In his 1995 book, The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell observed that an elite group of activist Americans, without being appointed by anyone, declared their superior morality and their critical role in correcting society’s wrongs.
The book is highly relevant today. The self-anointed, he says, believe their vision and ideas are superior and more moral than the rest of ours are. They feel obligated to foist their ideas on the rest of us to save society’s victims from oppression by imposing their collective will on others.
The anointed, Sowell explains, is a loose class consisting of members of elite media institutions, academics, and progressive politicians. They believe it is their role to rescue victimized and underprivileged classes. Their default mechanism for correcting perceived injustices is invariably the state.
For a recent example, consider Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said:
I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.
She is an example of an elite who sees herself as superior and on a morally higher plane. You can’t talk people like this out of it. Sowell said those with this mindset think “those who disagree with the prevailing vision are seen not merely as being in error, but in sin.”
The anointed must refuse to accept that their ideological opponents share compassion for marginalized groups. They must make those who disagree into the enemy. If the anointed acknowledged that both sides share compassion and caring, those emotions would lose their political potency. A monopoly on compassion is the platform upon which they place their moral superiority. The anointed’s vision requires that the victims’ own behavior, performance, and choices be swept aside and ignored as factors contributing to their circumstances.
Sowell noted:
People are often said to lack “access” to various jobs, educational institutions, or credit, when in fact they may not have behaved or performed in a way that would enable them to meet the same standards that others meet,
Along the same lines, Sowell cites the example of millions of people with incomes over $100,000 who lack health insurance not because they lack “access” to insurance but because they chose to spend their money on other things.
Sowell wrote:
With these three inconvenient complications out of the picture, results after the fact can then be equated with conditions existing before the fact. Success thus becomes “privilege” and failure “disadvantage” – by definition,
Despite this, government has increasingly come to be seen as a way of benefiting some groups over others. This often happens with little regard for what it does to other groups or to the integrity of the system as a whole.
Sowell concluded:
At the heart of many of these schemes is third-party decision-making. Third parties typically know less, even when convinced that they know more. In addition to lacking the incentives of those who directly benefit from being right and suffer from being wrong.
Consider the leftist fact-checkers. They are a perfect example of self-appointed moral and intellectual superiority. People need to do their own fact-checking. They all come from the same leftist perspective, and they have a corresponding agenda.
As FEE writes, “Advocates for liberty have no reason to cede the moral high ground to the self-styled anointed. Freedom, personal responsibility, and voluntary interactions are a far better and just means of uplifting the least among us.”