The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

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And yet it’s Randian vision is right-wing. So I get it. It’s just a form of right-wing that feels dated and in retrospect has meshed fairly well with coastal, professional class progressives and their cosmopolitan attitudes. Reply Once the mechanism for Information propagation changed, so too did the Myths. Previously burdensome religious myths were updated to align with new mercantilist culture. Status from reputation-based chivalry changed to status from financially-based wealth.

To end on a linguistic note — note that we commonly use the word “will” to denote the future tense, as in “what do I think WILL happen”. The way you used that phrase, it was to denote an impersonal process. But at root, to “will” something to happen is to intend for it to happen. The point is, that our ideas of what “will” happen often have more of an element of “willing” than we would like to admit. Replya b Bates, Stephen (29 December 2012). "Lord Rees-Mogg obituary". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 2 January 2013. 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] 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]

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. 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 O'Carroll, Lisa (10 January 2013). "Tributes paid to Lord Rees-Mogg at funeral". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 25 July 2019 . Retrieved 25 July 2019. Gaus, Gerald F.; Kukathas, Chandran, eds. (2004). Handbook of Political Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. p.128. The driving theme of this book is the information revolution, ‘the most sweeping in history’, liberating individuals at the expense of the 20 thcentury nation-state. Indeed, the authors argue that microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation state, creating new forms of social organisation in the process. It will be faster than any previous revolution, and not without pain.I did not have to agree with its essential philosophy to recognise that the book is the product of large brainpower, sweeping far and wide in historical research and analysis. Its strength, however, especially reading it today, lies in the force of its predictions about the new millennium that was to dawn three years later. Ellen Meiksins Wood (1972). Mind and Politics: An Approach to the Meaning of Liberal and Socialist Individualism. University of California Press. ISBN 0520020294. p. 7 Lysander Spooner (1852). "Trial By Jury" (PDF). Let's Abolish Government. Citation (p179) "If one man commit a trespass upon the person, property or character of another, the injured party has a natural right, either to chastise the aggressor, or to take compensation for the injury out of his property."

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. Our wishes, people’s wishes, do have power. Sometimes it may take a certain amount of time for the results of that power to show themselves, but that doesn’t mean that the power is not there. William Rees-Mogg’s wishes are a case in point. One of the wishes that William Rees-Mogg seems to express in the ideal of the “Sovereign Individual” is the wish to have individual power without communal responsibility. This is “wishful thinking” at its most dangerous — because it “might just come true” (if only for a later generation and not William himself). Or rather, it already has.Brian Armstrong". maavens.com. Archived from the original on 19 April 2022 . Retrieved 20 April 2022. Ammous, Saifedean (23 March 2018). "What Is Bitcoin Good For?: Individual Sovereignty". The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking (PDF). Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley. p.200 (218 on PDF). ISBN 978-1-119-47386-2. I haven’t read The Sovereign Individual, but it sounds like a precursor to the Neoreaction (NRx) school of politics. Popular with right leaning figures such as Steve Bannon (apparently) and Peter Thiel. The philosophical underpinnings of NRx (provided by Lang 7 Moldbug) seems to be attracting a growing audience.

The book is written somewhat in the manner of a memo to investors. ‘A series of transition crises lies ahead … We expect it to be a time of great danger and great reward … Increasingly autonomous individuals and bankrupt, desperate governments will confront one another across a new divide. 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 privatisation of almost all services governments now provide.’ Dan-Cohen, Meir. 2002. Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality. Princeton University Press. p. 296 It is called The Sovereign Individualand if I was unaware of its publication, it might have been because it was in early 1997, when I was busy working on New Labour’s campaign ahead of the election in May. But my Mariner was right. It really does help you understand why the political Right fought so hard for 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.1611The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, 1917–1921: The State and Counter-revolution". Spunk Library . Retrieved 4 March 2013.