Thriving in the Information Age

The Sovereign Individual, Caesarism, and megapolitical economy of violence

In the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age authors James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg offer a forecast for our times, and what comes next. They predict the rise of the Sovereign Individual who is freed from the hidden coercive forces which kept human autonomy, creativity and prosperity hostage in the agricultural and industrial eras. This article is just a quick summary to organise my own understanding of the topic, so I will gloss over critical points to convey what seems most salient in the context of my prior knowledge.

This is the first time I’m writing on economy in which domain I have no formal training. I’m not a historian either, although for over a decade I’ve been exploring the philosophy of history. I recommend you read the book yourself as its scope is vast and there is no way to give it justice in a short article like this. This piece is mostly a descriptive summary, with my occasional comments and speculations, as well as attempting to draw the similarities and differences between The Sovereign Individual and Spengler’s Decline of the West whose core insights seem to have served authors as the primary sensemaking framework for their own arguments.

Caesarism and the Sovereign Individual

The narrative takes off with a reference to Oswald Spengler’s classic 1918-23 opus magnum, The Decline of the West. In it, Spengler predicts an age of Caesarism where the power of the private individual supercedes the power of the state (think Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos). This I see as a blueprint of the logic driving the conclusions of The Sovereign Individual as here also the prediction reads that these are the last days of the nation-state and its monopoly of violence. While Spengler’s early 20th century conclusions were informed by mystical-philosophical reading of history in search of a common organic patterns that had shaped the seventeen world-cultures he had investigated, the authors of The Sovereign Individual contextualise Spenglerian insights at the millenial precipice of information economy which, as they argue, will replace the now redundant industrial economy, or more broadly, the Age of Violence, to use their own term.

Spengler believed that violence is an inextricable dimension of the human condition, the view he likely inherited from Nietzsche—his philosophical predecessor. In The Sovereign Individual, however, violence is investigated as an economic factor across different world-historical periods. The book aims to show that the currency of violence is contingent upon four megapolitical factors which have shaped human societies across history: topography, climate, microbes and technology. These are ‘megapolitical’ because they affect all humans on the planet. The balance between these factors, it is argued, determines the political economy of violence, i.e. how well violence pays in each of the four economic paradigms: hunter gatherer, agricultural, industrial, and now the Informaton Age.

While there’s no space in this short piece to investigate every one of these, I will focus on technology as this is the domain I feel relatively proficient in. Because the article is concerned with violence, we will look specifically at how subsequent military technologies shaped societies. Another critical technology worth exploring in light of its evolution would be communications, but this will have to be a topic for another article while here I will refer to it only insofar as it is weaponisable for the purpose of violence.

Universal evolutionary patterns

What is critical is that in order to adapt to each new paradigm, one has to learn to spot indicators of change before they become apparent on the surface. To do this, a broad socio-economic perspective must be adapted to spot universal patterns in all previous paradigms. This can then inform the forecasing of how such universals might affect the unique contextual features in each age, including the Age of Information whose advent the authors place on year 2000. For example, one such a universal is the exponential curve of the evolution of technology which as one megapolitical factor affects all the others. In other words, the speed of megapolitical revolutions that is driven by technology has been increasing throughout history:

Megapolitical catalysts for change usually appear well before the consequences manifest themselves. It took five thousand years for the full implications of the Agricultural Revolution to come to the surface. The transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society based on manufacturing and chemical power unfolded more quickly. It took centuries. The transition to the Information Society will happen more rapidly still, probably within a lifetime.

The accelerating pace of world-history is one universal trait we can see from the bird’s eye view which is otherwise impossible to see from the inside of our own particular epochal context alone. This is why it is so important to study the evolution of past societies transcontextually before we start making predictions about the future of our own.

Human societies are culturally conditioned

Another key premise of the book’s narrative is that cultures are not somehow engineered by the ruling classes or the outcome of a governance model unique to each era, but instead they are outcomes of the balance of unconscious forces generated by the balance between the four megapolitical factors.

The basic causes of change are precisely those that are not subject to conscious control. They are the factors that alter the conditions under which violence pays. Indeed, they are so remote from any obvious means of manipulation that they are not even subject of political maneuvering in a world saturated with politics.

This is a very counterintuitive view to a reader who has been subject to linear, sequential thinking that emerged from the five hundred years of industrialist-mechanistic ideology. Nevertheless, we know that 95% of human brain activity is unconscious, and that what we can “know” is limited to the 5% of the conscious thought governed by logic and rationality, while the context which determines the real meaning of what we can ‘“know” is not available to our conscious awareness. We can at best attempt to control what is conscious while the stream of life governs what is both conscious and unconscious. This is how I make sense of the observation that the four megapolitical factors are mostly independent of any sort of engineering process that might be undertaken by humans to control the natural world, or a human society understood as an ecosystem. The balance between these factors in each age conditions the age’s culture, which in turn conditions human behaviour, language, and consciousness.

Cultures are not matters of taste but systems of adaptation to specific circumstances that may prove irrelevant or even counterproductive in other settings. Humans live in a wide variety of habitats. The wide number of potential niches in which we live require variations in behaviour that are too complex to be informed by instinct. Therefore, behaviour is culturally programmed. For the vast majority of agricultural societies, culture programmed them for survival, but little more than survival in an environment where the luxury of participating in open markets was reserved to others.

It seems to follow from this, that until humans free themselves from the shackles of what Robert Anton Wilson called the bio-survival circuit of consciousness, one cannot talk of a meaningful definition of human agency. When we are anxious about our survival, we are programmed for a fight-or-flight response to a possible threat of losing our resources or their prerequisite in the form of “bio-survival tickets,” i.e. money. It’s worth noting that while in the bio-survival mode of consciousness we have no access to our higher cognitive faculties which one needs for creativity, prosperity and thriving.

If this condition is the reality of large clusters of human population for thousands of years, it is easy to make oneself believe that the propensity to violence or submission is human nature, even if these hundreds of generations, according to anthropologists, amount to a mere 1% of the total evolutionary timeline of humans. Authors claim that hunter-gatherers had lived healthily, freely and with little incentive to violence for 99% of human evolution until this ended with the dawn of agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago. One could therefore argue, that we have been programmed to accept war as part of human nature even though for the 99% of human evolution our survival depended on collaboration, mutual care and play much more than on the mastery of conflict. In times of Nietzsche or Spengler one could not have known what we know now after decades of discoveries around the world, by eminent anthropologists who studied human nature, like Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Erich Fromm and many others.

12,000 years of violence

If we follow this reasoning, we can see that each of the technological epochs—hunter-gatherer, agricultural, and industrial—with their defining technology stacks—conditioned greater or lesser incentives for the use of violence in their respective societies.

Hunter gatherers lived freely in small bands, owned little and weilded spears which was a decentralised military technology. Having roughly equal access to military technology coupled with little wealth meant there was little incentive for violence between bands of hunter-gatherers, i.e. the socio-economic conditions were not conducive for centralised development of the monopoly of violence or the development of violent behaviour as it would not be economically viable given the megapolitical conditions of the hunter-gatherer society. If a member of a hunter-gatherer band presented psychopathic traits, it was easy to sanction or banish them—thanks to small social units where everyone knows everyone and where social cohesion of the band relies on the normative integrity of its members.

The birth of the monopoly of violence

This had changed with the invention of the plough. Farming created surplus food and wealth. This contributed not only to the growth of farming populations but it had also created the demand for protection from being looted—an incentive for trading wealth or paying taxes for protection by a central authority which had the monopoly of violence that could guarantee such a protection. Farming communities aggregated into what had later become city-states. The surplus of grain had caused an explosion of the population as the centralised power of the state grew with it.

All agricultural societies—from the earliest Bronze Age kingdoms, through Egypt, Greece, Rome and into the early Middle Ages, all the way to the early 1500s CE—were vulnerable to violent plunder by those who had access to superior military technology. A sword-weilding horse-riding knight had an asymmetrical advantage over an old farmer with lots of land: he could transport himself much faster than by walking so he was much less bound by the locale, and he could wield his weapon from the horseback. Wherever the state could not offer protection, like during the slow decay of the Roman institutions between 500 and 1000 CE “might was right”, i.e. whoever had a horse and a sword or/and a bow was a law unto themselves in their ever-expanding territories. These territories had eventually become the Western-European kingdoms of the medieval period.

So, protecting physical assets such as crops or property called for a deterrent to being looted which only an entity with a monopoly of violence could guarantee. Such an entity would have to own military resources sufficient for the job of protection. It could be a mafia, a sovereign order or a state. If one wanted to amass wealth, one had to pay for the protection in tax, the purpose of tax funding the monopoly of violence as a protective measure for the tax-payer.

The Gunpowder Revolution: effectiveness over efficiency

The next megapolitical change which altered the logic of violence occured in the early 1500s CE, with the advent of pre-industrial technology, early manufacturing, great expeditions, discoveries and inventions. These had shifted the balance of the megapolitical conditions again and had led to the Reformation and rise of the secular state authority which had started to replace the hopelessly corrupt Roman-Catholic church. The political economy of violence found itself reconfigured again as those who now called themselves nobility—the decendants of the horse-riding plunderers of medieval farmlands—had an even greater scope and scale for exercising predation. The logic of military conflict had reached new dimensions:

Gunpowder enabled states to expand more easily outside the confines of rice paddies and arid river valleys. The nature of gunpowder weapons and the character of the industrial economy created great advantages of scale in warfare. This led to high and rising returns to violence. As historian Charles Tilly put it, “[S]tates having the largest coercive means tended to win wars; efficiency (the ratio of output to input) came second to effectiveness (total output).” (…) Only big governments with ever-greater command of resources could compete on the battlefield.

According to Tilly, this shift from efficiency to effectiveness was the key factor in this megapolitical transformation as it had set Western humanity on the path of the infinite arms race for domination on the finite planet while making it so by consolidating wealth in fewer and fewer hands. This process of the accummulation of wealth and power in the hands of private individuals informed Spengler’s prediction of the age of Caesarism or, or in terms of the present argument, the age of the Sovereign Individual—the globalist’s worst nightmare. Note: Spengler, his genius notwithstanding, had no direct experience of living in the information age—we do.

A historical climax of this new era of megapolitical economy reaching maturity was the Napoleonic conquest at the break of the 18th and 19th century. In Understanding Media: the Extention of Man, Marshall McLuhan quotes cardinal Newman commenting on the key to Napoleon’s imperial success: “He understood the grammar of gunpowder.” But in addition to this new military technology, new information technologies also came into being, like the semaphore telegraph or the newspaper—the direct result of the invention of the printing press. Napoleon recognised the concept of weaponisable information when he famously stated that “Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.” As words-become-weapons are scaled up, much of the kinetic violence (which is by definition overt) can be converted to informational-psychological-cognitive violence (which is covert if executed well).

The printing press

The Gutenberg press not only standardised and democratised literacy, but had also led to the breakdown of the centralised power of the Roman-Catholic church. Mass replication of knowldge facilitated the proliferation of science, but it also allowed for the printing of money and mass engineering of public opinion, most effectively by those who did understand the principle of 5% and 95% ratio of the conscious vs. unconscious, respectively, before it has become a scientific fact in our own age.

With the information tools capable of shaping collective consciousness, mass democracy was born; its success in the world where the “might is right” logic of gunpowder was, the authors maintain, thanks to the returns to violence caused by colonisation and continuous wars. The democratic welfare state as we know it today was brought to existence by taxation that has been a part of the feedback loop of escalating wars and atrocities as we have witnessed them throughout the Age of Violence, beginning with agriculture and ending with the coming death of the industrial nation-state. The gunpowder had transformed the political economy of violence while the printing press had morphed the political economy of information. Both were technological markers in a shift from feudal to industrial economy.

As we are witnessing today in a more visceral way than ever before, someone somewhere has to suffer and die in order for someone else in a Western democracy to be able to spend their days on low frequency leisure, as an “employee” of the warring state which rapes and plunders on their behalf. A modern welfare state plunders just as the medieval knight did, but now away from home, and on an ever larger scale facilitated by the continuously advancing military and information technologies, both of which, however, belong to the industrialist order and its unique megapolitical economy where perverse incentives to violence are too strong to stop it.

The Age of Violence

The invention of gunpowder had thus triggered a world-historical process of ever-escalating violence—the tragedy of the commons where not participating in the international exercise of military conflict meant being wiped off the map. The biggest players set the rules and dragged the lesser states into the tug of war while guaranteeing economic prosperity in return; as a result the plunder of the nation-state produced more wealth than ever, which also translated into increased material standards of living in the most militarised states:

When returns to violence are high and rising, magnitude means more than efficiency. Larger entities tend to prevail over smaller ones. Those governments that are more effective in mobilizing military resources, even at the cost of wasting many of them, tend to prevail over those that utilize resources more efficiently.

What comes to mind as a prime 20th century example of exploiting this modern approach to the logic of violence is the outcome of World War I: even if the Entente (Britain, France, Russia etc.) lost 36% of their troops, and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary etc.) only 22% of total military deaths, economically the Entente was still the party to dictate the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles.

Thus, the business of war was too good to be avoided as it funded the welfare state democracies run by the industrial-banking cartels, never mind the millions of deaths of those who were persuaded by the newspapers largely owned by the same warmongers into thinking that they were heroically defending their beloved motherland, while in the eyes of the warmongering “elites,” these young men slaughtered under the fire of German machine guns over the trenches of Ypres were simply war-meat sacrifices on the altar of a sociopathic hubris. This logic of warfare continued throughout and after World War II, but the kinetic warfare got exported beyond the territories and therefore beyond the concerns of Western humanity, while the rise of telecommunication technologies in the West allowed the states and their corporate masters to inflict psychological and informational violence upon their own populations through ubiquitous propaganda and mass marketing of commercial sedatives.

To sum up, roughly speaking, the same economic logic which had created the demand for the monopoly of violence with the advent of agriculture was exacerbated by early industrialism and the rise of the nation state, both of which had grown out of the technological power of gunpowder and printing press. Just as the physical assets in the form of crops, lifestock and farming technology needed protection by a central authority with the monopoly of violence which justified the practice of taxation, physical goods produced by the machine industry needed the same sort of protection by the nation-state. The state, thus maintaining its monopoly of violence, including in the latter part of the twentieth century, the financial violence of generating inflation after decoupling currency from gold reserves which used to determine its value, and then printing money had led humanity to an existential crisis akin to that of a heroin addict whose veins are about to collapse. In this way industrial economy had run itself into a wall of planetary boundaries where fiat money has lost its currency together with the industrialist systems it is coupled to.

Spengler foresaw this already in the 1920s while writing The Decline of the West in the midst of the Great Depression in the collapsing democracy of the Weimar Republic. The infamous polymath winds down his story thus:

The dictature of money marches on, tending to its material peak, in the Faustian Civilization as in every other. And now something happens that is intelligible only to one who has penetrated to the essence of money. If it were anything tangible, then its existence would be forever—but, as it is a form of thought, it fades out as soon as it has thought its economic world to finality, and has no more mateiral upon which to feed.

The death of industrial economy and its systems was to be slow and silent, continuing into the post World War II “age of abundance” powered by the debt slavery of the most prosperous in Western democracies. But towards the end of the century, a new economic paradigm was underway with the advent of digital communication technologies. The logic of violence was to be transformed yet again. For the first time in 12,000 years, information economy was to open new relations where the currency of communications supercedes the currency of finance and the predation it entails.

The Age of Information

Davidson and Rees-Mogg argue that in the Information Age it will not pay well to resort to violence as protecting informatoin assets will be done independently of the state at a fraction of the cost that was required for protecting physical assets. Information economy will depend on a global ecosystem of radically decenetralised, scalable communication technologies. With dwindling resources, environmenal pollution and existential threats mounting due to the wasteful predatory political-industrial order, the Age of Violence had ground itself to a halt by having to rely on violence as a dimension inextricably involved in the process of wealth acquisition in consumer capitalism of modern democratic welfare states. According to the authors, these states are now bankrupt.

When returns to violence were rising, as they were during the Industrial Age, governments that operated on a large scale tended to be controlled by their employees. This made it effectively impossible to impose controls on the claims these governments made over resources. Their unchecked control over resources conveyed an important military advantage so long as the magnitude of power predominated over the efficiency with which it was used.

But with scarce resources and impending planetary catastrophes, efficiency once again outweighs effectiveness. This deprives the industrial-scale monopoly of violence of its economic power. In the Information Age efficiency becomes king again, authors argue, just as was the case in the hunter-gatherer communities from before the Bronze Age city-states.

Diminishing marginal returns to violence

In the Information Age the logic of violence shifts again due to wealth being determined now not by ownership of physical assets but by the autonomy and sovereignty required for being able to comprehend, synthesise and communicate information.

Cognitive capital is by definition immaterial. As such, it does not require physical protection other than that required for maintaining cognitive health, the capacity to learn and adapt one’s life choices according to ever newly acquired intelligence. Of course, one still needs the protection of the infrastructure to run information systems, so there is a need of the monopoly of violence to some degree, but according to authors not to the extent that the past 12,000 years required it to be. Tanks, rockets and guns of the industrial era superpowers are rendered by the new informational era as useful as a warhorse was to a factory owner. With physical violence thus dis-incentivised, the constitution of the welfare state democracies is in trouble.

Informational, psychological and cognitive warfare

While the majority of warfare now migrates online, violence doesn’t pay here either. The more of corrupted information floods the internet, the more precious becomes the skill of discerning the signal from noise. The universal law of economy—scarcity creates value— works here equally well as it worked in all previous economic paradigms. And since informational violence corrupts knowledge and leads to cognitive errors, amplifies bias and breaks information ecology, communicating in a clear and transparent manner gains a premium value—the real currency is that which has the current value. Understandably, clear and transparent communication becomes the new gold in a world saturated with cognitive violence of propaganda and aggressive marketing while the subsequent scandals reveal the vacuous deceptions of the dying gods of the old paradigm—consumers turn away from those who want to trick them into compulsive behaviours, and instead seek leaders, products and services who/which demonstrate commitment to the virtues of honesty, trust and respect.

The old propaganda and brainwashing which worked so well in the industrial era of telecommunications are now exposed by alternative media run by the growing number of Sovereign Individuals equipped with low-cost information tools like computers, mobile phones and software.

Transcending predation state

This naturally triggers a violent response from the weakening centralised powers of the nation-states and their employees, including the populations provided with state benefits—the “victims” of past oppression according to the state ideology. As the struggle between individual sovereignty and state-dependency exacerbates, the balance of power ultimately shifts from the state to the individual. This conclusion, authors argue, flows from understanding of complex systems as articulated by Kevin Kelly of Wired:

“To multiply several prime numbers into a larger product is easy; any elementary school kid can do it. But the world’s supercomputers choke while trying to unravel a product into its simple primes.” The cybereconomy will inevitably be shaped by this profound mathematical truth. It already has an obvious expression in powerful encryption algorithms. (…) these algorithms will allow the creation of a new, proteted realm of cybercommerce in which the leverage of violence will be greatly reduced. The balance between extortion and protection will tip dramatically in the direction of protection.

The nation-state becomes obsolete in the business of informational asset protection as cyber-assets which are not physical can be proteted privately, outside the domain of the state’s monopoly of violence. In addition, the state becomes the victim of its own incompetence as its mapping of the logic of violence is incompatible with the new economic order where the ecology of communiction—to use Nora Bateson’s term—exposes the dysfuctional nature of the old coercive structures. This furthers the decay of welfare democracies in favour of the Sovereign Individual, or the Spenglerian Caesar who by demonstrating competency in effective decision-making, and personal integrity organically gains authority in the eyes the growing number of the disillusioned citizens who end up stopping to identify themselves with the morally and economically bankrupt nation-state.

The more powerless the old paradigm gets, the more violence it inflicts, and the more violence it inflicts, the more authority it loses. This loss of authority in the eyes of the governed destroys the political power of the predation state, which in turn transforms the governed into the ungovernable. Thus, any predation state through its own incompetence and expediency double-binds itself into a hopeless choice to either (1) surrender to its political death, or (2) to continue inflicting violence which accelerates its political death.

In the end, as the narrative goes, the death of politics in the Information Age is imminent and necessary, as in cyber-economy the returns to violence (which relies on miscommunication) are diminished, whereas the returns to clear communication soar—the power of information liquidates the power of violence.

Conclusion: the coming of the Sovereign Individual

The rise of the Sovereign Individual is consistent with Spengler’s prophecy of the age of Caesarism, albeit updated in the contemporary context of what Spengler could not have predicted. The key diffence the conclusions of The Sovereign Individual and those of Decline of the West’s is that for Spengler violence was a metaphysical principle intrinsic to human nature, whereas according to the Sovereign Individual violence is contingent on econonomic conditions determined by the four megapolitical factors.

If violence pays well, war becomes a big business, but under conditions where peace is more profitable, the currency of violence diminishes. The balance between the four megapolitical factors—topology, climate, microbes and technology—determines the political economy of violence across three stages of human society: the hunter-gatherer, The Age of Violence (agriculturalism and industrialism), and the Information Age where economic incentives to violence diminish in favour of the currencies of cognitive clarity and transparent communication, which is what HR agencies and coaching industry are championing as we speak—the Sovereign Individuals become the cognitive elite who as the minority of the human population will produce the majority of the world’s wealth.

While Spengler’s prediction is considered pessimistic, with the breakdown of democracy, and warring Caesars pillaging the lands, slaying as they please in the private war of all against all, the authors of The Sovereign Individual insist that the economy of the Information Age will incentivise not violence but the capacity for creating maximum value to the customer who once considered themself the citizen. This might take up to the whole new millenium. As the megapolitical economy of violence in the Information Age changes, human behaviour and values will change with it. Cooperation outweighs competition in a world exhausted by 12,000 of continuous warring. The tribal consciousness of the hunter-gatherer eventually transcends the Dunbar’s number as the planetary interonnectedness of the human race via digital information networks creates the first planetary civilisation based on universal human values of cooperation, mutual wins and abandonment of the atavistic notions of territoriality as the logic of cyber-economy dissolves national identity.