The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

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Together in aggregate: The printing press allowed for info-based competition within the dominant institution—religion (Catholic vs. Protestant). The Gunpowder Revolution further transitioned power from Religion to Nation-State. The final stages of the Industrial Revolution (steam-based engines, factories, etc.) solidified the Nation-State as the primary Institution. But its time is coming to a close. Information Revolution Transition from Nation-State → Sovereign Individual I promise you won’t regret it,” he said. “But, more importantly, if you don’t read this book, you won’t fully understand why Brexit is happening.” I, me, my’– far from acting in the national interest, our deluded and desperate PM is acting in gross betrayal of it It was early in August, 2018, as I stepped from a train at Marylebone station, that I experienced something of an Ancient Mariner moment, and was introduced to the most important book nobody has ever heard of. Vallentyne, Peter; Steiner, Hillel, eds. (2000). Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hallgrimsdottir, Helga Kristin; Benoit, Cecilia (2007). "From Wage Slaves to Wage Workers: Cultural Opportunity Structures and the Evolution of the Wage Demands of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor, 1880–1900". Social Forces. 85 (3): 1393–1411. doi: 10.1353/sof.2007.0037. JSTOR 4494978. S2CID 154551793. American libertarian socialist Stephen Pearl Andrews frequently discussed the sovereignty of the individual in his writings. In The Science of Society, he says that Protestantism, democracy and socialism are "three partial announcements of one generic principle" which is "the sovereignty of the individual". [18] Andrews considered the sovereignty of the individual to be "the basis of harmonious intercourse amongst equals, precisely as the equal Sovereignty of States is the basis of harmonious intercourse between nations mutually recognizing their independence of each other." [19] Burke's Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry, 15th Edition, ed. Pirie-Gordon, H., London, 1937, pp.1610–1611, pedigree of "Rees-Mogg of Cholwell", p.1611 Rand, Ayn (1988). The Ayn Rand lexicon: objectivism from A to Z. p.204. ISBN 9780452010512. Citation: "the ruler of the individual — as a sovereign authority (with or without supernatural mandate), an authority logically antecedent to the citizen and to which he must submit. The Founding Fathers challenged this primordial notion. They started with the premise of the primacy and sovereignty of the individual." Similar to the critique above, the authors also miss the idea that lower frictions lead both to decentralization (of information) and to centralization (of knowledge in ecosystems like Silicon Valley or Shenzhen). So the authors think that they’ll be a bunch of Sovereign Individuals living on the Information Superhighway. Instead, we have a bunch of smart/ambitious people more easily learning about each other and then congregating together. The reality is much closer to their Competitive Territorial Clubs (competing on the axis of “smart, ambitious people”) than it is to the Sovereign Individual. Missing The Macro GoalHerman-Hans Hoppe (2020). Economics and Ethics of Private Property. p.424. Citation: "In the same vein, the fact of self-ownership is a praxeological precondition of argumentation. Anyone trying to prove or disprove anything must be a self-owner." William Rees-Mogg was born in 1928 in Bristol, England. He was the son of Edmund Fletcher Rees-Mogg (1889–1962) of Cholwell House [1] in the parish of Cameley in Somerset, an Anglican, and his Irish American Catholic wife, Beatrice Warren, a daughter of Daniel Warren of New York. [2] [3] William Rees-Mogg was raised in the Roman Catholic faith. A few days later, I was on a train again, London to Aberdeen for the start of Burnley FC’s European tour. Did a bit of work. Had a nap. Then started the book. Marylebone’s Ancient Mariner was right. It was, in its own way, mesmerising. Spooner, Lysander (1852). "Trial By Jury". Let's abolish government. p.86. Citation (p.86) "The only real 'sovereignty' or right of 'sovereignty' in this or any other country, is that right of sovereignty which each and every human being has over his or her own person and property, so long as he or she obeys the one law of justice towards the person and property of every other human being. This is the only natural right of sovereignty, that was ever known among men. All other so-called rights of sovereignty are simply the usurpations of impostors, conspirators, robbers, tyrants, and murderers." Citation (p81) "What, then, is a 'sovereign' government? It is a government that is 'sovereign' over all the natural rights of the people. This is the only 'sovereignty' that any government can be said to have. Under it, the people have no rights. They are simply 'subjects' — that is, slaves. They have but one law, and one duty, viz., obedience, submission." Citation (p.208) "There is no particle of truth in the notion that the majority have a right to rule, or to exercise arbitrary power over, the minority, simply because the former are more numerous than the latter. Two men have no more natural right to rule one, than one has to rule two." Spooner understands sovereignty to mean the negative sovereignty of property rights but says that this is the only sovereignty, so rejecting positive sovereignty of ruling power. Nation-states will experience a sharp drop in revenue…but retain the unfunded liabilities and inflated expectations and social spending inherited from the industrial era…tax consumers will be the losers.”

He opened up a bookshop, he was editor of the times, these are ways of injecting ideas into the minds of people before Cambridge Analytica existed….this is the world we are moving into, the one where people can be affected more easily by people like this because minds have been opened to their self profiteering ideas Reply Others, however, believe that Johnson negotiated in bad faith throughout. In other words – given that the bulk of those who have supported him throughout his career, and ultimately helped him to become prime minister, were insistent on the purest form of Brexit – he was always going to go to wherever the Sovereign Individuals wanted him to. The authors’ hatred of welfare could not be clearer. It marks a welfare state up against out and out Communism, but very much down against ‘a genuine laissez-faire enclave like colonial Hong Kong.’First published in 1997, shortly before New Labour won the first of our three election victories, it is called The Sovereign Individual, and is subtitled Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.It is the product of very large brainpower, sweeps far and wide in historical research and current analysis, but its strength, especially reading it today, lies in the force of its predictions about the new millennium. What if William Rees-Mogg was also engaged in “wishful thinking”— but, he was in a position of enough power and influence to (at least help) make that wish become a reality? I did not have to agree with its essential philosophy to recognise that the book is the product of very large brainpower, sweeping far and wide in historical research and analysis. Its strength however, especially read

The trends the book predicted 20 years in advance are impressive and the technology to circumvent centralised power is increasing daily (read the history of the Cypherpunks and their impact on the digital age) – extrapolate this knowledge with facts we now have: echo Chambers and increasing polarisation in politics, off shore accounting, the crises of the central banks now heading towards persistent negative interest rate policies. Right-libertarian conceptions of self-ownership extend the concept to include control of private property as part of the self. According to Gerald Cohen, "the libertarian principle of self-ownership says that each person enjoys, over herself and her powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that she has not contracted to supply". [24]

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One important thing is that William Rees ‘sounds cuddly like a pussy cat’ Mogg was at Oxford University with Maggie Thatcher, in the conservative association, so his influence might be a little grander than we can imagine. Dan-Cohen, Meir (2002). Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691090078. JSTOR j.ctt7shdn.

Cybercurrencies will deliver monetary independence to individuals. Governments’ ability to control money by printing it will be transcended, the authors say – this is 1997 remember – by mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence…. ‘Only the poor will be victims of inflation.’ Finally, they believe that, in the age of “voluntary” taxation, recipients of charity will need to appeal to private individuals (not big government), and will need to appear morally deserving. The goal of this article is to review/summarize The Sovereign Individual, a book written in 1996 by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. At a high level, The Sovereign Individual (SI) tries to predict the effects of the Information Revolution. The authors explore this by using a “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes” approach. i.e. They analyze the Industrial Revolution and then try to map that onto the Information Revolution. This is not an exercise in prophetic, rational economics: it is an aristocrat’s charter. Aristocrats? Remember them? Remember how they looked down their noses at us and how we chopped their heads off? Those are the people this book is written to resurrect and flatter.

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And, bearing in mind that the third of this trilogy was written in 1997, when I was part of the Blair team meant to be in touch with the modern world, I certainly was not in touch enough to make this observation: “We believe the Information Age will bring the dawn of cybersoldiers, who will be heralds of devolution. Cybersoldiers could be deployed not merely by nation-states but by very small organisations, and even by individuals. Wars of the next millennium will include some almost bloodless battles fought with computers.” We can only imagine the power the church once had. It has influenced areas of life that still affect us hundreds of years later. Take the ban on eating meat on Fridays and the reasons for it: "The famous ban on eating meat on Friday originated in the same spirit. The Church was not only the largest feudal landholder; it also held major fisheries. Church Fathers discovered a theological necessity for the pious to eat fish, which not incidentally ensured a demand for their product at a time when transport and sanitary conditions discouraged fish consumption." "Institutions of government that emerged in the modern period reflect the megapolitical conditions of one or more centuries ago.The Information Age will require new mechanisms of representation to avoid chronic dysfunction and even social collapse." Privatization and the end of governments "We expect to see a radical restructuring of the nature of sovereignty and the virtual death of politics before the transition is over instead of state domination and control of resources, you are destined to see the privatization of almost all services governments now provide." May has handed real power to Corbyn. He can use it to cement no deal, win the long extension we need, and secure a referendum Rees-Mogg began his career in journalism in London at the Financial Times in 1952 becoming chief leader writer in 1955 and, in addition, assistant editor in 1957. [9] [10] During this period, he was Conservative candidate for the safe Labour seat of Chester-le-Street in a by-election on 27 September 1956, losing to the Labour candidate Norman Pentland by 21,287 votes, [11] as he did in the subsequent general election by a similar margin.