This is a book report of sorts. Its a very long read and very much worth the effort.
http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-we-got-here-is-failure-to.htmlHere is the start...
"What We Got Here is . . . Failure to Communicate
A few weeks ago my wife and I watched the 1979 film Time After Time. I hadn't seen it in many years. At the time I was still working my way through Sowell's magnum opus A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, so the second scene, set in H.G. Wells' London dining room about 1894, grabbed my attention as it had not before:
H.G. Wells: Socialism is the path man must tread on the way to a utopian society.
--
Wells: In three generations, social utopia will have come to pass. There'll be no war, crime or poverty. And no disease either, John. Men will live like brothers, and in equality with women as well.
John Leslie Stevenson (Jack the Ripper): I can't agree with you. You astonish me. In the midst of all your theorizing, you ignore the facts. We live in a cosmic charnel house. Mankind has not changed in two thousand years. We hunt, we're hunted. That's how it is. How it will always be.
Coincidences are funny things.
About a week before I started writing this essay, as Quote of the Day I selected something by Thomas Sowell from his most recent NRO Uncommon Knowledge interview:
Peter Robinson: If you had a sentence or two to say to the Cabinet assembled around President Obama, and this cabinet holds glittering degrees from one impressive institution after another, if you could beseech them to conduct themselves in one particular way between now and the time they leave office, what would you say?
Thomas Sowell: Actually, I would say only one word: Goodbye. Because I know there's no point talking to them.
In March of 2005, before (I think) I started running explicit "Quotes of the Day," I quoted The Anarchangel from his post Superiority Complex:
There can be no useful debate between two people with different first principles, except on those principles themselves.
These are, essentially, the same statement. There's "no point talking to them" because - as Sowell points out subsequently - his first principles and theirs are diametrically opposed. "A sentence or two" would be entirely inadequate and misdirected.
I'd previously read Sowell's Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, and I've read a lot of his columns, speeches and essays, but I hadn't gotten around to reading A Conflict of Visions until now.
I wish I'd read it decades ago. The man's a freaking genius."
