Sovereignty Without Tribalism

There is a version of "sovereignty" that means dignity, self-determination, and the right of a person to live by their own considered judgments. There is another version that means "my group, right or wrong." These two versions are sometimes wearing the same clothes. We want to be specific about which one we mean.

We mean the first one. We have no interest in the second.

The original meaning of the word

Sovereignty, in its older philosophical sense, is the property of being the author of one's own life. To be sovereign is to make your own choices and bear their consequences. To accept that you cannot blame your circumstances forever, that you cannot outsource your decisions to a tribe or a party or a leader, that the work of being a person is the work of thinking and choosing without permission.

This is a demanding standard. It is not the cheerful self-help version that means "do whatever you feel like." It is the older, harder version that means "you are responsible for the shape of your life and you cannot delegate that responsibility." Kant called something like this autonomy, from the Greek autos (self) and nomos (law) — the capacity to give yourself the law you live by.

That's the sovereignty we mean.

How the word gets hijacked

"Sovereignty" has been borrowed, in various eras, by movements that wanted to dress up tribal loyalty in philosophical clothing. National sovereignty. Group sovereignty. The sovereignty of the in-group against the out-group. Each of these takes a concept that originally meant the dignity of the individual person and applies it to a collective — at which point it usually starts meaning the opposite of what it originally meant.

If "the sovereignty of my group" requires me to suspend my own judgment in favor of the group's, that isn't sovereignty. That's its inversion. The philosophical work was supposed to be about freeing the individual from unexamined authority, not about installing a new unexamined authority called us.

Why "one humanity" is the necessary other half

This is where the brand name does its second job. HARMŌNI US doesn't just say be a sovereign being. It says be a sovereign being, and remember that everyone else is one too.

That second clause is the firewall against tribalism. Because once you've granted that the person on the other side of every political line, every border, every cultural divide is also a sovereign being — with the same dignity, the same standing, the same authorship over their own life — it becomes much harder to write off whole categories of people. They keep showing up as individuals.

This is uncomfortable. It complicates things. It makes it harder to be confidently outraged. The tradeoff we're making is that we'd rather be a little less efficient at outrage and a little more accurate at being human.

A practical test

If your version of "sovereignty" gives you license to dismiss whole categories of people — by political affiliation, by nationality, by faith, by background — it's probably not sovereignty in the philosophical sense. It's probably tribalism with a respectable vocabulary.

The test we use, when we feel ourselves slipping: does this respect the sovereignty of the individual on the other side, too? If yes, proceed. If no, slow down. We're probably about to do the thing the brand exists to push back against.

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— HARMŌNI US