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The swirl of their buzzwords—“access,” “stigma,” “progressive,” “diversity,” “crisis,” etc.—shows a discernible pattern. What these innumerable buzzwords have in common is that they either (1) preempt issues rather than debate them, (2) set the anointed and the benighted on different moral and intellectual planes, or (3) evade the issue of personal responsibility.
The Vision of the Anointed
Thomas Sowell
Furthermore, under this line of thinking, one could extrapolate that a right-wing journey would gravitate toward no government (anarchy), while a left-wing journey would navigate toward total government. This possibility calls into question the integrity of the old left-right dichotomy, meaning that the old, circular, horseshoe theory or U-turn spectrum (pitting fascism and communism as polar opposites) is either broken, a complot of historical sabotage, or simply an invention of pure fallacy. Such bending is absurd, at best, or dangerous, at worst. Why? Because if totalitarianism is positioned on the circular ends of both left and right, then “the political spectrum teaches us that opposites are the same and the same are opposites.”[155] Such absurdity fogs the mind with uncertainty and confusion; reality becomes nearly impossible to identify or define. And without clarity, how can anyone determine what is true or false?
Killing History
L.K. Samuels
Since specialization is a way of coping with the inadequacies of the human mind, it should hardly be surprising that those with the vision of the anointed often view specialization negatively, or that their vocabulary often reflects that. Cosmic decisions require minds with cosmic scope—and to say that there are no such minds, that the human experience must be broken down into manageable-sized pieces, is to deny the vision of the anointed. Meanwhile, those with the tragic vision have often proclaimed the virtues of specialization. Adam Smith attributed much of economic progress to the “division of labor,” Edmund Burke said that he “revered” the specialist within his specialty, and Oliver Wendell Holmes said that specialists were more needed than generalists, whose presumptions he derided. But such views are the opposite of the views among the anointed.
The Vision of the Anointed
Thomas Sowell
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