The sovereignty of humanity is currently being redefined, and many of these determinations are being made outside of the public view, for reasons that are unavoidable.
The confluence of AI's emergent influence over everything from climate change to financial systems, together with increasing control over news sources and social media in the rising dissemination of disinformation will likely mean that the public as a whole will, over time, know less about world events, less about their communities, and less about the future.
Even so, human freedoms -- and our understandable yearning for them -- live most poignantly and urgently in the context of individual sovereignty, in our power to know and celebrate our loved ones and ourselves.
If we can succeed in retaining the ability to view the world through our own sovereign eyes, make up our own sovereign minds about everyone we meet, and make our major life choices through an exercise of our own sovereign will, then human freedoms will endure in the ways that matter most -- which is to say, in the preservation of the independent progress that resides at the heart of all human potential.
The existence of the human soul is perhaps less in dispute than the question of its purpose. But it is worth pointing out that the human soul, too, lives in sovereign territory, with its own progress and capacity and worth hidden from all but its owner.
While not all truths can be a matter of public discourse or debate, we can appreciate the mystery of the human experience independently, and so, too, can we meet the world with a determination to make up our own minds about those issues that matter most to us.
Perhaps the greatest danger lies in turning to leaders who might espouse a freedom that translates to our diminishment instead. Can the public tell the difference between an illusion of freedom and the real thing?
I think they can.
Yet it is more necessary than ever for us to ask our leaders to uphold our own sovereignty as vigorously as they do their own.
Certainly, we are right to ask that our leaders uphold the most courageous among us, together with their families, refusing to allow dangerous manifestations of falsified law enforcement reporting and the myriad harms that can accompany them.
Rather, courageous Americans must be safeguarded and protected and, within certain bounds, encouraged to articulate the new shape of freedom toward which we all are now making our way, consciously or unknowingly, articulately or silently, in the history of human sovereignty and the human potential that depends upon it.
Our capacity for greatness now depends, and will always depend, on our insistence that human freedoms, in their most meaningful manifestation, endure.
And since greatness is the path intended for us, we cannot now leave our sovereign hopes behind.
Lane MacWilliams
** Please note that this essay acknowledges the need for confidentiality regarding certain aspects of human progress and societal governance. Sovereignty is not to be misinterpreted as public disclosure of certain concerns. Rather it is here defined as the capacity for independent assessment and free will, which may find their expression on an individual and private level.
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