This libertarian manifesto, loved by Peter Thiel, urges a ‘cognitive elite’ to see selfishness as a virtue
- Written by: Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
In Silicon Valley’s unofficial literary canon, few works loom as large as The Sovereign Individual. A kind of survival manual for 21st-century tech billionaires, it has been enthusiastically championed by Palantir and Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel (mentor to JD Vance), who wrote the foreword to the 2020 edition.
The “libertarian manifesto” offers a radical vision of economic transformation – while justifying a solipsistic retreat from the obligations of shared society. Published in 1997, it was co-written by former Times editor William Rees-Mogg (who died in 2012) and private investigator and financial advisor James Dale Davidson.
‘Cognitive elite’
Davidson and Rees-Mogg (father of Conservative politician and hardline Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg) flatter their readers by casting them as members of a “cognitive elite” – uniquely positioned to prosper as the old order crumbles.
They are upfront about their intentions, plainly stating their aim to help readers “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 educate and motivate themselves will be free to invent their own work and realize the full benefits of their own productivity. 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-informed opinions of others.
It is a strikingly utopian and irreducibly exclusionary sort of vision. The phrase “truly able” is doing a lot of work here, drawing an implicit dividing line between the deserving few and the unworthy many. Rees-Mogg and Davidson reassure their readers inequality is a natural fact of life: a flattering message for the elite.
Co-author William Rees-Mogg, a former Times editor, was the father Conservative politician and hardline Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Neil Hall/AAP
Political operators such as former Tony Blair spokesman Alistair Campbell and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen have embraced the book, too.
Andreessen considers it
the most thought-provoking book on the unfolding nature of the 21st century that I’ve yet read. It’s packed with ideas on every page, many that are now fast becoming conventional wisdom, and many that are still heretical.
To its devotees, the book foresaw the arrival of cryptocurrencies, the resurgence of populist politics and the fracturing of nation states in the digital age.
To its critics, it is less visionary prophecy than, in the words of Thiel’s recent biographer, Max Chafkin, an old-fashioned “political screed”. It is a timeworn narrative of elites daydreaming of escape from collective responsibility – trussed up in the language of technological inevitability.
This fantasy has not stayed on the page. Tech leaders have spent the past decade or so preparing for societal collapse in very literal ways. Mark Zuckerberg has bought up more than 2,300 acres on the Hawaiian island Kauai, complete with a vast compound and an underground bunker.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg owns 2,300 acres on the north shore of Kauai in Hawaii, with a vast compound and underground bunker.
Ron Kosen/AAP
Meanwhile, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff has quietly acquired hundreds of areas on Hawaii’s Big Island, sparking local concern and criticism about land scarcity, displacement and the reshaping of community life.
Perhaps the most high profile case of all, though, is self-professed contrarian Thiel, who pushed this contorted logic to its limit. He famously secured fast-tracked New Zealand citizenship in 2011 (via an “exceptional circumstances” clause), after buying vast swathes of land there. (Despite him spending just 12 days, across multiple trips, in the country.)
When his status was revealed in 2017, it fuelled debate over ultra-rich preppers treating entire countries as potential boltholes.
Thiel certainly wears his philosophical and literary influences on his sleeve. He went so far as to name Palantir, the data analytics company he co-founded, after the all-seeing orbs in The Lord of the Rings. Yet he seems blind to the irony that in Tolkien’s world, these fantastical spheres are instruments of falsification. They offer partial revelations, omit crucial details and often mislead those who gaze into them.
As a metaphor for modern surveillance, the comparison is unnerving: a tool wielded by the powerful that can be used to monitor, manipulate and sow seeds of discord.
Empowered people and desperate governments
The concept of megapolitics is central to The Sovereign Individual. It is the idea that shifts in demographics, economics and technologies act as the real motors of history. They shape the fate of nations and individuals more powerfully than any political movement or government policy ever could.
For Rees-Mogg and Davidson, these forces are most clearly discerned through the shifting “costs and rewards of employing violence”. Once, nation states held a monopoly on coercion. But the digital age threatens to break it. The authors envision a near future where the balance tips towards increasingly empowered individuals and ever more desperate governments – a recipe, they maintain, for unprecedented turmoil.
They write:
The clash between the new and the old will shape the early years of the new millennium. We expect it to be a time of great danger and great reward, and a time of much diminished civility in some realms and unprecedented scope in others. Increasingly autonomous individuals and bankrupt, desperate governments will confront one another across a new divide.
Like Rees-Mogg and Davidson before him, Thiel positions the book as a call to action. It urges followers to turn away from failing institutions and remodel their lives around a vision for survival reserved for the self-appointed ruling classes. He insists that even though most of his forebears’ most dramatic predictions have yet to come to pass, the trends Rees-Mogg and Davidson identified “are still at work today”.
Thiel believes the stakes have only intensified. He frames the current moment as one of “dramatic” and heightened danger – pointing to the geopolitical rise of China and the acceleration of artificial intelligence. We are on the cusp of an era, he writes, where the material rewards for those who correctly anticipate the future will be unprecedented, while the costs of being wrong or left behind could be catastrophic.
This is, in effect, a winner-takes-all, zero-sum worldview: one that urges its entitled disciples to dig in, build fortresses – both figurative and literal – and prepare to weather the storm, while the rest of the world is left to face the music. To put it another way, selfishness is elevated into something like a virtue.
Selfish virtue: the next Ayn Rand
One could be forgiven for mistaking this as a plot line from Ayn Rand: a millenarian reworking of Atlas Shrugged where Rees-Mogg and Davidson’s underappreciated “creators” – much like Rand’s misunderstood “prime movers” – withdraw their talent and labour from the public sphere.
Much like John Galt’s strike in Atlas Shrugged, this retreat is depicted as a wholly noble protest: a way of starving parasitic nation states, with their taxes, social welfare programs and swathes of bureaucratic red tape, until they finally collapse under their own weight.
The comparison is less fanciful than it might seem. Rand, who notably believed selfishness to be a cardinal principle of civilisation, remains central to what passes for philosophical discourse in Silicon Valley. She is a perennial cultural totem for those who see themselves as the vanguard of a new world order.
Ayn Rand is a perennial cultural totem for those who see themselves as the vanguard of a new world order.
Raimondo Borea/Photo Researchers History/Getty Images
In literary critic Adrian Daub’s reckoning, “Rand’s heroic individualism has become an inescapable part of how the tech industry presents itself.”
Indeed, the link between Rand and Silicon Valley is so well established it has become ripe for satire – as seen in the recent film Mountainhead, which riffs on the title of Rand’s breakthrough novel and lampoons the tech fixation on Randian ideals and signifiers. Directed by Succession’s Jesse Armstrong, it suggests today’s moguls might fancy themselves as Howard Roark, but end up looking more like the Roys – with all the dysfunction that implies.
This lineage matters. To my mind, The Sovereign Individual functions as a kind of bridge between Rand’s mid-century laissez-faire myth of the lone genius and today’s data-driven techno-utopianism. It swaps out Rand’s industrial heroes for cognitive elites, replacing steel mills and railway networks with digital gold and code. All the while, it preserves the same unforgiving moral architecture.
Seen in this light, Thiel’s enthusiasm for the book is telling. Like Rand, The Sovereign Individual suggests it is the duty of the geographically mobile and cashed-up – privileged people cut precisely from Thiel’s cloth – to break away from the lumpen, undeserving masses.
In this sense, then, the book doesn’t so much predict a possible future. It hands today’s tech bros, truly the careless people of contemporary times, a convenient intellectual alibi for building it – and imposing it on the rest of us, whether we asked for it or not.
If the past decade is anything to go by, they’re unlikely to lose precious sleep over the collateral damage.
Authors: Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
