BONUS: The 1987 Book that Explains Mamdani’s Victory

Summary

---

Episode Overview

Main Theme:
This episode of "Conversations With Coleman" (BONUS: The 1987 Book that Explains Mamdani’s Victory) explores the enduring relevance of Thomas Sowell's 1987 book A Conflict of Visions in the context of contemporary political shifts, particularly the election of Zoran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist, as mayor of New York City. Coleman Hughes joins Shiloh Brooks (from the podcast "Old School") to unpack Sowell’s framework of political visions—constrained (or tragic) versus unconstrained—in explaining not only today's political landscape but also the deeper instincts that shape our collective life.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Election & Political Climate

• Why Talk About Sowell Now?
  The election of Zoran Mamdani signals an era where political divides are being shaped by deeper, less superficial factors than mere tribalism. Sowell’s insights are cast as essential for understanding why seemingly unrelated political stances cluster together and how utopian or pragmatic instincts play out in policy (00:00–02:01).

Thomas Sowell’s "A Conflict of Visions"

• Core Concepts:
  • Sowell distinguishes two archetypes:
    1. Constrained/Tragic Vision: Human nature is fundamentally flawed and self-interested; there are no perfect solutions—only trade-offs and incentive structures.
    2. Unconstrained Vision: Human beings are improvable through rationality, education, and social engineering; problems such as war, crime, or poverty can be eradicated (03:15–07:00).
• Why Do Policy Alignments Cluster?
  Instead of pure tribal loyalty, people are guided by their underlying vision of human nature.

Illustrative Examples

• Recycling & Climate Change:

  • The unconstrained vision prioritizes mass education, believing human behavior can change if people just understand the issues.
  • The constrained vision doubts such programs, asserting that real, sustained change comes from altering incentives—not simply from awareness or moral appeals.
  • Quote:
    “The problem is they have no fucking personal incentive to recycle. They do not personally benefit from recycling. … People are selfish and always will be.”
    —Host (Coleman Hughes), (03:50)

• Poverty & War:

  • The constrained view accepts that some poverty and conflict are inevitable, focusing instead on managing trade-offs.
  • The unconstrained vision frames slogans like "end poverty" as meaningful and actionable.
  • Quote:
    “There’s no solution for poverty, there’s no solution for war. Right. There’s no ending these things. ... The reason there’s no ending these things is because of human nature.”
    —Shiloh Brooks, (06:11)

• Crime & Human Nature:

  • The unconstrained perspective sees crime as a product of social circumstances—improving those conditions can eliminate crime.
  • The constrained camp views crime as rooted in immutable aspects of human nature: “There’s something in human beings which will always, perpetually be drawn to commit crimes of various kinds for various gains.”
    —Guest, (09:04–10:09)
  • Incentivizing or constraining via law and punishment is the only practical solution in this view.

Hybrids & Historical Philosophies

• Complexity of Visions:
  • Sowell recognizes that even ideologies like Marxism can be hybrids: for Marx, constraints exist (material conditions), but utopia is ultimately achievable (12:00–13:24).
  • Religious upbringings and 'pre-political' factors may determine one’s vision (13:24-15:07).

The Psychological & Instinctual Roots

• Can We Choose Our Vision?
  • Our “vision” of human nature is often more instinct than reasoned choice, possibly pre-set by genetics or early life (15:07-16:17).
  • Quote:
    “You don’t really choose what you believe. You have an instinct for constrained or unconstrained or some mixture of the two. And that either comes from your genetic preset or be, or, or your sort of hard earned life experience.”
    —Shiloh Brooks, (15:12)

Critiquing Sowell’s Own Position

• Bias Toward the Constrained?
  • While Sowell as an adult lands firmly in the constrained camp, his ability to represent the power and appeal of unconstrained visions is questioned.
  • American political culture, especially among intellectuals and technocrats, is more unconstrained than constrained.
  • Examples given are the scientific optimism of engineers and tech entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, and the progressive impulse to improve on the Constitution (16:52-19:37).

Applying the Framework to American History

• The Civil Rights Movement:
  • Both visions can be used to interpret it:
    • The unconstrained focus: society underwent a genuine change in conscience through protest, reason, and appeal to ideals.
    • The constrained focus: removing Jim Crow was actually getting rid of a failed social engineering experiment, and market forces also played a role.
  • Americans continually look for “the next civil rights movement” (19:37–23:23).

Why Instincts—Not Ideologies—Shape Us

• Both guests ultimately view these visions as rough “instincts” that help us simplify and make sense of a complex world. They serve as maps—necessarily simpler than the reality they’re meant to guide us through.
• Quote:
  “A map is always simpler than the thing it’s mapping. … My constrained instinct … serves me well more than it misfires.”
  —Shiloh Brooks, (23:24)

Intellectuals and Over-indexing on the Unconstrained

• Intellectuals are prone to the unconstrained vision, seeking to change the world with ideas; ordinary people tend to be more constrained or skeptical (24:00–25:07).

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If you want a durable solution, you’re going to have to change the incentives for people that like, produce these things. … 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.”
  —Host (Coleman Hughes), (03:36)

• “The tragic vision does not believe solutions are possible.”
  —Shiloh Brooks, (06:03)

• “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 law abiding society.”
  —Shiloh Brooks, quoting Sowell, (25:07)

• “He [Sowell] does an extraordinary job elaborating the character of the two visions and showing what separates them and admitting that they’re hybrids.”
  —Guest, (13:24)

• “It’s a medicine for someone that has suffered because they believed in a project that sounded amazing. … And then very painfully and slowly character arced toward realizing that it created so much more pain for everyone than it had to if they had been less idealistic and less naive.”
  —Shiloh Brooks, (31:56–33:38)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:00] — The significance of Mamdani’s election & why Sowell
• [03:15 – 07:00] — Explaining the constrained vs. unconstrained visions (with recycling and poverty/war as examples)
• [09:00 – 13:24] — Applying visions to crime, hybrid ideologies (Marxism), and the influence of upbringing/religion
• [15:07 – 16:17] — Do we choose our core political “vision” or is it ingrained?
• [19:37 – 23:23] — Civil Rights Movement as a case study for both visions; the search for the next big moment
• [23:24 – 25:07] — World too complex for any one vision; why intellectuals lean unconstrained
• [25:07 – 29:00] — Reading Sowell's summation passage and its implications for human nature
• [31:56 – 34:53] — For whom is Sowell’s book a “medicine”? When painful experience brings us to the tragic vision

---

Takeaway

The episode argues that understanding American (and global) politics today—whether as the rise of socialism, progressivism, or enduring conservatism—demands an appreciation of the deeper, often instinctual visions about human nature outlined by Thomas Sowell. These visions not only color our take on social and political solutions but also shape our individual and collective disappointments, hopes, and recurring cycles of idealism.

---

For further exploration, listeners are encouraged to seek out the full "Old School" episode with Shiloh Brooks.

Transcript

[Host]

Last 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, but 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. A 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.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Hi there. I want to tell you about a new breaking news app you won't want to miss.

[Host]

You can now stream Fox News Live.

[Shiloh Brooks]

On the Fox one app.

[Host]

I'm what you would call a news.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Junkie, so having breaking news all in one place is really exciting.

[Host]

It means you can stay on top.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Of breaking news and the biggest stories live as they happen and and all from Fox Voices yous love bringing you coverage you won't find anywhere else. You can hear from people like my friends Ricky Schlott or Winston Marshall who are regulars on Fox and whose takes you won't want to miss. Start your 7 day free trial today. Offers are subject to change. Go to Fox one for complete terms and conditions. Fox one we live for live streaming now. So let's say, okay, we've got this climate change problem Right. We're gonna get the experts to study it for years and recommend solutions. And they recommend that we start recycling. Right? This is like an important thing that we can do to preserve the planet. Great, easy. So let's like educate people to recycle, right? Let's use the power of reason, the power of persuasion. People will, people will see reason, they'll, they'll understand, will teach them from a young age that if you got plastic, you put it in this one. If you got trash, you put 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 on, like, what's going on here? Clearly our educate. We haven't been educating people enough. We haven't 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 like, this is like one by one, from the inside out, we're gonna, we're gonna raise the consciousness of humanity and like, that's how we're gonna solve this problem. But 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 like, produce these things. Right? You're going to have to make it in our self interest to recycle. You'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 like start a nonprofit that like goes into kindergartens and teaches kids to recycle.

[Guest]

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. It'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, 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. An 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.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Yes. So the tragic vision does not believe solutions are possible.

[Guest]

Yeah, in the fullest sense, yes.

[Shiloh Brooks]

There's no solution for poverty, 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.

[Guest]

Right.

[Shiloh Brooks]

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.

[Guest]

Yeah.

[Shiloh Brooks]

And so the holder of the tragic vision would hear slogans like end poverty and end war to be just.

[Host]

Not.

[Shiloh Brooks]

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.

[Guest]

Yeah.

[Shiloh Brooks]

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.

[Guest]

Right.

[Shiloh Brooks]

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?

[Guest]

Right.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Because if this, if the answer is zero, you're going to be destroyed. Your country's going to, if, 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.

[Guest]

Right.

[Shiloh Brooks]

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.

[Guest]

Right.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Or at least as much.

[Guest]

Right.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Whereas someone with an unconstrained vision would have, you know, a proposal for, for, for stopping war altogether. I mean, I guess something like, something like the United nations to some extent reflects the unconstrained vision. You 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. With our words.

[Guest]

Yeah.

[Shiloh Brooks]

So that we don't have to go to war anymore.

[Guest]

Right.

[Shiloh Brooks]

And so. So that's kind of an example.

[Guest]

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.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Yeah. Versus finally agreeing on.

[Guest]

Exactly. Right. Versus, 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.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Or just the incentives.

[Guest]

Yeah.

[Shiloh Brooks]

As long as there's something to be gained from war, people will go to war.

[Guest]

Right, Right.

[Shiloh Brooks]

People will launch war whether or not you're willing to defend your country.

[Guest]

And this same analogy applies because we should take it. I mean, you've now got us into the practical with the recycling and the. 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. Whereas 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 constrained 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.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Yeah. The unconstrained person is going to say, you know, what happened to this person? How did we fail this person? That they went out and committed a double homicide in a. In a gang feud. Right. And a person with a constrained vision is going to say, well, they're part of like, let's say it's a gang related murder. Okay. They're part of a 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 by poaching a rival.

[Guest]

Right.

[Shiloh Brooks]

So that 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 anything went wrong. 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. It has to be like, if you do this, you're going 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.

[Guest]

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. What'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 summum 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 or in the evening or whatever it goes with the. That Marx says it. And 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 Soul's a pretty nuanced thinker. Let me now just say one aspect.

[Shiloh Brooks]

He was a Marxist in his youth.

[Guest]

Yeah. So it makes sense that he would see the depths of problem.

[Shiloh Brooks]

And he was a very. An extremely learned Marxist when he. In other words, he read every page of Das Kapital and understood it.

[Guest]

Yeah.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Which is more than you could say for 99% of Marxists.

[Guest]

That's right.

[Shiloh Brooks]

So his book on Marx is to my knowledge, the very best explanation of what Marx meant. If you've ever been confused by Marx, read Marx by Thomas Sowell.

[Guest]

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? What 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 Sol 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. If that's absent in your life, 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.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Yeah. And well then, then it raises the question, can you choose what you believe?

[Guest]

Yeah.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Which I'm not sure you can.

[Guest]

Yeah.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Right. Because like I, I have to be convinced of something to believe it. It's not exactly a choice, you know, in the typical sense. Right. Like I, I chose what to wear today. I had a lot of options and this is what I chose. For whatever reasons I chose it. But I didn't choose to believe that I had a podcast with you scheduled today, like that was. 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 don't really choose what you believe. You, you have an instinct for constrained or unconstrained or some mixture of the two. And that either comes from your genetic preset or be, or, or your sort of hard earned life experience, whatever, or, or not hard earned. And you know, you, you, you have the beliefs you have at any particular moment.

[Guest]

Yeah, but you can change them. I mean, as Soul did. One can change one's mind. So that shows it's not all true.

[Shiloh Brooks]

But the thing is the, the one's mind is changed, it should be in the passive voice, right? It's like I can't change my mind. Like I, like, like, like I, like I move my left hand, right. I can take in new information and see what it does.

[Guest]

Right. Arguments.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Yeah, yeah, I can take in arguments and see what it does, but it may, it may not change my mind if it, if it, you know.

[Guest]

Yeah. So it seems like Soul was subscribed to the constrained view.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Yes, definitely. As, as an adult.

[Guest]

Yeah. And I, and I'm, I'm curious to hear where you lie on the spectrum, but it seems to me that given that he 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, one of the thinkers he gives as an example of the unconstrained view is Jean Jacques Rousseau, who's a great French philosopher. 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. In 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 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. Or 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.

[Shiloh Brooks]

Well, one thing to make of it is that there have been moments in American history that testify to the power of the unconstrained view, most 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 one point that white people and black people should be separate. And even in the north, it was not really an issue of deep moral center 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. This was a major aspect of. 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. That's 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 another matter. 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. It's often forgotten that Plessy versus Ferguson, the lawsuit brought in Louisiana against segregated train cars, was funded by the train car company. It 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, from the point of view of a profit maximizing company. So they're the ones that funded that lawsuit, not like human rights groups or anything like that. There was some of that too, but. 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. Right. Although you'd have to add the caveat to that, that it actually required, required companies to serve black customers even if they didn't want to, which is not really unconstrained. So. Yeah. 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.

[Guest]

Right.

[Shiloh Brooks]

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. Yeah, 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 more of an, a constrained instinct about how people are going to behave in any given moment. Right. That instinct is going to misfire many times in my life. But I think it, I think it serves me well more than it misfires.

[Guest]

Right.

[Shiloh Brooks]

And I think that's true of my experience. And I also think that intellectuals in particular, far over index on the unconstrained.

[Guest]

Yeah.

[Shiloh Brooks]

I don't think normal people.

[Guest]

I buy that.

[Shiloh Brooks]

I think the average cab driver is pretty constrained.

[Guest]

I buy that.

[Shiloh Brooks]

But the average intellectual who deals in words for a living, almost by definition. I mean the reason Thomas Sowell is like 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.

[Guest]

So one of the things we like to do is, is ask our guest 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?

[Shiloh Brooks]

Yeah, on, on page 25. I think this sums it up really well and also puts it in the context of, of the state of nature, if you will. You know, like, you know, 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, like what are we really like at our, at our base level, Right. 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 law abiding society. So 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 a hundred thousand years before people discovered agriculture and started building civilizations, right? 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. But you know, 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 we're, 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 and 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, 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. 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. Who we are and what we're capable of at our core.

[Guest]

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. In 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 a sort of a dangerous thing for a philosopher to do.

[Shiloh Brooks]

It's very ambitious.

[Guest]

Yeah, 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.

[Shiloh Brooks]

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?

[Guest]

Yeah, yeah. The 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 psuke, the soul? One 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. So I'm curious to get you to diagnose who is the person and what is the mental, spiritual, however you want to put it, intellectual situation in which they're in, such that Thomas Sowell's book is the cure for it? Or is, if not the cure, the first step on the way to a kind of more fulfilling perspective on these matters? How is this book a medicine and for whom?

[Shiloh Brooks]

That's a great question. So I think it's a medicine for someone that has suffered because they believed in a project that sounded amazing. Someone who was seduced by either a political movement or an ideology or, you know, an idea or a way of living that sounded like the Garden of Eden and sounded amazing. And then very painfully and slowly, character arced toward realizing that it created so much more pain for everyone than it had to if they had been less idealistic and less naive and accepted that they were flawed and selfish human beings at the beginning rather than having to learn that the very hard way over a set of years. I mean, I think of, you know, I've been watching this show, Couples Therapy on hbo and this is, you know, like, this is not a political example. You see some of these couples that have been in polyamorous relationships for, like, years and have just like drip by drip realize that they cannot do it, that they could not cure their own jealousy, they could not reason the jealousy out of their partner. And they're just like, you know, several years of grayed hair later realize that polyamory is not for me.

[Guest]

Right, okay.

[Shiloh Brooks]

The political equivalent of that. There's a million different ways it could be. It could be, I mean, for, you know, it could be any number of things. But to spare you that very painful way of learning many of these lessons that get learned, that person is who this book is a medicine for. Just accept that you are not surrounded by a bunch of Buddhas. You are surrounded by a bunch of normal people. That's okay. They are flawed, you are flawed, you are selfish. When push comes to shove, each person should be assumed to pursue their own self interest. Unless they are your family member, your father, mother, child, wife.

[Guest]

Right?

[Shiloh Brooks]

Empathy doesn't extend quite that that far that we can actually learn to treat each other the way that we would ideally want, which is to make the world one big family. That would be so awesome, wouldn't it? I think it would, but turns out, not on the menu.

[Guest]

Right.

[Shiloh Brooks]

So whoever's been harmed by that idealism, that's who this book is for.