Seven Deadly Sins Grand Cross Size

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Christin Baus

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Jun 30, 2024, 11:06:47 AM6/30/24
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Hans-Hermann Hoppe is one of the most remarkable libertarian scholars of our time. He began as a prize student of Jrgen Habermas, the famous German philosopher and social theorist. Habermas was, and remains to this day, a committed Marxist. He is the leader of the notorious Frankfurt school.

Habermas was very impressed with Hans, and, under the patronage of this eminent Marxist, Hans had every reason to expect a stellar academic career in his native Germany. A problem soon arose, though, one which has had happy results for all those who love liberty. Hans soon came to realize that the leftism and socialism he had grown up with was intellectually barren and morally bankrupt. He discovered on his own the great works of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

Hans Hoppe has ... deduced an anarcho-Lockean rights ethic from self-evident axioms. Not only that: he has demonstrated that, just like the action axiom itself, it is impossible to deny or disagree with the anarcho-Lockean rights ethic without falling immediately into self-contradiction and self-refutation. (Liberty, November 1988)

Throughout A Short History of Man, Hans shows how the lessons of Austrian economics can be used to help us understand history. In doing so, Hans is following the path laid down by his great mentor, Murray Rothbard. Like Murray, Hans is a scholar of near universal interests. He is fully at home in anthropology and sociology, as well as global history, economics, and philosophy.

Drawing on his vast knowledge and Austrian insights, Hans addresses two questions. How did the family and private property originate? How did the Industrial Revolution get started? Readers will see how the development of secure property rights and the free market has been essential to human progress. The question for our times then is: Will these developments continue, to the great benefit of mankind, or will the state be able to thwart them?

Thus the first momentous event in the history of man, the Neolithic Revolution, is reconstructed as a cognitive achievement of the first order and a great progressive step in the evolution of human intelligence. The institution of private land ownership and of the family and the practice of agriculture and animal husbandry is explained as a rational invention, a new and innovative solution to the problem faced by tribal hunters and gatherers of balancing population growth and increasing land scarcity.

In combination, then, with the following studies I hope to make a small contribution to the old tradition of grand social theory and render the long course of human history from its very beginnings to the present age more intelligible.

However, from then on the rise of modern humans has been uninterrupted, spreading all across the globe and eventually displacing all of their archaic relatives. The last Neanderthals, holed up in some caves near Gibraltar, are believed to have become extinct about 25,000 years ago. The last remnants of homo erectus, found on the Indonesian island of Flores, date back about 13,000 years.

However, the life of hunters and gatherers faced a fundamental and ultimately unanswerable challenge. Hunter-gatherer societies led essentially parasitic lives. That is, they did not add anything to the nature-given supply of goods. They only depleted the supply of goods. They did not produce (apart from a few tools) but only consumed. They did not grow and breed but had to wait for nature to regenerate and replenish. At best, what they accomplished was that they did not overhunt or overgather so that the natural regeneration process was not disturbed or even brought to an entire standstill. In any case, what this form of parasitism obviously involved, then, was the inescapable problem of population growth. In order to permit the comfortable life just described, the population density had to remain extremely low. It has been estimated that one square mile of territory was needed to comfortably sustain one to two persons, and in less fertile regions even larger territories were necessary.11 So what was one to do when the population size exceeded these more or less narrow limits?

People could of course try to prevent such population pressure from emerging, and indeed hunter-gatherer societies tried their best in this regard. They induced abortions, they engaged in infanticide, especially female infanticide, and they reduced the number of pregnancies by engaging in long periods of breast-feeding (which, in combination with the low body-fat characteristic of constantly mobile and moving women, reduces female fertility). Yet while this alleviated the problem it did not solve it. The population kept increasing.

The process was essentially always the same: a group invaded some territory, population pressure mounted, some people stayed put, a subgroup moved further on, generation after generation, along the coastline, following rivers and game and avoiding deserts and high mountains. The migration from Africa all the way to Australia may have taken about 4,000 to 5,000 years, and migration to Europe 7,000 years (the oldest artifacts there ascribed to modern humans, found in Bulgaria, date about 43,000 years back) and another 7,000 years to reach western Spain.21 Once broken up, practically no contact existed between the various hunter-gatherer societies. Consequently, although initially closely related to one another through direct kinship relations, these societies formed separated genetic pools and, confronted with different natural environments and as the result of mutations and genetic drift interacting with natural selection, in the course of time they took on distinctly different appearances. By and large, the genetic difference between various societies increased in correlation with the spatial distance between societies and the duration of their separation time.22 Different ethnicities emerged, and later also distinctly different human races. These emerging, genetically based differences concerned matters such as skin color, physical build and strength, resistance to cold temperatures and to various diseases, and tolerance vis--vis certain substances. They also concerned cognitive matters, however. Thus, genetic evidence exists for two significant further developments regarding the size and cognitive powers of the human brain. One such development occurred about 37,000 years ago and affected most of the population in Europe as well as in East Asia (but left very few traces in Africa), and another occurred about 6,000 years ago and affected mostly people in the Middle East and Europe (but had less impact in East Asia and almost none in sub-Saharan Africa).23

About 35,000 years ago, i.e., 15,000 years after the initial exodus from Africa, practically all of Europe, Asia, Australia and, of course, Africa itself had been occupied by our ancestors, the modern humans, and archaic humans: homo neanderthalensis and homo erectus, were on the verge of extinction. About 12,000 years ago, humans had also spread all across the Americas. Apart from the Polynesian islands, then, all land and all of the naturally given supply of earthly (economic) goods: of plants and animals had been taken into human possession; and, given the parasitic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers, humans did not add anything to this land and the nature-given supply of goods but merely reacted to natural changes.

neither cohabitation, nor what precedes it or follows, generates social cooperation and societal modes of life. The animals too join together in mating, but they have not developed social relations. Family life is not merely a product of sexual intercourse. It is by no means natural and necessary that parents and children live together in the way they do in the family. The mating relation need not result in a family organization. The human family is an outcome of thinking, planning, and acting. It is this fact which distinguishes it radically from those animal groups which we call per analogiam animal families.29

Why, for instance, did not each man and each woman, after they had left infancy, hunt or gather alone only to meet for occasional sex? Why did it not occur what has been described as having occurred for groups of humans already on the level of individuals: one person, faced with a strictly limited supply of nature-given goods, breaking away from another in order to avoid conflict until all land was taken into possession and then a war of everyone against everyone else (rather than merely a war of the members of one group against the members of all other groups) breaking out? The answer to this is: because of the recognition that cooperation was more productive than isolated, self-sufficient action. Division of labor and cooperation based on such division of labor increased the productivity of human labor.

There are three reasons for this: First, there exist tasks which exceed the powers of any single man and require instead the combined efforts of several men in order to be successfully executed. Certain animals, for instance, might be too large or too dangerous to be hunted by single individuals but require the cooperative engagement of many. Or there exist tasks which could, in principle, be executed by a single individual but that would take up so much time for an isolated actor that the final result does not appear worth the effort. Only concerted action can accomplish these tasks in a time span sufficiently short in order to deem the task worthwhile. Searching for edible plants or animals, for instance, is fraught with uncertainties. On one day one might stumble across suitable plants or animals quickly, but at another time one might search for them in vain seemingly without end. But if one pools this risk, i.e., if a large number of gatherers or hunters begin their search separately only to call upon each other once anyone of them has turned out to be lucky in his search, then gathering and hunting might be turned into routinely successful endeavors for each participant.

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