BONUS: The 1987 Book that Explains Mamdani’s Victory

0:00Last night, the once unimaginable happened. New York City elected a socialist as mayor. Zoran Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization dedicated to, quote, transforming the power relations of global capitalism. Across the country, DSA membership numbers are at an all-time high. Mamdani's unlikely victory, and the momentum of progressive Democrats in general, is the latest sign that another profound shift in our politics could be underway. But how did we get here? I don't think you can answer that question without reading Thomas Sowell. Sowell is one of the world's most influential economists and philosophers, and he's written more than 45 books.

0:42But A Conflict of Visions, first published in 1987, is his favorite. In that book, he traces the underlying logic behind all modern political divides. Why is it that knowing someone's position on one issue, say gun control, makes it easy to predict their position on totally unrelated issues like abortion? Some people would chalk it up to simple tribalism. But Sowell, who was a Marxist as a young man before becoming one of the most important conservative thinkers in America, argues that it's something much deeper. A clash of instinctive visions about human nature and the limits of social engineering.

1:20A Conflict of Visions is the book that I chose to discuss with Shiloh Brooks on his new podcast, Old School. Our conversation, which was recorded well before yesterday's election, illuminates why some of us buy into utopian projects that seek to remake society, while others trust the quiet power of incentive structures like free markets. It was a great conversation, and I'm excited to share part of it with you today. This is just a section. For the rest of the discussion, search for Old School with Shiloh Brooks wherever you get your podcasts.

2:01Hey, Coleman here. If you're enjoying the show, then you probably care about how political decisions really get made. If that's you, I want to tell you about the new podcast, On Notice, produced by the nonpartisan newsroom Notice. Each week, journalist Reese Gorman sits down with lawmakers for candid conversations, not just about the headlines, but about what makes them tick and what brought them to Washington in the first place. On Notice gives you an insider's view of the people-shaping policy in the U.S. Reese's approachable style has earned him trust on both sides of the aisle, unlocking unguarded conversations that you won't hear in traditional interviews.

2:38So tune in to On Notice. That's notice spelled N-O-T-U-S. It's available every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts, or on YouTube. So let's say, okay, we've got this climate change problem, right? We're going to get the experts to study it for years and recommend solutions. And they recommend that we start recycling. This is an important thing that we can do to preserve the planet. Great. Easy. So let's educate people to recycle. Let's use the power of reason, the power of persuasion. People will see reason. They'll understand. We'll teach them from a young age that if you've got plastic, you put it in this one.

3:16If you've got trash, you put it in this one, et cetera. so you know fast forward 10 years or whatever you study it and you see that like recycling has had almost no impact on anything and you go hold hold on like what's going on here it clearly our educate we haven't been educating people enough we haven't uh emphasized this enough k through 12 we need more you know we need more flyers in public places we need educational videos we need a celebrity example video and this is one by one from the inside out. We're going to raise the consciousness of humanity and that's how we're going to solve this problem.

3:54But then someone from the tragic vision is going to quickly intuit and by instinct say, well, the problem is not that it's complicated or that people need more expertise. The problem is they have no fucking personal incentive to recycle. They do not personally benefit from recycling. It is a slight nuisance in their life it requires some extra time and extra thought. People are selfish and always will be. So this is not a durable solution to our problem. If you want a durable solution, you're going to have to change the incentives for people that produce these things. You're going to have to make it in our self-interest to recycle.

4:35You're going to have to make it in the self-interest of companies to use more sustainable materials or something like that. And so someone with a tragic vision would probably not even think to push recycling at the beginning because they would consider it so obvious that human beings aren't going to en masse change their behavior, even in small ways, because we're all too selfish. And the exceptions just prove the rule. Whereas people with the other vision would instinctively want to start a nonprofit that goes into kindergartens and teaches kids to recycle. Right. The constrained view seems willing to digest some measure of injustice in the world to say, we can incentivize it as much as we can.

5:18It's sort of like free markets. You know, Sowell talks a lot about markets. There will be in free markets people who are poor. Like just that's part of the function of the thing. And so we have to come to terms with the fact that our solution to the problem does not in every case provide each person with a kind of flourishing. We have to digest some measure, some compromise, some, you know, be moderate about our hopes, digest some injustice. Whereas the other side with the recycling, well, no, no, we just need more education and we can perfect this thing such that everyone recycles and we solved our problem.

5:54An unwillingness to digest or come to terms with injustice, perhaps, or imperfect solutions, one might say. This seems to be dispositionally something that separates the two. Yes. So the tragic vision does not believe solutions are possible. Yeah. In the fullest sense. Yes. There's no solution for poverty. Right. There's no solution for war. Right. There's no ending these things. Right. The reason there's no ending these things is because of human nature. We would have to become different kinds of animals in order for there to be no more war. There's no version of us currently constituted biologically that's compatible with a war-free world or a poverty-free world.

6:44and so the holder of the tragic vision would hear slogans like end poverty and end war to be just not simply naive but actually meaningless because the whole question is how you manage the trade-offs of poverty which will always be there how you manage the trade-offs of war which will always be there I mean in the case of war the problem is that obviously just because you don't want to go to war doesn't mean others will not want to go to war on you. So the trade-off there is how much war do I need to do in order to prevent the worst kinds of war against me? Because if the answer is zero, you're going to be destroyed.

7:28Your country's going to... If you never fight back, eventually some other country will invade you because education isn't going to work on them. It's probably not even going to work on you. Right. So the much smarter thing to do is think about incentives and deterrence. How do I deter my enemies? How do I make my enemies understand that if you invade me, it's not going to be, it's going to hurt you more than me. Right. Or at least as much. Right. Whereas someone with an unconstrained vision would have, you know, a proposal for stopping war altogether. I mean, I guess something like the United Nations to some extent reflects the unconstrained vision.

8:07You know, This idea that if we all get in the same room together, we're all, you know, post-World War II, we can just resolve stuff with our words so that we don't have to go to war anymore. Right, right. And so that's kind of an example. Yeah, that's a perfect example because it shows there's a certain rational optimism on the United Nations example. That there are, we can get together and reason through by way of words, solutions to problems, and we can have world peace or something like this. Like this tremendous hope, which is conditioned on us getting together and reasoning. Yeah, and all finally agreeing on - Exactly right.

8:48Versus like this, the starting point, which says there will always be war in the world because human nature is such that no institution, no matter how rational and well-meaning, can constrain and order the impulses, the wild and unpredictable vicissitudes of man or something like that. Or just the incentives. Yeah. As long as there's something to be gained from war, people will go to war. Right, right. People will launch war whether or not you're willing to defend your country. Right. And the same analogy applies because we should take it. I mean, you've now got us into the practical with the recycling and the war, but he talks at length about crime, that the constrained vision sees something interior or inside of human beings, which compels them or drives them to commit crimes, which can't be rooted out, no matter how good the justice system is, no matter how rehabilitative it is, these sorts of things.

9:43Whereas the other side seems to view crime not as a consequence of something inside of us, but as a reaction to the circumstances in which we find ourselves and their injustice, bad neighborhoods, poor public policy, or these sorts of things. And so if we can only make better neighborhoods and better public policy, we can rid the world of crime. Whereas the folks on the constraint side would say, no, you can't rid the world of crime. There's something in human beings which will always perpetually be drawn to commit crimes of various kinds for various gains. Yeah. The uncontrained person is going to say, what happened to this person?

10:21How did we fail this person? That they went out and committed a double homicide in a gang feud, And a person with a constrained vision is going to say,

10:35well, let's say it's a gang-related murder. Okay, they're part of an economic criminal enterprise, fundamentally not that different from a company, just operating by different rules and with different incentives. And they had something to gain by killing members of a rival gang, the same way a Wall Street firm would have something to gain game by poaching a rival. So you can't get rid of those incentives as long as there's a market for drugs and a black market. That's going to happen. And it doesn't mean society failed this person. What it means is that society needs to have a really strict set of rules and incentive, a counter incentive to this kind of behavior.

11:21It has to be like, if you do this, you're going to to go to jail very quickly, and it's going to suck. So that has to be in the minds of the people considering these decisions, and that's it. That's all we can do. We cannot educate our way out of a problem of having a black market that's always going to be there. Sowell is nuanced enough to say that these things are a gradient, which you've been emphasizing throughout your talk with me. He points out some very interesting examples of hybrids of the constrained and unconstrained. He talks about Marxism, which I think is the most interesting, fascism, and utilitarianism.

11:58What's interesting to me about Marxism and the way that it's a hybrid is Marxism begins with assumptions that we live in a constrained world. That world is constrained by material conditions. But the end of Marxism or its goal or its sumum bonum is that we will solve the problem of the injustices that are inculcated by material conditions and reach a kind of unconstrained paradise where we have found perfect solutions through communism to all of our problems. And so it's constrained in the sense that it acknowledges limits on human beings through material conditions, the way Marxism does, but it's unconstrained in the sense that its paradise is this sort of unconstrained perfect solution, you know, whatever, philosophizing in the morning and fishing in the evening or whatever it goes with that Marx says it.

12:44And so I'm fascinated by the way that these two things sort of fuse over various kinds of political philosophies over history. So I just point that out, by the way, to show folks that Sol's a pretty nuanced thinker. Let me now just say one aspect. He was a Marxist in his youth. Yeah, so it makes sense that he would see the depths of the problem. He was a very, an extremely learned Marxist. In other words, he read every page of Das Kapital and understood it. Which is more than you could say for 99 % of Marxists. So his book on Marx is, to my knowledge, the very best explanation of what Marx meant.

13:25If you've ever been confused by Marx, read Marx by Thomas Sowell. Sowell does an extraordinary job elaborating the character of the two visions and showing what separates them and admitting that they're hybrids. And it's a really beautiful portrait. What I was left wondering is, and we've touched on this a bit, what is it that makes someone adopt a vision initially? We've used the word over the course of our conversation instinctive. You could talk about subconscious. What soul seems to neglect is, and what in a way is the more interesting, if not the more interesting question, than an interesting question, which is, what is it that makes the man to the left of me unconstrained and the woman to the right of me constrained?

14:12What is that? Where does that commitment come from? And it seemed to me that there are, if I put it this way, some pre-political factors that soul doesn't take into account. For instance, one's religious orientation, I suspect, might well condition which of these two visions one adopted. If one believed that man was fallen or something like this, or that the power of human beings was limited in the world and that God would be the solution to these problems in an afterlife or something like that, then one might well be constrained. And that's a pre-political thing. One didn't come to that conclusion on the basis of a kind of consideration of public policy.

14:55if that's absent in your life you know you might have other sort of pre-political assumptions that would animate adopting the unconstrained view and so my sense was that there's a kind of psychological piece to this the the first cause which is why does a person go in a given direction in the first place not to say they can't change they can change yeah well then then it raises the question can you choose what you believe yeah which i'm not sure you can yeah Because I have to be convinced of something to believe it. It's not exactly a choice in the typical sense. I chose what to wear today. I had a lot of options and this is what I chose.

15:36For whatever reasons, I chose it. But I didn't choose to believe that I had a podcast with you scheduled today. If you had to persuade me out of that, you'd have to tell me actually the Shiloh podcast is Friday, not Thursday. And I'd have to, and I wouldn't believe you until I checked my calendar and my email and got the information or whatever. So in some way, you, you don't really choose what you believe. You, you, you have an instinct for constrained or unconstrained or some mixture of the two. And that either comes from your genetic preset or, your sort of hard-earned life experience or not hard-earned.

16:18And you know, you have the beliefs you have at any particular moment. Yeah, but you can change them. I mean, as Sol did, one can change one's mind. So that shows it's not all genetic. But the thing is, one's mind is changed. It should be in the passive voice, right? It's like, I can't change my mind like I move my left hand, right? I can take in new information and see what it does. Right. Arguments. Yeah. I can take in arguments and see what it does, but it may not change my mind if it, you know. Yeah. So it seems like Sol was subscribed to the constrained view. Yes, definitely as an adult. Yeah.

17:01And I'm curious to hear where you yourself lie on the spectrum. But it seems to me that given that he's subscribed to the constrained view as an adult, he may not do justice to the unconstrained view and its power. And that is to say, you know, one of the thinkers he gives as an example of the unconstrained view is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who's a great French philosopher. You know, Rousseau's philosophy gives rise to a whole tradition of unconstrained thinkers, especially in the Enlightenment, culminating with more modern thinkers like Nietzsche and these sorts of things, all of whom say the world in which we live can be and is in our control such that human beings can be perfected by way of, let's say, modern science and its attempt to rid the world of cancer, or let's say modern political and social movements which seek to rid the world of injustice or racism or whatever the case may be, that one can engineer by way of sufficient thought an unconstrained solution to a problem.

18:17In a way, although soul is constrained, and you may or may not lie more on the constrained side, it seems to me that the world in which we live takes as its presupposition the unconstrained view. I used to teach, for instance, in a college of engineering. Scientists seem to believe that almost anything is remediable by way of science, that one can eventually innovate and invent cures for cancer, ways to grow food such that it takes fewer resources. The limits that we find ourselves butting up against, I think of Elon Musk and many of his sort of grandiose views about what the world can be and renewable power and the paradise in which we'll find ourselves if only we allow the engineers to go forward with extraordinary research.

19:08Or the same is true of political views. The Constitution is outdated. We have knowledge now we didn't have then such that we can shape an even more perfect union, an even better regime as a consequence of progress that's been made in political science or political theory. So you can do the scientific aspect of this. You can talk about the political aspect of this. But it seems to me that despite a kind of predisposition for a constrained view, the world in which we live has faith, deep faith, enthusiasm in the unconstrained. And so I wonder what you would make of that. Well, one thing to make of it is that there have been moments in American history that testified to the power of the unconstrained view.

19:53Most importantly, the civil rights movement. So again, this is a situation where you can actually look at it through either lens. So from the point of view of the unconstrained vision, the civil rights movement was a moment where millions and millions and millions of white Americans, by dint of seeing their own government turn hoses on peaceful black protesters on TV, had a genuine moral change of heart on an issue of importance, namely the morality of segregation and Jim Crow. and this is true i mean it's true if you look in the behavior and the polling numbers and everything it's that it was just mainstream at at one point that white people and black people should be separate and even in the north it was it was um not really an issue of deep moral censure of the north to the south and then the civil rights movement through peaceful protest and demonstrating the brutality that that provoked in reaction changed hearts and minds genuinely and so this was a major aspect of the civil rights movement obviously and so the concept of sort of changing hearts and minds and changing society as a result that's at the heart of the unconstrained vision and that's it was quite an important moment in patterning how Americans think have thought about politics ever since right like we're at some level we're always looking for the next civil rights movement whether it comes or not is a is another matter um on the other hand if you have the constrained vision you could look at the civil rights movement from the point of view of getting rid of a kind of an element of social engineering right jim crow was social engineering um it's often forgotten that Plessy versus Ferguson, the lawsuit brought in Louisiana against segregated train cars was funded by the train car company.

22:05It was funded by the train car company. They did not want to segregate their passengers. It makes no sense if you have to have a white car and a black car and you've got 200 prospective customers, all white, but they can't sit on the black car. right you're just hemorrhaging money by not allowing freedom of movement on trains on buses it makes no sense from the point of view of um from the point of view of a profit maximizing company so they're the ones that funded that that lawsuit not not like human rights groups right anything like that well there was some of that too but um so from the point of view of the unconstrained vision you could argue that the civil rights movement was an example of getting rid of a social engineering policy and allowing freedom in the unconstrained sense, which is government can't tell you where to move, where to go.

23:02Although you'd have to add the caveat to that, that it actually required companies to serve black customers, even if they didn't want to, which is not really unconstrained. So to say something for, this is why I think about them much more as instincts than visions because a vision implies that in theory it could get the world right. I don't think either vision can get the world right in every instance. It's way too coarse-grained and the world is way too complicated. but as you know we have to simplify the world to think about it and we have to model and a map is always simpler than the thing it's mapping right so it's like I do have a more of a constrained instinct about how people are going to behave in any given moment that instinct is going to misfire many times in my life but I think it serves me well more than it misfires and I think that's true of my experience.

24:11And I also think that intellectuals in particular far over index on the unconstrained vision. I don't think normal people do. I buy that. I think the average cab driver is pretty constrained. I buy that. But the average intellectual who deals in words for a living, almost by definition, I mean the reason Thomas Sowell is so unique, it's like much of what he says is is common sense to the to the common man but strikes the intellectual as like extremely subversive yeah because i i think by nature the kind of people drawn to the written word as a profession almost by definition like or over index and wanting to change the world with the written word.

25:01So one of the things we like to do is ask our guests to pick a kind of favorite or resonant passage. Do you happen to have a passage that you think is one that's worthy of highlighting? Yeah, on page 25, I think this sums it up really well and also puts it in the context of the state of nature, if you will. If you read Rousseau and Locke and all these Enlightenment guys, they're arguing about what humans are like in the state of nature, which is to say, before governments form. What are we really like at our base level? So Sowell writes, while believers in the unconstrained vision seek the special causes of war, poverty, and crime, believers in the constrained vision seek the special causes of peace, wealth, or a law-abiding society.

25:52So what is this getting at? This is getting at the idea that basically humanity starts out for 100 ,000 years living in a situation where war is normal. People die and are killed every day. Everybody is poor, right? I mean, I'm talking about tribal societies, right? I'm talking about how hunter-gatherer societies lived everywhere on earth for 100 ,000 years before people discovered agriculture and started building civilizations, right? Yeah. So basically what we are at our genetic level are creatures that are wired to be in a group of about a hundred others that we consider family, fight tooth and nail against any other group we find unless we find it more comfortable to cooperate, more beneficial to cooperate.

27:00But always war is on the table. Just bloody raids of other tribes and bloody revenge raids on those tribes. And everybody's poor. We start out with poverty as the default. We start out doing anything selfish or anything that benefits us at the expense of someone else unless there's a system in place to punish that. And so that's who we are. That's what the unconstrained vision would say. The constrained vision would say that in the state of nature, we're much more like Howard Zinn's picture of Native Americans. It's like where we've got, you know, the fig leaf on our loins and we're nice to everybody and there's no war until the white man comes and everyone has enough to eat and everyone shares.

27:58And it's Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, essentially, until, you know, somehow greed is like introduced to the picture, right? And scarcity is introduced, right? Like you'll hear people with the unconstrained vision talk about the introduction of scarcity or the rhetoric of scarcity, whereas someone with the constrained vision would say, well, scarcity is a matter of fact. Like there isn't what, as Sowell puts it in one book, what everyone wants adds up to more than there is, which is, you know, a very simple and effective way of putting it. so so what this gets at is that the unconstrained vision and constrained vision one thing they always fight over and always will is what human beings and what human societies were like prior to the formation of agriculture and governments because that gets at who we are and what we're capable of at our core yeah that seems true to me and so you think I mean, based on the passage you read and what you just said, it occurs to me that what Saul is trying to do is kind of give a theory of everything in politics.

29:17In other words, he's trying to give the meta-explanation. Like, it's the causality for all of our political choices in the world. That's sort of a dangerous thing for a philosopher to do. It's very ambitious. Yeah, but it's in a way very unconstrained. Because, I mean, I know he's a constrained thinker, but what he provides us with is a theory of an explanatory theory of all of politics, which is a very kind of rationalistic, shall we say, enlightenment or unconstrained way of approaching the world. Like, let me now write a book that explains all of the things. Yeah. Well, you could say, if you believe, as he says, that man is limited in his knowledge, then how could a guy like Saul know so much?

30:00Yeah. Yeah.

30:07The word of the day is epistemology. Now, epistemology comes from the Greek word episteme, which means knowledge, and logos, which means an account or an argument about. So what you have with epistemology is an account of knowledge or knowledge about knowledge. Epistemology is a science like biology, psychology, but it's the science of knowledge itself. What can we know about knowledge? And how do we come to know what is knowledge for sure and what is not knowledge? The same way biology is, what can we know about bio, life? Or psychology is, what can we know about the psuche, the soul?

30:59One of the things that I think about when I read books is each book is a medicine for some problem that someone has. So if you're sick about love, there might well be a novel about love out there that you could read and would bring you some comfort and perhaps some insight and wisdom at that moment, if you were to find it, right? Or if you were frustrated with our politics or the polarization in our politics, you might know of a book out there that you could read and would have some sense-making effect on you, such that books become medicines for afflictions, intellectual or spiritual, that we have, assuming those books come into our life at the right time.