 First of all, I'd like to say how wonderful this church is, where the bishops will sit for questions after the sermons. Thank you. This question is for Professor Van Dunn. It occurred to me that your talk implied that the non-aggression principle might not be sufficient or might be too idealistic for libertarians that lack a conscience or have a conscience different than others in their group to co-exist peacefully or argue with each other because of the varying consciences of that. I think you mentioned it. So many words, the non-aggression principle alone isn't enough. I just thought, do you see that the role of a third-party arbitrator would have any effect in solving that problem or how do you think that could be addressed? The principle is not enough in the sense that you can repeat it a million times if it is not received, if the people to whom you address it are not ready to receive it, to understand what you mean, that it is of course all in vain. That means that you expect the people to whom you address your non-aggression principle to be educated along certain lines. And the principle of education do not stop by repeating to not commit aggression. You have to, cooperation is something else than not aggressing. And the constructive part is in the cooperation, the ways you cooperate and what you teach for instance your children. And the non-aggression principle is something that can be added whenever an enemy appears on the horizon. But normally if the enemy is there before the friends are there then nothing emerges at all. So everything that has to be defended rests on different principles than merely non-aggression. Good? Remember last year I talked about the bad neighbor problem that you have people living next door to you and they have sex orgies that everybody can see or let's say they engage in necrophilia which is also a non-aggressive activity or in incest or whatever which is also a non-aggressive activity. So there is far more necessary than only saying no aggression defined in physical terms in order to have peaceful relationships between people living in close proximity with each other. My question is for Professor Hopper. I haven't read Pinker so I'm asking you whether Pinker deals with the problem of making things look better or worse according to the date from which you start your analysis so that for example my financial advisor can show that my investments are doing very well just by choosing the date at which he starts. And does he deal with the fact that for example in the United States it's been estimated that the homicide rate would be five times higher than it is if we use the same surgical and resuscitation techniques as in 1960 and then if you consider that in 1960 they had already improved drastically and by this means you can show that the homicide attack rate in the United States has gone up by 100 times if you believe the figures has gone up 100 times since 1900 and at points in the 1970s it was 200 times. Does he deal with that kind of problem and what is the relevant point at which we compare our own lives with the past? Yes he does look at various historical periods in European and American societies and claims that the number of homicides sometimes goes up a little bit sometimes goes down a little bit but there is that the overall trend is at least what he claims according to his statistics is that there is a clear decline of homicide rates, there is a clear decline that is more pronounced in some societies slightly less pronounced in others but that is the overall trend in all societies for which he has collected data also the number of hangings for instance so number of hangings goes down the number of people subject to death penalty is going down he does admit that in certain areas it also went up for a while points out certain factors that have reduced it again but his interest is to show long-run developments I don't know if I if that answers your question or was yours well it does answer the question about what Pinker does I just dispute whether what he's saying is actually true and whether whether any sensible person would fail to worry that the homicidal attack rate had gone up enormously over the last hundred years by consoling himself that it's much better than it was in 4000 BC again is a what I said was I take his data as he presents them I I I'm not competent enough to judge the validity of all the statistics that he gives I try to show only that according to his own presented data that does not make much sense I have I have doubts about many of the data that he presents but that would be an entirely different task for which I do not think I'm qualified to answer that because that would require extensive historical research and I'm not a historian yeah this is a question for Hoppe and either the other two if you like so it's about the order the ethics and their origins so when you get to the bottom of libertarianism in Austrian economics it comes down to the the the non-aggression principle and self-ownership and I'm just I'm and where do you think ethics come from do they have a spiritual origin you know you touched on the Bible a little bit today this is a matter of religion used to address but it still begs the question for me that what is the isn't there a spiritual route to to self-ownership and right not to be invaded upon I think what what Frankfurt Dunn has pointed out the foundation is to be found somewhere in the fact that we argue with each other with the purpose of finding the truth and of course we must be unified with other people by having a common conscience but you begin with arguing one person with another person with a specific purpose in mind we want to resolve an intellectual dispute by peaceful means yes there is it of course that the principles the principles as they are established afterwards why after all this argumentation they become detached from the arguments themselves but you cannot do without the argumentation and the argumentation has to move within fairly narrow bounds of propriety because one blow to the head is enough to end the discussion so in order to keep the discussion going and to keep faith in the results of arguing with one another alive you have to have a certain spirit and the spiritual attitude moral attitude if you will has to be developed in the course of because you cannot presume it given but it has to be developed in the course of arguing itself so that is why argumentation is probably the rarest forms of exchange I distinct I have distinguished it earlier from negotiation and from intimidation and so on but I would also differentiate it from for example debates right now debates are plenty everywhere but the idea of a debate is totally different from that of an argumentation because in an hour in a debate typically the speakers are trying to persuade not the opponent but the the passive element the audience or the judge right so the danger there is that they start playing on the judges or the audiences preferences or prejudices rather than responding to the opponent's arguments so argumentation is very rare and you will find you will not find an argumentation based morality throughout history that's why most moral systems stay very close to a very small circle or rather small circle of people a tribe for example and then the anathema you are not to be one of us is rather strictly interpreted according to try tribal boundaries or ethnic boundaries but what we see in Western there are other examples in the in the Far East in the Western development of morality is that there was this idea of the the human person as such right okay should put some flavor on it so usually the argumentation is possible only with like-minded people and the trick which was achieved in medieval Christianity also already to some extent in Roman Christianity before that was that the range of acceptable opponents in argumentation widened enormously you could see that for example in Anselm's decision to include the 80s as a possible person to argue with right this was no longer a person you should avoid or even kill you could sit down and try to convince him with reasons that he was wrong and that you're right and something I also think that this approach by argumentation is a very helpful and convincing approach and what I always like to do is to try to go even deeper and try to understand what is the phenomenon as a natural social phenomenon that discussions argumentations about conflicts are going on so this too is something to think about and so I always think that you know when you ask as a as a lawyer or as a scientist in law sometimes the question comes up what is the law what is it of out of what is it made is it something a bit according to you questions that you you catch from heaven or comes it from inside bottom up or wherever it does it come from and I could imagine that convincing answer or a consistent approach to this aspect is to to look at the behavior of people in society if conflicts happen what what happens out of a conflict some reactions come up these are maybe just natural relax reactions actio equals reactio things like that and out of this maybe physical conflicts reactions come out shouting comes out argumentation comes out not in each individual situation but as a cultural development and so I can imagine that the ultimate basis of all these approaches including argumentation is the conflict as such the conflict produces its own solution it's a famous law a scientist in Germany Rudolf von Jering he put it very bluntly and said law this is revenge and out of very archaic times of course this is a different kind of dealing with conflicts as we do but in the very core of the phenomenon it's the same and I could imagine that there it's where you have to find to search for the answer what is law and where does it come from I guess you know you can have an atheist could have a utilitarian argument for what for for morality or ethics and I'm just it still begs the question though I mean even though if you arrive at an argumentation it's you know what what is right or what is true still you know you could come at it from a utilitarian way but it's it would still beg the question like what why do people think that there are things that are right and wrong or true or are untrue or what why is a violation of somebody wrong you know why is the theft wrong like it still begs the the greater question of why you know I guess I guess what do you think do you think you think there's more to it than than just if I understand you correctly what you're looking for is that even this level of of the question so what is it are these moral principles and and what is this a moral principle and what is right and what is wrong what is just and what is unjust I think that is also something coming out of this conflict of the argumentation and is is not the beginning of it but is the end of it is the end of all what comes out of the conflict why are these social interactions and finally things like morals like good like bad things like that emerge in society and become assets become elements become milestones within social interactions I don't think it is just a conflict and there's a reaction to the conflict in order to resolve the conflict you can also resolve conflicts by intimidation you can also resolve conflicts by using great rhetoric or whatever it is no the the key is the conflicts have to have to be resolved by purely argumentative means in that regard I entirely agree with with frank it is not there's not some sort of automatic resolution of conflicts conflict breaks out and then there's a reaction and there's another reaction and there's another reaction at at the end of this the conflict is resolved there must be a common conviction that only certain means are permissible in order to resolve in the conflict the conflict in such a way that it will be accepted by people as indeed a rational conflict resolution so I David tends to be for my view to be a little bit too naturalistic in in this in this dispute where we are more yeah can we say idealistic yeah in in a certain sense realistic in the platonic sense realism but I want about this conflict thing now conflicts my own very childish and rudimentary analysis conflict has a number of elements microphone I'm sorry the conflict has different parties at least two right it has a these parties have different views and purposes and goals there must be a common element this is what hands always stresses the common element is the scarce thing the what is at stake in the in the conflict and the parties must have free or equal access to that scarce thing if one of these elements is missing then there is no conflict in the real sense there is no clash of interest so you always whenever you have a conflict situation you have four logical types of solutions one is you reduce the number of parties to one okay or you eliminate the differences of opinion you create a consensus so in the first case you create unity out of plurality in the second case you create consensus out of diversity and you can also try to create differential access so that one party can no longer access the the scarce means which is the the element of the conflict and when these new conditions are established the conflict disappears it has no no longer any ground the fourth solution is you use simply eliminate scarcity right that's the utopian solution the utopian solution but the the problem is of course when you have this philosophical analysis that allows four types of solution and there is one conflict you will have a conflict among the different solution providers so one say no we need a unity that is a society an ordered arrangement in which this conflict will disappear another says no no no we need to build a consensus in which the differences of opinion will disappear another will say no no no no we need a strict property regime and the differences will the conflict will disappear and then the utopians will say no no no we need to make sure that everybody has plenty but these are meta conflicts they can arise from any particular individual conflict so they are not a conflict is not a natural thing it's basically in the in the in the mind it starts from the minds of people and the the argument finally i would i would bring in anselm here you can think of conflicts in terms of magnitudes that is clashing forces or you can think of it in terms of principles ethical positions and of course you can never get a netical principle from a clash of forces and that is the the fallacy of dolphins that's the fallacy of pinker when he reduces violence to the measurable aspects of certain acts and not the intentional things i didn't quite understand maybe i missed it but why did we have the emergence of the state as the kind of global solution for the past 500 years in other words if we want to move from the state back to something like the middle ages we need to really clearly understand why did we leave the middle ages if that was a better social arrangement why did that not last and why did we for now 500 years have a worst solution and you know people like starlin and hitler maybe took advantage of the existing state but they also moved it even further into the direction of monopoly and and serving their own means so what is it about the environment of the last 500 years that makes the state so resilient against a better social like an orcic situation maybe top because it it took a long time when only gradually occurred the feudal feudal king increasingly reaches a position of an absolute king with some of the previous institutions still remaining in existence and then you take the next the next step and the next step to use an analogy how did it happen that we have fiat currencies instead of hard metal you can see that there's a tendency that will go in that direction but they didn't do it instantly first you start with coin clipping then the next the next step will be you monopolize the mining of of gold the next step is you permit that money substitutes will be introduced that are partially covered only by gold you still have plenty of of competition between different different people who not mine but make really gold coins out of out of gold then you have the tendency of those people realizing you cannot inflate as much as you want as long as exist competition between different people who offer gold as money then you have a central bank coming into existence which allows all people to do coordinated inflation then you loosen that that connection between substitute money substitutes and and genuine money and and finally you break the link entirely so it was a long drawn out process which maybe some people realized what their ultimate goal was most people didn't but the next step was almost always clear that you had to take so you take one step and then it falls almost logically what the next step must be and I imagine that the process that we have state formation out of a system that had no state proceeded in a very similar in a similar way without any plan behind it except those people who wanted to acquire this power knew always this is the next step I have to have to take and then the next generation like I know now what the next step has to be is this in order to reach reach the ultimate goal since I am seated on the left of Professor Hoppe I will answer slightly differently from what he did because you asked about what brought the middle ages which were moving in the right direction what brought them to an end and I think the the the the it has identifiable causes and not just a drift well a well intention drift with dark size that nobody appreciated because the the middle ages ended with dark size all visible and I think that the basic changes were the changes in weapons technology and the advancement of trade trade being a cause of great inequalities of wealth which led to great inequalities in armaments the ability to hire mercenaries and so on so it was a physical rearrangement of forces that broke the equilibrium and the church was not able even if she wanted to maybe she did maybe she didn't she was not able to keep the new forces under control for example having authority over landlords is one thing but having authority over rich traders is another thing because they are constantly on the move and they are constantly making deals all over the place they are negotiators right they are not arguers traders and then there was of course the the bucolic plague which was an enormous blow to the structure of the middle ages because here was a problem an enormous problem caused apparently by nothing so you had to say it was an act of god but the pope was absolutely ineffective against it and the kings were ineffective against it so the two pillars of the medieval order were as it were called with their pants down in a matter of speaking and then there was the Byzantium right the Byzantine empire that fell and from the 1440s you had a constant in stream of refugees from the Byzantine borders and these people were also very rich and they brought an entirely new and astonishing culture with them artistic skills that were unknown in in the middle ages so there was a fairly drastic change in the material conditions and material conditions which nobody was able intellectually or particularly to cope with so a lot of things began moving around and and falling and let the chips fall where they may well that happened at that time now of course there were opportunities there and unfortunately whereas the the plague struck high and low the the royal houses were the least struck of all mostly the higher nobility was among the the best placed to defend itself against the plague and they were also together with the merchants they had the where we told to buy all the empty states that were available because the people there had died so there was an enormous rearrangement of political and economic power at the time yeah I don't disagree with anything but I don't I don't know why you said I'm sitting to the left of me as if as if that had some meaning I don't think I like very much professor deus presentation they put on the timeline the ascending power of state idolatry and the descending power of the catholic church well a few more remarks the first one is that the power of the state is limited only by only by thank you only by competing powers of other states or by the resistance or the counter violence of the people oppressed by by a state the power of the church is rooted in a divine order that means that it is always limited because it has to refer to this to the divine order cannot get out of control and this is one aspect which has a lot of consequences for instance if we look at the election results in Germany in the in the 30s you will see that in the catholic countries of in the catholic lender of Germany the the people that the people who were the percentage of people who voted for the Nazi party was much lower than in the protestant parts of the country because the identification with the state together with the missing link to Rome created or created another situation which was much more favorable for the totalitarian state second element is punishment the state if you want to leave the state you are punished immediately well so they created the hell on earth the punishment of the cat of the church also exists it's a little bit delayed you know you will probably end in hell but nobody has seen there really how it is so it's delayed and you have no sanctions to fear on earth the third point is which is i think particularly interesting because it's mostly misunderstood and that's the dogma of the infallibility of the pope what does it mean it's generally interpreted as an expansion of the power of the pope but in reality it's quite the contrary it put extreme limits to every pope because this infallibility is also in history that means every pope who said something in ex-cathedra cannot be contradicted by another pope afterwards and that's probably one of the reason i think that this was is one of the reasons why the catholic church still exists while all other protestant church simply transformed in some kind of humanistic associations without okay we don't talk about it but in the catholic church it's it's a wall against modernism and i think it was the up the the most important contribution in the dogmatic the doctorate development of the catholic church was particularly this decision by pios the nines imagine if we had not the infallibility of the pope imagine that pergola could do what he wants imagine what the outcome of that we would probably already have a female pope probably lesbian we would venerate a god as mother earth we would probably have corpus christi on the same day as the christopher street parade yeah and we would have a catholic church with no difference to every other of the churches who exists and who are completely victimized by modernization thank you yes these are interesting additions i can follow all your your thoughts to to take one point you you put in the first and in the third argument is the relation between church and power you said they legitimate their power from from god while states legitimate the power from elsewhere democracy or state itself whatever i think the the most important aspect in in this in this ambiguity between these two kinds of legitimation is not how is the power legitimized but who has the power effectively i mean i could imagine that the fact that the church made out of this papal infallibility not a regime to dominate you know the world but a regime to make the own faith the own system of morals more consistent more convincing perhaps for those that believe in it so this approach to these to these legitimations is was chosen not voluntarily but because they did not have the power anymore i could imagine that with the same dogmas the church would have acted differently 300 years earlier when when when they had the power so i think this is a very important aspect while the state who took over so to speak the power which was sort of you know secularization of the old church power into secular structures there they found any legitimations these states to enforce their power they had the power and the reason the legitimation is not that important anymore they can argue with democracy we know that got failed or they can argue with you know natural law or the state as such as the fascists did the remark you you told me before quite explicitly um maybe it's not that important much more important is that they had the power professor hopper you made passing mention of hobs and i know that you've gone into further treatment on the hobsy and myth i'm wondering if you would summarize pinker's work operating out of this depth as he was is just a empirical repackaging of hobs and if so if you could offer a further method or silver bullet to drive a stake through that hobsy and myth i think pinker's even worse than hobs because hobs does leave open the possibility that people can throw off the state if the state doesn't do what it is supposed what it is supposed to do pinker doesn't even has this aspect um that at any point that there might be a point coming where you have to throw off um this there are many contradictions in pinker for instance he the american secession from england he somehow finds good um even even though that is obviously a resistance against a state that contradicts his central seizes the guy writes in a way that he has a way to wiggle himself out of any type of objection um that you make because he always hedges uh this way and then he hedges this way so what i try to do here was to to reduce the entire book to the bare essentials um and i'm sure that if pinker would read something like this here but i also say this and i also say this um but you can only he can only do this if he just simply forgets about what his central seizes is um hedging your bets i think he is quite good good at that to avoid any type of criticism so but again in that regard he is worse worse and whatever hobs says because hobs does leave open the possibility if the state doesn't do it you are entitled to throw it over and go back to state of nature um i'd like to draw an uh unlikely comparison between two strange travel companions meaning martin luther and macchiavelli and i'm thinking about the sola grazia principle and the prince on one side the lutheran principle uh legitimates the existing order and the existing princes who broke free from the medieval order of the of the pope and the emperor and on the other side macchiavelli is the author of the definite separation between morals and states the prince has to pursue only power and it's irrelevant if he acts morally or not or even more he should act immorally because this furthers the power of the state uh what do you think about these two thinkers as at the beginning of modern states uh well there are certain similarities and there are also very obvious differences and the difference is that uh macchiavelli uh was not someone who denied the possibility of uh moral truth he simply said that or his main message if you will was that it does not weigh heavily enough in the decision making of of princes uh to play a role but he was not saying what luther was saying that it is impossible uh for human reason to come to any reason judgment about right or wrong these qualities are certainly uh possible but they are not effective in notice not just in politics but in a uh competitive political environment because that is the the point of the prince the macchiavellian prince is a competitor he is not a ruler from the ruling house the 17th in a row uh secure on the throne no he's he's somebody who has to acquire power and maintain it so his whole thinking is that of a entrepreneur so to speak in a market rather than that of a a ruler who has to sit tight and quiet and rule that is uh judge and be the judge and be the protector of the realm but the macchiavellian prince has to make power and he has to use it to and that is the great difference i think with the medieval uh scheme he has to use it to govern because medieval print uh medieval rulers did not govern they ruled but they didn't govern right uh and this was in the 19th century french liberals picked it up loroi guverne uh loroi rengem and a guvernepa this difference between ruling and governing but if you now go to to luther for him there is no possibility for corrupt human reason to find principles of right and wrong so that the secular uh replacements are power and wealth right power and wealth rule and the uh the only way in which morality enters is through the bible but the bible does not change anything except it adds a few words to the to the human situation but it does not change the dynamic of the of the human situation and the uh both luther and macchiavelli were opposed by the catholic church uh which held the the notion that it was possible since human beings are persons and persons are minded bodies or embodied minds it is possible for persons to act according to ideas consequently also according to the right ideas and this was a a moral duty therefore a perfect duty to do right and this was missing both in macchiavelli and in the in luther well this is a question to the panel um going into the future now so obviously state is accumulating more and more power and looking back there is a dynamic that probably could not be foreseen uh the same applies for the future but one thing should be sure that this accumulation of power of the state as as you showed um will come to an end uh because there is probably just one law that there will be change so uh there is not just to be sort of more of the same of course we can now prolong this in the future it will continue to accumulate power it will it will uh be richer it will be more powerful people will become more cursed or poorer but this will come to an end can can the panel comment on scenarios uh how it will come to an end and uh have a very patient outlook to the future as we are all sharing very low time preference that i think the two most likely scenarios are the one is we have to radically decentralize all these global system will fall apart due to internal rivalries which are even promoted nowadays in particular through the immigration policy making societies more and more heterogeneous creating more and more conflicts one way out of that is of course the separation of of different smaller units that do it their way the other um scenario that i see is likely is that we have that we will get a hardcore dictatorship once the problems that exist in the current societies like paying for pensions um uh all the free goodies that the welfare state has promised that that cannot be done that you then have to resort to truly violent measures even in the pinker sense uh violence so dictatorship i think is one possibility and the other one is if you want to avoid that would be decentralization the session breaking up of states that's what i see as a two most likely scenarios and i hope of course for the decentralization solution and fear that the dictatorship solution is a very real possibility i would like to add perhaps another scenario too which goes a bit in that direction of that that um dictatorship it is you know the world state it's just or maybe that was your idea not national or european or something like that dictatorship but world dictatorship i think that when you ask how when you say it will come to an end i would also think that dinosaurs also came to an end um so that this tendency will come to an end so there are in principle two variants it comes to an end um in the direction of decentralization that this tendency toward monopolization of power would would stop would fall apart would would um die of some virus some libertarian virus um but i think it's also possible that it will come to this apocalyptic um scenario of a world state i think there are many many signs that show in that direction not this conference of course but many other signs and i would say it's not unrealistic that this scenario happens it's not very promising but i would say not impossible and at the very least it's necessary to to keep that in mind to to be aware that is a very dramatic situation in which we are and once we want to take some influence by conferences like that by by by you know making this kind of of thinking and of communication and so on that that we have this danger and so it's it's really something to do um i could with this general view imagine that it's almost impossible to define a program and say okay let's make this or that in order to to try to change this this this history maybe these are that important elements of human evolution that actually one cannot influence them really but only um look at them try to to give some you know um kick in this or that way um try to support tendencies if they are if if there are tendencies in that decentralized direction but but finally um it could be that you know in the thousand year at another conference they look back and say oh that that was fine in uh ultimately it didn't go that wrong um as one thought it could go um suddenly this libertarian virus went everywhere and these big structures for fell apart maybe it's like that and i would of course very much welcome it of course i see a tendency to create a world state but i think that is not in the short and intermediate run i don't think that will happen and if it happens then it will also buy ultimate violence and there has to be some sort of super dictator who brings it brings it about um you first have to destroy all sorts of nationalist regional affiliations in the in attitudes among people yes they i mean i see the european development in this way that nationalism might have been a bad thing in the 19th century 19th century nations were partly created also by conducting war in this day and age nationalism is actually a good force in in my view because it prevents this tendency to create um a world state or ever larger states and those people who want to bring about a world state and there are of course organizations with mighty people who work in that direction um what they do is of course try to destroy all regional affiliations all national affiliations um by creating artificial heterogeneity uh in europe i think this importing all of these people from strange places into europe is of course a way to yeah eliminate that see the feeling of germans we are germans we are not we have something to do with other countries in europe but but still we are germans we do not want to be run by by brussels um the the more heterogeneous societies become the easier it is to centralize um but the centralization also needs dictatorial powers so i still think that i perfectly agree that there is this tendency and that is a long run possibility that that might happen but in the short run i think the alternatives will be either there will be decentralization or there will be dictatorship well i i do not have a separate or even blacker uh scenario but uh i would like to add to the the hopefulness that comes out of decentralization i would add the question what does decentralization mean in the age of facebook and twitter and things like that where the uh institutional uh decentralization may be uh complete yet the the thinking could be uh not more uniform than if it had been a completely uh institutionalized centralization so uh even institutional decentralization in an age of ultra-fast uh communication of nonsense and wrong-headed ideas uh may not be of great help but i'm a pessimist um i've got a brief question to professor van den i wonder if you could comment uh in a bit more depth than you managed um i know your text goes into a bit more depth but on the reintroduction of Aristotle and the around the height of late middle ages and the effect that that had on western thought yeah well uh i i did not uh go into that at length in the my my uh lecture but i think that's an important thing and it's of course uh a vital question considering that uh catholicism when you talk about catholicism people never seem to go back beyond Thomas Aquinas of course there was a lot before Thomas Aquinas uh but what he did it apart from being a wonderful uh genius of a man and what he produced in a very short time you he did so in in a rather limited philosophical way that is he he married Christianity to uh Aristotelianism and Aristotelianism does not really lend itself in my view to a a Christianization project the reason which i mentioned i i believe was that uh if nature all of nature everything moves towards its end from the inside why do you need a church and why do you need a christ because these are the people who showed the way they are the and uh they would be irrelevant if the the way was always uh as it were built in if everyone had his own uh GPS uh system and automatic steering towards the goal to be reached so the uh idea of Christianity as Thomistic Christianity in my view severely weakened uh the church not very long after Thomas with his Aristotelian ideas was accepted as a positive genial genius contribution to the church because uh he died in the in the uh 1270s right and he uh and the plague struck about 60 years after the plague was in 1348 i believe so in that short period when Aristotelianism was being established as the official not yet quite official but as the the strong contender for the doctrinal identity of the church an event occurred that made it very delicate for the church to accept Aristotelianism because suddenly now this was part of providence this plague this disaster was a providential act it was no longer something in nature that Christians would have to cope with no it was a providential act and i think that was a very uh difficult thing to explain to people who have lost all their relatives and and all their belongings and a lot of uh theological energy went into explaining that these things are really at bottom but in ways that we do not understand goods because Aristotelian ideas everything is good the previous theology the al-selmic theology was not everything is good that doesn't mean nature is bad but nature is neutral and things can happen in the family in in nature in the woods in in in the water in the in the sky which have no moral significance but you have to cope with them as moral beings so there you have the uh pinpointing of the the fortitude or the christian meekness the ability to stand up to whatever happens lies with man right it is not some sort of divine scenario in which the the good things will be revealed at the end meanwhile millions of people die within couple of months but it's okay um so first of all i very much agree with your analysis of the evil that the state represents um and there are very few people in the libertarian movement who can criticize the state as pointedly as you do um but how would we um or how would you ensure that uh the state won't reemerge once we've managed to abolish it uh because i'm specifically thinking of the high numbers of psychopaths and narcissists in executive positions in all sorts of organizations and society um so just to give you number 21 percent of all co's are come um are like a recent study showed our uh psychopaths or have personality disorders as compared to only like two to three percent um of the general population and so these people are simply much more functional and capable to handle high pressure situations and stress than uh us normal people but they're also willing to stop at nothing if necessary so wouldn't these people simply gather and through some sort of secret society or collusion take advantage of of us normal people again and wouldn't that bring back another um evil rule again over time um so how would a private libertarian community protect itself against such uh sociopaths that have obviously been ruling the world for centuries now and uh isn't the competition of crooks um the vet bevert the gauna like you call it uh isn't that a much larger problem than just within politics i think there's there is no guarantee that such a thing will happen but at least he was one of the phrase of mirrored but but at least you might have had a glorious holiday um and in the end we will we get that again there's also these small communities that i mentioned for instance yes of course they have to protect themselves too and the protection cannot always occur only with the people involved in these community alone you must also have alliances um with similar thinking communities arrangements that you help each other something that we can learn in a way from from the middle ages without imitating that exactly there existed of course all sorts of alliances but overlapping alliances some people were aligned with that some people were aligned with that they were aligned again with a third party or a force party and so forth which makes it very difficult to create a powerful enough opponents of of a free society to eliminate them so forming alliances that might be not neighboring communities but maybe distant ones would be would be a way to reduce this danger there is no there is no clear cut recipe how you can eliminate this this danger totally that is part of mankind with which we have to live but as i said it might work for a while and that might be worth it and uh and um and in the end we get something again like we have right now but to but to say that because that danger exists we rather stay with a current situation that seems to be a strange answer that is like committing suicide because you are afraid of dying later on