Are are some people just born wanting to be violent to others and dominate others? Or is that just a result of say a bad childhood or or or poor education? If the latter is true, then crime can be solved fundamentally by better education and better social programs. If the former is true, then we'll never be able to get rid of the cops and prisons and the the kind of crudder ways of dealing with criminals. I'm Coleman Hughes and today we're talking about one of my favorite books, A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Soul. This book was pretty important to me when I was an undergrad because it sought to explain one of the most important questions I was thinking about then and one of the questions uh you should all be thinking about now. He begins the book by asking this question, why is it that people predictably line up on different sides of issues that seem very unrelated? So if you just if if you ask someone on the street like, "Hey, what do you think of gun control?" They would say, "Oh, I think I think this." And then, "Hey, what do you think of affirmative action?" "Oh, I think this." "Hey, what do you think of minimum wage laws? I think this." You wouldn't expect that they should be all correlated and that you should get two lineups of people that all agree on certain totally unrelated issue. Like what does gun control have to do with climate change, right? But Soul thinks that this is not a coincidence and it's not just partisanship. In other words, it's not just the psychology of team sports. There's actually two different visions of the world of how the world works. and in particular how human beings work that underly all of these um seemingly more superficial disagreements. Now, he doesn't really say that they're the right and the left, but sometimes he kind of hints at that they're the right and the left, but let's just table that for now and not talk about the right and the left. He calls them the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision. What does this word constrained refer to? He he's referring to human nature itself. Is human nature constrained or is human nature unconstrained? What does that mean? Constrained in this context means changeable. Is is is is human nature uh fundamentally always going to be what it is? Or is it possible for us to become radically better, radically more giving, radically less selfish, radi radically less shortsighted, radically more loving, more open-minded? Your opinion on whether human nature is constrained has very deep implications for what kind of political systems will work and and what kind of political systems won't work. Another more simple way of labeling these I think this comes from Steven Pinker's comment on soil is the tragic vision and the utopian vision. The constrained vision of human nature is tragic because it says we can never actually uh we can never actually perfect ourselves or improve ourselves um at least not as a whole species. And the utopian vision is just that. It's the vision that we can make a kind of heaven on earth by bettering ourselves, changing our societies uh and so forth. Where does the rubber hit the road with these two visions? Right. Well, one area would be for instance in crime. After 2020 uh and George Floyd and the riots and the protests, it was a very popular idea to replace police officers with social workers or or skilled deescalators so that if something was going down between two people on a street, folks were scared. instead of calling the police, you would call these people that would come without guns and basically talk. A lot of people were into this idea because they felt, okay, well, if we train the social workers the right way, then they'll be able to talk down the people that are being violent in the right way and everything will be much better. Uh, and they'll never have to resort to using their gun or even using a taser. And in fact, it's the presence of the gun and the presence of the cop and the provocation of the cop that actually makes a lot of these situations go sideways. If you just had someone come in gently like a kindergarten school teacher with that soothing voice, actually a lot of these alter altercations wouldn't wouldn't start to begin with. So that that's a vision of human nature where people aren't just violent to be violent. people are violent because they're provoked or because a cop has done something wrong or a cop has brandished a gun. And actually in the absence of that provocation, no one has an urge to be violent for violent sake. So if you just treat the situation differently, there's no reason for for a crime to really occur. The tragic vision would say the opposite. It would say some people are just violent and you don't need to ask why. In fact, it may be baked into their nature. And so the way to prevent violence is simply to meet it with force, deterrent force and uh and and and warehousing force in this sense of putting people behind bars. That's an area where your underlying assumptions about for instance why people commit crime come straight out of your assumptions about human nature itself. Are some people just born wanting to be violent to others and dominate others? Or is that just a result of say a bad childhood or or or poor education? If the latter is true, then crime can be solved fundamentally by better education and better social programs. If the former is true, then we'll never be able to get rid of the cops and prisons and the um the the kind of crudder ways of dealing with criminals at at a larger level. This the unconstrained and the constrained vision connect very deeply with economic uh systems or systems of of political economics. What am I talking about? I'm talking about capitalism and communism, right? If you think about it, uh the allure of communism is deep because all of us, if we're lucky, we grow up in a communist system, which is called a family. uh a family is is the perfect example of what communism is and how communism actually can work which is to say um to from each according to his ability and to each according to his need. That's what communism says, right? All you have to do, the work you have, just do the work that you're able to do, right? Doesn't matter how skilled you are or how unskilled you are. You can have no skills at all. Just do what you're able to do. And what you need, everything you need will be provided from the common thewealth, right? That's what a family is. You know, if you're 5 years old and you can like help mommy with the dishes or whatever, that's fine. That's all you need to do because mommy and daddy are going to do the real work. bring in the real resources and make sure everyone is fed and clothed and so forth. Perfect communism works perfectly at that level. And so it's very tempting to say, why can't we make all of society like one big family? Like what is actually the barrier to doing that? Can we raise people to think of at minimum members of their country just like they would think uh uh of members of their family. and from each according to what he can do from to each according to to to his needs. Right? If that were able to work, then communism could scale up to uh uh a whole society. But in order for that to work, you would have to be able to change the knobs of human psychology, which is to say, we have deep emotional and psychological attachments to our family members genetically and inherently. Um, and in order for communism to work, you would have to you would have to somehow copy paste the attitude we have towards families, towards strangers. That's a very difficult thing to do in the constrained vision. This would be dismissed out of hand as impossible, right? We say actually it's just not it's not in the cards for all of us to become um, you know, like like Jesus or Mother Teresa. It's actually just not it's literally not possible for most of us for biological reasons. And if you try to premise a society on the assumption that we can become that way, um what you get is a totally dysfunctional system with a terrible incentive structure where in fact, as a matter of fact, everyone is behaving in a self-interested way and it creates all of these perversions. The capitalist system says the says the opposite. It says that we will never eradicate self-interest. People are always going to want more and more and more for themselves in particular and and not for others. Uh they'll most people will never be able to extend uh true selflessness outside of their own kin network to truly sacrifice for others that that they're not related to. Um this is true for for most similar animal species as well. And so we have to create a system that aligns their incentives so that they can climb the ladder of personal status and success by creating things that other people want to buy. And in doing so, it leverages uh personal ambition and self-interest in a way that that generally helps others as well. So also gives the example of the separation of powers. Um so for instance if you have the constrained vision it makes sense it could make sense to give one person a ton of power in in in the government or give a group of people a ton of power because um we'll be able to choose the right person through proper education of the populace. uh we'll be able to create leaders that are truly selfless and wise because uh because again human nature can be made that way and we can reliably create and choose the right people to lead society and so it makes sense to give them power so they can actually do things they can actually improve society. In the constrained vision, you assume basically that everyone's knowledge is limited, aka everyone's kind of stupid or only really knows what's true in their immediate surrounding. You assume every leader is going to be self-interested and try to become king. And so you create three branches of government with separate powers that are always checking each other so that uh no one of them can can ever predominate. and you create a feedback mechanism aka elections such that similar to capitalism it's in the leader self-interest to at minimum not do things that wildly piss off more than half of the people. So you align self-interest with the public interest you take but but in doing that you have to take some some level of self-interest for granted as a given that will never change. So Soul, it's it's no secret that Soul is on the constrained vision, the tragic vision. That's that's his vision. Um I think in a lot of ways it's my own. And uh it's it's a it's a it's an important idea to grapple with because many of us, I think, are born with utopian assumptions about what can happen. And I think part of it is the fact that we're raised in families and we don't to totally get why the world can't be a little more like that. And um and it would be very nice if it if it if it if it could be done. So there's a natural optimism to the utopian vision that I think attracts a lot of people. And so so basically tries to pull pour a lot of cold water on that optimism because if you don't you you you know the the the road to hell as they say is paved with with good intentions. So that's a little bit from conflict of visions. I'm curious what you guys uh find interesting about that thesis and uh what you're eager to talk about. Yeah. I mean I just find it interesting that in order to reach these unconstrained visions and to implement them to s into society um you talk about the ideologies of communism. I mean it takes basically like complete destruction or oppression of of one group in order to attain something like that. Um, another way to put it is like the unconstrained visionists often times will um get rid of anything in their way um for this ends like anything is justified. So isn't that like a really bad problem with unconstrained vision that constrained vision doesn't really seem to have? That is a good question. So, soil does say that in the utopian vision uh the ends justify the means is quite a common attitude because if it's possible to create a heaven on earth then almost almost anything would be worth getting there. Um, and so presumably you're talking about the various uh incredibly bloody communist revolutions and takeovers that have happened everywhere from Russia to Cambodia to China and so forth. I think there's something to that. However, it's also true that people quite often are attracted to the idea of the utopian vision and vote for it. Communist movements have been quite popular in in other places in in Latin America. And I wouldn't want to bismerch everyone with the utopian vision and say that they're all about ends justify the means or that people with with the with the tra with the tragic vision aren't quite often about that too. But there has been a pattern of in particular communists um um being comfortable with any level of human death in order to seize power. I was wondering how religion factors into the constrained and unconstrained visions because I think at least how I was understanding it in Christianity I feel like it views people as constrained but because of God and Jesus then you can become unconstrained. So I was wondering how kind of like religion changes the constrained and unconstrained views. Yeah, it it that's a very interesting question and it's one that soul doesn't dive too deep into, but he does say that uh the tragic vision values tradition more than the un than than than the utopian vision. Why? The idea is something like this. If your culture that has your tradition is still around, that means it's doing something right. Um, all kind of cultures and peoples have existed throughout history and not all of them survive. Airgo, the ones that do must be doing something right. The tragic vision basically says that you are too stupid to pick and choose which aspects of your tradition are the ones that account for the success of your culture. So you should you should be very careful and think very hard before getting rid of a tradition or a cultural norm that you grow up with. That's sort of the idea behind the uh the tragic vision. The utopian vision says that hold on actually we are rational animals. We're able to reason and critique the traditions that we grow up with. And it's possible that a lot of our traditions just don't make any sense and they are just we're just doing what we're doing because our grandparents said so and their grandparents said so. And actually, we can use our rational minds to to figure out which of our traditions are key to our success and which we can actually throw away because they're more causing more harm than good. And and so the utopian vision has very little to no respect essentially for tradition and thinks you should use reason to pick alakart. I will say I'm I'm a lot more sympathetic to the utopian vision on that particular issue of tradition uh and your ability to to to get rid of certain traditions because they actually don't make sense. That said, there's also something important that the the the tragic vision has a good point to make there too. Um, so you talked about the family being kind of the ideal communism, which like has a father who kind of can like pick the kid up and like slap him or something. And so does the does communism like try to import the kind of um because we're talking in we're learning about Aristotle and like the the king who is above all usually gets exiled because he's so unequal that he can't be under the same rule. So, is communism kind of like that where you have this the king who um is so virtuous that knows what to do and then tries to force not force everyone else to do that. Yeah, totally. I mean, in in the case of Joseph Stalin, Joseph Stalin and Maadong, you literally had a dear leader that everyone has a picture of at home and worships and believes uh is taught to believe is the most wise person. And from his policies, uh, that's the work you do. You don't get to choose your own work. You have to, um, the wise king has decided it would make more sense for everyone to live together on a commune, take care of each other's kids. In in the in the case of China, um, you're all going to farm collective land. You're not going to farm your own land. You'll farm collective land. Everything you farm will belong to the state and the state will distribute it to you according to to to your needs. Now the reason this doesn't work is because of the tragedy of the commons. If I'm a farmer and the level of work I put in has no correlation with the level of benefit that I personally see. Like I could just not farm this whole year and I would be fed the same amount of grain. Me and my family would be fed the same amount of grain. What is my incentive to work other than the illusion that I can completely neglect my own self-interest and fully subordinate myself to this state project in a family? A kid probably could do that for his parents because that's the psychology of a family. What actually happens is each farmer pursues their own narrow self-interest, understanding that it's not in their self-interest to work harder. it's in their self-interest to maybe find other black market ways of making money or use their time differently. And lo and behold, that's how you get a famine. Um, and so yeah, I think definitely the idea of a wise leader who's going to decide how to arrange everything is has been the the the main fault of communism and so is very hard on that point of view. So is the problem sorry just to ask one more question. Is the problem that in a family the father does the work and provides but in the communist state it's kind of like the child star where the children are asked to provide for the family instead. No I think the problem is deeper than that. The problem isn't about who is doing the work. The problem is about the incentive structure of the work itself. So it it it the the reason it doesn't work isn't isn't because the the guys at the top aren't laboring. It's because because you know both in a capitalist society and a communist society um it's the people at the bottom doing most of the labor. And in in China in the 1970s when they start opening up to capitalist marketplaces and practices in in the late '7s, first you get the Shiaang village which basically tries this small experiment in capitalism where now it's allowing farmers to have to own their own plots of land. Suddenly they find that food production is doubling, tripling, quadrupling, quintupling because each farmer now has an incentive to maximize to get to know his own plot of land to maximize um to maximize his output for purely self-interested reasons because he wants not only to feed his family but to produce as much e extra grain and sell on the market. He wants to get rich period. um and leveraging that purely selfish motive, all of a sudden there's no more famine in Shiaoang village, right? And and then that model then, you know, they they basically rediscovered what what Adam Smith had discovered 200 years prior and some places uh still haven't yet discovered like Cuba. But it's about the incentive structure rather than who's doing the work. It seems like the unconstrained and the constrained vision are like just two basic stories that we tell ourselves or that we kind of assume of the world and all our beliefs and the way we see the world is built off of that. And when I first read the book, although like I I saw and I agree with what Soul was talking about, it seemed to me that it was too limited and sometimes kind of a false dichotomy. For example, what Anolina was talking about with Christianity that seems to be more of an unconstrained vision when usually Christianity, if we're looking at like a two-party system or like the right and the left in America, it usually maps on to the conservatives who in like economics have a constrained vision or in government have a constrained vision and then their religion is unconstrained. So I was wondering if there's cases where it's like truer to take one of the visions um and where it's not like for example in economics it's truer or more accurate to take the constrained vision but maybe in education it's truer to take the unconstrained vision. Mhm. So yeah, your question is does can it be true that the tragic vision is better for certain domains and the utopian vision better for other domains? I think that's almost certainly the case. Like the there's no way that everything should should um be equally tragic. I think you know I I think economics is a situation where it's it's really uh not like the debate has been settled and and it is the the tragic vision uh wins wherever wherever it comes into context into into contest with the utopian vision. Um but you you you talked about education as one place in which maybe the uh unconstrained vision might be better. What do you mean by that? Well, um the constrained vision um I think in the first chapter talks about knowledge is kind of like a collective thing and it's more like culture rather the unconstrained vision um puts more of an emphasis on reason and rationality and we educate people because we think that you know maybe their abilities are limited but through education they will be able to gain reason and gain skills and become better people. So we do have we do tend to think that people like will improve through education, right? I think what the tragic vision would say about education is that education is probably not going to make you a better person. The best it can do is teach you those core skills like how to write well, how to read well, how to do mathematics, basic shared and accepted facts of history and drill down on those so that you can decide you can have the skills to do whatever you're able to do in life. Whereas the utopian vision might say education can be used as a tool to fundamentally change your nature and the nature of society in ways that are desirable. So for example, we don't like unequal outcomes between men and women. We don't like the fact that probably I don't know the number but 90 plus% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are men. Um, we don't like the uh the male female uh gender pay gap, the fact that that men tend to earn more money. And so we're going to use education to to to really try to make men and women the same for for instance, right? That that would be um that would be one idea. We're going to basically educate people to make sure they're they're not sexist, first of all, and then we're going to give boys and girls the exact same kinds of toys and the and and we're going to sort of push them to to value the same things and and in doing so, we can actually get rid of in inequality at the at the tail end. So that might be one way in which the two visions would differ on education. Um and my guess is that the latter vision would not work out very well. Yeah. Just on the the point about religion, it's talking about how religious visions may ascribe omniscience and omnipotence to God, but that in itself constrains man and so completely precludes uh unconstrained social vision. Um but I did have a question regarding like the the sources he's using and um the philosophy underpinning this whole thing. He does not cite Aristotle or Plato in this entire work which is shocking to me but he cites Hayek uh dozens of times. Um so is he just trying to explain or make sense of the modern world more so or what is he trying to do with this book? Is it like philosophical in nature? Is it a guide to people to navigate um contemporary political landscapes or Yeah, I would say it's it's more of a guide to navigate contemporary political landscapes. My my guess is he might say that the utopian vision being popular is a more recent phenomenon. I don't know to what extent societies were on mass adopting utopian assumptions in the time of Plato and Aristotle. That's actually a good question. I don't know the answer to that. But I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was a lot less than in the 20th century. say the 20th century may be looked back on as the high watermark of widescale attempts to implement utopian assumptions on whole societies including economics obviously soul is extremely influenced by Hayek probably more than any other single thinker and the essay he's influenced from Hayek is called the use of knowledge in society what this essay says Hayek's talking not about like book knowledge. He's talking about what uh you can call it hyekian knowledge which is like the knowledge that a particular deli store owner has of a particular street corner and what goes on there. Um you know like the the knowledge that the knowledge that's local in nature that's fleeting in nature. the kind of knowledge a businessman has about his particular corner of the market that's constantly changing where there's no book in the library you can find to go like learn about what the I don't know the the the bacon economy on 111 street in New York is like but the guy selling bacon knows because he has to know if he doesn't know he goes out of business he buys too much he buys too little he buys the wrong behind uh he doesn't get enough varieties. He learns every day what the market needs and how the market is changing. That's the kind of knowledge Hayek is concerned about and the use of knowledge in society. And Hayek makes this the simple point that what the price mechanism does, the price mechanism does what would what would only be possible with an uh an omnisient organizer. So if you had an omnisient organizer, he could simply say, "Oh, okay. Um, uh, people on 111 street need more bacon today and people downtown need more cabbage." Uh, and he could just tell you tell everyone what to do so that everyone gets what they need and want. In the absence of that, the price mechanism actually does the same thing without anyone having to arrange it. So the example he uses is like if the if for whatever reason tin becomes more scarce either because um you know I don't know for whatever reason there's less tin in the world um the price of tin will simply go up and that will convey to every relevant every everyone who who who who's affected by that decision downstream will ration their use of tin as if directed by a central planner simply because the price has gone up. And so the price the price mechanism coordinates behavior um to use scarce resources and it actually transmit all of that local hayaki and knowledge that that millions of people have in a really efficient way. And this is uh that's actually the essay that really launches Soul's interest in the the tragic vision. He he views the price mechanism as the the perfect example of of um how taking on the tragic vision can actually yield better outcomes on the whole. My biggest problem with the unconstrained the constrained vision is that to me they seem very exclusive. It's either that you're unconstrained or constrained. And I just don't believe humans are like that. I think this is somewhat what Cat was getting at is say with education. I wouldn't say I have neither a a constrained or an unconstrained vision. I think it's a combination of the two. What would soul say to that? Um I don't know, but I I I I agree it's a it's a spectrum rather than a binary. And um I think in a lot of ways when you write you have you often have to make a spectrum a binary in order to get the point across. But in reality, a lot of people are somewhere along the spectrum where they have certain tragic assumptions, certain utopian assumptions. And um and so I think that's that's a fair a fair point. He has he has a chapter about dynamic visions and he's saying that it's not all just either you're unconstrained or constrained. He's talking about um inconsistent and hybrid visions make it impossible to equate constrained and unconstrained visions simply with the political left and right. He discusses Marxism and libertarianism as things that do not exactly fit into one or the other. When we're talking about the right and the left, uh recently when Trump came into office, he was just like I mean it's just been executive order after executive order. I mean it hasn't changed this fast in a very very long time. um the government that is um and he's definitely taking on an unconstrained vision um just by the fact that you know the president's kind of post Obama have been um putting forth like more executive orders and um that's sort of against the right. I mean I don't know if Trump could be even put in the right or the left at this point. Uh but if he can if he can be put in the right then he's being unconstrained. So wouldn't that kind of flip uh the direction of right and left? Yeah. So what you're getting at is something libertarians have been complaining about for decades, which is that the Republican party claims to be or I don't think it claims to be anymore, but it used to claim to be the party of small government, which is essentially libertarian in principle and jibes very well with the tragic vision. Um the idea the tragic vision is we all have hayekian knowledge of our own personal lives and our own corners of the market and corners of society and as a result it makes more sense for us to have power over our decisions rather than a central authority. Um, if that's true, then you would want smaller government in general. But, you know, for the past several decades, it hasn't mattered whether a Republicans's in office or a Democrat's in office. The presidency has assumed more and more power. Um, government in general has assumed more and more power. The budget has increased every single pretty much every single year since at least the '9s. and uh executive orders, you know, Obama had tons of executive orders. Trump has tons of executive orders now. So, there really is no party that reflects the assumptions of the tragic vision through and through, although you you do get Republicans sometimes claiming to represent that party. I think it's possible tariffs are are are another example, right? Like the idea is uh the government can intervene in order to arrange the economy uh in in a desirable direction to bring back manufacturing jobs uh that haven't been in in America for many many decades at this point. Yeah, this is this is a classic example of the unconstrained vision because the idea is by intervening in the economy and arranging things just so the government can essentially create better outcomes than the free market would create by itself. Um but of course this means that now steel is steel is going to be artificially uh the price of steel is going to be artificially inflated which hurts everyone that uses steel to produce anything else. and and so forth. And and so and and what's more, people will now come to the president hat in hand looking for exceptions to the tariffs, which um again because everyone is going to pursue their own self-interest, right? Everyone is going to try to get exempted from the tariff if it if it if it if it uh doesn't benefit them. Th this is I think why it's you want to be careful and not just equate tragic and utopian to right and left. They're visions that are independent of our current uh of today's politics and uh you don't just want to make it into a synonym for Republican versus Democrat. Um so there's a great book called White Lies by AJ Bame. I don't know if you've heard of it before, but it talks about the internal infrastructure of the NAACP and his tension with web dubo. But what I was wondering is is it clear that soil's political thought had any impact with regards to whether it's the life of Walter White or specifically the civil rights movement? Oh yeah, certainly. So uh Soul was born around I want to say 1933. So, um, he's he's n going on 92 now. He was an adult, uh, during the civil rights movement. And, uh, when he he, you know, like like all black people, he was happy that he could now go to any restaurant in the south and be served and not have to sit on the back of a bus and so forth. Um but he questioned the the the automatic assumption that socioeconomic progress inequality would flow from political rights. So basically there a lot of people assumed in the 60s okay now that black people can vote a few years from now black people have the same income and wealth as white people. But so said why why why would anyone assume that? Why would anyone assume that that um political rights which are valuable on their own would automatically lead to econ socioeconomic uh equality of outcome and later in his career he would he would point out that actually African-Americans made lots of progress between say 1940 and 1960 the poverty rate cut in half in the black community from like 80% to 40%. all before the civil rights movement mostly as a result of you know migrating from the south to the north to to higher paying jobs and so forth. And so um how this connects with the tragic and utopian vision is that the question is are equal outcomes to be expected in a fair society or um are unequal outcomes to be expected in a society with very different uh groups of people and different cultures. And the conclusion so comes to is that even if society were perfectly fair, which of course it isn't, you would still expect two people with different histories, different cultures, um different demographics, different values to perform differently across a whole range of of of of um metrics. And so, uh, if if equal outcomes are not actually on the menu, then you begin to look at how the policies that are trying to enforce equal outcomes uh have distorting and and and toxic side effects potentially, right? So that's whereas if if equal outcomes are to be expected then it's a matter of educating educating people out of their racism um social programs to to help people and the measure of whether you're failing is the measure of whether there's an outcome gap. So you can basically diagnose a society's racism by the gap by the income gap and the wealth wealth gap between groups. Of course, if if if inequality is to be expected, then you actually don't know why there's an inequality. Um, it could be discrimination, but it could could also be cultural differences. Cool. All right.