Sovereign Individual

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CHAPTER 1 THE SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL

Peter Thiel and the Politics of Apocalypse

To understand the right-wing radicalization of Silicon Valley politics, you must understand Peter Thiel. To understand Thiel, you must understand the formative role the book The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State and its authors James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg played in shaping his political outlook. “The democracy of the future will be unpopular with many freedom-loving Americans,” wrote Jaan vanValkenburgh of the Memphis Commercial Appeal upon the book’s release in 1997. “While the Internet continues to provide new opportunities, it will also make the mediocre middle-class expendable and the uneducated, paupers. Nations will become antiquated, and talented individuals will no longer pledge allegiance to a country.” “Power and freedom will be held by the talented few,” she continued in a book review headlined “Gifted Elite Will Run Nationless, Ruthless World, Book Claims.” The book in question was a somber futurist manifesto that predicted

a coming economic and political revolution—fueled by technology—that would enable wealthy entrepreneurs and investors to overthrow the power of governments. “It describes how nations will become unnecessary and how talented people will help it happen and the lesser skilled masses will challenge it, perhaps violently,” wrote vanValkenburgh in the conclusion of her piece.

Publishers Weekly dismissed the book’s dire thesis—nation-states destroyed by cybercommerce, governments undermined by “cybercurrency,” citizenship rendered obsolete, mafias and criminal gangs seizing power from behind the scenes—as “an apocalyptic exercise that is unconvincing.” The Sovereign Individual, part of a wave of crisis-tinged business books published before the year 2000, was not a bestseller.

But it made a fateful impression on a young man whose fascination with its ideas would help to change the course of American history. His name was Peter Thiel. Nearly three years after the book’s release, on October 20, 1999, Thiel gave a speech in which he made a few stunning predictions about the future. Speaking to an audience of libertarians at a think tank called the Independent Institute, the thirty-two-year-old Stanford University graduate said technology would dramatically transform the world in the twenty-first century. New forms of currency—digital, encrypted, privately controlled—could completely change how money works and begin to replace physical currencies like the dollar. “It will be something where you have a choice between different currencies and the choice is not left to the sovereign, but to the individual,” said Thiel. “And, in a sense,

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William Rees-Mogg: A Remembrance

By James Dale Davidson | Saturday, 29 December 2012

I first met William Rees-Mogg more than three decades ago. I was back in the U.K. for a summer trip through the Highland haunts of my father's ancestors. After a week overdosing on oatmeal and haggis, however, I was ready to enjoy some English summer. When I was lucky enough to cage an invitation to join a weekend house party at White Barn, the country home of Sir Philip and Lady Goodhart, I jumped at the chance.

The Goodharts had graciously provided me with lodgings when I was at Oxford. Their estate at the top of Boar’s Hill overlooking Oxford was just barely within the range required to satisfy the university's peculiar residency requirement. To meet degree qualifications, one must sleep within six miles of Carfax, the central square of Oxford.

Fittingly, as William and I were to become collaborators and co-authors, our first discussion was about books. William had just left The Times of London as editor-in-chief and had taken up a new career as an antiquarian bookseller, trading through a Pall Mall bookstore, Pickering & Chatto. It was a task for which he was well suited as he knew a prodigious amount about books and intellectual history.

As it happened, I had been in Edinburgh a few days earlier where I visited the University of Edinburgh Press in hope of finding a straggling copy of the 200th anniversary edition of Adam Ferguson's “An Essay on the History of Civil Society.”

Unhappily, however, the book was out of print. I was advised that the only way to obtain a copy would be to seek out an early edition from an antiquarian bookseller. When I encountered William Rees-Mogg at the country house party, I seized on the good fortune to recount my adventures in search of Ferguson's fine book, which I had coveted ever since reading excerpts from it at the Bodleian library when I was at Oxford.

With very little coaxing, William kindly agreed to search out an old copy for me. Within a matter of weeks I was the proud owner of a well-preserved first edition. If I recall rightly, I paid 1,000 pounds. It was one of the best purchases I ever made because it helped initiate a friendship and long intellectual partnership.

Within a few months, William and I had embarked on a newsletter publishing project that was eventually to evolve into a collaboration in writing three books: “Blood in the Streets,” “The Great Reckoning,” and “The Sovereign Individual.”

For a senior figure in the establishment, Lord Rees-Mogg was a remarkably open-minded libertarian and I would say something of a free spirit.

He was not the least bit shy about joining me in making some outlandish predictions: At a time when the Cold War still seemed to be going strong, we told the world that the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse. When Newsweek dismissed our claim that communism was on its last legs, and that there could be another 1929-style collapse, as “an unthinking attack on reason,” Lord Rees-Mogg chuckled with amusement. He seemed to genuinely enjoy tweaking the establishment in which he was well ensconced. He knew many of the great figures of his time, but was by no means persuaded that all was right with the world.

The public got a rare glance at this libertarian aspect of his personality when Rees-Mogg championed Mick Jagger after the latter received a harsh prison sentence for a trifling drug offense in 1967. In a Times editorial entitled “Who Breaks a Butterfly Upon a Wheel?” (borrowing a line from Alexander Pope), he called upon the courts to free Jagger, a first offender who was apprehended with a French seasickness pill in his pocket. As Rees-Mogg recalled, “it was on open sale in France but required a prescription in England.”

It was later alleged that the Rolling Stones were targeted by a narcotics informant who said he was recruited by the U.K. and U.S. federal governments to help set up the drug bust for the purpose of causing the Stones legal problems. Rees-Mogg's editorial led to a rapid reversal of Jagger's conviction, although it did not altogether obviate legal problems for the band as both Jagger and Keith Richards had difficulties obtaining visas for years thereafter because of having been convicted of drug-related offenses. Still, Jagger later told Rees-Mogg's youngest daughter Annunziata that her father had “saved his career.”

I don't know how much Lord Rees-Mogg did for Mick Jagger's career, but he did a lot for mine. He was a very good writer. He could rapidly and lucidly turn out copy, scribbling longhand on a yellow pad almost as quickly as if he had been a stenographer taking dictation. I struggled and worked hard to formulate my contributions to our books together. He always seemed to assimilate with ease ideas I struggled to form.

If I do say so myself, even now some 14 years after the publication of our most recent collaboration, “The Sovereign Individual,” it can still be read without embarrassment.

When I heard the sad news that William was gravely ill, I spent a moment reviewing some of the reviews, one of which reported words that William originally wrote:“Modern society is vulnerable. As vulnerable as the plate-glass towers of the World Trade Center.” Three years before 9/11 he foresaw the vulnerability with clarity. As the reviewer put it, it was “a startling sentence. Why haven't the flakes of the world adopted this book as a new mystical text to replace the obvious cases of Nostradamus? Any book that has such tragic insights on the first page is worth exploring.”

Strangely, although our books were largely about the impact of technology in changing society, I believe that Lord Rees-Mogg was the only man I've ever known who lived through so much of the 20th Century without ever driving an automobile. In some ways, he was an anachronism, an old-fashioned gentleman in a not so genteel world. I will miss him.

Editor's Note: See also "Lord Rees-Mogg, Former Chairman of Newsmax, Dies at 84."

James Dale Davidson is an economist and co-author of three books with William Rees-Mogg. His latest book, “Brazil Is the New America: How Brazil Offers Upward Mobility in a Collapsing World,” was published in August. Davidson is also a contributor to Newsmax’s Financial Intelligence Report, and a member of the Newsmax Board.

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Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › The_Sovereign_Individual

The Sovereign Individual - Wikipedia

The Sovereign Individual: How to survive and thrive during the collapse of the welfare state is a 1997 [a] non-fiction book by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, later republished on 26 August 1999 by Touchstone with the new subtitle Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.

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NO REAL TALK

The Sovereign Individual: How to survive and thrive during the collapse of the welfare state is a 1997^[a] non-fiction book by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, later republished on 26 August 1999 by Touchstone with the new subtitle Mastering the Transition to the Information Age. It forecasts the development of the twenty-first century; focusing on the rise of the internet and cyberspace, digital currency and digital economy, self-ownership and decentralization from the State.

The Sovereign Individual has been recommended by members of the cryptocurrency community such as Naval Ravikant^[2] and Brian Armstrong.^[3] In 2020, the book was reprinted with a preface written by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.^[1]

Chapters

The book contains eleven chapters and has 446 pages (400 pages of plain text, 46 pages of references, notes, and an appendix. The latest edition of the book with Thiel's foreword adds two more pages).[citation ^needed]

The chapters are:

The Transition of the Year 2000: The Fourth Stage of Human Society
Megapolitical Transformations in Historic Perspective
East of Eden: The Agricultural Revolution and the Sophistication of Violence
The Last Days of Politics: Parallels Between the Senile Decline of the Holy Mother Church and the Nanny State
The Life and Death of the Nation-State: Democracy and Nationalism as Resource Strategies in the Age of Violence
The Megapolitics of the Information Age: The Triumph of Efficiency over Power
Transcending Locality: The Emergence of the Cybereconomy
The End of Egalitarian Economics: The Revolution in Earnings Capacity in a World Without Jobs
Nationalism, Reaction, and the New Luddites
The Twilight of Democracy
Morality and Crime in the "Natural Economy" of the Information Age

Content

Rees-Mogg and Davidson's main thesis centres around self-ownership and the individual's independence from the State, forecasting the end of the nations and nation-states.^[4] In a chapter titled Nationalism, Reaction, and the New Luddites, they criticize nationalism and appeal more to giving the individual control over his destiny rather than the collectiveness given by nationalism. Rees-Mogg and Davidson also refer to a transition to the year 2000, being a birth of a new stage of Western civilization in the coming of the new millennium.^[5]

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Sovereign_Individual_2020_%28cover%29.jpg)Cover to the 2020 printing of the book (cover by Calvin Chu)

With the rise of the information society, they argue, the individual would be freed from the oppression of government and the drags of prejudice:

Genius will be unleashed, freed from both the oppression of government and the drags of racial and ethnic prejudice. In the Information Society, no one who is truly able will be detained by the ill-formed opinions of others. It will not matter what most of the people on earth might think of your race, your looks, your age, your sexual proclivities, or the way you wear your hair. In the cybereconomy, they will never see you. The ugly, the fat, the old, the disabled will vie with the young and beautiful on equal terms in utterly color-blind anonymity on the new frontiers of cyberspace.^[6]

Rees-Mogg and Davidson also suggested that digital currency/cybermoney would supersede fiat currency:

New technologies will allow the holders of wealth to bypass the national monopolies that have issued and regulated money in the modern period. [...] Their importance for controlling the world's wealth will be transcended by mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence. In the new millennium, cybermoney controlled by private markets will supersede fiat money issued by governments. Only the poor will be victims of inflation and ensuing collapses into deflation that are consequences of the artificial leverage which fiat money injects into the economy.^[7]

Rees-Mogg and Davidson's recall of "mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence" is similar to the functional mechanism of certain cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and other proof-of-work currencies.

Rees-Mogg and Davidson have also predicted that with the rise of this new cyberspace, and consequently cybermoney, it will become harder for a nation-state to collect taxes from its citizens. They compare the State to a farmer keeping cows in a field to be milked but that "soon, the cows will have wings".^[8] They predict that for the government to collect taxes from its citizens in this type of society, it would have to violate human rights, even traditionally civil countries would have to resort and "turn nasty":

Lacking their accustomed scope to tax and inflate, governments, even in traditionally civil countries, will turn nasty. As income tax becomes uncollectable, older and more arbitrary methods of exaction will resurface. The ultimate form of withholding tax—de facto or even overt hostage-taking— will be introduced by governments desperate to prevent wealth from escaping beyond their reach. Unlucky individuals will find themselves singled out and held to ransom in an almost medieval fashion. Businesses that offer services that facilitate the realization of autonomy by individuals will be subject to infiltration, sabotage, and disruption. Arbitrary forfeiture of property, already commonplace in the United States, where it occurs five thousand times a week, will become even more pervasive. Governments will violate human rights, censor the free flow of information, sabotage useful technologies, and worse.^[9]

Reception

Peter Thiel, who wrote the preface to the 2020 printing, wrote that, among the many things that Rees-Mogg and Davidson got wrong, the biggest part was "perhaps their misjudgment in the rise of China and the prosperity of Hong Kong as an ideal type of government [under colonial rule]".^[10]

In his 2018 book, The Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean Ammous mentions and calls The Sovereign Individual's prediction of digital currency "remarkable".^[11] Ammous also gives insight on The Sovereign Individual during the section titled Individual Sovereignty, while also commending Davidson and Rees-Mogg's prediction of a digital currency as "remarkable".^[12]

E. Glen Weyl and Jaron Lanier criticized in 2022 its predictions about Fujimori's self-coup, cocaine traffic in the United States, bankrupt Canada, right-wing coups, cryptocurrencies and income redistribution. They point the processes predicted by the book are not unavoidable and point to Thiel, Sebastian Kurz and Jacob Rees-Mogg helping accelerate the power of the state to provoke a reaction enabling its collapse.^[13]

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