I’ve been watching a number of Stefan Molyneux videos. He seems very intelligent, very nice and very devoted to philosophy. I know that he disapproves of Ron Paul, which upset many libertarians, but he makes great points about the state.
Then I ran across this video in YouTube and this site on Google, and I’ve been doing a bit more research to find out if, in fact, Mr. Molyneux and his wife are promoting a cult.
Any ideas or insight?
P.S. I tried to join FreeDomanRadio a couple days back. They immediately sent me an email asking me why I wanted to join (apparently standard practice to avoid trolls). I wrote back that I’d learned of Molyneux on Mises.org and that I found his philosophy interesting and wanted to learn more. They have not written back.
Could the organization dislike the Mises community for some reason? I was rather looking forward to checking out that forum.
I don’t see how what he does qualifies as a cult.
I have seen a few youtube videos he has posted.
Molyneux puts forward the argument about why he believes participating in the political structure as way to institute libertarian ideology is not the best way to go about the problem. In discourse people have asked him what he thinks of Ron Paul and the conversation generally goes in the direction of explaining the above.
I know nothing about the cult stuff. I am skeptical of the claim due to the fact that people having problems with their parents have a tendency to cut contact with them.
Monyneux believes, and I agree with him, that it is not logical for humans to believe that they can achieve a freer world based upon Non-Aggression and Private Property Rights by taking over or at least refocusing the agency that has a legal monopoly to commit acts of aggression and violate private property rights.
If you examine the behavior of Ron Paul you will find a principaled individual who is remarkably different from the millions of people working for the US Federal Government. He certainly leads the way in makeing a freer and more peaceful world through the ending of much of military industrial complex, ending legal tender laws and what not. But, by being a Congressman, he is full of contradictions, for example he is for diverting money disbursed thorugh multi-thousand page spending bills to his own district based upon the logic that the Federal Government stole the money and he is getting some back.
That’s interesting. I know, if you work in politics, the best you can be is like Ron Paul: an advocate for a minimalist state. But the state is the state. One can logically conclude that the NAP inevitably leads to zero taxation as tax itself has force as its impetus. Nevertheless, I strongly disagree with Molyneux that Ron Paul is “a disaster” as he put it once in one of his videos. I understand his point: that the 1776 government inevitably led to what we have now (really, he should say the 1789 Constitution led to this; or, giving him the benefit of the doubt, the 1781 Constitution); however, to pretend that there is no difference between a totalitarian state and a minarchist state is to rashly overgeneralize things.
I just don’t know why, upon mentioning Mises.org, that they wouldn’t accept my request to join their forum. Perhaps a few of you might be willing to try to join the FDR forum to test this out? When you send the email, mention Mises.org and see if they snub you as well.
As for the info, it seems his wife gave some unethical counseling, and a couple people have left their FOOs (family of origin), which I think is a super weird thing. Your family is always there for you; and if there are cases of abuse, it’s implied that if you’re mistreated, you don’t have to stay. I think it’s cool that he’s a philosopher, but that whole family counseling/parenting advice thing does kinda seem a bit overkill and a tad bit weird.
I do not think that Moleneux thinks Ron Paul or his career is a disaster. He speaks about a Ron Paul Presidency as a disaster as the current state of the debt based economy can not continue. And when it really crashes hard when the central banks around the world face hostile populations and want out of the trillions of dollars in US Government debts, the populace of the USA will be blaming the ideas of Ron Paul and freedom.
When you say someone hates someone else, it is a clever way to avoid the actual arguments. It makes it seem like there is something personal between the two, when they never even met each other.
Perhaps stating that he didn’t think a Ron Paul presidency would be helpful might have been more accurate. I noticed in another Molyneux forum that you were a fan of his. I’m curious to see your opinion on the accusations by others that he is a cult leader, or perhaps he and his wife are cult leaders. I enjoy Molyneux’s rants, but being that I just learned about this last night and that they have not accepted my membership, presumably because I mentioned Mises, I was curious to see everyone’s thoughts.
P.S. Who rates these threads? I see it received 1/5 stars merely 3 comments in. Does everyone have the capability of voting on them? Not that it truly matters, just curious to see why there was such a knee jerk reaction to giving 1/5 stars so quickly before any discussion got going.
As for cultish behavior, I looked into it a bit.
Seems some think Molyneux is promoting a personality cult with himself at its head, with his book “Universally Preferable Behavior” as their gospel.
Some analysis of what’s happened to dissenters on his site shows he leads an inner circle to ridicule dissent. Just look at what happened to the philosophy phd-student who questioned him on UPB.
I think on whole Molyneux is a positive influence, he’s an excellent communicator of libertarian ideas.
If you can ignore his self-aggrandisement and sometimes over the top histrionics, he does bring some interesting materials to light for discussion. I like a lot of his work on parenting. I don’t necessarily agree with him on the degree to which he seems to endorse environmental determenism, but I like how he shines the light on abusive familial relationships. They definitely would need to be re-examined if we are to transition to an anarchist society, as a lot of dysfunction arises from this very point and is why some people look to the even more abusive state for salvation.
" I’m curious to see your opinion on the accusations by others that he is a cult leader"
It’s pure nonsense by a bunch of whiners who got banned from his forum years ago. None of whom thought it was cult beforehand.
The fact that he does what he wants with the forum he pays for is unfair to them, so they make up hysterical myths.
He is a great communicator and debator, I fully agree with you. I think he’s brilliant. As for the UPB Ph.D. student, do you happen to have a link? I’ve scowered YouTube and can’t find it. I’d love to see it.
Molyneux is an excellent communicator of libertarian ideas; there can be little doubt about that, with great videos like this and this. I check in at the FDR forums occasionally to see what’s going on there. It used to be more academic and focussed on philosophy and law and anarchy theories and so on, but discussion has shifted towards mainly threads on parenting, personal relationships, and people seeking advice about recovering from the effects of having had “abusive” (in the extremely broad sense used on FDR) parents. There is a strong sense of community at FDR, especially since this shift took place.
Whether they are a cult depends on your definition of the word, but I do see Molyneux and the Freedomainers sharing many similarities to Rand and the Randians. I think some of what Murray Rothbard said about the latter applies to them. In addition to the Molyneux Revealed site you linked to, there is also FDR Liberated if you want to read more about the cult angle.
With regard to Ron Paul, I disagree with Molyneux. Most of his criticisms of Paul fade away when you realise that Paul’s primary goal is spreading the libertarian message, and being in office and running for President was for him purely a means or strategy for doing that effectively - for better or worse. Molyneux is wrong to conflate Paul’s strategy (i.e. Rothbard and Rockwell’s strategy) with the flawed strategy of ‘dismantling the state from the inside’, which is what basically all so-called “libertarian” politicians that aren’t Ron Paul are trying to do. Whether Paul’s strategy or Molyneux’ strategy has been or is going to be more effective at spreading the message of liberty is an interesting debate to have, but Molyneux never really gets round to that debate, because he never addresses Paul’s actual strategy, just a strawman version of it.
Walter Block made some negative and entirely unjustified remarks about Molyneux recently. And David Gordon critiqued Molyneux’ UPB, quite reasonably. I expect these events left some Freedomainers with a dislike of mises.org (see threads here and here). But I think it’s extremely unlikely you were not allowed to join the FDR forum just because you mentioned mises.org. The knowledgeable posters there link to mises.org quite often. Have you tried joining again or emailing for an explanation?
would you mind explaining what the contradiction is?
Man, I always feel like, there’s so few of us libertarians, we can’t afford infighting like this! Especially if it’s merely over strategy and not necessarily philosophy.
I think Graham hit it pretty well. Virtually all of Molyneux’s complaints about Ron Paul (or really, the idea of Ron Paul) are little more than straw men he has crafted so that he might have something to attack about the man who has become a thousand times more popular and prominent than he ever will, and has undeniably done more to turn people on to libertarianism than pretty much any other single person. This, combined with Molyneux’s narcissism creates a cognitive dissonance that he must find a way to deal with…and of course his method of choice (like most others in such a position) is belittlement and attack.
And this sort of negativity — which I think can really most aptly be labled no more complexly than “jealousy” — is of course not unique to the bald self-proclaimed philosophy king.
I read this Walter Block piece where he called out anti-Paul lady Wendy McElroy for basically supporting libertarianism without being libertarian. It really blew me away to read some of the stuff she wrote. (Granted, it was during the 2008 presidential campaign, but still.) Even then things were making a huge impact. But it doesn’t even need to be stated how exponentially larger every aspect was the second time around…when you can see how much the influence as grown, and the visible results it was having at the height of the campaign, as well as the residuals it continues to show. I’m quite interested to hear a response from her and see if she’ll still try to stand by her claim that “the millions of dollars as well as the incalculable time and energy that libertarians have donated to elect [Ron Paul] will disappear down the drain,” and that “support for Ron Paul diverts money/time from causes and activities that have a lasting impact rather than one that evaporates after the faux-euphoria of political campaigning.”
I honestly don’t know if it’s a genuine disbelief that someone like Paul and his methods of spreading the word and making a difference would actually be effective (which, I have no idea how anyone could possibly try to make that claim…at least by this point), or whether it’s more just a simple jealousy that the people berating Paul have…
…that they (McElroy, Molyneux, et al) have dedicated their lives to something, and feel like they are being true to principle and “doing it right”, and yet are virtually unknown, and essentially have very little (if anything) to show for their efforts in the way of visible impact and influence…whereas someone like Paul…a politician, is at the front of a revolution, and, as Block said “has already put libertarianism on the map in a way that no one in the history of civilization has ever done.” I’m inclined to believe it’s a bit of both…but more so the latter. I find that these anarchist (at least, the anti-Paul types) tend to be rather ego-centric, and quite self-important.
Here’s a Mises Blog post with various examples (including the McElroy one). And here’s my post on typical Molyneux.
Youtube user lengthyounarther has a good video on Molyneux you might be interested in
