How to make libertarianism finally work!

Miscellaneous General
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You may be wondering how libertarianism can finally succeed. Well, I found a guy on the Internet who has the incredibly simple answers to difficult and seemingly complex questions like these!

In my view, it is essential that libertarians work to develop and communicate ironclad arguments for the universality and consistency of morality itself. If we take a rational and scientific approach to the challenges of moral theories, we shall start to get real traction in the world of ideas, and elevate ourselves about the yammering hordes of debaters who pound tables and bellow that their opinions are just somehow more correct than everyone else’s.

— Stefan Molyneux, http://freedomain.blogspot.com/2007/01/universal-morality-proposition.html

This guy came out with a book called Universally Preferable Behaviour, in which he claimed to have succeeded at the task. Wouldn’t you know it, his predicted results have already started to come to pass, of course, and we now have real traction in the world of ideas, elevated about (sic) the yammering hordes of debaters.

Now that I’ve intrigued you with his success at predicting what will work to help libertarianism succeed and his ability to “make it happen” in the vernacular of successful software salesmen like him, let me relay to you what the man says about how those of you who aren’t so good at coming up with world-renowned proofs of ethics might help libertarianism:

People can quite easily understand freedom, but the social cost for them to do so would be far too great, so they scorn it and pretend ignorance. As she puts it, if people grasped freedom, what would happen to their relationships? They’d have to break with their families, end their marriages – quit their jobs perhaps. Everything would have to change!

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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. If you can do that, you can speak honestly about freedom.

If you can’t, well, then you have no right to complain about the government. You can’t ask people to give up their illusions about remote political tyrannies if you can’t escape your own domestic tyrants.

— Stefan Molyneux, http://freedomain.blogspot.com/2005/04/are-people-just-stupid.html

So that’s the way to perform the greatest service for political liberty. Turf them. Any questions can be directed to him.

P.S., I’d also like to point out that although several people at his website have, over the years, complained about severe symptoms of depression as they have trouble handling the bosses that they could finally see were evil at their minimum wage jobs after disassociating from everyone who falsely claimed to care about and support them, he’s really very good at effective psychological advice. The bad statistics are because people are so hurt, not because his techniques would miserably fail normal studies of a psychological technique’s effectiveness. Don’t listen to the haters.

I leave you with one of his fellows, a man who also knows what a “true self” is, how your relationships are false, how to give long presentations about the psyche, how to live a good life and have a happy marriage, and how to deflect the criticism of those idiot reporters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML2Oa4Oigvo It reminds me of Mr. Molyneux’s brushes with reporters: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1093993/A-fearful-mother-reveals-The-internet-cult-stole-son.html

Let’s ensure this man continues to remain a prominent speaker at events like Libertopia and that people like Robert Murphy and Jeffrey Tucker continue to befriend him and extol his brilliance so that people interested in libertarianism can Google him and find his great theories lying about on his blog, giving a good impression as to how insightful and caring libertarians are about their fellow humans, and how well he’s regarded by the other libertarians.

The reputation we gain from such a course of action when any statist might take a few days to investigate his brilliant influence in the community and report it as a sign of what libertarianism is truly about…I shudder to think of the great things that will come from that!

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Please acknowledge the fact that you are not spam

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… What the hell?

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Oh, no, I’m not spam.

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Stefan Molyneux:

Destroying Your Statist Arguments

[and family]

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Stefan has a point, in that the nuclear family in the modern era is a toxic waste dump but he is in outer space when it comes to the logic of blaming parents. What happened to parents? Did they all get together and just agree to start being shitty parents? Was there a big “shitty parents convention” a few thousand years ago and we’re all suffering under the self-reinforcing effects of this?

He gets hyperbolic about coercion within the household. It is true that a lot of coercion and emotional bullshit goes on at home. But it is also true that human brains are wired to be “emotional bullshit tolerant”… that is, you were born ready for much of the shit that was going to be thrown at you by your parents, siblings, because this has always been an integral part of human development. Finally, we really can’t decide from the armchair which bits of coercion are dispensable to the benefit of everybody and which must be retained in order to preserve the human species. (In any case, Nature is not going to give us any say in the matter… the natural forces of survival are so overwhelming that no engineering project could hope to provide the slightest resistance to them).

I have not read UPB and never will. Hats off to David Gordon for doing the dirty work. One of the undertones I’ve noticed in Stefan’s work is this “unstated counterfactual world” where children are never slapped or yelled at and everyone grows up to be happy and healthy. I don’t think this is the case at all. I think that Nature designed us to be able to take a few whacks and some tongue-lashings. Other animals do it to their younglings. Of course, the potential intensity of human abuse is much greater than in the rest of the animal kingdom and I think it is this intensification that is the problem.

But Molyneux never investigates the causes of intensification beyond blaming it on State propaganda and a self-reinforcing cycle of past abuse. The fact is that changes in the human environment are primarily responsible: the Agricultural revolution and sedentariness. Life in the ancestral environment was very Rothbardian… children (what we call children) probably frequently left their parents and took shelter with other relatives or members of a tribe at will, particularly as they gained an ability to support themselves in whatever way. As the Agricultural revolution caused humans to settle down in place, this changed with children becoming nearly the property of their parents. This had good effects (rationalization of inter-generational wealth accumulation through the process of inheritance) and it had bad effects (child abuse).

I think that the role of law in mitigating the negative effects of the Agricultural revolution has not been fully appreciated. In the ancestral environment, there was very little need for formal law. Just like you don’t need an instruction manual on how to run or how to throw a rock, you didn’t need any formal instruction to be able to follow the rules of ancestral cultures. Being human was all the instruction you needed. But as our environment has changed, the gap between requisite skills and norms and our inbuilt capacity to exhibit them has widened. In other words, culture plays a bigger role in preparing the individual to be productive and harmonious.

The advent of State intrusion into family law has marked a sharp turn into the abyss. Cultural norms regarding family practices were never the model of moral rationality since the Agricultural revolution but they have never been more disconnected from the actual needs of families than in the modern era. The sole purpose of family law courts is social engineering at the family unit level - setting what sorts of marital and extra-marital relationships are permitted or prohibited, as well as imposing statutory whim on monetary and contractual agreements arrived at through voluntary means.

And the child protection bureaucracies wield the Hammer of God. Nobody fucks with the child protection services because, well, they’re protecting our children. The combined might of judges, politicians and lobbies - let alone individual parents - cannot withstand the determined agenda of a child protection agency. So you have disinterested bureaucrats barging into houses, determining that child neglect or abuse is occurring, whisking the children out of the hands of the two people on earth who - on the grounds of biology and simple probability - are the two safest people to be caring for the children, and displacing them into the hands of strangers who are more dangerous than the population average due to selection effects (pedophiles and child abusers are attracted to foster parenting because it is a safe, legal way to hurt children in an environment where the children have literally no legal recourse). Pure insanity.

If you want to talk about child abuse, let’s talk about the CPS agencies. Let’s talk about family law judges. Sick fucks, one and all. Let’s talk about the juvenile court system. Let’s talk about government schools. Let’s talk about housing projects and other pet social engineering projects that herd poor families around like so many cattle, putting their children through the meat-grinder of “unintended consequences.” Let’s talk about State religions (yep, America is not the world) and even the de facto religious orthodoxy that is encoded in much of our statutory and regulatory law. Let’s talk about the unspoken invasion of the child-related agencies and schools by religious organizations (I’m looking at you, Vatican). Let’s talk about the human traficking that goes on with winks, nods and greased palms all around the world.

The family - the biological relatives of a child - is the first line of defense against a brutal world and modern jurisprudence has turned this obvious fact so far on its head that we can have a buffoon writing a book called “It Takes a Village” to widespread applause. While the “Deliverance” model of child-rearing is obviously dysfunctional, modern families do not suffer from a lack of communalization of a child’s welfare. Social Security and the “Retire to Boca Raton and spend your child’s inheritance before you die” culture have seen to that. We have all the negatives of the Agricultural revolution with none of its positives.

Before about 150 years ago, all matters of family were handled through religious and extended-family arrangements. The threat of disinheritance was wielded by the family patriarch to maintain the House law and clerics - who probably knew all the disputants in a family argument by name - handled all the myriad other problems that can arise by applying plain old wisdom to the matter at hand, even if dressed in the garb of religious language. Finally, peer pressure played a massive role, as well. The role of prudishness is misunderstood nowadays. It is a glue that binds people together by the non-violent force of the fear of shame.

In summary: What needs to change is the law. Morality also needs to change but morality is in a circular relationship with the law. Morality is a matter of individual action. Change yourself and you will change the fortunes of your family and your children from here on out. There is no collective action problem here. But law is different. We need to get family law out of the State’s courts as soon as possible and back into the hands of voluntary mediators/arbitrators, clerics, and extended-family and we need to pull up the Nazistic, social-engineering, child bureacracies by the root. People need to go back to figuring out how to get along with each other on the basis of ordinary decency. “I can sue you” or “I can put a restraining order on you” or “I’ll divorce you” or “I’ll call the cops and say you hit me”… this is 99+% of the problems with the modern family.

Clayton -

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Molyneux is on my radar. I saw him speak at Libertopia and must say he a brilliant speaker, witty and fresh and understand the issues on a deep philosophical level and is able to present in humorous and penetrating ways, even extemporaneously.

He’s a perfect spokesman for libertarianism from what I’ve seen so far, and is a full time libertarian educator now, speaking on on Freedomain Radio and making a living off his books and the like.

His books can be found/bought here, digital versions free for download. The book referenced in the OP is there as well.

The OP is absolutely right that the war is primarily moral in character. It is the moral argument that primarily draws adherents into the socialist camp, for they are convinced that socialism’s moral principles are correct and that capitalism must be immoral.

However they are led to conclude this with a couple bad premises, and by that are led into a lifetime of opposing freedom in favor of impossible egalitarianism and the like.

Rothbard characterized old classical libertarianism as fundamentally hopeful and progressive. We were the original progressives, looking forward to a future of hope and prosperity. For a few reasons, the old libertarians lost that, and that mantle was taken up by the socialists.

We’ve got to recapture that vision of hope and progress, combine it with our moral clarity on rights and property. The ideological war can only be fought on moral grounds. Cede the moral realm and you cede the fight.

In that sense, I think Molyneux’s effort a good one, just from the description of it. It was perhaps Rand that kicked off the moral fight in modern times, Rothbard and others continued in that vein, and we’ve made traction ever since.

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Hmm, I have to say I lean towards agreeing with you just offhand.

I think the roots of statism are actually contained in the line between aggression and defensive coercion. People blur that line in their own defense and become tyrants in their own defense, going much further than is needed to stop another’s aggression and ultimately instituting aggression in the name of defensive-coercion. I call that line the def-off line, for the point at which defensive-coercion moves into being offensive-coercion, or aggression.

That’s not at all unique to families…

Is his family-centered thesis the point of UPB? Hmm.

Yeah, tend to agree. I wasn’t spanked but a few times as a kid, but looking back they weren’t unreasonable.

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I was disciplined at a level that would shock most people but I came through it without major emotional dysfunctions. I’m not saying I’m a representative sample, merely that this idea that if a kid gets hit or yelled at once he’s doomed to emotional dysfunction, is ridiculous. We see in nature that animal parents apply mild physical coercion and punishment (e.g. a mother dog nipping her puppies’ ears when they bite while suckling). Humans, in this regard, were no different in the ancestral environment. Of course, both animal and human children in the ancestral environment are essentially Rothbardian… they leave whenever they don’t want to be around a parent and nobody does anything about it.

Oh, I forgot one of the fastest growing forms of child abuse: drugs. They’re pumping children full of these psychotropic drugs and this is a depraved act of violence. Compare the reaction of the man on the street to: (a) “date rape drug” and (b) “Ritalin”. In the former case, his face will wrinkle up in horror and disgust. “How awful that someone could forcibly drug someone without their consent!” In the latter case, his face will go somber and devout, “Yes, how good it is that we have modern tools to help children cope with emotional maladjustments and psychological problems like Attention-Deficit Disorder.” But, logically, what is the difference? Administering Ritalin to a small child is no different than slipping date-rape drug into a woman’s drink. The child cannot possibly consent to what is being done to him. He is being drugged without consent. And you can’t compare it to chemo or some other life-saving technique because the child can consent to “living”… he can’t consent to being drugged for a “disease” that he himself does not even believe he has. Thomas Szasz FTW.

Clayton -

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“How to make libertarianism finally work”

as if that is possible. perhaps some critical thinking is in order.

“How to sell the most libertarian ideas in a world where the idea most sold prevails.”

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Clayton,

In my life I have always been struck by two things to do with personal relationships: the horror of what people often to do to themselves, and the horror of what people often do to one another, and I have to say that I agree with Molyneux to a fair extent. I’ve never seen something which will make or break an individual, as it were, than their family life and childhood… And I’m saying this as someone who had a really wonderful childhood (no sarcasm)

Also for whatever it’s worth I’ve noticed a very distinct tendency for people with better upbringings to be more libertarian… This could totally just be a coincidence though, because it is in no way universal.

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That’s a common misconception of Stefan’s work. In fact, people who say ugly things like that will usually start to say that he’s some kind of cult leader. I’ve seen it time and time again.

If you watch a great video on how cults work (YouTube video zxJyfqeaKU8), you’ll see that he only does about 80% of that (even if you go past the outer layers of the “onion” to see what happens to people who get much more involved with Freedomain Radio), which shows that he’s not a real cult leader.

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So Molyneux is only 80% of a cult leader? Honestly, I have no idea why you would bring up cults. It only makes Molyneux look worse…lol

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Lol.

I intuitively agree with Molyneux on child abuse, and mostly the idea that insecure relationships with parents, authority figures, and peers (which often take the place of authority figures in school, unfortunately) more or less leads to a degredation of self-esteem and rational capacities. This may or may not be exactly what Molyneux posits, and my claim isn’t necessarily scientific, but on an empirical level, I’ve come to think that child abuse generally has a massive impact on self-esteem, and that low self-esteem can lead one to live irrational, self-degredating lives.

In my own case, I don’t think I ever realized how truly growing up in a single-parent family from brith affected me until I got into my teens, where I had a lot of trouble with anxiety in many areas of life that I know look back at, and wonder if a lack of a father figure (and generally a bad relationship with him in general) may have influenced how I delt with controversy.

That said, it was also a blessing to be with my mom on her own, because she was a great parent and allowed me absolute freedom to come to conclusions on my own. She could not discipline me like a father, simply because it was not possible for her at times, and I think this allowed me a path of self-learning, which may have been difficult in comparison to many teens, but which left me with an open-mind, a ton of self-awareness…

And anarchy!! Woo!! Go capitalism ftw!

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My point isn’t that abuse doesn’t matter but that Molyneux has misdiagnosed it. In fact, he hasn’t diagnosed it at all, he’s given a magical explanation that it’s a self-reinforcing problem that started a long time ago (for no known reason) and has been raging, unabated, ever since. Abuse doutbless plays a role in social dysfunction of every type. But Molyneux indicts “the family” and “parents” when these are the very things that Nature has designated as children’s first line of defense. Tearing up and rewriting the family is the domain of every tyrant. Saying “family” is the problem is a lot like saying DNA is the problem. Even if it could be true, it wouldn’t matter. We’re stuck with it by virtue of what we are.

I think there is a positive correlation with socioeconomic status and libertarian social values (as distinct from libertarian political values). In other words, I think it is the poor and lower-middle-class who are mostly afflicted with feelings of a false duty to self-sacrifice. And this is the foundation upon which the anti-libertarian social order is built. 80+% of the population can be buffaloed into believing that they ought to give up some percentage of their income if they work, that they must follow the dictates of other human beings when properly arrayed in ceremony and floral language, that they need to be prepared to give their lives “in defense of freedom”, and so on. And this is a purely moral conquest - people will still try to “cheat” the system but they sincerely feel guilty for doing so and that is the statist meme in action.

The upper middle class and the wealthy, on the other hand, are less deluded. They basically “get it” that they’re being bilked by their sociopolitical superiors and that the whole thing is a pyramid all the way up. The solution? “If you can’t lick 'em, join 'em”. They seek to join in the bilking of the 80%. These are the ambitious bourgeoise, the ones who see “promotion” and “climbing the social ladder” as their entire purpose in life. So, as far as their “internal” morality, they are libertarian… they understand they have no right to take from others and nobody has any right to take from them. But as far as their behavior goes, they are anti-libertarian because that’s how you move up. I suspect this describes the vast majority of politicians.

Clayton -

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Dude, nowhere does Molyneux say family in itself is the problem; he says that abusive relationships within the family are the problem, and that one should walk away from them, or at least not feel bounded to abusive relationships based on the fact that these people may be family.

It’s been a while since I followed Molyneux on this topic, but it’s even obvious to me that you are confused about his actual claims in more than once instance. I guess this should be expected since you made it very clear you have very little interest in hearing what he has to say.

I think you perhaps are making valid points, but it’s obvious they are all over the place, as opposed to in context of what Molyneux is actually saying.

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Jumping in here, I think Molyneux’s argument can be refined. As I see it, the problem isn’t with the family (i.e. kinship) per se - the problem is with the notion that parents own their offspring. I’m deliberately using the term “offspring” instead of “children” because I think saying “parents own their children” can readily imply in the minds of others that parents’ offspring will own themselves once they become adults. The notion that parents own their offspring is meant to convey that there’s no necessary point at which that ownership must disappear. In the extreme, a single person could be considered to own all of his living descendants, no matter how many generations there are. Furthermore, I think the notion of parents owning their offspring was the origin of the state.

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I think it’s fairly clear that the point of the thread isn’t to make Molyneux look good and raise questions about well known libertarians associating with him and his ideas.

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Exactly! Molyneux is quite clear that not all parents are worthy of being considered collateral damage by deFOOing them, to put a few euphemisms together to make the idea easier to take.

However, a lot of libertarians have a bland misconception. They think, if you can believe this, that if people merely understood the principles of liberty, they’d be competent enough to enact them and live them. This couldn’t be further from the truth! Sure, Stefan sees that you need to put together YouTube videos and Libertopia presentations and so on to get the intellectual ideas out there, so he does that. But that’s not the most helpful thing at Freedomain Radio.

The most helpful thing is when someone will come in and agree with Stefan that really abusive parents should be left behind but think that they can determine for themselves whether their parents are worthy of this or not. No! Stefan is quite an authority on the matter to whom we should defer, as he’s been to therapy for a few years where he journalled a lot and thus he can validly say that he’s one of the few people alive who’s dealt with their trauma! He has spent countless hours showing people that their impressions of their families are completely wrong due to psychological trauma that removes their ability to figure things out in significant ways. How can you expect such an incapacitated person to make valid decisions even with the best libertarian philosophy?

That is why we’re lucky to have such a man in libertarianism! Unlike most of us, he can see clearly now, the trauma is gone. He can see all obstacles in our way. Gone are the dark clouds that held us back. It’s going to be a bright, bright, bright, bright sunshiny day!

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LOL…yup.

I came across this website which documents some of the rather unsavory aspects of Molyneux’s organization, eye-opening to say the least.

Especially this, and this.