 Okay, good morning to all of you and a special thanks, of course, to Hans and Goldson for their incredible hospitality, not only this year but all the previous years, maybe some years in the future. My subject, The Trouble with Society, I will deal with it from the point of view of the philosophy of law and politics. That is, of course, white terrain, just how white the number of topics one could cover under this approach. First of all, a few words about the philosophy of law, then the general approach to the philosophy of law in the particular context in which we are interested in it, the law of the world, of societies and communities and so on in the world, and then all the other concepts that come into play. Sorry, philosophy of law is really philosophy, all of philosophy, because law, the basic sense of the word is order, and what philosophers do is look for order in the different areas where we participate. First of all, the order of ideas, the totality of all logical things, and in particular pure quantities, numbers, mathematics and pure qualities. In German and Dutch, pure translates as schoen, or schoen, and schoen, head, schoen, height, translates it to English as beauty or beautifulness. So it is in this area of ideas that we find the philosophy of beauty understood as understanding the things in their pureness. And eventually I will talk here about society itself, that is society in its pureness, or relative pureness, without all the distracting connotations it may have, present or unpleasant. Second area for the philosophy of law is order of or in nature, and nature consensibly understood as all those things that exist, whether or not there are human persons, but of course they are observable, observable and measurable by humans. And third law or order of or in the world, then we are speaking about all the things that exist only because there are human persons. In this context the expression natural law means the order of natural persons, natural persons, humans of course. And the grand scheme, the cosmos, the totality of things, but we will not discuss that here. And the discussion of law, laws of nature, laws of man always needs to make at some point a distinction between lawfulness and legality. That is because the origin of the word legality is the Latin lex and that really means a command. And law understood as a law is merely a principle of order and that need not be and usually is not a command. Laws can be discovered, commands are not discovered, they are given in post. Valid law defines a paradigm of order and there are some examples here, axiomatic laws, mathematical laws, but also in ethics. Nothing is better than goodness itself, that is nothing is better than pure goodness, nothing is worse than pure evil, but also and for the scientists here more relevant postulated laws which define a paradigmatic conception of order which unlike an axiomatic law is cannot, can be a gain set, can be contradicted, but not with reasoning or with experiments within the same paradigm. It's like it defines a kind of language to speak about things. An example is Euclid's postulate of parallel lines versus the much later postulates of cursed space. Aristotle's law of motion versus the laws of inertia that launched modern science in the 17th century and finally the postulate of praxeology. Man acts purposefully versus for example the postulate of behaviorism. Now usually postulate of praxeology is called the axiom of praxeology, but that is because it does not look at the pure format of the statement because man acts not, does not act purposefully or for purpose is not a contradiction, a form of contradiction. So it can be posited, but it is, cannot be defended, as Moses said, because every attempt to defend a rejection of man acts for purpose exemplifies, every attempt to refute exemplifies the truth of the action. But purely, logically speaking, it is a postulate, it is not an irrefutable action. And then you have the empirical laws, but we are not going to discuss that. And then the other idea, that law comes from command, and then you have the Lex legal family of concepts where Lex is imposed by public authority, also by contract, so an arbitrary agreement is a legal imposition. And we talk about legal rights and legal obligations, and these are imposed on elected or selected or collected persons. This is always this idea of Lex choice. This is an old distinction between law and legality. If you go back to the digester of Ulpian in the Corpus Eurus Ivelis of the Emperor Justinianus, who was discussed earlier, you find the reason-based or use-conception of law. Justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to every man his due. And these Ulpian continues are the precepts of law to live honorably, to harm no one, to give to each his own. And finally, the science of law is knowledge of divine and human affairs, the science of what is just and what is unjust. And as you can see, if you look at the Latin text, the word Lex does not appear, it's all about use. So this is a particular conception of law, distinct from the following. Also from the digester and from the same author, Ulpian, the sovereign, the precepts is not bound by any laws, because what pleases the sovereign has the force of law. And in both cases, law is a translation of the Lex concept. So this is really another word and another reality, the command conception of law. Now let's return for a moment to praxeology. The general axiom or postulate for praxeology is man acts in pursuit of a goal for a purpose. And the most famous praxeology for the people here, I guess, is the in pursuit of wealth. Economic praxeology is basically the purposeful pursuit of wealth as the goal. There are two, of course, other goals. You could have a praxeology of health. Man seeks health. Certainly modern man is a health seeker. It's a serious business. But also power, fame, holiness, whatever you get, whatever goal you see, you can develop into praxeology. What to do to achieve this goal. And in fact, the first famous praxeology in the modern west, days from the 16th century, sorry, was written by Thomas Hobbes and is a praxeology of power. If you read the Leviathan, it starts with definitions, concepts, and it develops these. There is no empirical study of anything whatsoever. In fact, Hobbes once famously remarked, if I had based my work on experience, it would have been just as worthless as any other empirical work, any other work based on experience, because he did not really believe that people learn much from experience. But it was a very systematic development of ideas, so it certainly fits the model of praxeology. Now, there are always two departments in praxeology. One is team managerial praxeology. This is just the question, we have a goal, how to achieve it. Then you devote all your attention and study to solving the problem. What does a manager have to do in order to achieve his goals effectively and then efficiently? But the manager's perspective does not take account of the outside world. As a manager, you say, my responsibility is to make this thing work. This hotel, this firm, this company, this army battalion, this is what I have to do. It's a very goal-oriented perspective. General praxeology looks beyond the own household, which is to be managed into the outside world and ask which restrictions on managerial decision-making minimize negative external effects, because external effects are likely to create conflicts in the world and conflicts can be all-consuming. They can lead to war and war can really mess things up generally. So avoiding conflicts with other households is not strictly related to the goal of a household, but it is related to the existence of households within a wider world. The question is, minimize negative external effects without impeding positive external effects. Every gathering, even this gathering, there are some rules to prevent negative external effects among the participants without impeding positive exchange discussions and so on. Praxeology of management, here you have the saying, the end justifies the means, and this leads to the managerial attitude. This is the goal. I have to use the means available to achieve it. And it also leads to insights. If this is your goal, then you ought to do such and such. Praxeology of ethics asks, is a managerial department of managerial praxeology, but it does not start with what is your goal, but what ought to be your goal. So it has an explicitly normative approach, and this translates into categorical laws because G ought to be your goal, you ought to do X. So this is normative without the ballast of hypothetical laws. Hypothetical laws say, if this is your goal, then you should do this, but if it's not your goal, okay, that's fine. So it's not binding in any way. Remember the distinction between nature and the world, which I made at the very beginning in order to distinguish areas of law. The distinction was made between nature is that which would exist even if there were no persons, no human persons, and the world comprises everything that exists because there are human persons. And the distinction, the classical distinction in philosophy that tells you what, when you have to deal with a person, if you are a person yourself of course, is that you have to deal with a reason able, a speech able, a logical being, and the general term is a reason, reason is the characteristic of personhood. And it comprises the, or is essentially the ability to master symbols to think, read and reckon, to ask and answer questions, to give, understand and evaluate semantically and pragmatically meaningful descriptions and explanations and reasons as relevant answers to a question. Now symbols are something you do not find in nature, right? It's typically something of the world. And symbols, although they may be represented by physical shapes, they are never the physical shape itself. This came up in the discussion yesterday, I think. Neither the symbolic value, the meaning, nor the pragmatic value, importance of a physical thing can be derived from its shape or any other of its physical properties. That means that you will never get to the world if you think only in terms of physical forces and reactions. And the most important point really, the third point under the heading reason, a material shape becomes a symbol, meaningful symbol only in a linguistic context with other symbols. That is a language with vocabulary and grammar. But since symbol use is so essential to personhood, you can understand that this interdependence of symbols also means interdependence of persons. You cannot become a person on your own, right? Because on your own, you hardly need any symbols. Your symbol use develops in the context of interactions, exchanges with other persons. And in Western theology, you have a residual effect of that in the notion of the God-astrinity. It's not one person, but it is a personal whole made up of three persons. And it is only in the context of the other person that each person of the trinity takes on a meaning. Second aspect, a more visible aspect of personhood is the ability to present yourself, not always elegantly. This is a self presentation, but I can imagine you have better examples of self presentations than this one. Anyway, persons have the ability to speak for themselves and also for other things of course. And it is their ability to speak for other things that makes the world so complex. Because people speak of animal rights, for example. Animals never speak of animal rights. It is something that happens in the world of persons. Buildings are set to have rights, historical monuments and so on. That is because people are interested in them and they use their own language of rights to speak for those such things. Okay, pure personhood, remember that's what philosophy is all about, the purity of the concept. It's also called divine personhood because God is the pure example of personhood. I'm not saying of a person, but personhood in philosophy. Because he's the quality of being perfectly reasonable, unaffected by natural forces. So there's no influence of fire, water, or any of the other elements, earth, soil, atoms. These do not affect divine personhood because it is pure personhood. It is nothing but personhood. And this is related to the ability to reason and to present itself. And this gives us the notion of a value. A value is a quality that is unquestionably better for a person to have than to lack. So if you say illness is a value, you are saying it's better to be ill than healthy. Few people say that. And those who say that say it only in the context where they want to make a point that is not related to health, but say to logic as I did just now. Seriously, nobody calls health a sickness, a value. It is not something that is better for a person. You can wish illnesses on another person, but that is not the same as calling it a value. The absolute values is a value considered in its logical purity. For example, shame, height itself, the beauty itself. Wisdom, another example of an absolute value. And here we consider it as something that cannot be told better than the value itself. Wisdom, pure wisdom, nothing can be better or wiser than pure wisdom itself. Because pure wisdom conceptually is nothing but wisdom. Just as pure love is nothing but love. There are no contaminations. The reason why, for example, when we speak of pure evil, we get into trouble because pure goodness, when it gets corrupted or contaminated, becomes worse. But if pure evil becomes corrupted or contaminated, it gets better. So there is a conceptual logical distinction between good things and evil bad things. I got the classical definition in western theology, specifically western theology, since the Middle Ages is Anselm's notion of God, this idea of God as that better than which nothing can be thought. So the sum of all absolute values and the sum of all divine values. Remember, divum is a Latin noun and it means daylight, basically light. So it's the God of light and the God of beauty that is the center of western theology. Practical reason enters in it, thanks to the explanations of Thomas Aquinas. He argued that the practical reason of the creator, that is the stuff of which eternal law is made. Because the creator's wisdom, that is the practical reason. And the man as participating in the eternal law, that is also a definition of Thomas Aquinas, man participates in the eternal law that makes him a co-creator of the world. So it is the primary function of the human being to be a co-creator of the world. But that means that he has to have practical wisdom, practical reason. And the development of that reason, call it the primacy of practical reason, which is recognized not only in the West but also in other civilizations. In China, for instance, Lao Tzu and Confucius who spoke about the way, the right way, the practical way, the right way to do things. Okay, natural personhood is derived from divine personhood as a sort of contaminated, impure version. And you have there the explanation that I just gave you, Thomas Aquinas, how he gets to the natural law via the participation in the eternal law. Eternal law being the practical reason of the creator, the creator's wisdom. And practical reason seeks for natural persons to transcend human nature, which is humanness in search of humanness. Just before I started talking here, someone said to me, you're talking trouble with society, ah, the trouble with humanity. No, it's a different thing. Society is a particular order in the world, but humanity as humanness, the quality of humanness is different from the quality of society. And one of the reasons why I talk about the problem or the trouble with society is that society is a word that is used all over the place without any specific meaning. Remember Friedrich von Hayek, who called the adjective social a reason world word, because it sucks the meaning out of every noun which it qualifies. And in fact, society is also used as a kind of distraction, because it has a specific meaning, but it also has a very general meaning. Everything is a society, a human society. And in the same way, when people talk about law, they very often mean just a collection of legal orders or legal commands. Law becomes a system of commands. And when you use the word society loosely, in many people get the impression that you are talking about in a loose way about this society and that society and another society. Not about the general notion of human commerce and interaction. And it is in fact an unfortunate consequence of the fact that the medieval thinkers who spoke Latin but lived in a world in which there were practically no societies. There were communities, there were villages, there were households. There were occasional bands of armies and so on, but there were no societies in the Roman sense. But they used the word society, so kietas, the Roman word to talk about the world they lived in, which was not a world marked by social orders. There were communal orders, there were tribes and so on, but not societies in the formal sense. Okay, natural personhood contrasts of course with artificial persons. We are not going to discuss these in detail, but we have a tendency to personify everything. Countries, firms, groups, even objects. The art world and that sort of thing. We personify them, making them look or sound as if they are persons. Now going back specifically to human law, this is just a reminder that in the western languages of law all thinking about law seems to be governed by the logic of three Latin verbs. Regre, legre and urare. The first regre, from which the most famous noun is derived, rex, simply means to make straight to control and it is an expression of force. The idea of positive law, modern positive law is based on somebody has the force to impose order and that is the function of the rex, the action of a rex. Second, legre, the lex group has a different characteristic. We will go into it more in detail later. The last group, the use group, urare means to speak solemnly and relates law as a function of solemn speech, meaningful speech to the use conception of law which I mentioned in connection with Ulbian's definition of what the precepts of law are to live honestly and to harm no one and so on. Okay, regre, to keep it simple and graphical is to govern by force or power and that means that the thing governed, the box below is not necessarily a person, it can be anything but it is treated as a tool to be used for the rex, the master's purpose. And the essential thing is tools have no rights. They are basically to be used as needed and wanted by their master. The second notion, legre, means to govern by institutionalised authority or the authority of an institutionalised power. Now authority simply means the quality of being an author, so a creator if you want. But it depends of course what is created and who creates whether you will recognise it as an authority in the common sense now. To govern by authority of institutionalised power and it is towards institutionalised indicates that we are dealing with an organisational context in which positions are recognised. So it's not just the person speaking giving a command but it is the person speaking and giving a command from within a particular position in an organisation. Obviously when Hans Hoppe speaks here he speaks as the institutionalised power and the authority in this context. His word is law here in the sense of lex. He cannot change the laws of nature or the laws of the world but he can change the laws of these meetings, the legest commands that govern these meetings. The important implication and indication of what is wrong with society is that under this relation rights and obligations attach to positions and not to natural persons. Because all of you who work for a large company for example in large companies as you know people will say I want a promotion because then I will get in a position where I can do such and such and such which I cannot do now and I will earn more or have more perks of office. Your rights and obligations change with the position. You need not change but your position change and that makes all the difference. Urare on the other hand requires natural persons. Positions in an organisation do not speak neither solemnly nor in jokes they do not speak simply. It's only natural persons that have this power, this faculty of solemn speech. And from this ability if used interchangeably arise argumentation and negotiation. So the use-based conception of law is really the conception of law among speakers or potential speakers. But to speak that is the order of law. That makes argumentation ethics such a vital element in the whole construction of thinking about man and the world. Because man is a speaker and all the discussions about the world are among speakers. If there are other conflicts about the world it's usually war and treachery and other fraudulent actions. Now the use-relationship between speakers as you can see in red there is traditionally called free and equal, the free and equal condition of law. I remember my first lecture when I went to law school an assistant professor came to give the introduction and she told us that law is the order imposed by the state on society. That was her definition. It took until the third year before an elderly professor said well actually law is a relationship of freedom between equals. That is where you have to get your idea of order from. It's something you have to work out in your mind. It's not something that you find in the command book by the state. Important point, you rarely exist only between natural persons. So you have a direct connection with the idea of natural law, the order of natural persons and this use conception of law, this speech relation between speakers. Okay, the final move. Unfortunately the world is full of conflicts and these conflicts called interpersonal conflicts. I leave aside interpersonal conflicts. These always involve a plurality of persons who have free access to the same scarce resources which they want to use for diverse purposes on the basis of diverse opinions for diverse goals. So these conflict situations are everywhere. Most of the time they remain latent or potential conflicts but very often they flare up. Somebody said the wrong word or made the wrong movement and the movement became a racket as we heard yesterday. Good, how to solve interpersonal conflicts is one possibility you eliminate scarcity. If you eliminate scarcity then there is no more interpersonal conflict but it has to be total and absolute abundance, total and absolute elimination of scarcity because as long as any scarcity remains people will have the impulse to say I am going to use this for my purpose but if you study Marxism or other avenues to utopia you should study the condition of abundance but it is not something we experience abundance so I am going to skip this. The second solution to the problem of interpersonal conflict is what I call conviviality. Remember conviviality is a condition, a quality like community is equality, like society is equality. And I use the word conviviality where Hayek had used the word catalactic but that is too much of a medical connotation. I think it never caught on. The catalactic order sounds like science fiction or something. Conviviality is a familiar word and it derives from the medieval Latin word convivere to live together. And this is different from the classical word convivi which is a verb meaning to have a festive meal together. But conviviality is a general term and why do I choose it? Because it has this notion of people, natural law but also because the typical convivial relationship is among persons and their personal property intact. There are two contexts in which conviviality is familiar. When you are among friends, you would not think among friends that one of them is going to steal you or to make fraudulent suggestions to you. And at the other end, the wider world. We are, I am, Belgian national living in Turkey. I go out in the street. I have absolutely no problem with the local population and they do not have any problem with me. So there is a basis of mutual respect and of course there may be misunderstandings but they are solved in the spirit of conviviality. This is to me the great discovery of the Middle Ages that they transcended the communal orders, the tribal orders and built up this idea over the boundaries of tribes. People can live in friendship, peace and enjoy life as such. Community is probably the most essential in the sense of the most basic form of solution to the problem of interpersonal scarcity. It does not eliminate personal property but it recognizes that these personal holdings, property holdings are never all inclusive. All ways have commons, the streets, the beaches and people like that. They like not to be stopped, show your papers, show your ticket and so on but community is a way of solving the coexistence of personal property and communal property by requiring a sort of common approach, common consensus on basic values and basic opinions for dealing with the common parts of the world and these things may of course turn into claustrophobic experiences when different communities exist close to one another each with their own ideas of how to deal with the commons of human interaction. Society, the last one and the troublemaker because it is a solution for interpersonal conflict that relies on the elimination of plurality of persons and plurality or diversity of opinions because in society the societal decision makers are the judges of what can be thought and what cannot be thought or said or done or whatever and all the other members of society are pushed into subordinate positions more or less in fact more rather than less in the shape of tools. Now there's all sorts of connotations of society, open societies, democratic societies where the connotations hide the fact that ultimately you are to obey what is being commanded to you. Remember the famous essay by Immanuel Kant on what is the enlightenment? It begins with there to think and it ends with you can criticize all you want but obey. That was the conclusion of this free speech but not if we from the top say what to do. Society, here the summary is a vertical structure with an increasing scarcity of higher positions so this gives the notion of the social elite at the top of the pyramid. It has no internal market societies because they are structured as command entities. You can have markets between societies but not within society so the more society comes to dominate the more it achieves the position of the top order in the world as it is doing today the more these societal effects elimination of markets elimination of free speech of reasonable speech is eliminated. The primitive world had only communities very little transactions between different communities but conviviality within communities was essential because otherwise there would be no possibility to raise children for example. In the Middle Ages the grand transcendence was achieved where order was thought of in terms of a civilization which was basically the same civilization but had very different local communities, language communities even different linguistic, different religious communities varieties of offerings. But in modern times with the rise of the state you had this drive towards socialization socialized man even in mises of all places you find society and socialization are discussed as positive terms the socialized man, socialization giving man a position the human being a position in society that is of course because he uses the word society there in the loose sense where it has no structural properties other than markets but a market is not a society and the people who push for socialization they are now pushing for what is it the transhumanist agenda you have to change human beings so that they can be better fitted into our societal project that is the thing. So to sum up, societies in themselves considered as top orders are lawless, command based orders they are lex based, not use based they are committed to force as the religious factor I use the word religious as signaling for binding and you have different type of religious basically in the west the religion of reason and the religion of force and the religion of reason that uses reason in the sense in which I had it under the discussion of personhood so the lawless speech as the religious factor in the human world and society is always intent on creating a qualitative difference between the governing elite and the subordinate population otherwise if you do not do that the effectiveness of a command based order simply disappears in order to have this is the noble lie about which Plato spoke people have to believe that they are commanded by superior beings they will not obey and that's it I have overstepped my time limit, my apologies thank you