The relationship between individual and corporate life is best expressed through the family unit. Even then, things went sour between Cain and Abel.
As a citizen of the United States who is moderately engaged with civic realms, I am inclined to reject candidates for public office who subscribe to the unconstrained vision.
Over the past months and years I have been giving thought to, and developing tools to, expose them in hopes of limiting ballot access, or at least warning other citizens away from their perfidy.
Through the above post I hope to gain some clarity in understanding the manner and degree to which the unconstrained vision is incompatible with the Preamble. Your response is helpful to that end. I still have a lot more thinking to do on this subject.
I have not read Sowell’s work on it yet, but apparently he considers the unconstrained vision to be neither stupid nor incoherent, but if it is not in accord with the truth concerning human nature, it certainly is neither smart nor helpful.
I was just listening to the book again today on a long drive, and did not hear any reference to the unconstrained vision to be neither "incoherent" nor "stupid", so I checked when I read your post when I got back home.
"A Conflict of Visions" is such an impressive book to me that I have the hard copy, the Kindle version, and the audiobook. (I am unable to find the hardcopy, I think I lent it to someone, darn it)
However, the Kindle version is perfect because it is searchable, and in searching for either "coherent" or "stupid" I got no hits back on "coherent" and only four hits on "stupid", none of which contained any characterizations of the unconstrained version being incoherent or stupid.
I will say that since this is probably considered to be a scholarly book (not an ideological one as if it were written by someone like Ann Coulter...not that there is anything wrong with that, BTW) and as such, I would have been surprised to hear that characterization.
He discusses these two views in a scholarly fashion, as expected in a book of this type, in my opinion.
In logic, there is a term I have heard called a "cleavage point" used to describe an area in which a clear differentiation between two viewpoints may be found. I believe it refers to the concept of Gemology (such as diamond cutting) in which a diamond, if the right area and angle is found, can be struck, splitting the diamond cleanly along that plane.
To me, I find this concept so interesting, because I view the "constrained" and the "unconstrained" ideological plane to be the area that can cleanly separate Leftists and Conservatives, at least on a macro scale. As I said in the other post, nothing is 100% but I view this differentiation as being as close as we can get.
In his opening chapter, the first few paragraphs, Sowell says this:
"One of the curious things about political opinions is how often the same people line up on opposite sides of different issues. The issues themselves may have no intrinsic connection with each other. They may range from military spending to drug laws to monetary policy to education. Yet the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again. It happens too often to be coincidence and it is too uncontrolled to be a plot. A closer look at the arguments on both sides often shows that they are reasoning from fundamentally different premises. These different premises—often implicit—are what provide the consistency behind the repeated opposition of individuals and groups on numerous, unrelated issues. They have different visions of how the world works."
He apparently feels the same way I do, seeing this as a "cleavage point" with his comment "...Yet the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again..."
I think that is why it resonates with me...his "Conflict of Visions" seems to be a logical explanation to me.