CONCEPT
The Anointed
Sowell's term for credentialed elites who design policies from the unconstrained vision, rarely pay costs of failure, and dismiss contrary evidence as moral deficiency.
The anointed, in Sowell's framework, are the self-appointed moral and intellectual elite who possess a vision of how society should operate and who use their positions in media, academia, government, and cultural institutions to advance that vision. They evaluate policies by intended benefits rather than actual outcomes, treat dissent as moral failure rather than intellectual disagreement, and are structurally insulated from the consequences of the policies they advocate. The anointed are not a conspiracy; they are a social class united by a shared vision (typically unconstrained), shared credentials (elite education), shared vocabulary, and shared immunity from the costs their policies impose on others. Sowell's critique was not that the anointed were stupid or malicious but that the combination of unconstrained-vision assumptions and insulation from consequences produced a predictable pattern of policy failure that the anointed could not recognize as failure because their framework made contrary evidence invisible.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Sowell identified the anointed by their rhetorical patterns: emphasis on how they feel about issues