This libertarian manifesto, loved by Peter Thiel, urges a ‘cognitive elite’ to see selfishness as a virtue

In the unofficial literary canon of Silicon Valley, few works are as large as the sovereign individual. A type of survival manual for the 21st century technological billionaires, it was enthusiastically defended by Palantir and the co-founder of Paypal, Peter Thiel (mentor of JD Vance), which wrote the preface to the 2020 edition.

The “Libertarian Manifesto” offers a radical vision of economic transformation – while justifying a solipsist retirement of the obligations of the shared company. Published in 1997, he was co-written by former editor-in-chief William Rees-Mogg (died in 2012) and private investigator and financial advisor James Dale Davidson.

In his foreword, Thiel the champion as a guide of life-although the one who reads more like a retirement and self-service manual. He took it off as a device to consider “carefully the future that your own actions will help you create” – and use it to argue that the real issues of the next decades will not be decided by elections or parliaments, but by the deeper forces of history.

These forces – whose book mentions “megapolitics” – will determine which societies are mounting or decreasing, he writes.

On its 400 pages, the sovereign individual celebrates the instinct of our technidal suzerains incredibly rich to accumulate, thesauty and isolate himself from the more disorderly requirements of mass democracy. These instincts are not escapes, nor signs of ethical gaps, according to the book. They are tangible proof to be on the right side of history.

‘Cognitive elite’

Davidson and Rees-Mogg (father of the conservative politician and Brexiteer Hardline Jacob Rees-Mogg) flatter their readers by throwing them as members of a “cognitive elite”-is placed only to prosper while the old order collapses.

They are frank on their intentions, clearly indicating their objective of helping readers “to take advantage of the opportunities of the new age and avoid being destroyed by its impact”. They claim, for the first time in history, “those who can find out and motivate themselves will be free to invent their own work and carry out the total advantages of their own productivity. The genius will be unleashed, released both from the oppression of the government and the streaks of racial and ethnic damage.

It is a kind of vision with utopian and irreducible exclusion. The expression “really capable” does a lot of work here, traces an implicit division line between the little deserving and the many unworthy. Rees-Mogg and Davidson reassure the inequality of their readers is a natural fact of life: a flattering message for the elite.

Political operators such as the former spokesperson for Tony Blair Alistair Campbell and the venture capital Marc Andreessen also adopted the book.

Andreessen considers that “the most stimulating book on nature that takes place from the 21st century that I have read again. It is full of ideas on each page, many which now become conventional wisdom, and many which are still heretics.”

To his followers, the book provided for the arrival of cryptocurrencies, the resurgence of populist policy and the fracturing of nation states in the digital age.

For its detractors, it is a less visionary prophecy than, in the words of the recent biographer of Thiel, Max Chafkin, an old -fashioned “political screed”. It is a used account in the time of the reverie of the elites of the escape of collective responsibility – drawn in the language of technological inevitability.

This fantasy did not stay on the page. Heads of technology have spent the last decade preparing for the collapse of society in a very literal way. Mark Zuckerberg bought more than 2,300 acres on the Hawaiian island Kauai, with a large compound and an underground bunker.

Meanwhile, Marc Benioff de Salesforce has discreetly acquired hundreds of areas on the Big Island of Hawaii, causing local concerns and criticisms on the shortage of land, the displacement and reshaping of community life.

The most high-end case of all, however, is perhaps the opposite of Thiel, which pushed this distorted logic at its limit. He obtained an accelerated acceleration of New Zealand citizenship in 2011 (via an “exceptional circumstances” clause), after buying large expanses of land. (Despite that he only spends 12 days, through several trips, in the country.)

When his status was revealed in 2017, he fueled the debate on ultra-rich preparers dealing with whole countries such as potential Bolth holes.

Thiel certainly carries her philosophical and literary influences on her sleeve. He went so far as to appoint Palantant, the data analysis company he co-founded, after the orbs all in the Lord of the Rings. However, it seems blind to irony that in the world of Tolkien, these fantastic spheres are instruments of falsification. They offer partial revelations, omit the crucial details and often induce those who look at them.

As a metaphor for modern surveillance, the comparison is disturbing: a tool exerted by the powerful who can be used to monitor, manipulate and sow discord.

Empowered people and desperate governments

The concept of megapolitics is at the heart of the sovereign individual. This is the idea that changes in demography, economics and technologies act like real engines in history. They shape the fate of nations and individuals more powerfully than any political or political movement.

For Rees-Mogg and Davidson, these forces are most clearly discerned by the change in “costs and awards for the employment of violence”. Once, the nation states have held a monopoly on coercion. But the digital age threatens to break it. The authors are considering a near future where balance is heading towards increasingly authorized individuals and increasingly desperate governments – a recipe, they maintain, for unprecedented disorders.

They write: “The confrontation between the new and the old will shape the first years of the new millennium. We expect it to be a period of great danger and great reward, and a period of civility much more reduced in certain areas and an unprecedented scope in others.

Like Rees-Mogg and Davidson before him, Thiel positions the book as a call for action. He urges the followers to turn away from failing institutions and renovate their lives around a vision of survival reserved for self -proclaimed ruling classes. He insists that even if most of the most dramatic predictions of his ancestors have not yet succeeded, the trends that Rees-Mogg and Davidson have identified “are still at work today”.

Thiel thinks that the issues have only been intensifying. He supervises the current moment as a “dramatic” and increased danger – pointing to the geopolitical development of China and the acceleration of artificial intelligence. We are at the dawn of an era, he writes, where the material rewards for those who properly anticipate the future will be unprecedented, while the costs of evil or a leave behind could be catastrophic.

It is, in fact, a vision of the world with winning trials, to all, which urges their disciples entitled to dig, to build fortresses – both figurative and literal – and prepare to resist the storm, while the rest of the world is left to music. To say things in another way, selfishness is raised in something like a virtue.

Egoist virtue: the next Ayn Rand

One could be forgiven to have confused this as an intrigue of Ayn Rand: a millennial reshuffle of Atlas raised the shoulders where Rees-Mogg and Davidson underestimated by “Creators”-a bit like the “Prime Movers” of Rand have misunderstood Rand.

Like John Galt’s strike in Atlas Haussa its shoulders, this retreat is represented as a completely noble manifestation: a way of starving parasitic nation states, with their taxes, their social protection programs and their bureaucratic paperwork, until they finally collapsed under their own weight.

The comparison is less fanciful than it seems. Rand, who believed in particular selfishness as a cardinal principle of civilization, remains at the heart of what passes for philosophical discourse in Silicon Valley. It is a sustainable cultural totem for those who consider themselves the avant-garde of a new world order.

In the calculation of the literary criticism Adrian Daub, “the heroic individualism of Rand has become an essential part of the way in which the technological industry presents itself”.

Indeed, the link between Rand and the Silicon Valley is so well established that it has become ripe for satire – as shown in the recent film Mountainhehead, which laughed at the title of the revolutionary novel of Rand and Lampoons technological fixation on ideals and signifiers Randian. Directed by Jesse Armstrong de Succession, he suggests that today’s magnates could imagine like Howard Roark, but end up looking more like the Roys – with all the dysfunction that implies.

This line is important. In my opinion, the sovereign individual functions as a kind of bridge between the myth of the middle of the century of Lone Engineering and the techno-utopianism based on today. It exchanges the industrial heroes of rand for cognitive elites, the replacement of steelworks and rail networks with gold and digital code. During all this time, it preserves the same ruthless moral architecture.

Given from this angle, Thiel’s enthusiasm for the book is revealing. Like Rand, the sovereign individual suggests that it is the duty of geographically mobile and cashed people – private people cut precisely from the Thiel fabric – to break with the lumpy and non -deserving masses.

In this sense, the book therefore does not predict a possible future. He puts technical bros today, really the reckless people of the contemporary era, a practical intellectual alibi to build it – and imposing it on the rest of us, whether we asked or not.

If the last decade is something, it is unlikely that they will lose precious sleep on collateral damage.

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