoughtful people.
Two very relevant quotes from Thomas Jefferson, traditionally viewed as a great defender of a free press:
“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.” –Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632
“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.” –Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:224
Wolla Dalbo: those two Jefferson quotes are wonderful.
And sobering.
Wolla Dalbo,
The quotes are even more sobering when you think of the changes in the population. In 1807, people had limited access to the wider world but were more in touch with everyday reality and could extrapolate from that. Today, people have broader but more superficial knowledge of the world, yet many lack anchors to human basics. As with Climategate, the base data set is unreliable. How many can now say that something doesn’t smell quite right? We have gone from knowledge gained in families and communities to pseudoknowledge gained in celebrity mags and round-the-click news and spin reports, where coolness and edginess trump everything.
What Mr Sowell is pointing out is the hubris of intellectuals who think they know better than gravity which course a river should take. 300 million people in their individual lives behave like gravity charting the course for society. Social engineering by intellectuals assumes those 300 million people are always wrong.
csimon,
Since my first Presidential election as an eligible voter (’92, in which I voted for Clinton, and since which I have made the same journey as our host), I have marveled at how those who best get their message out, those who campaign most effectively, do so by personalizing the issues, no matter which side of the political spectrum they come from. In that respect, Alinsky’s rules – or some of them, anyway – ought to be seen as not being just for radicals. Campaigns by anecdote always win. And I don’t see how good conservative ideas and ideals lend themselves to personalization any less than do leftist ones. It was difficult to follow Scott Brown’s campaign in depth from overseas, but I got the general impression that he was able to do some of this, and Coakley’s doing absolutely nothing certainly didn’t hurt.
I think that the “star” of campaigns for GOP House and Senate seats this year, and for President in 2012, should be the put-upon Small Business Owner. The butcher, the barber, the stationery-store owner, all of whom are suffering far more under Obama than The (Obama-voting) Rich. Drum that into the public’s head and watch the dominoes fall.
Yackums: have you ever thought of going into the political campaign management business?