FDR Liberated

At 11:28 am, Feb 1st, an FDR member named Allison left a message on Stefan Molyneux’s forum that ended this way:

“….As for me, my experience in this thread has shown me that I need to take a break from the forums. There is a mismatch of perspectives and approaches that is creating an environment that’s just not healthy for me to remain in…”

And with that, one of the most remarkable recent conversations on FreeDomain Radio came to a conclusion. During that conversation, over 160 posts were made in that thread alone. Other threads spun off from it. Tempers flared. FDR True Believers fretted behind the scenes. Members defected–some publicly, some privately. One member got banned.

You might say it was some thread. I say it’s a window.

By the time it was all over, we got a revealing glimpse of the FDR “community.” We saw how the True Believers defend the faith. We saw a backlash against the growing number of uncommitted members who are donating, swelling FDR ranks, but corrupting Molyneux’s pure vision. And a few disturbing little truths about Stefan Molyneux came out into the light. They won’t be in full view for very long. FDR is much like the shore of a beach–each day new waves of threads sweep over the surface, covering the old conversations, slowly pulling them out of sight forever. So let’s just take a look while we can, shall we?

So how did it all get started?

A new member, who chose the name bake, logged on with a question about one of Molyneux’s books. Just eleven days before Allison threw her last card (I’ll explain that in a bit), bake started a thread entitled “Logical flaws in RTR.”

Now, right off the bat, bake was in harm’s way because RTR (Short for Real Time Relationships, The Logic of Love), is a revered book among FDR True Believers–written and self-published by Stefan Molyneux himself. Even Molyneux’s closest followers would acknowledge a minor flaw–perhaps a typo or misspelling–might exist somewhere, but the logic within the book certainly must be right as rain. It just has to be.

The sales literature for RTR states:

“Real Time Relationships” helps you bring the virtue of real honesty into your relationships with your friends, family, colleagues and lovers. Filled with practical examples of how to achieve true intimacy, this book will open your heart to the beauty of love without endless conflicts, resentments and misunderstandings.

Now, someone who knows FDR well might be tempted to stop here and point out that…

• Molyneux encourages FDR members (while they are in the process of being lured away from their families) to ambush a parent with the RTR technique in which you feed back in real time your exact emotions about what the parent is saying instead actually responding to him or her. Of course, such a strange shift in dialogue would make any unsuspecting person frustrated. So, when the hapless parent does respond in frustration, well that–Molyneux tells his acolytes–simply confirms his/her evil nature…
• or that Molyneux has frequently stated his primary use of RTR is end relationships…
• or that many of Molyneux’s most ardent followers–while fully subscribing to the logic of love–tend to live alone and are unable to sustain relationships in their private or work lives…

…but that would simply draw us off track. This story is about bake and Allison.

Bake wasn’t being hypercritical in her comments. In fact, she was highly complimentary of the book’s impact and expressed gratitude to Molyneux for the work. It’s just that the book had a few errors in logic, that’s all. Perhaps a clarifying discussion would pave the way for a few edits, no?

Did bake know just how significant the question was? Certainly, most followers of the thread didn’t realize it.

But Molyneux knew for certain.

What’s a few flaws among friends?

You see, Molyneux has been building the philosophy of FDR for several years. It’s all based on the scientific method, he says. Or sometimes he says it is built from first principles. The point is, Molyneux’s unified view of PhilosophyPoliticsEconomicsPsychologyRelationshipsReligion is an intricate, self-reflexive structure that started with A is A, and was built upon each unassailable truth that followed, brick by logical brick.

That is why I say he is an absolutist and why the Molyneux philosophy must be swallowed whole.

So, do you see why bake’s question might rattle Molyneux? To the rest of us, if someone finds a flaw in our work, it means a little re-thinking and re-editing is necessary–perhaps even major rethinking–but that’s the process through which we learn.

But if Molyneux’s fundamental logic is revealed to be flawed, it would be as if someone just shoved a black hole into the center of his philosophic universe. (If you saw the latest Star Trek movie, you know how pesky that can be.)

As Yeats would say, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…”

It was of small consolation to Molyneux to hear first from bake, and then from other members–even some of his True Believers–that RTR was very useful, despite the logical flaws. Isn’t Molyneux the same man who has thundered for years against works such as the Bible for similar offenses? In fact, because Molyneux interprets a few biblical passages as exhorting Christians to kill unbelievers, etc., to him the entire work is no longer worthy of discussion. Only a fool would expect to find value in it.

That’s why Molyneux believes RTR is more than simply valuable. It is pure. It’s part of his attempt to show the world a new way–a world entirely built on logical principles.

So, to even acknowledge such flaws would collapse everything. The thread started by bake wasn’t simply a discussion. To Molyneux, it was like being forced to walk blindfolded down a street with all the manhole covers removed. One misstep and it’s all gone.

And don’t forget that whole “War against Academia” thing…

As I covered in Part 1 of the Promise and Failure of UPB, Molyneux apparently hates to be forced into explaining his premises. It appears that he views such questions as a personal attack. Against him.

…Right, and, of course if they like you, they’ll let that go and say ‘well, of course, that’s accepted by everyone.’ But if they don’t like you, they’ll say ‘well, you haven’t made that case.’ Right? And then when you try to make that case they’ll say ‘Oh, well, that’s a whole different article and this is too long and you haven’t made that case.’ So, you’re stuff will get bounced, right? Your stuff will get rejected.

Molyneux’s description of his life in academia, a small part of which I excerpted above, suggests his work is not a separate thing from himself. In other words, questioning one of his premises is another way of saying “I don’t like you.”

Molyneux discovers big things. Stuff like a “cure for ethical cancer.” As one can see during Molyneux’s behind-the-scenes rage at Danny Shahar’s scholarly dismemberment of UPB, he does not believe he needs to explain exactly how he got to the cure to some…academician.

And now here was bake, out of nowhere, logging onto FreeDomain Radio to discuss “Logical Flaws in RTR.”

Into the thread…

It all starts casually enough. bake makes a respectful opening statement, mentions her respect for Molyneux and the significant merits of the book. Then she lists specific examples of logic errors that bothered her. Now, one or two years ago on FDR that might be enough for an instant charge of “troll” and subsequent banning. But this is the 2010-kinder-and-gentler FDR. The bigger-tent FDR that’s trying to recruit new donators without immediate pressure to defoo. And there’s no denying that bake’s argument is precise, courteous, and complimentary.

A few people show some interest. One subscriber admits he also noticed some logical flaws. Molyneux himself pops in and asks for clarification. But bake, in her response, asks Molyneux an interesting question: “On a side topic, are you open to editing RTR?”

Did bake know more about the gravity of her opening post than it appears? Because no matter what Molyneux says publicly, the answer to the question she’s asking here must be no. The logic of love is perfect, thank you.

A few gambits from FDR members are attempted on Page 2 of the thread. Traditionally, FDR True Believers who perceive outsiders to be “trolls” won’t try to answer their questions about Molyneux’s philosophy directly, but tease around the edge of the question, misdirect, and hopefully pull the whole conversation off course. One member suggests it’s a language issue. Another asks for all examples to given in syllogisms. And one, of course, gave the quintessential RTR response: “What emotions came up on the first attempt to read the book?”

No one wanted to deal with the actual question. Molyneux began to roll out a bizarre gambit, again not addressing bake’s question but asking instead if bake had bought the book or read the free version.

Allison joins–and now it’s shake ‘n’ bake.

But then, surprisingly, a long-time FDR member named Allison makes her first post in the thread, adding another dimension to bake’s question. Disarmingly, she says “I wish I was formally trained in philosophy, because I don’t feel like I’m capable of expressing my thoughts as clearly as I’d like to, but oh well.”

Allison neglects to mention that–like bake–she has a razor-sharp mind and she came to play.

So what were Allison’s views on RTR?

I was at first disarmed by how brilliantly divisive and decisive the book is, but reading it again some 14 months later, I would agree with what I think bake is saying, that it oversimplifies things, and follows seemingly logical chains that upon further examination aren’t actually logical. Thus, as interesting as the book is in and of itself, the lack of nuance and context prevents it from being entirely applicable to the complexity of real life. Whether there’s any way to take life’s complexities into consideration and still end up with a book that actually says anything, I’m not sure.

Allison’s post continued as she laid out her specific concerns with the logic of RTR. Again, not the conclusions of the book–simply the logical arguments that lead to them.

Whether bake or Allison knew it at the time, they were in for a long slog. First, to address a Molyneux error, one must address him as student-to-mentor, with deep admiration and respect, and frame all questions in a way that they do not appear to be a challenge from one of equal stature, but a humble request for clarification from one seeking enlightenment.

It was this technique that served Danny Shahar well in the early days of trying to make sense of UPB. But I don’t think anyone anticipated a performance like the one that was about to happen.

And there’s another reason that the conversation would be difficult. Whether it was by design or their own natural courtesy, bake and Allison’s language suggested they perceived themselves to be in a joint effort with Molyneux, working together to find the truth about a point of logic. With Molyneux, however, you’re always in a debate. And that’s a little different, because debates aren’t about truth; they’re about winning (or at least appearing so).

Why, what can be more exciting than to be center stage, all eyes on you, manipulating a crowd into believing something that you’re saying solely because of your wit and rhetoric? For Molyneux, not much.

Molyneux loves debating. He was a proud member of the debate team as an undergrad at York University in Toronto. You can find articles about Molyneux in that debate team in the school newspaper. It was there–and perhaps even earlier–that he developed his thirst for winning an argument, for being right, whether he actually believed in his points or not. That’s what debate teams do.

In fact, Conrad, the adminstrator of Liberating Minds, once wrote a brief summary of the ten techniques Molyneux uses to escape his challengers and claim victory. It has nothing to do with finding the truth. Molyneux already knows that. (By the time the bake and Allison thread was over, Conrad had added an eleventh.)

Page 2 of the thread ends with pointed question by Allison to drag the conversation back in focus: ” Stef, I’d love to know what you think about the thoughts that have been put forth in this thread. ”

The game is afoot

But Molyneux was having none of that. By Page 3, he was spinning madly, pushing bake on the number of Molyneux books she had read. Confusingly, Molyneux stated he was doing so because bake had started the thread with questions about “integrity with standards.” (Which she clearly had not.)

The conversation was starting to have an impact rarely seen at FDR. More FDR members began appearing with requests that Molyneux address the issue bake had raised. Even one of Molyneux’s most ardent followers chips in, before having second thoughts about the post and deleting it, leaving behind a single period. Later in the thread, a Philosopher King would do the same.

Calmly, bake and Allison keep the conversation on track. And the chorus of FDR members asking “why don’t you address the topic?” continued to grow.

Page 3 ends with an unexpected surprise. Allison asks the startling question “I was wondering to myself as I went about my evening routine, what was/is your emotional experience of this thread?” That’s a common and, as they say, “curious and empathetic” question to ask at FDR. Exactly the kind of question RTR asks for. But it just sounded wrong.

You see, RTR is something Molyneux teaches. He lectures to his members about it. Somehow it seemed curiously inappropriate for one of his members to actually use it on him, as if she were his…equal.

So, in addition to the thread full of people politely asking Molyneux to explain his logic, one was now asking him to bare his emotional soul about why he wouldn’t.

Backlash and rising tempers

As the thread continues, some Molyneux supporters begin to push back on the questioners in earnest. One says, “I’m sorry, perhaps I’m missing something, but you don’t see accusing a philosopher who values logic of ‘misusing it’ as questioning his integrity?” He asks a leading question about “black and white thinking” that threatens to derail the thread. Another member immediately piles on with another post.

Bake answers them all calmly and then uses a trick that completely protects the thread from any further derailment. She replies, “I’ll answer that in a new thread.” And thereafter, in each attempt by a True Believer to pull the “logic errors” thread off track, bake would open a new thread for the question. Few of those threads went anywhere, since the challenger wasn’t really interested in the question to begin with.

Tempers began to flare. Some were angry that Molyneux’s logic was challenged. But most seemed angry that few genuine attempts had been made to answer bake’s concerns. Finally, one FDR member had had enough with bake’s treatment. He deleted his account, leaving the following message:

I’m seeing a lot of really creepy pseudo-curiosity and passive aggressive character assassination, and its really disappointing and saddening to me. Almost nobody is dealing with the substance of Bake’s arguments.

A while back Stef posted an article which painted Ayn Rand in an unfavourable light, with the a comment along the lines of “it would be nice if people criticized her work instead of her character”.

Actually, you know what? This has upset me to the point that I don’t want to have anything more to do with this discussion board. I actually feel sick to my stomach at the stifling atmosphere, the double standards and the emotional manipulation, not to mention the fogging and subject-changing.

Bake, you’re doing an admirable job, and I think your civility throughout this discussion reflects very well on your character.

I’m going to try to delete my account now, and if I can’t figure that out perhaps a moderator would be so kind as to do so for me.

The first FDR defection had occurred. But more would soon follow.

Once the account was deleted, the original post above was deleted with it. Fortunately, the message survived because another FDR member had preserved it in a quote–so it remains in the thread. Later on, however, we’re going to see some actual tampering of this thread by a site administrator.

At this point, the thread seems to settle into one specific example in the Molyneux book, taken from a mediocre romantic comedy, “The Break-Up,” starring Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn. (In the FDR thread, poor Vince accidentally gets renamed to Vance.) Molyneux uses a scene from the comedy to logically demonstrate that Vince doesn’t respect Jennifer because she has to continually nag him.

Of course, as Allison said much earlier, such black-and-white logic isn’t possible in the real world. There could be a wide variety of reasons why Jennifer feels she needs to nag Vince. Many of the board members, including Molyneux, begin to focus on this one incident and the argument drags on over the next several pages of the thread.

An uncomfortable digression on friends, or lack thereof

Speaking of Vince/Vance and Jennifer, this might be an opportune time to point out something that troubles me.

Quite a few relationship examples in RTR are made-up examples using made-up people. You hardly notice it at first, as Molyneux often writes very well. But writers of similar books quite often use real-life examples to support their theories. Compare RTR to what might be the most well-known relationship book of all time–How to Win Friends and Influence People. (Here’s one link to a .PDF version, but it’s not hard to find other free versions on the Web. Don’t bother with any summaries–read the book.) Dale Carnegie’s book is filled with personal observations of real relationships gathered over many years. While the book is also about selling, its fundamental purpose is to teach readers how to build good relationships, personal or otherwise. I have no doubt Molyneux himself read and utilized the principles of the book during his days selling software solutions.

Although it sounds terribly unkind to say this, it seems unlikely Molyneux himself could produce such examples because he doesn’t seem to have close relationships beyond that of his wife and child. I could be wrong–and I’m trying to be very respectful here–but I don’t remember hearing among any of the 1,500 podcasts or reading in any of the forum posts about Molyneux having weekly poker nights with his college buddies or the dinner parties that the Molyneuxes often throw for their dear friends. There’s no life-long best friend. No other couple that the Molyneuxes share their true private lives with. In fact, the majority of personal relationship matters I’ve heard Molyneux talk about are the difficulties he had developing female relationships prior to his marriage to Christina.

What the Molyneuxes consider to be their “family” is small, since Stefan has defooed the rest of his and Christina has done the same with hers.

During one podcast, he admits that he adopts a jovial personality while he records his podcasts–in other words, he adopts a persona in order to sell. FDR members, even those who believe they have a relationship with him, are relating to that persona. You see, the members of FDR are not his friends quite so much as they are students/customers. Even in the inner circle–where members feel closest to Molyneux–there is a wall.

Because he expects to be paid for his time.

Speaking of those members, many of them–even those who fervently defend RTR–now live separated from their family and former friends. They have trouble connecting to people outside of FDR and complain of troublesome relationships with their co-workers. Some FDR members, when considering moving to another city, will make a post on FDR asking where other members live in the hopes of finding one other person they’ll feel comfortable talking to face-to-face.

And so, for example, you’ll find a member deciding to move to a city the size of Philadelphia–not so much because of the employment, cultural, and lifestyle opportunities there, but because he knows there are three or four people there who can engage in a periodic FDR “meetup.”

Honestly, I don’t want to be cruel. I wish happiness and fulfillment for everyone at FDR. But to discover that in this nearly relationship-free environment one of the most cherished tomes is a book on relationships written by Molyneux is somewhere in the top three or four most intensely paradoxical concepts I’ve ever heard.

Just sayin’.

Too baffling for words (i.e., you don’t know it yet, but there’s a podcast in your future).

The stunning inability (or I suspect refusal) for some of the members to understand that there are many possible answers to the Vince/Vance and Jennifer situation will rage on over the next few pages, but the very first post on Page 5 of the thread is stunning. Molyneux finally replies to Allison’s “how do you feel about this thread” question and this is what he says:

“Thanks for the questions Allison, I really do appreciate it — I am a little baffled, and I’m having a hard time understanding what the actual criticisms are, they have not been made any more clear throughout the thread.”

I’ve written about 3,000 words of this article so far, but everyone does remember that bake pointed out logical errors in RTR and wondered if Molyneux would clarify them, right? Apparently, Molyneux does not.

By Page 6 the “relationships” within the thread begin to crystallize. bake is the calm, courteous one–unfailingly on point with crystal-clear logic and unfailingly patient as she continues to keep the thread focused on The Question No One Will Answer. In many ways, bake has out-Shahar-ed Shahar by taking on a Molyneuvian sacred cow with precisely the right (i.e., unbannable) tone. And people were beginning to listen.

Allison is the self-deprecating FDR member simply seeking enlightenment, but whose questions have the knack of landing on the most revealing logical disconnects–as if she were gently throwing nuclear darts. She responds to Stef’s “bafflement”:

I’ve come up with a way of characterizing your bafflement that is similar to the dilemmas presented in the first post. Let me know if it resonates for you. The question is, why are these criticisms only coming up now, years after the book was published? The dilemma is, either there are logical inconsistencies, in which case, no one has pointed them out to you in all this time, or there aren’t, in which case we’re all incorrect in the posts we’ve made in this thread. From such a perspective, the conclusion that some of your listeners(/readers) are being deceitful is inevitable. It makes it so that questions can’t be asked without someone being called a liar. But again, I think that putting the situation into such black-and-white terms abstracts away complexity that is vital to understanding what is going on. Perhaps people didn’t feel self-confident enough in their understanding of the book/philosophy to bring up any questions they had. And certainly reading other people’s thoughts can spark thoughts of your own. The point I’m making here about how simplifying a situation into a dichotomy might prevent correct understanding of it applies to the examples provided by bake, as well.

That was kind of a big ouchy. “Speaking of relationships, Stef, I’m going to use your own readers’ response to your book to demonstrate why applying your binary, black-and-white thinking (you know, the same thinking you used for UPB that didn’t work there, either) has no relationship to the real world.”

Oh, but wait, there’s one more little thing.

From my understanding of RTR, this entire set of asssumptions and rather serious allegations built on the back of the woman’s actions is exactly the problem. It is useful to understand just how much your actions can communicate to another person, but, having that knowledge, and still allowing that communication to affect your own thoughts and actions without attempting to intervene, escalates the situation unnecessarily. Using RTR, the entire situation might have been defused if the man had stopped and told her about the feelings that arose for him in conjunction with the situation, if they had tried to dig down to truth instead of building up conjectures. However, in my reading of this section, building up a set of assumptions and allegations is deemed as an appropriate response to the woman’s actions. This is directly contradictory to RTR, and could leave the reader seriously confused about the message of the book. I’m scratching my head even now. Am I missing something fundamental here? If so, I’d love it if someone could explain it to me. I have more examples of situations presented in the book that seem to contradict RTR methodology, if those would be helpful.

It’s important to dwell on this for a bit. There’s something that may or may not have been on Allison’s mind when she wrote those words, but she certainly reminded me of it. This is it:

The vast majority of what goes on at FDR is a presumption of what outside parties are thinking. This is yet another synapse-threatening, unexplainable paradox of FDR.

• Get an e-mail from a defooed parent? Molyneux will tell you what they were thinking when they wrote it.
• Is there a paragraph in the letter you don’t understand? He will tell you the hidden manipulation behind it.
• Have a confusing RTR conversation with a parent? (It’s almost guaranteed you will). He will show you how the parent is using guilt to control you.
• Are you sad? Talk to Molyneux and he will link your current feeling to a parental abuse in your childhood and tell you what your parents were thinking when they did it.

Allison has aimed her dart aimed at another problem you don’t immediately notice about RTR. Much of the book may be about curiousity and empathy, but a greater portion of it is spent making assumptions about parents and others.

So yes, it’s paradox time once again. RTR is a cherished book in an environment where curious and empathetic members intentionally cut off communication with friends and families and spend the rest of their lives presuming how those ex-friends and family members think.

Well! We haven’t even seen the best of the thread yet, but I think this is a good spot to break for now.

I’ll leave you to consider Allison’s graceful head shots here and pick this up again next time. (And maybe even explain what I mean by “Allison’s last card!”)

Click below to e-mail or DIGG, etc., this article! As always, I welcome your comments!

I’m gonna trick ya.

But play along, won’t you? Maybe you’ll find it interesting.

Here we go!

For months, I’ve been very interested in the tools Molyneux uses to guide his followers down a path that starts with the typical ambivalence young people feel about their families and ends with total rejection of both families and friends. Molyneux’s own writings, podcasts, and personal encouragement are part of it, to be sure. And there is, of course, Christina’s authority as a “trained psychologist.”

Alice Miller and the abused children of FDR

But if you spend any time on the FDR site, it won’t be long before you hear about the writings of psychologist Alice Miller. Miller began writing books about childhood abuse in 1979. Her central teaching is that childhood abuse is far more pervasive than we admit, the number of behaviors that fall into the “abuse” category are far greater than we know, and our current treatment paradigm for abuse victims can be far more damaging than the original abuse itself.

Heady stuff.

I’m not quite sure what to make of her as a psychologist. I certainly don’t think she’s in the same crackpot camp as some of Molyneux’s other psychology influences, but I get the impression her work has been used to do as much harm as good.

For example, there is a psychology triangulation of sorts going on at FDR. If the subtleties of Molyneux’s absolutist “first principles”-based discarding of your parents are lost on you, or you don’t quite grasp the deep “insight” of Christina’s “it all starts with the family” theories, then perhaps a world-renowned psychologist can be used to convince you that yes, oh yes, you were very badly abused.

The two things that concern me about Miller are her zealotry and her attempt to popularize her ideas. Perhaps the latter is the result of the former–you see, despite the fact that her work has been around for decades, her theories still haven’t made a significant impact on mainstream psychology. In fact, from my limited perspective, she hasn’t seemed to warrant enough attention from psychologists even to refute her theories–she seems to be mostly disregarded.

Perhaps Miller was so overzealous in stating her case–even when she didn’t have true clinical research to back it up–that mainstream psychology became leery of her. So she began writing books for the public. Who knows? I’m just speculating.

Despite all that, it really is too bad Miller hasn’t been given more credit for the awareness she has raised. I’ve come to believe that a great thing happened in the 80s when society began coming to terms with formerly hidden abuse–childhood, spousal, etc. I think Alice Miller’s dogged determination to enlighten everyone is part of the reason why. One cannot question her courage.

But seriously…everybody has been abused?!

Daphne Merkin of the New York Times wrote an informative and compelling review regarding the good-idea-taken-to-extremes tendencies of Miller. The review is entitled If Only Hitler’s Father Had Been Nicer and is an examination of The Truth Will Set You Free, one of Miller’s books.

All of Miller’s popular works fit nicely into the post-Freudian/pop psychology zeitgeist of the 80s when “all families were deemed dysfunctional until proved otherwise,” as Merkin puts it.

Merkin describes some of Miller’s dabbling in psychohistory (incidentally, another concept favored by Molyneux which, as a result of theorists like Lloyd deMause, also frequently veers into crackpot-ism) and Miller’s sometimes overreaching claims, which tend to suggest that nearly everyone is an abuse victim.

Merkin sums up the good and bad of Miller’s work this way:

The pity of it is that we end up dismissing the message along with the messenger. Miller’s excesses–the bombast and imperiousness, the fanatic refusal to make distinctions along a continuum of harmful child-rearing–have served to diminish her perspective to one of easily parodied alarmism.

The problem I have with Miller popularizing her work instead of working within the scientific community is that (in addition to sidestepping true research) she uses marketing to make it sound almost enviable to be an abuse victim. Consider. Her seminal book Drama of the Gifted Child was originally published with the title Prisoners of Childhood.

["Prisoners of Childhood" interactive game: Quickly download a copy of Molyneux's "On Truth" and count the number of times he uses the word "prison" to describe childhood. Stop either when you get to 100 or begin to wonder how many of Molyneux's "original" psychology ideas were lifted from Miller. Then come back here.]

Why did Miller change the title? Simple. Because it sucks to be a prisoner and it’s awesome to be gifted. As one reviewer put it, anyone looking in a bookstore for help with their troubled life would see that new title and say “That’s me! I’m gifted. I have drama!”

Merkin captures that impulse this way:

What self-respecting narcissist of a reader wouldn’t want to be a member of a club predicated on a rarefied sort of victim status, in which underlying depression was warded off by ”increased displays of brilliance”?

The perfect victimhood soufflé

So now the average visitor to FDR–typically, a very bright young person going through the nearly always difficult process of individuating from his/her family–is served a perfect soufflé of Stefan’s theories, his wife’s theories, and the theories of a justifiably famous psychologist. Discovering that you’re the gifted victim and hating your parents for it never felt so…right.

New members are so busy focusing on their own giftedness and the revelation of the true, miserable drama of their own families, they barely have time to notice that all FDR members are being served exactly the same soufflé and every family has committed more or less exactly the same crimes against children.

So, if you are a recently defooed parent and you’re trying to understand out how Alice Miller figures into all this, that’s pretty much it in a nutshell.

In fact, here’s what one parent posted–as she was searching the forum for answers–about the negative impact of this soufflé on her family.

Can anyone tell me about Alice Miller? Her books are being used to make the cult members realize what parents do is always wrong. Early on is when Molyneux gets them to start blaming the parents for their own problems.

That is how he initially gets them away from family and friends. Alice Miller’s books makes you hate your parents…. it is so generally written that it can be applied to anyone that reads it. Someone with problems will find fault in their parents by reading her books. Stop blaming yourself, but blame the parents….. That is the message I get…..

Even when I read her book I started to question my mother, grandmother, just about anybody that raised me….. I am not denying that some have an abusive upbringing and go through a lot during growing up. But us “normal” parents, or those with “normal” parents that try to do the best we/they can, in the best interest of the child, get put down and accused of emotionally abusing our kids….

Yeah…..looking back, I know that my parents tried their best, I felt unloved at times (who doesn’t?) was mad because she ignored me and went to work instead of playing with me (!)….….my mom is not a psychiatrist; she did the best she can. I will not blame her for my problems. I think love for others is helping in that matter. I love my parents, grandparents, with that love I have in me, I can forgive and understand.”

Sound familiar?

Well, if it did, then I succeeded in my attempt to trick you!

You see, the parent who wrote that particular troubled post wasn’t talking about Molyneux at all!

This person was actually talking about a suspected cult leader named Wayne Allen Geis. Where the original poster wrote the name “Geis,” I simply replaced it with “Molyneux.” You’ll find the verbatim quote in this thread on a forum completely unrelated to libertarianism or Molyneux.

Why did I try to trick you? To demonstrate just how easy it is for gurus who may have an ulterier motive to (mis)use Miller’s theories for their own ends. You can see the danger more clearly when you consider how two widely differing “friendly advisors” such as Molyneux and Geis can both use the work of Miller in amazingly similar ways to achieve their desired result (which is always, of course, to convince you that you must separate from your family).

Geis’s and Molyneux’s “communities” have many differences. Geis claims to run an acting school and he uses a method called “The Process” to help his followers “grow” as actors. Since his community has nothing to do with logic, philosophy, and ethics, etc., the thinking is spiritual and a lot fuzzier than you’ll find on FDR.

On the other hand, Geis ends up sleeping with a lot of his victims, which means he’s probably having a lot more fun than Molyneux.

So there’s that.

Cult expert Joe Szimhart looked into Geis’s operation and detailed his findings here. Geis’s essential ploy is this:

Bait: Each one of the students approached Geis for personal instruction in acting, singing, and theater arts.

Switch: Geis quickly maneuvered each one into a therapeutic relationship that included his diagnoses based on the diagnostic manual used by psychiatry. Each one came to believe that it was necessary for Geis to help purge them of all the negative influences in their lives from family, other schools and society. Each one felt compelled to confess or otherwise reveal their innermost feelings, memories, and secrets to him and the group if he so directed. Each one came to believe that Geis had their best interests in mind even if it required total submission and giving more money than they first imagined. A few believed that having sex with Geis would, as he promised, somehow improve their enlightened status as performers.

Different dog. Same fleas.

In the thread I linked to above, you’ll also find a Joe Szimhart comment on how Geis exploits Miller’s work:

As for why Geis or anyone else who lives through malignant narcissim finds Miller’s book useful, it is a way to legitimize selfish needs to feel important. Of course, only the naive and manipulated would think that Gies truly understands Miller’s intent. Geis and JZ* live in a world apart, insulated from peer review and reality testing by grandiosity. Miller earned her reputation among peers in the field of mental health professionals…Miller’s powerfully written book can easily mislead the self-diagnosing reader.

* JZ Knight is a leader of yet another suspected cult.


Do Szimhart’s words have a similar application to Molyneux?

As you’ve seen in this article, I do struggle with my own ambivalence about Alice Miller. Her work is of inestimable value in revealing the tremendous impact a child’s perception of their upbringing can have in their later lives. Still, as one reviewer put it:

‘The Drama of the Gifted Child’ is a powerful book and it is worth reading even after 20 years. It is not a scientific book in the sense that it contains testable findings, it presents a practitioner’s conclusions gained from personal experience. You may call it an informed speculation, or an interim report from ‘the search for the true self’ as it is subtitled.

When Miller’s work is treated as true science by someone trying to self-diagnose, the outcome is unpredictable at best.

When it is rapaciously plundered by self-styled gurus with no clinical training, it can destroy lives.

Want to know what Miller thinks about gurus?

You can and it’s pretty interesting. She wrote a section called “Gurus and Cult Leaders, How They Function” in her book Paths of Life.

I offered the opinion in an earlier post that if FDR is indeed a cult, it is probably not by Molyneux’s design or wishes. Moreover, I suspected that Molyneux (and leaders like him) gain control not by intentional manipulation but as an indirect result of their fervent, unshakeable reverence for their own beliefs. (Surely you must see that the world operates exactly as Molyneux says. How could you not, unless there were something…wrong with you?)

I was unaware that Miller had figured all of this out a decade ago.

In the following passage, Miller describes the internal processes of gurus. It makes me a little uncomfortable, as she starts by referring to the “unconscious manipulation” of parents, an assertion that often takes her over-the-top in her theories. There is an element of truth, however, in that we all unconsciously try to influence each other at one time or another.

But the passage is fruitful because it points out how gurus fall into the same pattern. Does it apply to Molyneux? I’ll leave that to you but, if so, I’m struck by the strange reciprocity at work here here–Miller’s theories on gurus may actually apply to those gurus who use her other theories to control their groups!

The thing that concerns me most about cult groups is the unconscious manipulation that I have described in detail in my work. It is the way in which the repressed and unreflected childhood biographies of parents and therapists influence the lives of children and patients entrusted to their care without anyone involved actually realizing it. At first glance, it may seem as if what goes on in cult and cultlike therapy groups takes place on a diffferent level from the unconscious manipulation of children by their parents. We assume that in the former instance we are in the presence of an intentional, carefully planned, and organized form of manipulation aimed at exploiting the specific predicament of individuals.

In my view, however, this allegedly conscious exploitation can also be traced back to unconscious motives, Terrible as the consequences were, I do not believe, for example, that the two initiates of “feeling therapy” discussed earlier actually set out to establish a totalitarian regime. It was the power they gained over their adherents that made them into gurus. And this is what I have in mind when I refer to the unconscious aspects of manipulation. In the end they themselves became the victims of a process with an inexorable logic of its own, a process they were unaware of because they had never given it any thought.

Thus they sparked off a conflagration they were unable to control, much less extinguish. First, they learned how to reduce people to the emotional state of a helpless child. Once they had achieved that, they also learned how to use unconscious regression to exercise total control over their victims. From then on, what they did seemed to come automatically, in accordance with the child-rearing patterns instilled into them in their own childhood.

Regardless of how you classify FDR, Miller is suggesting (and I believe her) that Molyneux may have been swept up into FreeDomain Radio as much as any of his True Believers. The most ardent first member of the “community” is probably Molyneux himself.

And Alice Miller remains one of his most powerful tools.

Click below to e-mail or DIGG, etc., this article! As always, I welcome your comments!

Random observations, quotes, excerpts, and stuff

Christina’s Web. I can’t stop thinking about Molyneux’s wife. Should I tell my therapist? Anyway, I continually wonder about her migraine-inducing weltanschauung. Consider the following intricate web of beliefs she has used to build her relationships with her husband, profession, employees, and patients.

As noted earlier, Christina and her husband are apparently doing everything they can to purge evidence of her prior involvement with the FreeDomain Radio site. However, he cannot delete from his foundational essays his claims that her singular insight was the intellectual wellspring for his psychology/philosophy connection.

What was her magic insight? She said, “It all starts with the family.”

Now, to me personally, that sounds like something my slightly inebriated Aunt Tizzy might blurt out at a family reunion instead of the psychological foundation of a world-reshaping philosophy. In fact, I’d venture to say that virtually every psychology expert in the world would call her magic insight a gross and somewhat inaccurate oversimplification. But what do I know?

But by pretending that “it all starts with the family” is some kind of insight, Molyneux was able to use his wife’s credibility in his initial essays. Perhaps he was also patronizing her in an attempt to improve their relationship. Maybe not. Who knows? But somewhere in that tangled web of beliefs between the two of them lies the foundation of the anti-parent/anti-family stance of FDR.

So what could make more sense for Christina, the intellectual wellspring for the anti-family psychology of FDR, than starting a…wait for it…family therapy clinic, right? She used to run it out of the Molyneux home but, when her husband decided to take his FDR business full time, she moved it to a new location and decided to grow her practice to bring in more revenue.

Christina then hires an associate who earned a Master’s Degree in Psychology (Christina doesn’t have one of those) by writing a thesis that suggested…drumroll…peer influence may actually have a much greater impact than parents on adolescent development and stuff like personality and behavior!

So there is another interesting web in Christina’s clinic, where apparently it’s a matter of random chance whether you pick Christina behind Door #1, who believes family and religion are the source of all the world’s problems or her employee behind Door #2, who actually belongs to a religion (I verified it) and probably thinks that blaming your parents for everything wrong in your life is preposterous (and maybe a little, um, adolescent). Can you choose wisely, troubled one?

Like I said, migraine-inducing. I wonder what those two talk about at lunch?

Conrad’s Conundrum. Hey–did you ever wonder how and why Liberating Minds got started and why Molyneux hates it so much? Pull up a chair. It’s a good story. Somewhere around 2007, Molyneux began to be more public in his belief that his philosophy was the one-true-road-to-happiness. I think that led to a lot of unrest and argument on his FDR forum among the early members who tended to be more free thinkers. (That sort of thing can’t happen on today’s FDR, where the only dissenters are newbies and they are quickly purged.)

Some of Molyneux’s followers (as you saw in The Promise and Failure of UPB) believe him to be the most important philosopher in the last 6,000 years. But–darn it all–he’s not even the most important philosopher in the Molyneux family!

Distant ancestor William Molyneux, who came up with the relatively obscure question known as Molyneux’s Problem, wins that title. Sorry, Stefan–but I do think there’s a philosophical problem you can claim at least partial ownership for–a so-far unanswerable question I’ll call Conrad’s Conundrum.

During those early years of FDR, a thoughtful member named Conrad asked Molyneux a seriously troubling question. You see, among the well-read FDR members, it is known that Molyneux’s theories are largely derived from Murray Rothbard’s ideas. The new wrinkle Molyneux added was his own peculiar take on the psychology/philosophy connection–you know, the idea that you are completely corrupt if you continue to even associate with your religious or statist parents/family/friends.

So, Conrad wanted to know, if it could be shown that Rothbard associated with his families or religious/statist friends, would that mean Rothbard–the uncredited originator of much of the FDR ancap philosophy–was also corrupt? And what if the same were true for the great Ludwig von Mises himself? Hmm…

Molyneux responded by immediately banning Conrad, of course. (Reminds me of that famous Ring Lardner line: “Shut up,” he explained.) Whether it was because…

• Conrad pointed out an unanswerable logical flaw
• exposed that Molyneux’s best “ideas” aren’t exactly original
• reminded Molyneux that he’d been sidestepping more than a few other flaw-exposing questions
• or simply embarrased Molyneux by reminding him that he has absurdly predicted a total economic system collapse within 5-10 years (even less now!)

…remains to be seen.

It all happens in this short thread, which is one of my all-time favorites. (In just a few short answers, Molyneux exhibits at least #3, #5, and #7 from the list of known Molyneux debating techniques.)

Conrad was asking about more than a point of logic. With one question, he more or less blew up the whole Molyneux philosophic universe, so you can hardly blame Molyneux for the rapid banning. Following that abrupt dismissal, something completely unexpected happened. Instead of slinking away wounded into that good night, as expected, Conrad simply started the rival philosophy forum known as Liberating Minds.

So there you go. It turns out that for Stefan, the least-answerable philosophic problem isn’t ancestor William’s “Molyneux Problem,” but the far more vexing “Conrad’s Conundrum.”

Any takers?

A.C.E.ing out Dr. Vincent J. Felitti. Just as he did with Alice Miller, Molyneux is now exploiting another doctor’s work. This time, it’s Vincent Felitti and the research he’s conducting for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente. It’s called the A.C.E. (Adverse Childhood Events) Study.

The study is a fairly simple but good idea in that it tries to establish scientific parameters for what nearly everyone intuitively knows; i.e., that people with messed-up childhoods can grow up to have messed-up lives. Molyneux presents it to his members as a giddy revelation. Some of his True Believers have taken the short A.C.E. quiz and are beginning to report their own A.C.E. scores. (It’s easy! Get yours at www.acestudy.org!).

The point of Dr. Felitti’s work is to assess the health-care burden of a number of bad things that can happen in childhood. It assesses 10 possible events that have been divided into three categories:

• abuse (physicial, sexual, emotional
• neglect (emotional, physical)
• household dysfunction (mother treated violently, household substance abuse, household mental illness, separation/divorce, someone incarcerated)

I have no problems with the study itself, although there doesn’t seem to be an attempt to quantify the relative danger of each A.C.E., if any. For example, “my brother smoked weed” and “my father raped me” would each get an A.C.E. score of 1. If you had sex with a 22-year-old the day before your 18th birthday, that is an adverse childhood event. Even if the other person was smokin’ hot.

But I suspect most people who view Molyneux’s little (YouTube presentation) don’t notice how he cleverly misuses the report solely to support and lend credibility to own theories. Remember, Molyneux believes that nearly everyone is badly abused by their parents. But the A.C.E. Study is about a wide range of possible Adverse Events, not just abuse! Given the report’s very wide criteria of possible adverse events, it’s no surprise that only a little more than a third of the respondents reported having none.

Now that’s perfectly appropriate in the context of the study, I suppose, but Molyneux completely misinterprets the findings for his own ends. He leads you to believe that every event in the study falls into the category of abuse when, in truth, it does nothing to shore up Molyneux’s claim that nearly everyone is abused (and certainly doesn’t suggest that the only solution for any “virtuous” person is defoo his or her family), nor would the doctors conducting the study ever dream of making such claims.

What I’m talking about here is not the problem of childhood abuse, but Molyneux’s continued flagrant practice of Psychologist Abuse; specifically, borrowing the credibility of others to create the illusion that they support his own unsupportable ideas. Would Dr. Felitti really have granted an interview to Molyneux if he had known his work would be misused to encourage current and prospective new defooers? I don’t think so. So, Vince, if you just googled your name and found this, well, you’re a part of FDR now. Deal with it.

This is your brain on abuse. All I can say is fasten your seat belts. In the YouTube video we were just talking about (here’s the link again) and also in the outstandingly bizarre recent podcast entitled Why We Are Different (FDR 1551), Molyneux pulls out the latest intellectual bauble he’s been playing with–his conjectures about the physiological effects of child abuse; specifically, that all child abuse causes some kind of permanent brain damage. (Depending on the type and severity of the abuse, there may be a bit of truth to that, but stay with me…).

Here’s what he says in that podcast:

01:45…[in the future] where it [child abuse] does occur, there will be simply brain scans, right? And the brain scan of the child will show the effect of the abuse. And I believe the brain scan of the parent or primary abuser, whoever that is will show the effects of being an abuser….I believe that the perpetration of abuse creates brain changes as significant if not more significant than being the receiver or victim of child abuse.

So, if you watched the YouTube video, you probably saw at about 2:31 a CT scan image that Molyneux believes is a “proof” that abuse causes brain damage.

Well now. Let’s just take a look at where that slide came from, shall we?

Molyneux obscures the fact this image came from Dr. Bruce Perry’s study Altered brain development following global neglect in early childhood. Dr. Perry’s study is about neglect. Certainly, neglect and abuse are kissin’ cousins, but they are not exactly the same. Moreover, the subject matter of Dr. Perry’s study and the subject matter of Dr. Felitti’s work are miles apart. Which is probably one of the reasons Molyneux doesn’t want you to know about the origin of that CT scan image.

Specifically, Dr. Perry’s research focused on “globally neglected children,” those suffering from severe malnutrition, very little social contact, etc. Some of them were so badly neglected that they “were raised in cages in dark rooms for the first years of their lives.”

It seems Molyneux is entirely misrepresenting Perry’s work to make his own points. I guess Neuroscientist Abuse is just as acceptable as Psychologist Abuse. In his defense, Molyneux would probably say that while the image is on-screen, he uses the word “neglect,” but he is clearly slipping it in as if it is part of Felitti’s work.

Not convinced, huh?

Then let’s freeze the YouTube image at 2:31 and compare it to the one on the Perry study I linked to. Notice something? That’s right, Molyneux blocked out the labels beneath the two brain scans, the one saying “Normal” on the left and the one saying “Extreme Neglect” on the right!

I guess Molyneux was afraid you’d worry yourself sick trying to understand what, if anything, that slide had to do with the point he was making about abuse. And that kind of thing could cause brain damage. So he just blocked it out so you wouldn’t be confused. Another little thing he overlooked (and blocked out) was the really, really big text beneath the slide that said “All rights for reproduction of the above image are reserved, Bruce Perry, M.D., Ph.D., Baylor College of Medicine.” Maybe there’s a Fair (mis)Use Doctrine I didn’t know about.

So where did we end up on this? Here’s my read. Molyneux (when he’s not going on and on about his own ethics and virtue) is perfectly O.K. with misrepresenting one physician’s work (that he’s using without permission) to aid in the misrepresentation of another physician’s work, all to support his otherwise completely unsupportable theories. There’s something really awesome about all that, in a master-criminal kind of way.


…And this is your brain on philosophy. Any questions? You probably think I’m all through with that Podcast 1551 stuff right? And you would be wrong.

Molyneux says he made the podcast because one of his True Believers asked why are “we” (we, meaning the most ardent FDR members) so different? I’m assuming that means “why are we so amazingly superior to our hateful families and the violent, chaotic, knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers we have to put up with in our daily lives?”

Molyneux’s answer, about those he considers “successful” at FDR, is pitch perfect:

02:45….so the one thing I have noticed that is centrally characteristic of those who are participating in this conversation and particularly those who continue–who don’t hit a plateau and just kind of stop and circle, slowly. is that they have not harmed others. They have not harmed others.

So, once you’ve defooed and tossed in your $500 to become a Philosopher King, you can proudly announce you’ve never harmed anyone. That’s much better than getting absolution as a Catholic, because this is actually retroactive. A few seconds later, Molyneux makes his case that he’s never been a bully (which I guess means we’ve forgotten all about that Conrad’s Conundrum incident.)

Alrighty, then. At least now we have an answer for why some FDR members become True Believers and some do not. If you have joined the FDR forum but haven’t completely given over to defooing and hating your family and whatnot, it is because you have given yourself brain damage from abusing others. Frankly, I’m glad I don’t know you. So, circle on, you harmful bastards.




Whew! January was a busy Quickies! month, wasn’t it? By the way, I’m not actually promising to do these monthly, you know, so don’t get all excited. See you next time.


Click below to e-mail or DIGG, etc., this article! As always, I welcome your comments!

Random observations, quotes, excerpts, and stuff

I hope you’ll forgive me for not mentioning this. You know that little article I wrote about the crazy thinking behind Molyneux’s Philosophy of (un)Forgiveness?

It occurred to me shortly afterwards that with one simple change, Molyneux could have turned it from one of his more destructive podcasts into one of his very best. Do you know what that change is? Instead of “proving” why you should make loved ones who hurt you grovel for your mercy, he should have said “this is what you should do if you hurt someone you love.”

One simple change in focus, and it transforms from a narcissistic exposition on selfishness into a loving exposition on caring for the most important people in your life. (I probably should have saved this post for Valentine’s Day. Whatever.)

He got everything right except the direction. And that is why he got it so terribly wrong and created something so sadly revealing.

The sad little life of Izzy, the symbol. For some time now, Molyneux has been posting countless new photographs of himself with baby Isabella on FDR. Surprising, when you consider that most FDR True Believers condemn the pride their parents showed in them as something that was selfishly motivated, something they were taking credit for. You know, just another example of parental narcissism. (Hey, I just report the facts–don’t blame me if they don’t make sense.)

True Believers have accepted with all their hearts the Molyneux revelation that there aren’t any “really good parents out there.” That is, of course, until Molyneux came along, sired Izzy, and is now blazing the trail of perfect parenthood for all of us.

And so Izzy has become a symbol. To the True Believers, a symbol of what the world might be like if everyone had really good parents. A symbol for their own lost childhoods that became instead the damaged “inner child” they must now carry around inside–the child unforgivably ill-used by their own not-really-good parents. A symbol for the children they hope to bring into the world. A symbol for the future.

Izzy has been exposed to the world enough, so I’ll just gently tiptoe around a reality, a cynical little reality almost obscured by all those symbols. By constantly posting Izzy’s pictures, using her as little more than an advertisement for himself and his own perfect parenthood, using her as part of his promotion of FDR, Molyneux is simply exploiting his poor daughter in a way his True Believer’s parents never even dreamed of.

But hey, good marketing is where you find it, right?

And so it goes.

So, is this “FDR II, THE SEQUEL”? FDR has been through interesting changes over the years…

…the 2006 version when it actually was a community and Molyneux actually wrote the cogent essays he later recorded as podcasts (instead of simply recording barely-focused ramblings off the top of his head and releasing them un-edited as he does today)…

…the 2007 blow-up as Molyneux became bigger-than-FDR, a number of his free-er thinking members departed, his site became his livelihood, and he began granting “Philosopher King” titles at $500 a pop…

…the media attention in 2008 from The Guardian and other journalists that ended the bold and transparent role Molyneux played in separating his followers from their parents (didn’t end the role altogether, of course, just the bold and transparent part)…

..and now the 2009+ refined FDR in which Molyneux refuses to acknowledge (but never repudiate) the foundational philosophy of FDR.

I hate to bring up Scientology (because it sounds like I’m going to use the “c”ult word), but doesn’t it kind of remind you of the way L. Ron Hubbard’s craziest notions are now carefully hidden from normal people’s view until they become deeply integrated into that “community”?

So instead of Scientology, I’ll use a Godfather II analogy. Doesn’t it seem like FDR has suddenly moved to Vegas and is trying to be legit? I’ve already noted that many of the more embarrasing “psychology” documents and podcasts (along with evidence of any involvement of his wife Christina) are being rapidly purged from the site. And now Molyneux has his web radio show where he interviews libertarians of more significance than himself (and who don’t really have a clue who he is) in an attempt to lend their credibility to his.

But his original followers? They’re quickly becoming a minority and maybe an embarrasing one at that. A greater percentage of newer donating FDR members appear to have bought into the myth (for now) that Molyneux advocates defooing only in the most extreme situations, greatly outnumbering the original True Believers–the ones who learned in Molyneux’s early essays that defooing is an essential step for every virtuous AnCap.

You know, the ones who actually built his “community.”

In my view, if you are going to have a philosophy–no matter how crazy–you should live it. And you certainly shouldn’t be afraid to say it out loud. If not, then admit you were wrong. Molyneux has never actually rescinded his absolutist views on the psychology/philosophy connection (I don’t think he can, actually). No, those ideas have simply become the crazy uncle in the attic that no one talks about. (Oops, forgot! This is supposed to be a Godfather II analogy…) They’re the bodies Molyneux left floating in the East River before FDR put on its silk suit and skipped town.

At the risk of appearing to care more about Molyneux’s members than he does…If I’m right and Molyneux is changing the face of FDR to something that appears less crazy, then what of those defooed members–the poor folks on whose backs he built FDR? They’re scattered out there, mostly friendless and unable to socialize with the people around them, believing themselves to be victims of parental abuse, ekeing out some kind of minimum wage and sending in their donations. Will he one day call “All-y all-y in free!” and send them back to their friends and families? Or will he absolve himself of them, wash his hands, and move on?

I wonder what Michael Corleone would do?

I’m probably some kind of genius or something. Several weeks have elapsed between the time I wrote the note directly above this one and now. During that time, FDR completely changed its home page and made everything I wrote above sound almost…prescient. (Of course, I’m the only one who knows that since I’m publishing them both at the same time, but trust me!)

The “Corleones-move-to-Las-Vegas” maneuver is nearly complete. Molyneux continues to take on the air of legitimacy, advertising the Blog Talk Radio interviews he now does with freedom luminaries. They honestly believe he is promoting them and not using them to promote himself, poor dears.

I wonder if he mentions to his interviewees that if their parents believe(d) in government or religion they are victims of child abuse? Or that if they believe in either of those then they are/will be abusers? I’m going to take a stab and guess “no.” I didn’t hear his interview with Dr. Stuart Shankar, Prof. of Philosophy and Psychology at York University, but I wonder if he mentioned to him that he thinks academic philosophers have turned ethics into “a subjective and murky swamp”? Again, probably not.

The new home page tells us that FDR is “The largest and most popular philosophical conversation in the world.” This will probably come as a shock to the freedom-focused folks at Mises.org, Anti-State, Free Talk Live, and elsewhere. Especially because FDR has 7,000 members and they have, well, more.

Maybe Molyneux is counting the number of people who download his podcasts or listen to Blog Talk Radio (but aren’t interested enough in what he’s saying to actually join the “conversation”)?

Maybe he is referring strictly to sites that bill themselves as Philosophy forums. That’s it.

But wait. I just picked a couple sites at random and it turns out that The Philosophy Forums has nearly 27,000 members and the Online Philosophy Club has nearly 36,000. I’m crazy like this but isn’t that also more than FDR’s 7,000? I’m confused now. They promised me there would be no math in blogging.

I’m reluctant to suggest again that FDR’s proud 7,000 are mostly spam accounts but, as I mentioned in last month’s Quickies!, a few thousand of those folks seem to have e-mail addresses like putajackhammerinyourpants@sexpills.ca so I’m just not sure.

You know what I’d say to defooers? I had a chance to once because someone who was thinking about it asked over at Liberating Minds. It was a pretty courageous thing to do, since Molyneux tends to ban members who post on sites he hasn’t approved. (I know, I know…I guess you can only have a Free Domain if you keep your members from being “corrupted” by outside opinions, but that’s for another Quickie!)

The conversation was about a pretty knotty problem–about the feelings and motivations behind a defoo. Defooing is a painfully emotional experience. Blame can get thrown around a lot, along with accusations of insensitivity on either side.

I don’t know if the person actually defooed or is still an FDR member. Anyway, this is what I said (after I edited some unnecessary junk out and deleted the user’s name):

Hi, there!

Welcome! I appreciated your thoughtful post and I hope it is the first of many. I don’t think anyone can really understand the child who leaves his or her family until one understands what a tremendously terrifying and painful step it must have been–a desperate step people take when they believe they have no other choice, when they believe the family has become entirely insensitive to their basic needs.

In fact, I think that having a clear understanding of how everyone is experiencing the family is so important, it’s universal.

In other words, it should exist on both sides.

Unfortunately, people who become associated with FDR are given equally insensitive claims about the hurt their families experience following a defoo. These claims–and most attempts by Molyneux/FDR to extend the defoo–bring the issues no closer to resolution than ignoring the pain of the child before the defoo.

Stefan Molyneux repeatedly–as sweeping generalities–counsels defooers that the family isn’t hurt when they leave. Or if there is pain, it isn’t real or legitimate. Repeatedly, he has used clever phrases such as “you don’t defoo your family, they defoo you.” He characterizes the heart-wrenching and anguished attempts of the family to reach out to their child as simply the wailing and gnashing of teeth from those who have lost their ability to control or humiliate. He counsels defooers to cut off all communications which, not coincidentally, also shields them from seeing first hand what the family is experiencing.

Any attempt by Molyneux to claim he does this on a case-by-case basis is clearly false. In books such as “On Truth,” and many, many podcasts, he makes blanket condemnations of parents and families.

If it is wrong for parents to ask a defooed child “did you set out to hurt your family?” without really understanding what the child has gone through, it is just as wrong for a counselor to consistently claim–”go ahead and leave–your parents don’t understand you anyway and you aren’t going to be hurting them in a way that should matter to anyone.”

Because in summary, that is Molyneux’s opinion and that is his advice.

My question has always been–once the defooed child has made his/her escape, once they’ve established the separate peace they need and deserve for their mental health–what next? If hanging around FDR is the answer, then why do the closest members of Molyneux’s inner circle seem no happier today–and in fact are still posting with their same family complaints–than the day they joined FDR? (In my opinion, the longer they stay, the worse the family complaints actually become!)

Clearly, clearly there are unresolved feelings. For those who have such feelings, why not just say to their families: “I left because I felt I had to. I’m not apologizing for it and I’d be disappointed if you didn’t make an earnest attempt to understand why. However, I do have unresolved feelings. Some of them are anger. Some of them could be love. I’m willing to do the work to see if we can have a family relationship, but only if you are prepared to do the same. If so, then we all need to go into counseling together and resolve these feelings and I need your commitment that you will fully participate. This is the only available, non-negotiable, next step for us–take it or leave it.”

That seems so extraordinarily common-sense to me. Yet, in hundreds of thousands of posts on FDR and in over a thousand podcasts, I’ve never seen it seriously suggested–not once–that troubled families should seek counseling. Only separation.

Why is that, do you suppose?

I wish more FDR members were curious about that one.

Click below to e-mail or DIGG, etc., this article! As always, I welcome your comments!

Random observations, quotes, excerpts, and stuff

 
(I’m going to experiment with putting up short bits without in-depth analyses occasionally–just little observations or notes about FDR. Here’s the first. And maybe the last! We’ll see.)


What families and Humpty Dumpty have in common at FDR. After recording over 1,500 podcasts, Molyneux has never made one on repairing families. Amazingly, his followers still believe his sole goal is not to separate them from theirs.

Curiosity and empathy are one-way streets. One of the most commonly used phrases among FDR believers is “curiosity and empathy.” It’s almost like a mantra. Yet none of those who have defooed have the slightest curiosity or empathy about how their families are doing. When they get letters, e-mails, or calls, instead of being curious or empathetic about their parent’s meaning or motive, they simply turn to their fellow FDR members (and Molyneux) for instant confirmation about their family’s “manipulation” and “corruption.” Maybe it’s just me, but I think it reveals a stunning lack of curiousity to instantly and uncritically classify every family/friend attempt at contact for every FDR member as a “Foo Attack.”

Surprise!–it turns out that the “curiousity and empathy” mantra is simply a code meaning only one thing: Outsiders are to be tested for their curiousity and empathy to FDR members. If they display any, then the conversion process can begin. If they do not, they are illogical, irrational, and disposable. Of course it’s one-way! Who would want to show any curiousity or empathy to the irrational?

The rapidly vanishing Christina. First, all of the “Ask a Therapist” podcasts featuring Molyneux’s therapist wife, Christina, suddenly disappeared from the FDR site.

Then, the line on the site’s home page that formerly read “Topics range from politics to philosophy to psychology to economics to relationships to atheism” (with links to summary pages of Molyneux’s views on each) was altered: specifically, the word psychology and its associated linked page were deleted without explanation.

And now the infamous podcasts–Defooing, Parts 1 & 2 (#451 and #452)–recorded during an autumn hike as Chistina and her husband ridicule an anquished letter from her own parents, have simply vanished.

It appears that all traces of Christina’s involvement with FDR psychology are being rapidly purged from FreeDomain Radio. Does it matter? Well, the differentiating foundation of the FDR philosophy is the psychology/philosophy connection. In Molyneux’s own words, it was a foundation inspired and co-authored by Christina. If there’s no psychology in the theory, there’s no FDR. Not as we know it.

But these days, Molyneux downplays Christina’s involvement while insistently reminding followers that he is not a therapist and his “convos” are not therapy. They just happen to be a conversation between two friends. Except in this particular case, the younger friend has an emotional problem and the older friend always traces the source of that problem back to the younger friend’s parents using the techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy (a service for which he gladly accepts donations).

But that’s only a coincidence–it’s just two friends talkin’.

At any rate, what is going on with Christina and FDR psychology these days?

Hundreds of people are flocking to the FDR Community! Every time you hit the FDR forum page, you see a bunch of new members have joined! The community has over 5,000 members and is growing by leaps and bounds. However, is it my imagination or are most of those names suspiciously weird? I’m probably just jumping to conclusions. I’m certain that lcdtvprice11, samedayloans, christiandating (my favorite!), greenteafatburn, and freeappleiphon are perfectly thoughtful philosophers who just coincidentally picked user names that sound like spam e-mail addresses. I mean, who would neglect to throw the switch on the ol’ user registration spam filter simply so they could claim on their home page that they have “largest and most popular philosophy show on the web”? That’s crazy talk.

The one thing you’ll never hear at a therapist’s office. Molyneux wants his followers to seek therapy, right? Trouble is, by the time they are deeply enough into the FDR mind-set to follow that advice, they fully believe they have grown up as abuse victims. I wonder if any of them have had the courage to begin their therapy sessions this way:

“Hello. I’ve come to see you because I believe I am a victim of parental abuse. I’ve left my parents, of course, but in addition I’ve left everyone else in my family and all of my friends because they are also corrupt. I did this after I became part of an internet group. It’s run by a man and his wife. He has left all his family and friends. Then he helped his wife realize she needed to leave hers. By a strange coincidence, it turns out that both of their parents were abusers and all of their friends and everyone else in their families were also corrupt.

“Following their advice, I listened to a few hundred of their hour-long podcasts back to back. They have a lot more for me to listen to, though! During that experience, I spent a lot of time on the man’s forum and chat room and skype conferences where everyone I talked to helpfully pointed out reasons why I was a victim of abuse and surrounded by corruption.

“Those people, who previously left their families and friends, have now become my new friends. They’ve accepted me unconditionally. Every time I post about my former abuse, they respond with little “hug” icons, so I can tell they really love and empathize with me. They know that all of my bad feelings are a result of my family and corrupt friends. Now I talk exclusively to them on this man’s internet site. We call it a “community.”

“Here are some of the podcasts and books that convinced me I was being abused, so you can see for yourself that I came to my new beliefs entirely on my own. Surely you can see that, right?

“Let’s begin our therapy! Where do you think we should start?”

“Pay no attention to that man behind the diploma!” Molyneux reportedly tells his followers they don’t need college degrees. Fair enough, but…did you notice that Molyneux prominently features his own academic credentials in his own FDR bio? And doesn’t he tend to use his wife’s academic credentials as validation for his own psychology theories? Her certification–made possible by her degree–is the reason she could (a) open a practice and (b) support Molyneux’s FDR venture.

Molyneux recently appears to be fiercely anti-academic. But I wonder there is more to it. Sounds crazy, but it appears as if he believes he has replaced academia, as if “graduating” from FDR (however one defines it) is all you need for a fulfulling life. Judging by his and his wife’s actions, however, they certainly seem to think their degrees are pretty useful.

Is this a little harsh? I don’t know. Someone left this comment on MolyneuxRevealed and it amused me:

If you want to be a philosopher, and you are asking Stefan Molyneux for advice, then it’s probably getting close to being time to find a new dream. As it is, there are more people who want to be philosophers than the market can support. Many of them are really, really good. If you don’t see what’s wrong with Molyneux’s arguments, in spite of widely publicized, rigorous discussions of those problems, then you probably don’t have what it takes to compete with them.

As a (presumably atheist) libertarian interested in studying (presumably political) philosophy, it makes sense to try to go to the University of Arizona to learn from Schmidtz and Gaus, the University of Virginia to learn from Lomasky and Simmons, the University of Wisconsin to learn from Lester Hunt, Tulane University to learn from Eric Mack, Brown University to learn from Jason Brennan, Auburn University to learn from Roderick Long, West Virginia University to learn from Daniel Shapiro, the University of San Diego to learn from Matt Zwolinski, the College of New Jersey to learn from James Stacy Taylor, Ohio University in Athens to learn from Mark LeBar…I could probably go on. The point is, there are MANY options out there. Learning your craft from a self-published web site manager whose primary philosophical audience doesn’t know anything about philosophy should not be one of them.

OK. Maybe that is a little harsh. So let me just add: ouch!

Why don’t people do this more often before they defoo? If you have time and money to spare you might find it very revealing to ask a legitimate, reputable therapist to listen to one of the “therapy” podcasts Molyneux has conducted with a listener and critique Moyneux’s methods. (I did, but thankfully she did it for free!) Here is what you will learn:

Competent therapists always ask open-ended questions. They do not guide patients to a conclusion they have already reached. They never plant. They never create their own connections between your feelings and events and convince you to accept them. They never use the technique of saying obvious truths in the beginning, followed by “Right? Right?” until you fall into the resultant pattern of saying “yes, yes” to everything else they suggest later on. And when you reach the core of what you are trying to understand about your relationships, they never demonize the other party in an attempt to drive you further away.

“And then Tom suddenly defooed….” Those who think that Tom (of the UK Guardian article) suddenly decided on his own to defoo after one podcast “convo” with Molyneux have been misled. It rarely happens that way. Tom–along with the vast majority of FDR members who defooed–was actually conditioned over a number of months, first through indoctrination tools such as Molyneux’s book “On Truth” and the hundreds of podcasts on evil parents and then later through the love-bombing that occurs on the forum, chatroom, twitter, and skype conferences. By the time most FDR members defoo their bewildered families, they have fully accepted a view of themselves as victims of abuse. There is nothing sudden about it and many people have contributed in helping the new member accept this belief.

To sell the truth. What happens when you stop pursuing the truth for its own sake and start selling it? I don’t know. I’m just asking.

In his 2006 podcasts, Molyneux was just a guy with a job he doesn’t like who ALSO had an interest in a wide range of areas related to governance, economics, psychology, truth, and philsophy. A lot of people connected with Molyneux at that time and, from what I gather, had their healthiest relationships with him at or before that time. In my view, his very best essays and podcasts were during that era.

Then, in 2007, he made the decision to have FreeDomain Radio and activities related to it be his main source of income.

So what happens when your focus changes from pursuing the truth for its own sake to packaging and selling the truth for your own livelihood? Well, for starters, the most important thing in the former is “the truth” and the most important thing in the latter is “your livelihood.”

In the former, it is a personal pursuit of something, irrespective of the emotional/financial cost. In the latter, it is a two-way transactional relationship. There must be something in the way the truth is served up–packaged, polished, made more palatable, more enticing, whatever–that makes “your customers” want to pay for it.

So when the direction of FDR changed in 2007, Molyneux was no longer asking people to share the burden as they shared their experiences in their personal quests for the truth. Now he was asking them to support a profit-based enterprise designed to provide he and Christina with financial freedom. They were no longer supporting each other in the quest. They were supporting him.

And it makes me wonder. On that new Web site, what would it mean if people openly challenged the “truth” as Molyneux sees it? Doesn’t that mean they might also be interfering with sales? (Imagine a bunch of people in McDonalds shouting, “This food sucks!”) So wouldn’t that hurt the earning potential of his product? Wouldn’t it make the forum look more attractive and with more apparent value to new customers/members if everyone on the site appeared to be happy and fully on-board with Molyneux’s teaching?

And…so…wouldn’t it make sense for the “greater good” if those dissenting people and their comments just, kind of…went away? Even if some of the things they were saying was just a little bit true, too?

More than that, what if you’re doing something potentially risky, such as telling confused teens and 20-year-olds that they’re sad not because they’re growing up and going through something everyone goes through but because their families are corrupt and they should abandon them permanently? (Even though when they’re 30, they’ll realize it really was that first thing)?

Does it make a moral difference if it’s coming from a guy on a personal journey sharing truth as he’s found it versus a guy who stands to make a profit by how he influences them?

And so there it is–does selling truth for money corrupt? Just asking questions…




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This is where it all begins.

This article will prove to you the essential truth about FreeDomainRadio.

In the shortest possible terms, FDR is based on this:

• People reject anarcho-capitalism for psychological reasons.
• Their psychology is messed up because they were victimized by their parents.
• Nearly all parents are child abusers.

In a nutshell, that’s it. That is what FDR stands for.

As proof, I submit the following little-known essay written by Molyneux. I don’t even need to analyze it since the meaning is crystal clear.

Anyone who still thinks–after reading what follows–that FreeDomain Radio is not about discarding parents and family can only be delusional.

Before Molyneux created the profit-generating enterprise known as FreeDomain Radio, before the pressure from the media and public exposure began forcing him to use wordplay to avoid revealing the truth, he was simply Stefan Molyneux, philosopher.

He had a rock-solid foundational belief–the three points I listed above–which he still maintains today. He wrote essays about it, for example: Are People Just Stupid? In the essay, Molyneux tries to answer the question, “Why on earth are people so blind to the tyrannies that rule them?” By “tyranny,” he means any form of government. Let’s be clear–I’m not criticizing anarcho-capitalism itself; there are too many brilliant arguments in favor of it. I’m focusing on Molyneux’s belief that if you aren’t an anarcho-capitalist, it’s because your parents abused you.

It’s an important essay. It’s Molyneux unplugged. Molyneux unguarded. You don’t have to use any logic or decipher any slippery obfuscation. It’s also important because Molyneux claims in the essay that he and his wife (who runs a family therapy clinic, of all things) believe the same thing. In fact, he says, she partly inspired it.

You can read the whole thing, but the essence is in the excerpt below. All of what is FreeDomain Radio today is built on this belief.

Therapists generally consider that a patient who is terminating a multitude of long-term relationships is acting in an impulsive and self-destructive manner. In particular, breaking off relationships with family members is considered only a last resort, usually reserved for physically abusive parents or spouses. Everything else is supposed to be ‘worked out.’

Of course, quite the opposite is true. Of all the relationships in your life, your relationship with your parents and siblings is by far the most likely to be completely screwed up. Not only that, but you also have absolutely no power to improve these relationships.

Harsh? Not at all. Merely logical.

When raising children, parents have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. Why should children obey them? Because parents are right? Hell no – ask parents why they hold their beliefs, they don’t have a clue. How could they? The last competent philosopher was probably John Locke, over three hundred years ago. The general social stream of ideas is just muck and confusion, designed by evil people to baffle and paralyze any good souls that accidentally emerge from the sick swamps of modern thought.

Average parents can no more reinvent morality from scratch than they can build a Space Shuttle in their backyards. Still, they have to get their children to obey them – how do they do it?

Oh, the usual suspects. Guilt, shame, withdrawal, criticism, bribery, bullying, manipulation – the usual crap that has passed for parenting throughout history. Guilt, shame and bullying always rush to fill the void when logical morality loses favour, because children must be taught, and if no carrots are to be found, sticks will always just have to do.

So face it: your parents were bullies, or weak curriers of favour, or manipulative emotional infants themselves. You have no respect for them, for respect requires courage, and courage requires logical morality. You do not love them, since love demands virtue, and manipulating children into blind obedience is not at all virtuous. There are only a few possible responses to modern parents:

- Contempt
- Indifference
- Boredom
- Hatred
- Empty conformity

These are usually mixed into an over-stimulating frappe of conflicting emotions, leaving family gatherings fraught with tension, alienation, dissociation and emptiness.

You are told to repair things with your parents, but that is an impossible task – a complete waste of time that will also make you crazy. Since they hurt you when you were young, you cannot fix the relationship. To make the point with an extreme example, if you are raped by a man, you cannot cure him of his desire to rape. Maybe someone else can, but you cannot. Since your parents bullied or bribed you into blind obedience, you cannot help them become better people. Maybe someone else can. A therapist perhaps. But not you. You have no hope, since their guilt about how they treated you will always muck up any attempt at honest communication.

And really, it is impossible to forgive someone who has bullied a child. Forgiveness is for repairable events, like being distracted or breaking a vase. A bad childhood cannot be repaired or returned intact. Where restitution is impossible, forgiveness is impossible. Don’t even try.

Does this sound too radical? Do you think it extreme for me to say that almost all parents are horribly bad? Perhaps it is. However, if you look at the state of the world – the general blindness and the slow death of our liberties – the challenge you take on by disagreeing with me is this: if it’s not the parents, what is it?

Either the world is not sick, or parents are. Because, as my wife says, it all starts with the family. If you want to perform the greatest service for political liberty, all you have to do is turf all of your unsatisfying relationships. Parents, siblings, spouse, it doesn’t matter.

Got it? All parents bad. Siblings, spouses. Whatever. Family relationships are bad and can’t be repaired. If you think you love them, you’re sick. They all have to go.

(Extra credit if you noticed the first glimmer of The Philosphy of (un)Forgiveness!)

Since the essay speaks for itself, I’ll leave you with two final thoughts.

Every day, young people come to FreeDomain Radio believing it is “safe haven” to discuss family problems. Tragically so–whether they knew it or not, any young person who has ever called Molyneux to seek objective advice on his or her parents received counseling by a man who sincerely believes anyone’s best solution is to “turf” their family.

Second, I ask you to consider this. Why is it a little-known essay? You can clearly see it is his foundational exposition. So why isn’t it on the front page at FDR? Why isn’t it the first thing you see? Why isn’t every new member told to read the essay before posting? Why is it highly likely that first time you’ve seen or heard of this essay is on here on FDRliberated even though the entire structure of FDR is based upon it?

I’ll leave those questions with you.

Click below to e-mail or DIGG, etc., this article! As always, I welcome your comments!

This is Part 2 of my “Foundation” series–what FreeDomain Radio stands for and why it was built. The previous article, The Foundation of FDR, talked about the essential belief of FDR. This article is about why it was built.

I’ve realized over time that while some outside observers do intuitively understand the purpose of FDR–that it exists to help separate members from their families–few realize how transparent Molyneux has been about stating it.

So, without further preamble, here we go.

Let’s start with the question: Given his growing popularity as explainer of anarcho-capitalist ideas in 2005, why exactly did Molyneux feel the need to create an on-line forum?

Prior to the FreeDomain Radio forum, Molyneux gained some notoriety writing about his philosophies. He had a growing audience of people listening to his FDR podcasts. He had some excellent on-line outlets for his work. In addition, several highly respected on-line forums, such as Mises.org, were already operating. Perhaps it was simply a matter of e-commerce. An on-line presence would make it easier for listeners to provide donations. But that could have been done with a few web pages. It doesn’t explain the comprehensive forum, chatroom, skype conferences, etc. So there must be something else. Something that the other excellent forums that already existed at the time either could not or would not do.

Molyneux’s own words show that FreeDomain Radio was an idea developed by Stefan and his wife, Christina, to pry young adults away from their belief in the assumed virtue of their parents. In Podcast #589 (Cracking the Family), Molyneux explains:

7:42 It was through the suggestions of my wife that I really began to feel that I had something new and unique to offer and, believe it or not, this is all related to this initial question of children of parental obligations and fundamentally the great challenge of how to reach the kiddies, how to reach the children and the challenges of all of this.

Why was this new and unique? In the view of Molyneux and his wife, it is people’s belief in the concept of “family” (and, by extension, religion) that prepares them for subjugation to the state. The genesis of and philosophy behind FreeDomain Radio is that it is specifically designed to target “children” at the most beneficial age, when they are young adults ready to leave home but not yet established in the same “destructive” lifestyles as their parents.

On the surface, that doesn’t seem to be a particularly bad goal. Isn’t destroying the concept of “assumed virtue” simply another way of saying “relationships are voluntary”? It is, as long as we are attacking assumed virtue. But what if the result of this concept that Stefan and Christina developed is a site that challenges the actual virtue of all parents? What if instead of simply prying his members away from a belief, he is literally prying them away from their families?

My thesis is that because Molyneux is an absolutist in his theories about love, virtue, relationships, and family, to him there is no difference between one and the other. That is the problem. And that is what makes FDR and the works Molyneux produces a cause for concern.

This is a crucial distinction (so please forgive me repeating it!). Most of what follows provides the evidence for this point. Molyneux outwardly talks about refusing to accept the inherent virtue of families, a belief that some people may quarrel with but I do not. But all of that is to cover up what I attempted to prove in my first “Foundation” article and will continue to do below–that Molyneux does not believe, practically speaking, in the actual virtue of families. I maintain that it is impossible to read his essays and listen closely to podcasts and conclude otherwise.

The absolute truth

What do I mean when I say “Molyneux is an absolutist”? Molyneux clearly states that all his relationship ideas are derived from “first principles.” As a result, there is no possible room for equivocation. Molyneux has frequently published and written about the “corruption” that occurs from associating with statists or people of faith. Typically, he couches his arguments in very careful rhetoric so that casual readers/listeners don’t immediately connect the dots. But every once in a while he lays it all out. When a new FDR member named Tyler asked if–in Molyneux’s view–he could have a loving relationship with his Christian parents, Molyneux immediately responded with:

I do have a few problems with Christians, since their book – OT and NT – tells them that it is moral to murder me…

So to me, Christians look sort of like the KKK does to a black person, if that makes any sense.

I’m not saying that your parents want to kill me of course, but that’s the club they support…

When Tyler responded that his parents were typical loving parents, Molyneux responded:

…I do apologize once more for being so blunt, but this is a site devoted to rational philosophy and ethics, and I was faced in particular with the following proposition from you:

1. My parents are happy, positive and loving people.

2. My parents are Christians.

3. Christianity is an irrational and superstitious belief system that commands the murder of others.

4. Therefore it is possible to be both happy, positive and loving, and subscribe to an irrational belief system that advocates murder, rape and genocide.

Of course, if your parents do not subscribe to any of the violence and evil in the Bible, then they are not Christians of course — if they do, then they are not moral, as I’m sure you would agree.

It’s nothing personal against your parents, of course, but as a philosopher, it is very important for me to resolve these contradictions in some manner.

My approach has always been that reason = virtue = happiness – if irrationality is placed at the beginning of that equation, I cannot see how you can get virtue and happiness out the other end.

That just didn’t make sense to Tyler, who was close to his parents (even though he didn’t share their beliefs). He continued to press the issue and was quickly banned from FDR.

So, we’re not talking about abusive, demeaning, manipulative parents above. Just ones who happen to believe in religion. Molyneux’s argument against people who believe in the state is the same. They advocate violence against him, therefore there is no way to get virtue and happiness from a relationship with them, either.

Another example. The following passage is his reply to a recent question “Does Stef advocate dissociating with statists and theists?”

I do think that it is important to talk to a statist patiently and with curiosity, and help him to understand that when he wishes to use government to achieve his ends, he is advocating the initiation of force against you.

In the same way, a Christian or Jew or Muslim all worship the morals in a holy book that commands death to unbelievers, promotes slavery and rape and other heinous crimes.

If people are willing to reject the use of violence in dealing with others, I think that is wonderful!

I don’t think that it is particularly honorable to remain ‘friends’ with someone who is unwilling to renounce the use of violence against you, but that is everyone’s decision to make of course…

You have to read this carefully because Molyneux is using slippery rhetoric to throw one by you. Once you examine it, however, the meaning is clear. The “patient and curious” conversation you are supposed to have must end with your friends renouncing religion and the state. You could remain friends with them but then you would be, at minimum, dishonorable in Molyneux’s eyes. When he says above: “If people are willing to reject the use of violence in dealing with others, I think that is wonderful!” He means “if people are willing to reject their beliefs in religion or the state.” If not, then they believe in violence. Against him.

Of course, nearly all of the parents in the world today believe in some kind of state and/or some kind of Higher Power. From the passages above, it is an inescapable conclusion that he believes nearly all parents abuse their children, if not physically, then morally and intellectually.

Well, you don’t even need to conclude that. He spells it all out in his book “On Truth–the Tyranny of Illusion”, where he describes the “virtue” of parents :

The moment you realize that your parents, priests, teachers, politicians-–your elders in general-–only used morality to control you, to subjugate you-–-as a tool of abuse-–your life will never be the same again.

The terrifying fact that your elders knew the power of virtue, but used that power to control, corrupt, bully and exploit you, reveals the genuine sadism that lies at the core of culture-–-it reveals the awful “cult” in culture.

A doctor who fakes his credentials is bad enough-–-how would any sane person judge a doctor who studies the human body not to heal it, but to more effectively cause pain?

A fraud is still better than a sadist.

What can we say, then, about parents and other authority figures who know all there is to know about the power and effectiveness of using moral arguments to control the actions and thoughts of children-–who respect the power of virtue-–and then use that power to destroy any capacity for moral integrity in their children?

As you can see, the frequently expressed notion that FDR members defoo “only abusive parents” is only more slippery wordplay since, by Molyneux’s definition, nearly all of them are. In fact, you can be a parent who finds Molyneux’s insights quite compelling, introduce your son to FreeDomain Radio, appear in an FDR podcast as a Molyneux-certified “good parent” and still be defooed! (That sad story is right here.)

Absolute FDR

Molyneux and his wife look forward to a world unencumbered by bloodthirsty governments, but believe that states will always exist as long as such “abusive” parents do. FDR is the fruit of their ideas on how to help achieve a peaceful, stateless planet–by directly assaulting the idea of family.

The entire Podcast #589 is an explanation of how FDR came to be, who it is targeted to, and what it is supposed to achieve. (On the FDR Web site, the title is listed as “Examining the Family.” If you download it, however, you will see that the original title was “Cracking the Family,” a little less scholarly sounding, but more accurate.) In this passage, Molyneux talks about how hard it is to give up on a belief in the state. In his view, as long as you believe your parents were good, you can’t escape it:

26:26 Obligation to the state is a mere shadow of obligation to the parents. You can take away obligation to the state in a conceptual way, but it’s always going to come back if you are obligated to your parents. Because your parents did a lot more for you than the state did–even mine.

If you get rid of the obligation to the parents, who is going to take an obligation to a state seriousy? Or to a god?

But if you don’t take away the obligation to the parents, those other things, though you may push them back, are going to roll back in like a fog down a hill. Inevitiably. Inexorably.

And that’s the only way I know to inject some air–to widen these cracks. To take a hack at the root–the virtue of parents.

That’s the only way that I know, that hasn’t been tried, that I think is the fundamental…it is the fundamental underpinning of hierarchical or hegemonic, top-down power.

Certainly, opposing the state doesn’t matter. And opposing the state if we’re still obligated to our parents still doesn’t make us a whole lot more free. Our parents our older; people in the state are usually older. “Parents” is not a chosen relationship; the state is not a chosen relationship. Parents do a whole bunch of stuff for you; the state does a whole bunch of stuff for you. It’s all…you can relate this to religion as well…it’s all the same nonsense, but, it really is fundamentally all wrapped up in the assumed virtue of the parents.

And we all know how frightening this is, and how horrifying it is, and how painful it is–to question and act against that assumed virtue. Those who are doing it are magnificent.

Are magnificent!…

…in their courage and in what they’re doing, what they’re actually doing, what they’re actually doing to make the world a more free place.

Ranting about Prison Planet is fun. Doesn’t do a damn thing. Writing articles in Mises.org–fun, interesting, stimulating. Won’t do a damn thing and hasn’t done a damn thing for the past 80 years since Mises first wrote.

But I think–I really do think–that working at the root of the family absolutes, the family corruption, that is the keystone to the archway, that is the lynchpin that will set us free.

(Someone needs to let the folks at Mises.org know that they are failures, so they can delete all that stuff and put up a celebrity gossip site or some other profitable enterprise.)

At any rate, here you see the entire premise. People are simply not going to accept the “truth” of anarcho-capitalism as long as they feel some sense of “obligation” to their parents. And the members of FDR who have given up that assumed virtue are “magnificent.” (He’s talking, of course, about the defooers.) But wait–they’ve done more than give up the notion of the assumed virtue of parents, haven’t they? They’ve completely discarded their entire families and friends. What makes that magnificent, when we’re only talking about concepts and ideals here?

Because in the absence of any ability to love these creatures we call parents–especially when we realize they knowingly used morality to abuse you, that they were genuinely sadistic–there is little other choice but to defoo. The defooers are the ones who have followed Molyneux’s absolute logic all the way home.

When love is reduced to logic, there is no middle ground.

Molyneux has boldly taken on the task of freeing the world from all of its hypocrisy, myths, and ethical quaqmires. In that same podcast, he explains that he wants to share with his listeners the joy he felt from defooing his family, in hopes they can experience it, too:

2:14 I really did wrack my my mind about how to approach this question of freeing the world. Because that’s what I wanted to spend my time doing; that’s what means the most to me. I have experienced both the depths of enslavement within my family and the heights, yay! Almost the giddy heights of freedom that I currently enjoy. And really feeling the difference between the two, and feeling just what a tiny person I was when I was enslaved. Just what a tiny, tiny, tiny person I was when I was enslaved and how that sad that is–for all of us, all of our potential and our intelligence and our creativity and our wonder, and the beauty of the world, the curiosity, the joy. All of it, pounded into a tiny little nugget of a black hole of nothing stored in this invisible core at the heart of emptiness.

And having felt, really, the difference between the two, it’s just a joy I wanted to share.

FDR simply wants to share the joy. Continuing the excerpt from “Cracking the Family” that I used earlier in this article:

7:42 It was through the suggestions of my wife that I really began to feel that I had something new and unique to offer and, believe it or not, this is all related to this initial question of children of parental obligations and fundamentally the great challenge of how to reach the kiddies, how to reach the children and the challenges of all of this.

And this is sort of something that I’ve tried to contribute that I think is sort of new–at least certainly new in terms of the stuff I’ve read. Not just about personal freedom, but I’m trying to slip a javelin into the black, obsidian biosphere of the family. And that is a very, very hard thing to do. That is a real jailbreak. That is a real Houdini trick.

The incredible thing about the family is that it is this absolute obsidian, perfect, diamond-hard biosphere through with almost nothing, almost no idea, almost nothing can pierce.

10:13 It became very clear to me that you cannot slip truth under the door of a family home and have it reach the kids. The parents will always intercept it; the parents will always attack it; the parents will always reject it.

13:48 …99.999% of the time, children live in a truly anarchic society, in a truly lawless society. The parent’s whim is law. And parents can make your life intolerable as a child without lifting a finger–they can withhold food and treats, they can lock you in your room, they can do lots of things that aren’t violent but make life intolerable and unbearable.

14:42 ….and reason and ethics and virtue and philosophy and truth and objectivity and science–you might as well be throwing leaves of grass at a tank.

15:13 …the family is the ultimate WMD.

But to whom should FDR be targeted? With whom do you share the truth that their family is the ultimate WMD? Children? Middle-aged folks? 30-somethings? Molyneux continues:

15:22 And so, I felt, when I was working out the approach to FreeDomain Radio, I felt that I could not speak to the children directly, it’s possible to speak to teenagers I think…

16:44 …and so, how do you do it? How do you do it. How do you break the habits of 100,000 years? How do you break the oldest dictatorship? And really, that’s why there’s been this defooing thing. And this is why–although the hardest thing other than defooing is talking to people about defooing–I think it’s something that, it’s important to do because people don’t even know that they can (laughs). They don’t even know it’s an option.

And, it’s going to be a slow–at least one generation. But, people who have defooed or at least have heard about defooing, they can at least know that their authority as parents is not an absolute.

I think the parents of those who have defooed have kept it even more a guilty secret than those who have defood–it’s a very hard thing to talk about. It’s like saying, “hey, here’s my porn collection, let me spread it out over the dinner table while we’re dining out in this fine restaurant.” It feels sometimes like that to talk about defooing with people.

But the moment that we do talk about defooing with people–yes, of course, there’ll be lots of horrified looks and people simply won’t want to talk to us a lot of times–but, there is something out there, which is that it can happen. And if it can happen, that’s a crack in the family.

That’s the only crack in the biosphere I’ve been can think of. Maybe there are others I’ve never been able to consider but…This defooing is the only way that I know to get a crack in the biosphere, widen this horrible cyst-like abcess of history–the family–and get some air into the biodome, get some leverage, right? Wedge a couple of crowbars through the cracks and see what can’t be worked out from the inside.

(Obviously, this podcast was recorded while FreeDomain Radio was under the radar–before the media articles, before family members began posting on Liberating Minds, and before some parents began to get organized and angry. Hmm…they certainly don’t seem to be acting like they have a guilty secret.)

The Molyneux plan is to stick the crowbar into the family to pry out young adults at the point of individuation. To reveal parent’s corruption to children any younger would be too cruel. To wait until they become established adults like their parents would be too late.

Great. But then there’s the next problem. How does one get young adults to realize the liberating truth that their entire lives have been subjugation to an amoral environment?

The Prying Game

Well, as you’ve seen from the snippet I quoted earlier, you can certainly get the ball rolling with “On Truth–the Tyranny of Illusion.” It is a primary recruitment tool for FDR: 72 pages of proof that your childhood was a prison. Another way is through gentle persuasion in the FDR chatroom. Here is how Molyneux coaches his followers to treat new members who enter the FDR chatroom (from his post “Notes about the chat room…”):

As a given, or as a bare minimum, we can thoroughly expect people who come here to honestly believe the following:
1. Some sort of God exists somewhere
2. The government is necessary for social order
3. The police and the military defend the rights of the citizens
4. Morality is relative
5. Truth is relative
6. Parents, reformers, Christians and so on all have “good intentions”
7. etc etc etc

Now, while we know these positions to be false, I do consider it entirely rude to flatly contradict those people who come to FDR with those positions. Is not their fault that they have been taught by public schools and statist universities; it’s not their fault that all of their irrational ideas have been constantly reinforced by corrupt culture – anymore that it was our fault to be ignorant and incorrect before we discovered the joys of philosophy.

If you want to help people discover the truth, just contradicting their honestly held opinions will not work, and will only drive them away. We need to respect people’s reasoning skills enough — and with good reason I believe — to accept that if we build a case from first principles, step by step, with positivity and good humor, they will at least be open to what we are saying.

Thus, if you do wish to debate ideas with a newcomer, remember that it is not about you, it’s not about you being right, and it is certainly not about you feeling some sort of superiority for having learned or been taught something about philosophy.

It is about effectively exciting other people about the truth. Remember when you first discovered Freedomain Radio, how my passion and excitement or philosophy ignited your desire for the truth…

Think about how much philosophy has brought to your life, the clarity, the certainty, the joy of truth,

Then, dedicate yourself to bringing that same joy to others – not by flatly contradicting them, or lecturing them, or being impatient with them, or feeling “superior” and “wiser,” or rolling your eyes – but by being curious, persistent, and entirely focused on their enjoyment of the conversation.

I have been dropping into the chat window for the last week or so as a guest, just to see how I am treated — I will continue to do that, as a quality control measure. If I am treated with rudeness or abruptness or condescension, I will not be happy, because that completely interferes with and undermines my goals with this site, and what I have dedicated my life to, which is to spread the joy and power off philosophy to as many people as I can before I die.

If I find that people in the chat room are persistently interfering with my goals, I will ask them to take a break From the chat room until they figure out how they can approach people positively.

Thanks so much!

Prying them loose is a matter of slow persuasion. As Molyneux says here, he expects his followers (under threat of banning them from the chatroom) to slowly and carefully convince new members that their parents and others do not have the best intentions (in the same way he did to his followers). And he’ll be watching from the wings to make sure they do.

One of Molyneux’s followers described his ability to convince new members’ of his beliefs as “ninja-like elegance.” The reason that the Tyler thread quoted previously stands out is because it is one in which Molyneux is uncharacteristically blunt, to the point that even some of his followers at the time (some of whom have since left FDR), questioned his tactics. Molyneux was offended at the challenges and, on the 5th page in the thread, declined to participate any further in the conversation.

That “ninja-like elegance” is the slow persuasion of FDR members that can often happen while they are still living at home, among family members who are unaware of their growing involvement with FDR. When the defoo happens, it happens suddenly–sometimes without warning or explanation. But the persuasion has occurred over months.

For example, when the media was introduced to Tom through the UK Guardian, there was a brief flurry of debate whether Tom fled a home of nonstop abuse or if he was persuaded to by Molyneux. Months before Tom defooed, he stated the following in his very first post on FDR:

Since first listening to the FDR podcasts in the summer, I have unearthed a great deal of understanding about my parents. I have recently realised a few clues regarding my current personality and the choices i have made in the past to build up a picture of how i was raised as a child.

Long before the newspaper articles and the famous podcast–the final persuasion–in which Molyneux compared Tom to a “rape victim” and revealed to him that he was no more than “a vessel for his parents to vomit their feelings into,” Tom spent months listening to podcasts and engaging in FDR conversation that encouraged him to carefully sift through his past like an archeologist, until he could link every aspect of his personality that he disdained and every choice he regretted to some parental influence. When Catholics seek absolution, they go to confession. FreeDomainers apparently blame their parents and defoo.

FDR members would claim that Tom was simply “waking up” to his situation.

I think it was all part of the prying game.

And now, a word from reality

Astoundingly….gob-smackingly….this all seems to make sense to Molyneux and his followers. As if FreeDomain Radio invented teenage rebellion and is the sole province where it exists. As if young adults who “crack out” of their families to live their own lives and ideals are as rare as blue diamonds.

Which is, of course, a profoundly ridiculous notion. The process of individuation naturally includes examining the values of one’s parents and deciding which values you want to share and which should be set aside. It’s at the heart of virtually every “coming of age” story I’ve ever read or seen. I think that’s all as it should be, including the difficult internal conflict that happens at the very age Molyneux targets.

The idea that Molyneux promulgates–that all young adults (except the blessed few who share the joy of FreeDomain Radio) are automatons who unquestioningly repeat the lives of their parents is utterly without merit. Challenging parent’s values occupies about 90% of a young adult’s time!

Like nearly everyone, I think some of my parents’ values are dead wrong. There are values I admire. There are things they did raising me that I have vowed never to repeat with any kids I might have. There are even a couple things they did that I’m still really, really pissed about. There are other things I hope I can do nearly as well as they did. I’m satisfied with the relationship I now have with them, despite the fact they “disapprove” of some choices I’ve made.

The reality–the true “guilty secret”–is that despite Molyneux’s grandiose goal, FDR doesn’t create dissatisfaction with parents. It simply capitalizes on it.

A few more concluding observations:

• The biggest blind spot in Molyneux’s logic is he pretends that all of our worldviews crawled out of the primordial swamp along with humanity, and he is the lone heretic. Of course not. Every great idea in the world today began as a heresy. None of them required “Cracking the Family,” including the evil Christianity (which destroyed a few states of its own)–that Molyneux contends against.

  When these “heresies” became “great ideas” that changed states and societies, it was because the ideas captured people’s imaginations and they were delivered by spokespersons who captured people’s attention. Molyneux’s message was not getting out, so he has blamed all of the families around the world. If I were troubleshooting the problem, before I’d blame the world, I’d take a good look at the messenger. Just my opinion.

• Also, if Molyneux wants to bring freedom to the world, as he states in “Cracking the Family,” I haven’t figured out how that is achieved by creating an insular community that cannot associate with the rest of the corrupt world. He started FDR because his truth wasn’t being adopted quickly enough. Personally, I’d guess that not being able to associate with outsiders would tend to slow things up a bit more, wouldn’t it? That whole John Galt thing is a romantic notion that only works in Ayn Rand novels.

  Doubtless there is a podcast that addresses this problem, but I haven’t found it yet.

• Finally, this part of Molyneux’s logic escapes me entirely. His goal is to solve the problem of a lack of people accepting the idea of anarcho-capitalism. As I understand his rationale, it’s something like, “wow, getting this difficult notion across is really hard. How can I make it easier? I know, I’ll start by destroying another notion that is so deeply ingrained that it’s probably part of human DNA. That should be much easier.” What logic would conclude that the best way to achieve a difficult task is select a nearly impossible one as a first step? To me, that’s like saying “I know I can prove that air travel is safe, but first I must learn to levitate.” I’m not nearly as brilliant as Molyneux, but that one completely escapes me.

  (After I initially posted this article, several people pointed out that since Molyneux’s stated notion that there is no “inherent virtue” in families is actually quite supportable, one could argue that Molyneux’s logic stated above does make sense. Getting young adults (or anyone for that matter) to re-examine their families from a voluntary perspective isn’t necessarily impossible and can only be a good thing. But, again, I’m referring to the belief Molyneux keeps carefully hidden–a blanket belief that families are inherently bad. In an FDR podcast that I’ll be discussing in a future article, Molyneux states “Let’s just say that you had a bad family because you, say, have a pulse…” And he means it. If you came from a family, it was a bad one. I don’t think that notion has any merit at all and he has no chance of getting traction on it. If he had simply stayed with the voluntary message, he would have been in safe harbor.)

That’s the purpose of FDR in a nutshell. If it doesn’t make sense, it’s because you weren’t supposed to hear it in a nutshell. These things take time.

The FreeDomain Radio forum is the crowbar designed to pry you away from your false belief that your statist/religious friends and family have good intentions, so that you can more freely embrace anarcho-capitalism. After that, you should literally separate from friends and family, unless of course, you want to live a dishonorable life. After enough time, persuasion, and podcasts, Molyneux hopes you’ll start to think it makes sense after all.

Given the absolutist logic that Molyneux applies to relationships, how could you rationally defend yourself having a loving relationship with people who want you dead?

But you don’t have to answer that now. It’s not like me to pry.

Don’t forget to click below if you feel like e-mailing or DIGGing this article and, as always, I welcome your comments!