Thomas Sowell - The Origins of Woke

[Music] the vision of the anointed now that's a that's an interesting title who are the anointed they are the elite and the media in the pa in politics all of those who think that third parties ought to be making people's decisions for them the subtitle is self-congratulation as a basis for social policy in other words people who think that everything is wrong with the econ the country is due to the fact that other people are just not as smart as they are and if only they could you know or people like them could take over

and make our decisions we'd be so much better off but in the early in early america didn't this sort of educated class make the decisions for everybody as far as governmental decisions but the government itself didn't make uh the decisions for everyone now uh you know you you can't decide where your kid's going to school you can't decide whether or not they can move a halfway house for drug for drug users next door to you or whatnot it's out of your control the government decides that's right the government decides too many things they decide also

how your children will be raised uh you may have an idea about how at what age children should be introduced to sex and in what manner with what kind of moral commitment i mean as a parent as a parent a parent yes uh the schools have taken that over by the time you even think about it they've already had years you know passing out condoms to these kids is not even the half of it uh they're showing uh motion pictures of naked couples engaging in sex both homosexual and heterosexual in the seventh grade and if

you complain about it that's that's considered to be censorship you don't you you can't pull your kid out of school and say they don't have to put up with this stuff i guess you could but you'd be well if you have a private school to put him in but you have compulsory attendance laws and if you don't have the money for private schools then you're stuck where did this country get off the track and decide that the federal government should make most of our decisions well it started to some extent in the new deal but

i think the 1960s is sort of the golden age if you want to put it that way of this whole mindset and that's what the book's about it's about a mindset it's not about a series of policies but of showing how in policy after policy those who think a certain way will try to take over other people's decisions how do you characterize the liberal philosophy today from the conservative philosophy oh that's a tough one uh i guess the main thing about the liberals again is that they think a program will do it if there's something

that they don't like in the society you have set up a program and that will solve the problem i think one of the things that one of the words they use a lot is solutions and i argue here and elsewhere that there are there are no solutions there are just trade-offs so for example when ralph nader launched his attack against the corvair many years ago he said it's an unsafe car and it does the has these safety problems and those safety problems and in some respects he was correct not all uh but the fact is

there were other things that the corvair would do that made it safer than other cars and on net balance it was as safe as the rest of them are you saying there are no solutions to our problems as americans there are no solutions to anybody's problems there are trade-offs you know safety is a classic example every every every year so many hundreds of thousands of people are vaccinated against measles smallpox those kinds of things now this saves the several hundred lies that it's estimated it also causes brain damage to about 30 kids a year now

there are no solutions in that they were just trade-offs what about crime take crime as an issue can we solve the crime issue or fundamentally solve it so it's reduced well then that that's that's that's that's a trade-off you know you know you don't solve it there will always be crime there always has been but you want to keep it down to some level it's not this astronomical thing we have today for example the people the liberals right now are saying you know crime is eased off in new york and that's true there were there

were six times as much crime in new york a few years ago as there was in 1960. now it's down to five times as much crime as there was 1960. now that's not what i regard as a great as a great as a great trend unless it continues a lot more liberals think we need more education and we need to help people in the inner city more to cut down crime there uh conservatives would say we have to be tougher on crime is either of them correct oh i i don't know you see the conservative

view is really not not a solution it's a it's a trade-off it says yes it would be wonderful if we could do all these things to prevent crime in the first place we just don't happen to be that smart and so what we do we put people behind bars who commit violent crimes now a few years ago in east palo alto which is not far from stanford university a minority community low income they had the doubtful distinction of being the murder capital of the united states in proportion of their population the next year murder and

all sorts of other violent crimes dropped tremendous amount 30 40 50 percent in one year now that wasn't because they discovered the root causes of crime well because they worked out everything was wonderful they launched a campaign that put a lot of the bad guys behind bars and when they were behind bars they didn't commit as many crimes makes sense to me and the thing that this is you know even in a high crime area the great majority of the people are not criminals and so if you can just put your hands on those people

who are raising all all the hell in the community and take them out of circulation the crime rate drops people say there's undue uh emphasis on african americans for committing crimes is that true uh i wrote in all column here that the population is 25 african-american in new york 62 of the crimes are committed by african-americans is that a and he says i haven't i haven't checked these figures but but yeah throughout the world this is this is this is not not unusual throughout the world people are disproportionately represented in all kinds of different things

and it's true obviously in basketball it's true and all kinds of other things uh the main thing is not it's not to keep people out of jail because they're one race or another because when you do that the people who are going to suffer the most will be the black community where are you on affirmative action against why well you can only do one of two things you can either just judge people individually or you can judge them by groups this whole notion that you're going to come out with a compromise i would defy anybody

to come up with a compromise on that you're going to do one of those two things now you can pretend to be doing other things but that's all you're going to do those are the only two choices you really have in the end again the people who are the anointed think of this as a symbolic issue and they want to be on the side of the angels they don't ask what are the consequences now i've studied affirmative action programs around the world one of the consequences is that those people who are more fortunate in the

group that has the preferences those people take the line share the preferences very often those at the other end of the scale the poorer people uh actually fall further behind that's true of black sheer it's true of melees in malaysia it's true of various groups in india and there are reasons for that uh you know you can say you must have certain proportions nothing is easier than for an employer who would who might otherwise locate let's say in the bronx to locate out in provo utah where he will be not near any black people and

therefore he will never have lawsuits and the jobs will be in provo and people wonder why don't people you know here have more jobs it never seems to occur to liberals that other people are not blocks of wood that when you set up certain incentives they will react to them in certain ways and when they do that the result may be the opposite of what you set out to do how did the anointed refer to people they don't agree with all sorts of ways but i think the main thing is they believe that you're not

merely in error but in sin whereas they can't believe that you're just mistaken you must have you must have sold out you must have must be something warped about you you guys are for the rich you guys only care about the rich guys uh answer that how do you how do you respond liberal says conservatives only care about rich people well one of the things i go into in the book is that the whole notion of rich is ridiculous that most americans don't stay in the same income bracket even for one decade so the same

guy who is quote rich now was 20 years ago probably in the bottom 20 percent i mean i was on a cruise recently luxury cruise and the guy said you know if somebody told me when i was growing up that i would end up on a cruise like this i would have said get real man you know that uh very few people are in that same income bracket the whole time the genuinely rich and the generally poor i would estimate to be no more than three percent of the american people really put together really yes

genuinely poor now they you know i'm seeing numbers like when they were talking about health care they said uh what third twenty thirty million people couldn't afford it or something uh several million of those were making more than fifty thousand dollars a year so it's not see this is one of the things that you know to do they never believe that people make choices there are people who may who have the money they prefer to put that money into a bmw rather than have rather than a lot of young people didn't want health care they

they were betting on their help absolutely and then this allows them to buy more stuff they want to buy so it's not a question they couldn't afford it it's a question they don't choose to spend the money what about mean spirited conservatives are mean-spirited they're they're bigots they don't like people well you know one of the things i i tell people people say you know you're you're a very tough person i'm not tough life is tough i'm merely trying to acquaint you with with those facts you know back in the 60s lyndon johnson announced a

war on poverty am i wrong but there are more poor people i mean otherwise today than they were then yeah they're more poor people yeah i mean this was a hell of a war we lost it apparently because for the last 30 years we've been dumping money into these poverty programs oh absolutely where's the money go oh it it supports a whole industry of people who uh run those programs who talk about those programs restrict those programs bureaucrats and so on it doesn't help poor people no uh the tragedy you see is that the anointed

really want to make symbolic statements and running these programs makes those symbolic statements they don't really care if in the wake of affirmative action for example companies start locating away from minority communities so they don't get involved in legal action they don't care about that they've made their statement on the side of the angels and that's what's important have you ever debated jesse jackson no i haven't is that because would you like to or would he not want to do that i have no idea i have no idea uh you'd be willing to i assume

oh i i maybe i don't i don't know i think that's too much showbiz it is uh you know there's a there are people who go and do this and i i'm doing less and less of it i tell them the story of an african boxing champion who fought an irishman in saint patrick's day they in dublin and he lost his title on what the sports writers called a questionable decision and so you have to know what forum you're talking about i was i was i saw shelby steel on with him and i said you

know if jesse jackson and selby steele each had to present a two-hour lecture to an audience with an average iq of 120. shelby would wipe him out but if they had five seconds each on donahue it would be jesse jackson all the way right so everything depends upon the forum uh is jesse jackson good for african-americans or not he's not for himself good for himself and that's true of most ethnic leaders in most groups in most countries in most periods of history that what will make what will serve his interest is to keep people paranoid

dependent upon him dependent upon government what will serve their interest is typically just the opposite that's pretty interesting so you're saying that the the leaders whatever group whatever wants the people to be poor and dependent on them as opposed to dependent on themselves oh absolutely and i i you see this in the greatest cynicism in the academic world where in many places uh the black organizations on campus have a say on who gets admitted and they have turned down blacks with excellent credentials both as students and as faculty members uh for that very reason who

are the mascots of the anointed you talk about the mascots of the anointing there are people whom whom they choose to um back and whose rights are supposed to override other people's right the homeless are a classic example uh i'm i'm appalled when i see people out there in the street uh giving money to the home i'm able-bodied men one of the classic pictures to me it was in san francisco when there was this able-bodied white man out in the street begging and there's this black lady coming along there very modestly dressed like she didn't

have but she's stopping to open her purse to give him some money you know i thought good have us have we really come to this and we've been brainwashed by the anointed into thinking this is what we ought to do what do you say to guys that bum money off of you not all of it can be repeated on on the air but the fact is they don't get any money they don't and i and people who complain now about all these people begging in the street is a simple answer don't give them money and

they won't be in the street when you wrote this what were you trying to accomplish with the book and did you do it were you nailing liberals for 30 years of social policy what were you trying to say i was trying to reveal the thinking behind that the kinds of assumptions the kind of world that exists inside their mind and therefore why those assumptions are so dangerous in the long run it's not just the policies mission and those and that they think they're better than everybody else oh absolutely there's no question uh and that's what

makes them dangerous even all the policies that i mentioned there 20 years from now those policies may not be the policies we're concerned about but that mindset will still be there and what makes them tremendously dangerous is that facts that contradict what they believe are simply ignored or evaded where does the press fall into this as the anointed group are they part of the oh absolutely they're a major part of it because one of the reasons that people don't get many of the facts that go against what's believed is that the press doesn't choose to

publicize those facts give me an example of something the press might not cover or cover well oh a few a few years ago there was a story about prenatal care among blacks that black women get less prenatal care than white women infant mortality rate is higher among blacks they immediately assume that one causes the other now i now one of the things i like to do is go back to the original source and find out what it said i went back on the very same page where it said that it's the figure showed mexican americans

get even less prenatal care than blacks and they have a lower infant mortality rate than whites so impromo prenatal care and infant mortality rate have nothing to do with each other if you break it down further black women who have only a high school education but who are married their children have lower infant mortality rates than white women who have a college education who are unwed mothers so it's not race it's not income it's not education it's lifestyle when you live a certain way there are consequences to that the media doesn't want to want to

accept that because if you say people's lifestyles have a lot to do with the outcome then there's no room for the anointed