Libertas

Escaping Leviathan

Personal Sovereignty can initially be a confusing concept to someone emerging from the twentieth century and not clear on the future direction of human society.  Yet personal sovereignty is really very simple.  To be sovereign over one’s self is to be free of the control or coercion of others – to truly direct one’s own life. Most citizens of advanced nations believe that they control their own destiny, yet they are generally mistaken. Practically all have it within their power to achieve such control, with the result being a quantum leap in individual productivity, wealth and happiness.

The Personal Sovereignty Movement

Even though I support the Libertarian Party, Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty, We The People’s Congress, and Texas and Hawai’i National Independence, the Personal Sovereignty movement is NOT a political movement railing against one political party or another. Instead, the Personal Sovereignty movement represents a new paradigm for human social evolution which will challenge and eventually replace current social hierarchy structures in the early twenty-first century.

In the 21st century Personal Sovereignty will replace national citizenship as the status of the ordinary person within society. At the same time a network relationship between individual sovereigns, sometimes called a Network Society, will replace republican democracy as the primary political system within advanced nations.  The Network Society and the personal sovereignty movement represent a natural maturation and evolution of representative democracy from a majority rule system to a system based on the rule of the majority of one.

The Sovereign Individual

A Sovereign Individual believes in rights and power for the individual. Some of those defining characteristics include: a belief in the concept of self-ownership; a strong commitment to individual rights; a distrust of political democracy; a market-anarchist or natural order mindset; a belief in the right to financial and personal privacy; a willingness to think and act outside the square – as regards being beholden to existing nation states…

The term was popularized by the book The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age, written by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson in 1997. The term Sovereign Individual could also be applied to another less known word – PT (meaning Perpetual Traveler). The term PT was first coined by W. G. Hill in his underground classic of the same name. In many ways the ideas suggested in PT are very similar to the concept of life as a sovereign individual.

A PT is someone who lives a private life, and spends his time “visiting” countries – as a tourist, not being a resident. The thinking behind this idea is that as a tourist you are afforded a much more hospitable welcome and general treatment, than if you were a citizen or resident.

Another related word is internationalist – meaning someone who thinks globally and has broken formal and emotional ties with any particular nation state.

I’m not sure I can actually break emotional ties to Oklahoma, Texas or Hawai’i though.

So, the term sovereign individual is a confluence of many different ideas – all linked with the basic concept of self-ownership.

A Different Life: A Life of Freedom

Now, it’s quite possible to BE a sovereign individual without really using or even understanding the term. And there have always been people who live and think like that – albeit giving themselves different labels. However, the essence of the concept is a shift in how you see the world, and your own place in it. It’s a rising above the idea of being owned, or of being subject to arbitrary external authorities – to the idea of being fully autonomous.

Becoming a sovereign individual is thus more than just doing certain things in a certain way. It is much more about a way of thinking – and then acting accordingly.

“The ‘journey’ of life has many possible roads. The sovereign individual chooses the one less traveled.”

From The Centre for Personal Sovereignty and Sovereign Life.