I’ve been listening to BBC4's “The Coming Storm” and in the program, they mentioned a seemingly prophetic book “The Sovereign Individual” by James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. In 1997 (before really, as books are written before they are published) they predicted a world where cryptographic currencies and a global internet would enable sovereign citizens to do business without government and taxes. A world where democracy would be under threat from fake news and a lack of taxes. A world that seems a bit too much like ours.
It reminded me of something I found odd when looking at a way to identify people for a Universal Income, Self Sovereignty. Many people were calling a system that didn’t directly use your name, birthdate, and address as a unique identifier a self-sovereign identity. I found the wording odd, sovereignty to me then was about kings and belonging to a realm. For kings are sovereign, a very different thing to a citizen or person.
Then during covid, a bunch of anti-vaxxers and people annoyed at lockdowns were calling themselves Sovereign Citizens.
What was all this?
The various Sovereign Citizens seem to be in different groups but the general idea of "no state control" is an umbrella for all these terms.
A book written in the '90s that I hadn’t heard of and co-written by a former editor of The Times is popping up… now?
Gabriel Gatehouse who made “The Coming Storm” had a whole extra episode called “The Sovereign Individual” because he thought he was falling down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Rees-Mogg was an investor in, and board member of MaxNews a right-wing news site that supported Trump and seemed to be whipping up chaos around democratic institutions. His son was a pro-Brexit British member of parliament. Peter Theil, Paypal and Facebook original investor calls Sovereign Individual one of the most influential books and even wrote the forward for a later edition.
Zuckerberg was moving fast and breaking things, Google tried to “do no evil” and then stopped, and everyone else was trying to find the next industry to disrupt. Taxis, hotels, education, and healthcare, all barren land ready to be disrupted. From disruptions money can be made, money is power and as a side effect, the old order loses power.
Were these investors and "innovators" trying to create the chaos envisaged by Rees-Mogg and Davidson in order to profit from it and become god-like (the book supposedly describes sovereign individuals as like the Greek gods of antiquity) rulers without borders?
Gabriel from the BBC decided no, it wasn’t a conspiracy to rule us all.
I agree that most times you think there’s a grand conspiracy instead it’s just a bunch of people acting semi-autonomously with similar information or goals dumbly trying to survive or maintain their dynastic wealth and power in a changing world. This was just one of those things.
Hard...saying our current world isn’t a conspiracy is hard
There’s a problem.
Inequality and concentration of power.
A recent New Yorker articlesaid that the Getty Family Office (Rich families have an office of people to manage their investments) may control a fund worth trillions of USD.
The GDP of Australia is just over a trillion USD. I am not shocked by the number, it makes sense, the sheiks of the middle east control similar. Qatar, a nation of a few hundred thousand people, held the World Cup.
The scary bit is that it is run by an office of bureaucrats who won’t do anything that may threaten their position or the Goose (laying the golden eggs), the capital that pays the money to the family and makes them rich. You don’t kill the goose!
What rich people courtiers: advisors, managers, lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists - want to happen does. The fact that it’s the courtiers not the wealthy is the scary bit. Courtiers work with rules, and make rules, and control wealth but don’t have wealth (relative to their employer, compared to you they are rich). They are scared and scary. They want to maintain the status quo by all means.
The state of play
There’s a clash between the:
Technocracy - the bureaucrat, trust fund lawyer, corporate executive, public servant, and our courtiers.
- and
The hedonistic trust fund kid - activist, artist, globe-trotting neo-nomad, world-saving..
and the
New world creating rich person - the bitcoin millionaire, the IT billionaire, the wannabe -sovereign individual.
The government gets lumped in with the technocracy. Weirdly hated by the general populace who have since stopped trusting it.
Most influencers want to be the trust fund kid. So everyone with hope loves them.
Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg et al are changing the world and think they will rule it.
They are finding old money and power doesn't like their ideas, or them..
Everywhere with new money is realizing they need government, not to control the masses but to fund their moonshots and protect them from the old money. And save the planet.
In the USA the old money likes the Democrats and the new money the Republicans. Is that an odd flip or just the way things were. The working class has never had a political party in the USA.
You may have noticed I'm just talking about different groups of the rich and powerful. That's because they are the ones that matter, not you.
To them the majority of real people are just wage-slave consumption units who may vote. Or just people to avoid.
There is a clash in the monied lot. The result will determine the survival of the world.
But with the Cicadas in the yard and the sun shining and a nice wine. I don't care.
The best revolution is forgetting.
Forget who employs you, forget who owes you, forget who you owe. Forget your state.