The Sovereignty of the Individual



Permission is granted to reprint the following article as long as no changes are made and the byline, copyright information, and the resource box is included. Please let me know if you use this article by sending an email to dje@newedisongazette.com.

The Sovereignty of the Individual

Copyright © December 24, 2021 Douglas W. Jerving.
All Rights Reserved.

I am a financial trader. A day trader. Mostly, I trade stocks and foreign exchange currencies (forex), and a little bit of cryptocurrencies. I am learning how to trade Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). In my real money accounts, I have doubled my money, but not yet making anywhere close to a living wage. I still work a full-time job. It pays my bills. I am getting better at day-trading and my goal is to move full time into that in the next three years, which is when I will ”retire“.

Retire. Sounds like I plan on putting retreads on my truck. I hate the sound of it. It isn’t really what I hope to do. My goal is really to be completely ready in the next three years to move into my new position as a professional risk manager. Professional means I do it for a living. Risk management means managing financial trades either for myself or as a prop trader for an institution.

Trading is all about psychology. If you have watched the Netflix series Billions you probably have some idea what I am talking about. Wendy Rhoades (played by Maggie Sith) is the corporate psychologist at Axe Capitol. Why does a trading firm need an on-board psychologist? Because trading is mostly about psychology. It is about how your life and your work interact with one another. If you can’t do right in your job it is probably because you are not doing it right in your life. Screw up your personal life, you screw up your job. Job is failing? Probably a reflection of a failure or series of failures in your life.

In trading you decide your parameters. You set rules for yourself that you will not break unless you have proven back-tested reasons to change those rules. You will always do this and never do that. You never deviate from those rules because the deviation destroys the statistics needed to prove or disprove the test. And you are always testing. When the test is proven you stay with the set of rules. When the test is false, only then will you modify the rules. You don’t change the whole system. You just modify that part of the system that does not efficiently work as well as it should.

Within the current set of rules, you maintain 100% fealty. You never break the rules even though they look like they may go against you. Only after they consistently prove you wrong do you modify the rules. Until you are proven wrong over many tests, you either enjoy or suffer the consequences. The suffering or enjoyment are a part of the test, for as long as the test is determined, whether 25, 50, 500, or 10,000 tests. The number of tests is predetermined by the individual or the organization. It must be adhered to religiously or else you have violated the statistical analysis. You have destroyed the science.

You NEVER allow yourself to trade outside of your established boundaries until you prove them wrong and revise the boundary. You establish the boundary. You maintain the boundary. You are the sovereign over that boundary. If you break the rules, you have broken the rules you established, and you are the only one responsible for that failure. You make it; you break it. The failure is your own, not the market, or life in general. Quit blaming your failures on everyone or thing outside of you. What you choose to do is your own. Deal with it.

Life is the same as the market. The financial world is a microcosmic display of your whole life.

So, let’s talk about life in general, and how most people work their way through it. We have a strong tendency, as the human race goes, to seek the easiest way around trouble in the shortest time frame available to us regardless of the long-term consequences. We most often will move the boundaries, whether we set them ourselves, or they were set by long-established societal morays.

The book of Proverbs in the Old Testament bible (or the Jewish Tanach) says ”Do not remove the ancient landmark.“ It is a wisdom statement because it applies to so much more than just the property rights of a family, or a tribe. That is certainly a part of it. But it has ethical applications far beyond real estate. We have established boundaries within ourselves that we should certainly challenge, but never remove until we have determined their validity, or have falsified them.

Here is an example. Death. By cancer. Some may consider this extreme, but it is an example from daily life. It is only extreme when you are not the one that must deal with it. You don’t have this problem? You can blithely pass over it. It is a close relative? You can still excuse it because they are going to die, not you. Death is always an ethical conundrum that everyone else must deal with, but not me! ”I am never going to die!“ or so we think.

No! Seriously! That is how we think. And we only stop thinking that for four hours at the funeral of our dear departed what ’s his/her face. Then we go back to believing the ridiculous Snow-White fairytale that the magic potion will redeem our lives from death. The great gods of medical science and the witchcraft pharmacopeia they set forth will deliver us. “Be thou our gods!”

Maybe you are on the opposition team. Not too many of us remain. You are skeptical of medical science. You believe in holistic health, herbalism, trusting God for your healing, or just a yin yang powers of the universe sort of thing. You're healthy and have always been healthy! That proves that what you are doing or believing is right. You are generally opposed to modern medicine. You don’t use it except in the most extreme cases.

You are well enough read to know that modern cancer research only supports Big Pharma. It is in their best interest to keep the ”cancer people“ strung along with drugs and chemo until they die before the cancer has a chance to kill them first. So sad. Bye! Thanks for all the money from your friends and family.

Then one day your annual checkup says you have a tumor, and the doc says they need to extricate it. Maybe it is just a cist. Maybe it will cease and desist! Maybe it will be benign. Or maybe it will be number nine. “Number Nine! Number Nine!” You figure just this once, you will move off your parameters. Figure out what is going on. See if this is something to be concerned about, and since it certainly is not, you will go on, proud that ”that shit don’t happen to me“.

It is just a cist, or it is benign, or whatever. Or maybe it is pre-cancerous. (You still are not one of the ”cancer people“). Let’s just nip it in the bud. We cut it out and it won’t spread (Hah-hah. LOL. BS). You gamble on what they tell you possibly being true even though it goes against everything you already know, because you want to believe in their quick fix. You want to agree with the priesthood!

It violates your set parameters; your rules of life; your ethical standard. But compromise is necessary because now it is like Coca Cola. It is the “real thing”. You submit yourself to a new set of rules or ideals that you did not formulate. Not your plan anymore. The water you are swimming in is no longer controlled by you, but by people and organizations far different. They have a belief system incongruent from you, and now they have control over your life-choices. You have forsaken your sovereignty as an individual for the overlording of a system that you already know you cannot trust.

You have two choices.

Forsake your personal sovereignty over your own body (which includes your mind). Give it up to the system that you know you can’t trust, and that has a bad history of promoting itself. First choice is become one of the electric sheep. Join the ranks of the well pedigreed useful idiots.

Exercise your individual sovereignty by refusing to submit yourself to them. That is your second choice.

In either case, the worst you can do is die!

Either way you suffer or enjoy whatever the consequences may be. That does not change. What changes is who or what is the final arbiter of your life. Die one way or die another. You still die or you still live to die another day. The difference is who or what you die for. What hill will you die on? For whose glory is your life or death? What value?

Maintaining your rules for life is the same as maintaining your personal sovereignty. Establish those rules as early as you can in life. Make those rules your habit. Change them only when they are proven wrong. ”Let the little dogs bark.“ Ignore your haters.

When you are proven wrong move ahead with a modified plan based only on a change to that part of the plan that was not working. You never forsake the whole process, unless the whole can be falsified, causing a paradigm shift (i.e., Thomas Kuhn).

Never forsake your rights as an individual to govern your own life, no matter what the pains and pronouncements and persecutions arising against you. Hold fast to what you know is true. You control your life, your death, your health, your faith. You stand before God alone as to what you are, or were, or ever will be.

God Himself is the Vice-Regent; the sovereign over all of life. You are, in your own life, personal and public, the sub-regent. You are the Regent (the sovereign) over your own life, under God. Never forsake the regency He has given you.









------------------------

Doug Jerving is the publisher of the NewEdisonGazette.com. You may contact him at dje@newedisongazette.com.

=================================





Return to The New Edison Gazette main site.