The constrained and unconstrained visions

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In the video

Thomas Sowell on the Myths of Economic Inequality

Thomas Sowell discusses two very basic social assumptions which explain the differences between liberals and conservatives. They are what he calls the Constrained vision and the Unconstrained vision. They represent two very different assumptions underlying the way liberals and conservatives think.

Constrained vision: The constrained vision “sees the evils of the world as deriving from the limited and unhappy choices available, given the inherent moral and intellectual limitations of human beings.” The constrained vision understands itself as constrained by the limitations of reality itself. In other words, one cannot proceed as so many do to contend that good things happen automatically but bad things are somebodies fault. For the amelioration of the human condition, the constrained vision relies on certain social processes such as moral traditions, the marketplace, or families.” Not government.

Unconstrained vision: When Rousseau said that “man is born free” but “is everywhere in chains,” he expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision, in which the fundamental problem is not nature or man but institutions.” In other words, he has the notion that good things happen naturally and bad things because institutions including civilization itself have made these bad things happen.

It is my personal suspicion that the vast majority of the assertions of the 18^th century French philosophers on close examination would be found to be great sounding nonsense. It was an intellectual trend among these thinkers at that time to idealize the life of the savage living out on some south-sea island as being much better than civilized life.

In regard to good things happening naturally, one thing is certain. “Nature” can be both very harsh and unfair. I just saw a YouTube video on ostriches in which they stated that only 1 in 15 ostrich chicks survived to adulthood. From what I understand the young of a great many creatures have a very poor chance of reaching adulthood. (Most are eaten or suffer some bad fate before reaching adulthood.) Nature is simply not just, as we might view just. Throughout history most people have been born to hard, rough lives with some lucky few born into wealthy families where they received every advantage. Most people have been peasants and large portions of mankind have been slaves. Some people were born into slavery and others made slaves by some means or other — as being captives in a war or, perhaps, being sold into slavery for payment of a debt. [In Biblical times wives and children were viewed as property and men desperate for money could sell them into slavery or could themselves be sold into slavery for non-payment of debt. See the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, Matthew 18:21–35.]

[However, looking at things another way, we have all been born into a great and wonderful world in so many ways and have been given so much. Consider all of the wonderful gifts we have been given: that marvelous organ called the eye that gives us that power to see the beauty that is around us, that marvelous organ called the ear that gives us the power to hear the most lovely music, that organ called the mouth that gives us the power to converse with others, that really amazing organ called the brain that is capable of so much. God really is great and has given us all so much. We just don’t appreciate it.]

There is a burden that has been placed on all living things: the need to eat. For some creatures finding food may be easier than for others. Grazing animals such as deer, cattle, sheep and goats may find food readily available in the form of grass or other vegetation. It is all around them and ready for eating. They just eat it. No special training is needed. For other creatures finding food is a lot more difficult. The meat-eaters have to kill to eat and the job of finding and catching prey is not so easy. You have to be smart, sly, quick, and skilled to catch a dinner. The meat-eaters go through a training process in their youth where their parents teach them how to catch prey. Without lengthy training they would just starve. Mostly, in this world life is about competition and survival of the fittest. And violence is a big part of reality. In the wild, a life is lost to provide food for another. The predator is so made that he has no choice but to kill. For him it is either kill or starve to death. For the non-predator the situation is different: He must be careful, cautious, wary, and smart if he wishes to survive and not become food for a predator. It is a fact of life: violence, heartlessness, and cruelty is an unchangeable part of the basic design of the world.

Acquiring food can be very difficult. Americans might not understand this. For them, finding food is just a matter of a trip to a supermarket. They don’t think about all of the arts and processes that lies behind that food on the shelves — all of the knowledge and skills and modern devices that are involved in producing it. It is my guess that if you placed most people out in the middle of a forest or meadow where there was no civilization around they would starve to death. They would not be able to find or catch food. The middle of a forest is very quiet and all you see are perhaps some birds up in the trees and a few insects. Mammals are wary and stay hidden. Catching wild prey is not so easy. Without special knowledge you would have a hard time finding or catching something you could eat. Primitive man must have had to learn a lot just to acquire food for himself. It is just not that simple. He gradually learned how to catch prey and learned about grains and other things he could grow and eat. It was certainly not easy. There was surely a long learning process involved. The abundance and variety of foods in a modern supermarket is a modern marvel. There is a lot of scientific research and modern know-how behind it. It is true, you can grow some foods with a little fertile land, seeds, and knowhow but it takes several months of time and some work.

Nature is full of hardships and dangers. Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, diseases, famines, droughts. For as long as man has been on this earth he has had to deal with sickness, disease, natural calamities and disasters. Life is just not simple, fair or just. And then there have always been other tribes or groups of people around who would come and kill you for your possessions — like the Vikings, Huns, or Mongols.

Much in life is just luck and chance. Some people are born in some big third world slum (like the Mumbai or Manila slums) where people have a real daily struggle while others are born to some wealthy family in the USA. Some children in poor countries get sold by desperate, cash-strapped parents into slavery of one kind or another while the children of others are sent by their wealthy parents to some ivy league college. Children in some places of the USA are lucky enough to have great schools to attend while children in other places are forced to attend atrocious schools.

Much of the badness and injustice in the world has to do with the basic facts of life. And many of these facts of life regard the basic nature of man himself. Man is a flawed being — a deeply flawed being with all kinds of perverse inclinations. Pride, greed, laziness, hatred, envy, jealousy, deceit, lying, lust, etc. are facts of life encountered everywhere. You cannot create a perfect society, or anything close to it, when your building blocks are deeply flawed beings. You can’t get around all this with laws and social programs. You just get a lot of foolishness and squandering of money and resources.

A man marries a woman and then later becomes enticed by some other attractive woman and abandons his wife. He has wronged his wife. Just another injustice in a world ruled by Satan.

Our modern liberals have all of the answers. They have abandoned God and his teachings and looked and seen through to the Truth. And they are determined to re-engineer society to conform to their truth. They reject chastity and embrace promiscuity and perverted sex. They reject marriage in favor of living together and indoctrinate schoolchildren into the acceptance of homosexual sex. They charge Christians with being haters and demand that everyone uses the preferred pronouns on men or women who feel like they are the opposite sex from what they really are. They are dogma driven by socialist mentality and think all of the problems of humanity come from a bad system and changing the system will solve them. They think our free enterprise system is bad and should be replaced with Communism. They think all white people are bad because some of their ancient ancestors had Black slaves. They think racial bias is the sin of sins and that the white mind needs to be “re-engineered”. And if they were able they would rewrite the laws of the country to force everyone to think and act in the way they think they should. At heart they are totalitarians and don’t like challenges.

See Thomas Sowell and a Conflict of Visions

It does seem to me that there is a basic assumption that characterizes the thinking of most liberals beginning with the 18^th century French thinkers and running up to the present time. First, they are atheists and reject Biblical authority. Second, they are much impressed with the accomplishments of science and have infinite confidence in the mind of man. They believe man with his great and powerful mind, if he discards all of his religious beliefs and assumptions, can come up with some perfect system, some utopia, in which all will be wonderful. A system in which all of the ugly problems of life and the basic faults of man will disappear. They think the great mind of man can come up with a perfect system, that the faults of man are due to a bad system, and in the right system his faults will melt away. There is that assumption there that a perfect system exists. The big thing standing in the way of finding this perfect system is religion. Thus they need to get rid of religion. This is an assumption in Marxism and I think it is an underlying assumption of all liberalism. So they reject all religious beliefs and assumptions and start thinking from scratch. And after a lot of deep thought they end up advocating free love and homosexual sex. They decide Capitalism is bad, that it is the source much of the social evil that besets man and needs to be replaced. And from all of this comes their idea that they need to re-engineer man’s mind. His beliefs are wrong, his outlooks are wrong, and he needs to be re-educated.

An example of all this lies in the Communist attempts to install Marxism in Russia, China, Cuba, etc. The Communists always made great efforts to shape and form the population psychologically through various methods such as indoctrination of school children; re-education camps for adults; sending dissidents to labor camps, etc. The idea was to indoctrinate people, psychologically re-engineer people; inculcate into peoples’ minds the outlooks, attitudes, values, etc. of Marxism. Another example of this is what has been happening in American society for the last sixty years in attempts of the liberal Left to transform and remake the American mind into the outlooks of liberalism through all of the pro-homosexual propaganda, feminist propaganda, socialist anti-capitalist outlooks and mentality, and all of the political correctness. It is an attempt to re-educate, mold, brainwash people psychologically. The socialists have the idea that they can create a perfect society if they can only remake people according to their own ideas.

Perhaps this is the unrestrained vision.

I think liberals tend to give little attention to the wisdom of the past, to the great thinkers of the past. The reason is probably because, mostly, the thinkers of the past have been primarily concerned with reality, the real nature of man, how to live life as we find it. It is true that Plato did propose a very idealistic, communist type system in The Republic and was perhaps rather akin to our modern liberals. Aristotle on the other hand was a lot more realistic and practical in his thinking. Most wisdom of the past is concerned with the real world and the nature of man and how to deal with it.

Most liberals, it seems to me, have a very high opinion of their own intellect and a very low opinion of the intellect of others. In general, liberals do want to create a more just world. And they have their ideas on how to do it. Sometimes their arguments may be valid. In the early days of the industrial revolution there were many factories employing mostly children in England and the socialists had valid criticisms. With changing times accommodations must be made for new realities. The problem is that they get carried away and don’t seem to understand that there are always pros and cons to almost anything one proposes to do and they seem to be blind to all of the cons and ramifications of the things they propose. And they tend to be very ideological and slaves to basic dogmas based on false assumptions with a lot of deep defects. Because their minds are based in an atheistic outlook their opinions on things can be very different from what a God fearing person could accept.

There are many causes for all of the injustices that occur in life and it is foolish to think that any economic or political system can solve even most of them. Reality is far too complicated for that. Any system that can be designed has pluses and minuses, pros and cons, tradeoffs.

Many people want to help less fortunate people. But I think that doing this is usually far more difficult than one might suppose. It is my belief that the most deserving people don’t usually need help. Their good life habits such as industriousness, perseverance, and integrity have taken care of them. It is usually the undeserving people who are in need of help. Their bad habits have pulled them down. And trying to help some foolish person pulled down by bad habits is a waste of time.

The biblical teaching is that man is a sinner — and that Satan rules in this world. I believe this is a basic truth of life and that this is a prime reason why there will always be a great deal of foolishness and evil in this world. The modern liberal has a lot higher estimation of his own intellect than is merited. He is wise in his own conceit. He is unable to see his own great foolishness. He vastly overrates himself.

In his book, “Intellectuals and Society”, p. 98, Thomas Sowell says the following:

The two visions differ fundamentally, not only in how they see the world, but also in how those who believe in these visions see themselves. If you happen to believe in free markets, judicial restraint, traditional values and other features of the tragic vision, then you are just someone who believes in free markets and traditional values. There is no personal exaltation in those beliefs. But to be for “social justice” and “saving the environment,” or to be “anti-war” is more than just a set of hypotheses about empirical facts. This vision puts you on a higher moral plane as someone who is concerned and compassionate, someone who is for peace in the world, a defender of the downtrodden, and someone who wants to preserve the beauty of nature and save the planet from being polluted by others less caring.

In short, one vision makes you someone special and the other vision does not. These visions are not symmetrical. Their asymmetry, as we shall see, affects not only how they see themselves but how they see those who disagree with them.

9 Aug 2023