Disclaimer: This article reflects my personal interpretation and understanding of the ideas presented by Jordan B. Peterson in his lecture Introduction to the Idea of God. It is based on my own assumptions, reflections, and independent research, and does not claim to represent any theological or academic authority. My intention is not to discuss religion, but to explore an intellectual and philosophical angle on the concept of sovereignty and how it connects to questions of responsibility, order, and autonomy in the digital age.

The views expressed here are entirely my own and written in the spirit of curiosity, personal development, and open dialogue.

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For most of modern history, sovereignty was a word reserved for kings, nations, and divine powers. Today, it has migrated into the digital realm. Governments speak of data sovereignty, organisations demand cloud sovereignty, and regulators debate digital autonomy as if it were a new invention. Yet the word itself carries a much deeper heritage.

I have always been drawn to content that challenges me to think deeper. To develop myself, to learn, and to become a more decent human being. That is why I often watch lectures and interviews from thinkers like Jordan B. Peterson. His lecture Introduction to the Idea of God recently caught my attention, not because of its theological angle, but because of how he describes sovereignty. Not as external power, but as an inner principle – the ability to rule responsibly within a domain while remaining subordinate to higher laws and moral order.

That insight provides an unexpected bridge into the digital age. It suggests that sovereignty, whether human or technological, is never just about control. It is about responsible dominion, the ability to govern a domain while remaining answerable to the principles that make such governance legitimate.

When we speak about digital sovereignty, we are therefore not talking about ownership alone. We are talking about whether our digital systems reflect that same hierarchy of responsibility and whether power remains accountable to the principles it claims to serve.

The ancient logic of rule

Long before the language of “data localization” and “cloud independence”, ancient myths wrestled with the same question: who rules, and under what law?

Peterson revisits the Mesopotamian story of Marduk, the god who slays the chaos-monster Tiamat and creates the ordered world from her remains. Marduk becomes king of the gods not because he seizes power, but because he sees clearly (his eyes encircle his head) and speaks truth (his voice creates order). Sovereignty, in this reading, is vision plus articulation, which means that perception and speech transform chaos into structure.

Source: https://mesopotamia.mrdonn.org/marduk.html 

That principle later reappears in the Hebrew conception of God as a lawgiver above kings. Even the ruler is subordinate to the law, and even the sovereign must bow to the principle of sovereignty itself. This inversion, that the highest power is bound by what is highest, became the cornerstone of Western political thought and the invisible moral logic behind constitutional democracies.

When power forgets that it is subordinate, it turns into tyranny. When it forgets its responsibility, chaos returns.

From political sovereignty to digital power

Fast-forward to the 21st century. We have entered a world where data centers replace palaces and algorithms rival parliaments. Our digital infrastructures have become the new seat of sovereignty. Whoever controls data, compute, and AI, controls the rhythm of economies and the tempo of societies.

Yet, as Peterson would put it, the psychological pattern remains the same. The temptation for absolute rule, for technical sovereignty without moral subordination, is as old as humanity. When a cloud provider holds the keys to a nation’s data but owes its allegiance to no higher principle than profit, sovereignty decays into dominance. When a government seeks total control over data flows without respecting personal freedom, sovereignty mutates into surveillance.

Therefore, digital sovereignty cannot be achieved by isolation alone. It requires a principle above control and a framework of responsibility, transparency, and trust. Without that, even the most sovereign infrastructure becomes a gilded cage.

Sovereignty as responsibility, not control

Peterson defines sovereignty as rule under law, not rule above it. In the biblical imagination, even God’s power is bound by his word – the principle that creates and limits at the same time. That is the paradox of legitimate sovereignty: its strength comes from restraint.

Applied to technology, this means that a sovereign cloud is sovereign because it binds itself to principle. It protects data privacy, enforces jurisdictional control, and allows auditability not because regulation demands it, but because integrity does.

The European vision of digital sovereignty, from the EU’s Data Act to Gaia-X, is, at its core, an attempt to recreate that ancient alignment between power and rule. It is a collective recognition that technical autonomy without ethical structure leads nowhere. Sovereign infrastructure is not an end in itself but a container for trust.

The danger of absolute sovereignty

Peterson warns that when sovereignty becomes absolute, when a ruler or system recognises no law above itself, catastrophe follows. He points to 20th-century totalitarian regimes where ideology replaced principle and individuals were crushed under the weight of unbounded power.

Our digital landscape carries similar risks. The hyperscaler model, while enabling global innovation, also consolidates an unprecedented concentration of authority. When three or four companies decide how data is stored, how AI models are trained, and which APIs define interoperability, sovereignty becomes fragile. We exchange the chaos of fragmentation for the order of dependence.

Likewise, when nations pursue “data nationalism” without transparency or interoperability, they may protect sovereignty in name but destroy it in spirit. The closed sovereign cloud is the modern equivalent of the paranoid king. Safe behind walls, but blind to the world beyond them.

True sovereignty, Peterson reminds us, requires both vision and speech. You must see beyond your borders and articulate the principles that guide your rule.

Seeing and speaking truth

In Peterson’s cosmology, the sovereign creates order by confronting chaos directly by seeing clearly and speaking truthfully. That process translates elegantly into the digital domain.

To build responsible digital systems, we must first see where our dependencies lie: in APIs, in hardware supply chains, in foreign jurisdictions, in proprietary formats. Sovereignty begins with visibility, with mapping the landscape of control.

Then comes the speech, the articulation of principle. What do we value? Data integrity? Interoperability? Legal transparency? Without speaking those truths, sovereignty becomes mute. The process of defining digital sovereignty is therefore not only political or technical but also linguistic and moral. It requires the courage to define what the higher principle actually is.

In Europe, this articulation is still evolving. The Gaia-X framework, the Swiss Government Cloud initiative, or France’s “Cloud de Confiance” are all attempts to speak sovereignty into existence by declaring that our infrastructure must reflect our societal values, not merely technical efficiency.

The individual at the root of sovereignty

One of Peterson’s most subtle points is that sovereignty ultimately begins in the individual. You cannot have a sovereign nation composed of individuals who refuse responsibility. Likewise, you cannot have a sovereign digital ecosystem built by actors who treat compliance as theatre and trust as a marketing term.

Every architect, policymaker, and operator holds a fragment of sovereignty. The question is whether they act as tyrants within their domain or as stewards under a higher rule. A cloud platform becomes sovereign when its people behave sovereignly and when they balance autonomy with discipline, ownership with humility.

In that sense, digital sovereignty is a psychological project as much as a technical one. It demands integrity, courage, and self-limitation at every level of the stack.

From divine order to digital order

The story of sovereignty, from the earliest myths to the latest regulations, is the same story told in different languages. It is the human struggle to balance power and principle, freedom and responsibility, chaos and order.

Peterson’s interpretation of sovereignty – the ruler who sees and speaks, the individual who stands upright before the highest good – offers a mirror for our technological age. The digital world is the new frontier of chaos. Our infrastructures are its architecture of order. Whether that order remains free depends on whether we remember the ancient rule: even the sovereign must be subordinate to sovereignty itself.

A sovereign cloud, therefore, is not the digital expression of nationalism, but the continuation of an older and nobler tradition. To govern power with conscience, to build systems that serve rather than dominate, to make technology reflect the values of the societies it empowers.

The true measure of sovereignty, digital or divine, lies not in the scope of control but in the depth of responsibility.

For decades, digital transformation followed a clear logic. Efficiency, scale, and innovation were the ultimate measures of progress. Cloud computing, global supply chains, and open ecosystems seemed to be the rational path forward. The idea of “digital sovereignty”, meaning the control over one’s digital infrastructure, data, and technologies, was often viewed as a political or bureaucratic concern, something secondary to innovation and growth.

But rationality itself is not static. What we perceive as “reasonable” depends on how we define utility and risk. The Expected Utility Theory from behavioral economics tells us that every decision under uncertainty is guided not by objective outcomes, but by how we value those outcomes and how we fear their alternatives.

If that’s true, then digital sovereignty is not only a political mood swing, but also a recalibration of what societies see as valuable in an age where uncertainty has become the dominant variable.

Expected Utility Theory – Rationality Under Uncertainty

When we speak about rationality, we often assume that it means making the “best” choice. But what defines best depends on how we perceive outcomes and risks. The Expected Utility Theory (EUT), first introduced by Daniel Bernoulli and later refined by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, offers a framework to understand this.

EUT assumes that rational actors make decisions by comparing the expected utility of different options, not their absolute outcomes. Each possible outcome is weighted by the likelihood of its occurrence and the subjective value, or utility, assigned to it.

In essence, people don’t choose what’s objectively optimal. They choose what feels most secure and beneficial, given how they perceive risk.

What makes this theory profound is that utility is subjective. Humans and institutions value losses and gains asymmetrically. Losing control feels more painful than gaining efficiency feels rewarding. As a result, decisions that appear “irrational” in economic terms can be deeply rational when viewed through the lens of stability and trust.

In a world of increasing uncertainty – geopolitical, technological, and environmental – the weighting in this equation changes. The expected cost of dependency grows, even if the actual probability of disruption remains small. Rational actors adjust by rebalancing their notion of utility. They begin to value autonomy, resilience, and continuity more than convenience.

In this sense, EUT doesn’t just describe individual behavior. It reflects the collective psychology of societies adapting to systemic uncertainty by explaining why the pursuit of digital sovereignty is not driven by emotion, but by a rational redefinition of what it means to be safe, independent, and future-ready.

Redefining Utility in a Fragmented World

The Expected Utility Theory states that rational actors make choices based on expected outcomes, the weighted balance of benefits and risks. Yet these weights are subjective. They shift with context, history, and collective experience.

In the early cloud era, societies assigned high utility to efficiency and innovation, while the perceived probability of geopolitical or technological disruption was low. The rational choice, under that model, was integration and interdependence.

Today, the probabilities have changed, or rather, our perception of them. The likelihood of systemic disruption, cascading failures across tightly connected digital and geopolitical systems, no longer feels distant. From chip shortages to data jurisdiction disputes and the limited transparency of AI models, the cost of dependency has become part of the rational calculus.

Sovereignty as Expected Utility

What we call “digital sovereignty” is, at its core, a decision under uncertainty. It asks: Who controls the systems that control us? And what happens if that control shifts?

When the expected utility of autonomy exceeds the expected utility of convenience, societies change course. This is precisely what we are witnessing now. A collective behavioral shift in which resilience, trust, and control carry more weight than frictionless innovation.

Consider the examples:

• Geopolitics has made technological dependence visible as a strategic vulnerability

• Cybersecurity incidents have revealed that data sovereignty equals national security

• AI and cloud governance have shown that control over infrastructure is also control over narrative and the flow of knowledge

Under these pressures, sovereignty is no longer a romantic ideal. It becomes a rational equilibrium point. The point at which perceived risks of dependency outweigh the marginal gains of openness.

From Emotional to Rational Sovereignty

In the past, sovereignty was often treated as nostalgia. A desire for control in a world that had already moved beyond borders. But what if this new form of sovereignty is not regression, but evolution?

Expected Utility Theory reminds us that rational behavior adapts to new distributions of risk. The same actor who once outsourced infrastructure to gain efficiency might now internalize it to regain predictability. The logic hasn’t changed, but the world around it has.

This means that digital sovereignty is not anti-globalization. It is post-globalization. It recognizes that autonomy is not isolation, but a condition for meaningful participation.

Autonomy as the Foundation of Participation

To participate freely, one must first possess the ability to choose. That is the essence of autonomy. It ensures that participation remains voluntary, ethical, and sustainable. Autonomy allows a nation to cooperate globally while retaining control over its data and infrastructure. It allows a company to use shared platforms without surrendering governance. It allows citizens to engage digitally without becoming subjects of invisible systems.

In this sense, autonomy creates the conditions for trust. Without it, participation turns into a relationship defined by dependence rather than exchange.

Post-globalization, therefore, represents not the end of the global era, but its maturation. It transforms globalization from a process of unchecked integration into one of mutual sovereignty: A world still connected, but built on the principle that every participant retains the right and capability to stand independently.

Sovereignty, in this light, becomes the structural balance between openness and ownership. It is what allows a society, an enterprise, or even an individual to remain part of the global system without being consumed by it.

The Return of Control as Rational Choice

Post-globalization has taught us that the strength of a system no longer lies in how open it is, but in how consciously it manages its connections. The same logic now applies to the digital realm.

Societies are learning to calibrate openness with control. They are rediscovering that stability and agency are not obstacles to innovation, but its foundation.

Expected Utility Theory helps make this visible. As uncertainty rises, the perceived utility of autonomy grows. What once appeared as overcaution now reads as wisdom. What once seemed like costly redundancy now feels like strategic resilience.

Control, long misunderstood as inefficiency, has become a new form of intelligence. It is a way to remain adaptive without becoming dependent. Sovereignty, once framed as resistance, now stands for continuity in an unstable world.

The digital age no longer rewards blind efficiency. It rewards balance, which is the ability to stay independent when the systems around us begin to drift.