william rees mogg the sovereign individual

It won’t happen overnight, it’s more of an iterative proccess, just like how our previous power structures fadded into irrelevance, such as the Church: they are still around, but their influence is order of magnitude lower than it used to be a couple of centuries ago. This thesis is built upon a previous one: the progressive erosion of power and influence of nation states. Blue, red, who cares? We’re talking about a topic of higher significance than who gets to star the political muppet show of your country. That’s the gist of the thesis I want to explore today. The reality will allow for a weird but unavoidable cohabitation of the two trends. While they are still citizens of one or several countries, they are not tied to them and can move at the moment’s notice. They treat nation-states like mere service providers (health care, education, justice, etc.) and put them in competition with one another. ◎ The Sovereign Individual - James Dale Davidson et William Rees-Mogg (1997)

Such individuals understood the decreasing power and importance of states and developed a form of statelessness. On the other end is the sovereign individual, as described by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg more than twenty years ago. What’s left are citizens who have essentially less liberty than serfs from the Middle Ages, since they are oppressed by a remote and inaccessible technostructure instead of a lord you can visit and plead to. This thesis has been documented since the middle of the past century. The reality is that the facts do not matter anymore - only the perception of them is accounted for. As the situation worsens, they tend to tighten their grip even more to maintain a fleeting appearance of order.

The most obvious end is the extrapolation of the current one: states becoming increasingly greedy in terms of surveillance and control, despite a lack of provable results coming from these strategies. It can be scary and worrisome, but it has one merit: the current situation is exerting too much pressure on the status quo for it to sustain itself - it will eventually normalize one way or another. I for one welcomed the “post-Covid” world with open arms, as it finally made apparent fundamental shifts that previously were hard to notice. ◎ Triptych - Francis Bacon (1976) The two post-covid worlds I think that today already if we’re attentive and careful, we can envision the next steps of our societal development. Yet, the phrase had the merit to stress the role of the pandemic which brought so much stress on our social structures that it resulted in twenty years of “progress” packed into one. Remember when we used to talk of a “post-covid world”? It’s funny to see how the expression quickly stopped being used as people realized the social order of the “new” world would be as nonsensical and wasteful as the previous.

William rees mogg the sovereign individual