James Dale Davidson and William Rees Morg’s The Sovereign Individual

The Sovereign Individual is one of those books that permanently alters your perspective on life. Although it was written in 1997, the extent to which it foresees the implications of blockchain technology will give you the shivers. We’ve progressed from the industrial to the information age, and now we’re at the fourth stage of human evolution. This book is required reading if you want to grasp the extent and magnitude of the changes that are coming.

 

We already know that individuals who genuinely prosper in the new information age will be employees who are not bound to a particular job or vocation and are location independent as it becomes possible to live comfortably and generate an income anywhere. The desire to live where you can save money is already stronger, but this trend extends beyond digital nomadism and freelance work; the fundamentals of democracy, governance, and money are all moving.

 

The authors foresaw Black Tuesday and the Soviet Union’s demise, and they forecast that growing individual power would coincide with decentralized technology chipping away at political control. They foresaw with incredible foresight that private, digital money would be the death toll for nation governments. When that happens, the government’s role as a stationary bandit plundering hardworking folks through taxation will shift. You’re ready to join the new cognitive elite if you’ve developed the ability to solve difficulties for individuals all across the world. This is a must-see.

 

“Governments will no longer be able to charge more for their services than they are worth to the people who pay for them when technology is mobile and transactions occur in cyberspace, as they increasingly will.”

 

Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

 

Whenever I want to impress someone with the quality of this book, I ask: “Do you want to know what the main distinction between humans and monkeys is? A monkey may hop up and down on a rock, swing his stick about, and yell alert his pals that a threat is approaching. ‘Danger! Danger! Lion!’ says the narrator. A monkey has the ability to deceive. When there is no lion, it can bounce up and down on the rock, flail a stick about, and yell about it. He’s just having a good time. A monkey, on the other hand, cannot leap up and down and flail a stick about while screaming, ‘Danger! Danger! Dragon!'”

 

What is the reason behind this? Because dragons do not exist. According to Harari, the ability to believe in and talk about things we have never seen or touched has elevated the species to collaborate in vast numbers with strangers. Outside of human imagination, there are no gods in the cosmos, no states, no money, no human rights, no laws, no faiths, and no justice. We are the ones who create them that way.

 

All of this serves as a great prelude to where we are now. Following the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions, Harari leads you through The Scientific Revolution, which began barely 500 years ago and may usher in something altogether new for humanity. Money, on the other hand, will continue to exist. Read this book to learn how money is the greatest tale ever written, and how trust is the basic ingredient used to create all forms of money.

 

Quote of the Day: “Sapiens, on the other hand, exist in a three-layered world. The Sapiens universe has stories about money, gods, governments, and businesses, in addition to trees, rivers, fears, and wants.”