Sovereignty, Society, and the Infinite
The Individual and the Emerging Structures of Governance.
The concept of the sovereign individual, made famous in the book The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, is one that many in the Bitcoin community hold closely. In a recent conversation with friends, I found that I was struggling to articulate how I view the sovereignty of the individual, specifically in regards to the individual’s inextricable relatedness to society. This piece is my attempt at hashing out my view on what it means to balance the conditions of a society with the sovereignty of the individual.
What is the Sovereign Individual?
The Sovereign Individual argues that the transition into the information age, of which we are still in the early stages, will result in a reallocation from an emphasis on the nation state to the importance of the individual and their values. This is analogous to the movement away from religion during the industrial revolution, toward the myth of the nation state.
As we move into the information age, we are clearly seeing the signs of a dying governance paradigm, perhaps best anthropomorphically encapsulated by the senility of the current Biden administration in the United States of America. The most powerful country of the 20th century now outwardly presents itself in its decay. This is the seemingly palpable last grasps for power by the nation states as they come to terms with the forces of evolution on our distributed governance structure. A paradigm shift is occurring towards the influence of the individual on state organization.
The book argues that we will move toward the individual as a client or customer of the state, rather than a blind servant, or dependent. As states impose their will to power on the individual, those with the means to do so will vote with their feet, changing jurisdictions or countries in order to find the services and morality they value in a society. Balaji Srinivasan has also written extensively on this sort of idea in The Network State.
The Ethics of Civil Disobedience in the 21st Century
”Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men, generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them.”
-Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
Just as Thoreau thought it necessary to disobey an unjust government, it is the logical evolution that we will show our opposition to the state by simply leaving that state. We will vote with our feet, allowing us to transgress that which we find objectionable in the action of the state. Nation states will eventually need to adapt to the notion of the sovereign individual as a client of the state, and cater to the real needs and desires of the citizens should it wish to continue to exist in any meaningful way. And with the rise in remote work, there is a democratization of relocation such that voting with your feet is no longer reserved for the wealthy. If you can pick up and take your job with you, seeking out the conditions that you, a client of the state desire, then we will see more meaningful reorganization of states in their attempt to attract capital and innovation from the digital class.
The Inextricable Relatedness of the Sovereign Individual
And so this is where I want to wrestle with the relationship of the individual to the society. It is not practical to think of the individual as an island, and I don’t accuse those adherents to the ideas stated above of taking that view. However, since the term sovereign individual can be taken to literally mean having supreme political power of oneself, we need to be careful not to fall into narcissistic, solipsistic categorizations of the individual. The human psyche is prone to creating ideologies out of just about anything, so our approach should always be one of integrating contradictions, not asserting that they do not exist.
There are many philosophical and religious frameworks that point us to either the integration, or acceptance of, contradictions and polarities. We have the Jungian perspective of individuation, Tantric Buddhism aspiring to integrate these dualities into a non-dual absolute, and Hegelian dialectics wrestling with the contradiction and negation of the absolute.
From a Jungian perspective, Individuation is the integration of the whole personality, both the conscious and unconscious. Jung proposed that the integration of the psyche occurred naturally and autonomously, however it could occur in a much more directed way with intentional engagement between the conscious egoic self and our unconscious. The tension in the attempt to integrate the conscious and the unconscious creates a new, third being that is something more than the sum of its parts. Something beyond.
The individual and the society can be thought of in the same vein. Not only do we have the conscious hive mind of society, but there is the collective unconscious underneath it all. We are one in the sense that we are an individual, a part; and we are one with others in the sense that we are embedded within a society. In order integrate the individual and society, we need to consciously hold in our awareness our unavoidable relatedness to others, yet our separateness from the Other.
Byung-Chul Han argues in The Agony of Eros, that the rise of the narcissistic self, and the tendency towards consumption (not just of material goods, but in how we approach relationships) does away with the negativity of the Other. Succinctly, we consume the other person in that we relate to them in a manner that reflects ourselves back to ourselves, relishing in the narcissistic self. To relate to the Other authentically is to come to understand their inherent negativity, their ungraspable-ness, their contradiction.
To do away with being able to hold the contradiction in other individuals in a society is to consume them. It is an attempt control from the top-down, to mold others in your image and to use them as ends. So it strikes me that one piece of the matter of understanding how a sovereign individual fits into a society is to accept that they are part of, yet they are Other to the members of that society. The sovereign individual is in contradiction.
The Internet of Minds and the Tendency Towards Ideology
One might argue that the pre-linguistic human was the most individualistic we have ever been. Bound inwards by non-verbal thought, our ideas, in whatever pre-linguistic form they took, were locked inside of us. Like a single computer without an internet connection. I would imagine we communicated feelings and emotions through our outward appearances, but you understand the limits to which I am pointing to.
Language networked us to other humans and forever embedded us in a distributed form of cognition, and so ending our most autonomous cognitive era. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues in his book The Secular Age, that following these early days of networked cognition, we began to form early religions that provided coherence and gave us a place in the cosmos. We were part of something through the myths and rituals we enacted.
Within early religions though, as well as modern ones, are the seeds of ideology and the justification of social orders through the weaponization of belief. The late philosopher James Carse writes beautifully in his book The Religious Case Against Belief, about why the concept of religion must be open and adaptive, as opposed to rigid and unchanging. Religion as an adaptive system provides knowledge, whereas religion as a closed system, can only assert belief. Knowledge is integrative of contradiction, while belief has no ability to integrate.
As a species, we tend towards hierarchies. This is not a bad thing. Hierarchies built on merit and skill are well justified within a society. But historically we, or rather those at the apex of hierarchies, have tended toward imposing belief as a justification of their social standing. Since rigid belief structures hold no contradictions, they tend toward conflict.
The idea of the sovereign individual itself is not immune to becoming a belief system. However, I do think that it has the potential of adaptability exists within the very idea of being sovereign of the nation state. In order to flow as individuals in our sovereignty, we need to hold the contradictions, and integrate the polarities as they arise, and they will arise.
Carse talks about adaptive religions as being horizonal, in that there is no boundary, they are pushing toward the horizon. In his other classic work, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, Carse represents the infinite game as play for the sake of the continuation of play, while the finite game is to win a game with a set ending, within a fixed boundary. The act of being a sovereign individual in the 21st century should orient towards playing infinite games. Some games are finite, and that is fine. We have three periods in a hockey game and the score at the end decides a winner. But if you zoom out and examine the whole human experience, including the finite games we play, we see that our success is rooted in the infinite and our relatedness to one another.
“No one can play a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others. Simultaneously the others with whom we are in relation are themselves in relation. We cannot relate to anyone who is not also relating to us. Our social existence has, therefore, an inescapably fluid character... this ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity; rather change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
The infinite inspires and aspires. The infinite is beyond. I think we are on the precipice of great change and great entropy, because life itself is always at the precipice. The sovereign individual should stand at the edge of the horizon in awe and wonder, rather than assert a set of beliefs that dictates what they take themselves to be. In voting with our feet in our opposition to the nation state we have the power to shape our worlds, but we also run the risk of a continually nomadic way of life, never settling into community, neither physically or cognitively. However, we are uniquely placed in time to build out both digital and in-person communities, and to blend these communities into one.
As we build out the multi-generational project of what it means to be a sovereign individual, we can orient ourselves towards the integration of contradiction and the acceptance of the Other. It does not mean we do away with conflict, again, there is no utopia. But insofar as we can aspire to knowledge over belief, we are participating in the infinite.