In similar veins, his 'A Conflict of Visions' and 'The Vision of the Anointed' are two stunning incisive books that show pretty directly why we are where we are now, as divided as we are now. Likely corresponds strongly with Haidt's 'The Righteous Mind', referred to elsewhere in this topic.

I read your entire comment history couple of weeks ago.

Great experience! Thank you for providing level headed and well articulated responses to the widely spread mass hysteria.

I also learned a lot, special thanks for pointing Thomas Howell's books. Reading now the 'A Conflict of Visions'.

A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conflict_of_Visions
http://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Visions-Ideological-Political...

Really good read, though a bit longish. But that could be due to the fact that I listened to an audio-book of it.

I think Thomas Sowell's "A conflict of visions" should be mandatory reading at high school for this sort of reason. And not just in America. In every democracy. The book really is that good.

(it presents a very compelling theory as to why people separate into political left and right)

A Conflict of Visions is not a book about Marxism, it is a description of a model to help us understand our ideological preferences. Like all models, it is wrong but sometimes it is useful.

Love it. I've been reading a bunch of Thomas Sowell recently. That seems like it could be straight out of "A Conflict of Visions."

A column or collection of random quotes will never adequately summarize a thinker - however his books "Knowledge and Decisions" and "A Conflict of Visions" both rank as masterpieces.

Bryan Caplan also wrote a widely-circulated critical essay about A Conflict of Visions: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/sowell

I agree with some of the criticisms, but in general I think the dichotomy of the two visions is appropriate for explaining why two individuals may irreconcilably disagree on a particular issue at a given point in time.

Hmm, I don't recognise that description. His books "A Conflict of Visions" and "Intellectuals and society" are all about human decision making, judgement and uncertainty.

Thomas Sowell's "Conflict of Visions" theory might provide better explanations. In effect, people with more left/liberal views tend to emphasise the importance of speech, ideas, things that seem expert or scientific. People with more conservative views in contrast emphasise practical experience over ideas, common sense / simple explanations over complex / expert explanations, and tend to consider speech not particularly powerful at changing minds or spreading ideas.

The above explanation is not judgemental. There are times when complex, expert arguments are correct. There are also times when people obfuscate hidden agendas behind clever sounding language. How powerful speech is at spreading ideas is a purely intuitive judgement, it's not easy to measure.

If you believe that expressing your opinion isn't particularly impactful on the world, that people who use complicated statistical methods aren't automatically trustworthy and might be obfuscating things with maths, that academic/intellectual types who talk a lot aren't really valuable to society, then automatically you'd find participating in a poll unappealing.

In contrast, if you believe speech/expressing opinions is an extremely powerful way to change the world, that experts who use maths are inherently worth supporting, that academics/intellectuals are amongst the best of us, then talking to a pollster might seem like a pretty important and virtuous way to spend your time.

The above explanation is invariant to cancel culture, sneering attitudes towards conservatives etc.

Yes. Read a conflict of visions by Thomas Sowell. It explains why people separate into these two camps across time, place and culture.

> The above description makes left wing views sound superior to right wing views, which was not my intention.

It certainly wouldn't be Sowell's intention (you don't get to be a Hoover Institute fellow with that kind of attitude.)

> In fact Sowell's book lays down an extremely fair and balanced description of both right and left wing beliefs and assumptions, with IMHO no discernable bias between them.

As I understand it, A Conflict of Visions is the first part of a trilogy whose overall thrust, as I understand, is an attack on the "unconstrained" vision (the one you ascribe to the left wing -- not sure how accurate that reflects Sowell); though the first volume is mostly stage setting and the serious attacks are in the other two volumes.

From your description, it may be fair and balanced (though, given everything else I've seen from Sowell, I wouldn't expect that except in the Fox News sense of "fair and balanced"), but it doesn't seem at all accurate of the difference between the left and the right (it might better explain some of the difference between the libertarian and the authoritarian -- though I would not describe it, even there, as the dominant or sole basis for either view -- and certainly its not unheard of for right-libertarians, especially American right-libertarians, which Sowell certainly is, to conflate the left-right and libertarian-authoritarian axes.)

Most decisions put to referendum in Switzerland don't require deep knowledge. In fact most decisions governments make don't - they can't because neither politicians nor civil servants are chosen on the basis of their specialised knowledge.

Typical issues that go to referendum in Switzerland range from the trivial (shall we raise taxes to build a new football stadium/road tunnel/etc), to the constitutional (should international treaties be able to override referendums... that one is running at the moment). In none of these cases is a decision so complex that it can't be understood by everyone in a short time.

Generally, I've found that anyone claiming a government-level decision is too complicated to explain to an average person is trying to cover up major weaknesses in the underlying arguments.

The kind of everybody is equal mentality that must underlie such a statement boggles my mind. It's an attitude that is shockingly disconnected from the real world

The extent to which people differ in their moral and intellectual potential is the defining difference that creates right wing vs left wing politics in basically any democratic society. Read Thomas Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions" to get a very insightful analysis of why this is so. Far from being mind boggling, it's entirely expected that different people have different intuitions about the capability of the average person.

I have read more books by Thomas Sowell than by any other author, by a very wide margin. The one which has influenced me the most is the one which best captures the fundamental principles underlying his view of the world: A Conflict of Visions. I'd suggest it as required reading for anyone who wants to fully appreciate Sowell's work, as it provides insight into how he makes normative judgments about the merits of economic policy choices.

In general Sowell does an excellent job of demonstrating through data that the outcomes of economic policies are often directly at odds with their stated objectives, but to really take a principled stand on what the proper objectives are in the first place you need a set of coherent first principles. A Conflict of Visions provides this backdrop, and once you understand that Sowell clearly adheres to the "constrained" vision of humankind then his other works fall into their proper context.

It's a great book, but not above criticism, so in the interest of thoughtful inquiry I'd encourage anyone to read the book as well as this review by Bryan Caplan, economics professor at George Mason University who is also an economic libertarian: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/sowell

This set of observations has been made repeatedly throughout history, albeit usually in works that sink immediately into obscurity. That's a pity because the key insights are very important.

The same theme - why do so many intellectuals find themselves supporting dictatorships long after the rest of the world has understood their true nature - has been extensively explored by Sowell in books like Intellectuals & Society, and a Conflict of Visions. He finds similar explanations:

* Difficulty in accepting that individuals are inherently limited and corruptible, and that ideas are often worthless when tested in the forge of reality. After all, intellectuals are almost by definition people whose value to society comes from production of ideas and who see themselves as unchained from the normal moral and mental limits most people slave under.

* That reason, reflection and debate are limited tactics that can't yield that much insight about the world.

* That to believe in intellectuals as a concept is almost inherently to disbelieve in the notion of democracy, because if insight and wisdom were really so compressed into a few moralistic bookworms and if most people really had none to share, then voting itself is pointless or even harmful. Instead the best outcomes would be yielded by a dictatorship of intellectuals (which is what communism is, in effect).

So you end up with academics, writers, some kinds of politician ... the people who would these days be called the 'elite' or 'globalists' ... having a distinctly lukewarm relationship with markets and votes throughout history.

Yet because they are fundamentally wrong about human nature, where their ideas are put into practice things inevitably go wrong. The intellectuals who end up in charge don't create a utopia. Their 5 year plans turn out to be not that well planned, their price-fixing turns out to create other problems elsewhere, and their profound belief that most people are too stupid or immoral to rule turns into an oppressive dystopia. And so the wheel turns.

If you're interested in these ideas or philosophies, this video interview with Sowell is a good place to start:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERj3QeGw9Ok

The book "A Conflict of Visions" is by far the best treatment of this topic I have ever read. It was recommended to me some years ago by an anonymous poster on an internet forum and I am glad he/she did.

It's essentially a generalised theory that explains left/right (liberal/conservative) differences in terms of a single underlying intuition about human nature. Because it's an intuition, you can't alter people's point on the political spectrum through an interesting fact or argument, it's only experience that can change people. And yet he shows how starting from this one basic assumption you can logically extrapolate all conservative and liberal political positions from it, in an entirely rational way.

> now they send me emails telling me that as a liberal, I am radical, insane, an anti Semite, and hate America

Political rhetoric has always been inflamed. I see it from my liberal west coast politicians. I see it from friends and family. You yourself have said that all conservatives are alt-right.

> If there are conservatives that don't engage with the world like this, I want to get a drink with them, on me, because I've lost hope.

The truth, I suspect, is that they are probably all around you. Most people are not particularly introspective or philosophical when it comes to politics, but if you dig in you'll generally find there are good reasons for them believing the way they do (even if, in the end, you find those reasons unconvincing).

Dr. Haidt has done reasonable job (as a liberal) of trying to understand the conservative mind. I also recommend Arnold Kling, an economist who wrote The Three Languages of Politics, and Thomas Sowell, who wrote A Conflict of Visions.

I should also add that there is an increased intensity with some of the rhetoric, but I think that has more to do with people (on both sides) sensing that we may be undergoing a shift in the political landscape, and that more is at stake than usual. If so, it's not the first time it's happened in U.S. history (they happen approximately every ~40 years, from what I've read). Hopefully it will pass in a few years, but we'll see.

>For instance the apparent love of conservatives for 'respect for authority' is not actually respect for authority (why would they be so against big government if that were the case?)

Because authority is not the only value they hold, it is just one of six values. Overreaching authority will naturally conflict with those other values, particularly liberty. This is also complicated by the fact that libertarians tend to be lumped into the category of conservatives in the US, when libertarians have little in common with conservatives and overwhelmingly base their moral foundations entirely on liberty. Libertarians don't have respect for authority, conservatives do. But if you call libertarians conservatives, that will make things look weird.

>One can observe that people with liberal views often have tremendous respect for certain types of unstructured authority, in particular, academics.

I can not observe that at all. Quite the contrary, I find overwhelmingly that liberals do not respect authority in any form. Academics are not respected by liberals, they are constantly attacked and vilified for publishing facts that liberals don't like. Liberals will point to an academic that agrees with them to bolster their argument, but they don't actually respect academics, as they have nothing but disdain for an academic that disagrees with them. Look at how James Watson has been treated by liberals, I don't see a lot of respect there. If they had respect for academic authority, they would actually consider what is said, instead of assuming the person saying it is evil and calling them evil.

>The book "A Conflict Of Visions" provides an alternative explanation for this apparent discovery

I'm not sure that's an alternative explanation, it seems like the same explanation. Haidt notes the same thing, that liberals view conservatives as evil because the underlying values conservatives hold are not values to liberals. While conservatives see liberals as ignorant or stupid, because they incorrectly assume liberals are using the same underlying values to come to conclusions about issues and so they must be ignorant of some fact or making an error of reasoning.

You should read Thomas Sowell's "A conflict of visions". It's short and really great. It's about why people group themselves into the political left and right, and why those sides disagree.

One of the points he makes is that the left and right don't agree on what the words "equality" or "fairness" mean. Right wing people tend to focus on equality of process. Left wing people tend to focus on equality of outcome.

That is, a conservative will tend to say "is the hiring process fair? yes? then if 90% of the jobs go to men, there's no problem". Whereas on the political left, they may say "if 90% of the jobs go to men then by definition the hiring process is not fair, and we should find a Solution, like by setting quotas". Right-wingers will tend to reject direct intervention like that, as they don't trust in human ability to intervene without causing unexpected and undesirable side effects.

Whilst that's one way to phrase it, the underlying differences are deeper and more to do with perception of the span of human nature.

For instance the apparent love of conservatives for 'respect for authority' is not actually respect for authority (why would they be so against big government if that were the case?) nor particular to conservatives, but rather, a preference for systems and formalised power structures over loose, informally specified power structures. One can observe that people with liberal views often have tremendous respect for certain types of unstructured authority, in particular, academics.

The book "A Conflict Of Visions" provides an alternative explanation for this apparent discovery that liberals cannot understand conservatives but not vice-versa. Conservatives see disagreement with their world view as naivety, but liberals see disagreement with their world view as the result of an evil or malign nature. The latter view leads to a belief that attempting to understand such a perspective is itself immoral behaviour, as you might be legitimising it, or alternatively, might be tempted to the dark side by mere exposure to the ideas themselves.

This is why you see so much no-platforming and general censorship coming from people with particular world views: they believe that conservative ideas work like some sort of infectious disease. Conservatives don't think that way about liberal views.