Alas, poor QuestEon finds his disorganized mind literally buried under half- and sometimes three-quarters-written drafts for the “scholarly” side FDR Liberated.

He is feeling the pressure to finish at least one of them, even though there is every reason to believe his audience is almost non-existent and his blog little more than a pimple on the ass of the internet.

And suddenly—on top of all that—he feels he must set aside even those efforts long enough to put out another Quickies! even no one is asking for it and the aforementioned non-existent audience wouldn’t care one way or the other.

Let us pause briefly and reflect on this perfectly captured moment in existentialism.

And…off we go!

Today, let’s talk about the NAP (non-aggression principle).

Where would we be without it? Certainly a wide range of anarchocapitalist possibilities presuppose such a thing must exist.

The non-aggression principle is good, good stuff. It’s easy to see how one could easily create an entire world full of peaceful people with just that one idea.

Practically the only thing left to argue about would be what constitutes property. If we can just figure out a way to keep from proactively harming each other, we’re good to go. No wonder Molyneux (along with any libertarian worth his/her salt) mentions the NAP so often.

Why am I going on about all of that? Well, it’s just a little thing I noticed. It may not be anything.

Just a harmless bauble of a thought, really.

When Molyneux is (or at least appears to me to be) encouraging his followers to defoo, it all sounds very NAP. He uses phrases like “you don’t defoo your family; they defoo you.” Or he may describe you as being a ghost to them—a representation of yourself your family created that isn’t truly you. (So why stay at all?)

Molyneux uses quite a lot of rhetoric to convince his followers that they are walking away from a situation in which they barely exist. It’s no big deal and it’s pretty good for your mental health.

But then I listened to an Ask-a-Therapist podcast (FDR 724, Christina’s Resistance). This podcast (one of many that were purged as a result of scrubbing all traces of Christina’s involvement from FDR) was recorded just before Molyneux took on FDR as his full-time, sole source of income. It was a conversation between Molyneux and his wife about her last-minute resistance to the idea. At several points in the podcast, Molyneux mentions what appears to be one of his own “emotional benefits” in defooing.

15:56 …The ultimate vengeance is to not confront people. The ultimate act of revenge for a wise person is to not confront the unwise with their unwisdom.

Christina: Go on.

It’s something that I’ve noticed as a younger brother as well as a son. That the people that I hate are the people that I don’t confront and that’s exactly the opposite of what people experience…

17:50 …And so those I hate, I don’t confront and I leave them to simmer in the living hell of their own false self.

18:43 …And that’s when you know you really hate someone…

Christina: Uh huh. (agreement)

When you really hate someone is when you will not confront them.

See what troubles me? He’s saying that he hates his brother. He hates his parents. He has visited on all of them what he consider to be the ultimate act of vengeance upon them. And the pain they feel from that—the most pain he can imagine inflicting—he pictures as a result of forcing them to simmer “in their own living hell.” It’s almost as if he…likes it, a little. And because he encourages defooers to absolutely cut off all communication, his followers rarely recognize any of this—what must be the most intense pain their parents and family will ever endure.

Like I said, it may not be anything. Just a curious and funny example of a man who demonstrates that passive aggression apparently doesn’t fall under the umbrella of the NAP. When it comes to emotional harm, bring on the hell.

And yet…I wonder why he then characterizes the act in a completely different way when he recommends it to his defooers? Why does he never truthfully tell them that they are simply replicating the ultimate act of hate he showed his own family?

In short, what is defooing to Molyneux? A personal path to mental health? Or simply a way to deal out hate and vengeance?

I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for all of it. But (if you want to toy with the bauble a bit more) I wonder—when someone defoos as a result of Molyneux’s encouragement, who’s getting the biggest emotional benefit?