On Finally Getting Around To Reading The Sovereign Individual
Commonplace Newsletter #60
The problem with recommending books to people is that they recommend books back. This is one of Marlo Stanfields ‘good problems’, but it’s a problem nonetheless. Every month my ‘to read’ stack grows longer and I wonder how many years it will be before I hit that existential inflection point where I have more books to read than I have years left in which to read them. And this morbid calculation doesn’t even take into account all of the classics that need to be re-read along the way. It can catch you off-guard, this thought, make you look nervously into the void when what you should be doing is writing.
Anyway.
We are only one paragraph down and already dangerously close to veering off track. So. Of all of the books in that towering, teetering, looming stack there is one that has been calling out to me as of late. One that friends, co-conspirators and Social Club regulars have been harping on at me to check out for ages. Peer pressure prevails through perseverance, and though the book itself concerns topics that are not usually up my alley- you would file the book in question under finance, economics or politics if you were a librarian- I have decided to relent.
The book is called The Sovereign Individual. It is written by some fella called James Dale Davidson and some other fellas, a titled one, called Lord William Rees-Mogg. I recall seeing another Rees-Mogg, a politician here in England- regularly featuring in Private Eye magazine and being ridiculed for his ludicrous, top hatted, raised-by-nannies, Bertie Woosteresque clueless carryings on. Maybe that younger Rees-Mogg is our co-authors son or nephew or cousin or something. I don’t know. I’m not going to bother looking it up at any rate.
What I am going to do now is to retire to my reading chair and delve into The Sovereign Individual with an open mind and then talk about it (or probably, to be more accurate, talk vaguely around it) for the remainder of this piece.
A General Note on Predicting The Future
No one knows what the future holds with any degree of accuracy or specificity. Which is a blessing as to do so would be an awful, Cassandra-like curse. We are all at heart gamblers in that we make bets on the future with our words and our deeds (buying a home is a bet, starting a family is a bet, deciding that wingsuit flying would be a fun hobby to pursue is a bet). And the gamblers vision of hell is not a world in which he loses very bet, but a world in which he wins every bet. Endlessly and without variation.
To exist beyond the possibility of surprise would make our life a never-ending tedium.
But fortunately this is not the case. The greatest prognosticators are retrospectively proven to have been directionally correct, but they often fall apart in the specifics. In the fine details when they are pressed to really narrow it down. But in terms of directional correctness time has proven- and I believe further time will further prove- our men Davidson and Rees-Mogg to be very prescient indeed.
Now maybe things will turn around or go sideways- our lives are full of surprises after all- but I don’t think so. And so the implications of The Sovereign Individual are worth pondering. Which is why I guess people kept harping on at me to actually read the damn book.
The View From On High
Our authors deal in what they call Megapolitics, which is the societal changes that occur on a very zoomed out, macro level. The kind of changes that happen every half a millennia, not every half a decade. So for example, The Roman Empire turning Christian was a megapolitical change. The Roman Empire falling 500 years later was a megapolitical change. The emergence of Feudalism at the turn of the first millennium was a mega political change, as was the falling of that system and the dawn of the Renaissance and modernity circa 1500.
Every 500 years something that irrevocably changes everything occurs. And wouldn’t you know it, we are living through one of these moments right now. See, where the authors go right, I believe, is that they state from their late 1990’s vantage point just how unprecedentedly radical microprocessors and the Internet will prove to be. And a mere twenty something years later here I am typing these words into an iPad screen in England for publication on a San Francisco based email newsletter platform to a worldwide audience of debit card paying subscribers. A lot has changed in the world since the 90’s.
So following this line of reasoning that the societal shift that the Information Age would usher in would be just as monumental as that brought about by the Industrial Revolution, our authors were able to predict the rise of cryptocurrencies (what they call ‘cybermoney’) a decade before bitcoin was even invented. This fact, I should imagine, is what has made the Sovereign Individual a cult classic and thus brought it on to my radar.
But cybermoney is just the beginning.
See, with seismic societal shift comes the falling away of all of the old ways of doing things. Feudal serfdom seemed an eternal inevitability for the Medieval masses until suddenly it wasn’t. Because something endures for centuries doesn’t mean it will endure indefinitely. In fact, on a long enough timeline it’s a guarantee that it won’t. And so many things that we see as permanent and irrevocable features of reality- democracy, politics, the nation state- may merely prove to be 20th century aberrations when viewed through the long lens of history.
Things haven’t always been the way they are now and things will not continue to always be this way. It sounds like a trite and obvious truism when you say it out loud, but the present has a way of blinding us to anything other than itself. And this change is a terrifying prospect if you are either wedded to the current way the world works, or worse if you actually currently profit from the system as it is.
But worse still, the authors argue, would be to obstinately stay wedded to a way of doing things that is clearly on the way out, that is clearly increasingly less tenable as the age of industry gives way to the age of information. Conventional thinking becomes a trap when all around you the conventions are crumbling.
WGMI
Like any revolutionary and world redefining force, crypto and web3 (the decentralised internet that is in its infancy) is a mass of jargon, acronyms and in-group phrases. The most significant one to my mind is WGMI- We’re Gonna Make It- which is somewhere between a rallying cry, a dry statement of fact, and a source of reassurance and solace whenever one of the extremely volatile crypto assets takes a nosedive in price.
WGMI and it’s antithesis NGMI- Never Gonna Make It- permeate the Sovereign Individual. This is the way things are heading, the book say, specifics may differ but this is the direction. You can accept and adapt or you can cling impotently to the increasingly untenable old world model.
Now a cynic would say that Davies and Rees-Mogg are investors and businessmen and so stoking this belief about the upcoming death of the nation state is merely a ploy to get people to buy into their offshore money management services. And that may well have been part of it. But I think it’s fairly apparent- as the authors argue- that both the political class (of all parties) and the bureaucratic, ultra-consumerist way our world currently operates is tantamount to the greed and corruption of the decadent late days of the failing Roman Empire or to the arrogant grasping folly of the elites in the last days of Feudalism. Old structures become more extreme as they reach there nadir. To quote Tom Cruise in the (underrated) film Cocktail: ‘Everything ends badly, otherwise it wouldn’t end.’
So if all of this is true, if all of this will play out (approximately) as Davidson and Rees-Mogg predict then one must adapt to the Sovereign Individual Mindset. (God, that sound like an awful self-help book. Forgive me). You have to decide that WGMI.
Which in practical terms means detaching from politics, mass media, mass consumption and the like and instead embracing the pursuit of individual freedom and autonomy. Now of course this can be taken to paranoid and rapacious Gordon Gekko extremes where one grows increasingly contemptuous of the NGMI masses. But the fact remains that there is now more scope and opportunity than ever to create the kind of free, peaceful, independent, meaningful life that our ancestors trapped by the forces of empire, feudalism, industry and geography could ever have dreamed of.
Change is disorienting and frightening. But change is also the bringer of opportunity. We can choose to embrace it. And if we do then maybe, just maybe, WGMI.
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Great read. I share this dualism of feelings about changes. I recall someone wrote that the most interesting times in human history were those when everything was collapsing because that meant something new was being born.
WGMI