First, there’s an incentive reason for that: Freud was a private psychoanalysis, and generally those that follow that profession to this day tend to be attached to his ‘version’ of psychology. The other ramifications of psychotherapy nowadays originated form state-funded programs of “inmate correction”, school psychologists and the like. A load of crap indeed.
Second there the Nietzsche argument: just read Freud, and I mean any of his books (but I myself prefer The interpretation of dreams), and you get an inexplicable grin. As Nietzsche said: a truth is only a truth if when we hear it for the first time it makes us smile. Can seem a silly argument, but is just a far-fetched way of saying: go read one of his books and you’ll see that Freud’s methods are by far the bets in the game, to this day.
Third, make no mistake, any psychological method, and any science at all for that matter, does construct theoretical models and then tries to “force the facts” to fit that model. And it is indeed true that there’s no point in arguing with someone over his model: it’s just so. Competition in the field of psychology, among different models, is only organized by the market. Only those theories that produce more decent results in actual therapy get passed on. So, even if it might well be frustrating that one can hardly argue with a psychotherapist about hi model, know that it is precisely this ‘unarguability’ that allows psychotherapy to skip through the dreadful ‘peer review’ process, and go straight to the market: there’s no point arguing about theories, let’s get those to work. And the market again shows that Freudian methods and models, with spins of course, are yet the most sensible to this day.
As for Molineux: come on guys, this is not some sort of ‘competition’, where either praxeology or psychology wins the battle for the souls on libertarians-to-be. He does more good than harm (actually much more good than the crushing majority of academic libertarians) and as such must be greeted for his efforts (and the sacrifices he made in his personal life to go for that choice). I’m not saying ‘stop criticis him’, point out what one believes to be his questionable point is very good. But I really don’t get this ‘us versus him’ thing I see sometimes around here.
Yeah, I listened to that “debate” between you and him, I was very disappointed with it. The way I saw it was that he just fogged you. There wasn’t any consistency. I listened to it when it happened, so it has been awhile. What was especially annoying was he never addressed the idea that there were different interpretations of what is considered property.
He kept insisting that “self-ownership” just means personal identity or conciousness and that he doesn’t believe in rights because they aren’t explicit physical properties of objects (when he had just made a video argueing for property rights a few months beforehand). So I’d be like, “But Molyneux, libertarians usually use self-ownership as a rights concept - the right of self-ownership”, and he’d just evade the issue and act like I was denying that people purposefully act, while pulling out dubious analogies such as “that’s like saying that a mammal is both warm-blooded and cold-blooded”. He wouldn’t allow the discussion to even make it to the point of aknowledging/understanding what I was actually saying and clarifying terms.
So yea, after it occured, I listened to the recording of it and it was very clear to me that he basically stonewalled a real debate and was using some sleight of hand manuevers to try to make me feel or appear silly. Which is why I made numerous blogposts critiqueing him afterwards. He actually read my written critique of the “debate” outloud in a podcast and concluded that I wasn’t worth engaging anymore. He’s done similar things to other people.
The debate was mostly over his UPB theory of ethics (which is similar to Hoppe’s “argumentation ethics” in many ways) and my rejection of the way in which he was using the concept of “self-ownership”.
Here are some of my further critiques of UPB and Molyneux’s arguments:
I can’t speak to that, but from what I know of Molyneux’s character, it would seem to me that Brainpolice is more likely to be right than wrong. I will review the debate myself and provide my own assessment when I have finished.
BP and I have had some pretty serious disagreements in the past, to say the least. I don’t think I’d ever question his intellectual integrity and there’s more than a few people who would corroborate this. Moreover, there have been plenty of people who have independently reached similar conclusions regarding Molyneux.
It’s not my place to make this comment, but your post really left a bad taste in my mouth. It seems more like you’re going for some sort of purge than intellectual debate. And besides, I really dislike Molyneux.
Purge of what? Wild caricatures and hooligan splicing and context lifting? I see it very often and it has been done to me. There are many people who think that things like quoting half of a sentence from a conversion and writing a paragraph of criticism on it is journalism.
I guess his blogging buddy Niccolo would corroborate it, judging by his ludicrous raving distortions of what Molyneux says and accusations of Molyneux trying to create a cult worshipping him.
When I said it was debunked that was my assessment of the study. There is no evidence that a placebo effect exists. The reason I referred to the JCE is for the extra irony that a medical journal debunked a still medically accepted myth. What the placebo effect and psychiatric therapy have in common is plenty of studies reporting that they work and a lack of any valid evidence that they do.
Like Hoppe? Yea. He is one. I’m hardly alone in that observation within libertarianism. But you’re sidetracking from the topic at hand into old, tiring scruples that have been played out ad nauseum.
I haven’t seen Niccolo Adami make any posts here or elsewhere for like 2 years. I do have him added on facebook, and he doesn’t talk about politics ever. I do remember that he was always very adamant and conflict-driven. But, from what I recall, Niccolo’s criticisms of Molyneux were overwhelmingly over the religion issue, since Niccolo is a catholic.
As far as Molyneux and cults go, he very clearly has what we would call a “cult of personality”. Calling it a plain “cult” might be stretching it, however, and made a post a while back being rather balanced about that issue. But since I joined his website like 4 years ago and used to participate in the subculture there, my experience does confirm the psychological oddity that goes on there in the interactions between Molyneux and certain dedicated members, especially those who have been there from day one (cough Greg Gauthier). It does come off as an online psychotherapy cult at some points.
There have been quite a few people banned for no good reason other than persistent disagreement, and I’m far from the only person who used to participate that has been critiqueing Molyneux and the website. Molyneux has had fallout with quite a laundry list of anarchists and assorted people online. Hardly a conspiracy theory.
You once made (what may have been) an off-hand comment that gave me a clarifying perspective–that what we can see from our external point of view is how his most ardent followers respond to him.
Here’s why I think that’s clarifying. If one takes an “inside-out” view (i.e, Stefan Molyneux is a developing cult leader in the process of creating an on-line therapeutic cult), it raises specific issues about his motives that may or not exist (along with a lot heated objections from those who find particular aspects of Molyneux’s philosophy or libertarian views illuminating) and can never be truly resolved–only argued about.
All of those heated arguments are unnecessary if one ignores any possible “cult” intentions on Molyneux’s part and restricts one’s view to an “outside-in” perspective. What remains germane is that some percentage of Molyneux’s followers appear to establish a cult-like relationship with FDR. By that, I mean a percentage of followers tend to act upon his one-to-one “convos” as if they were therapy, though he claims they are not. They tend to adopt a view of themselves as victims of an abusive upbringing (primarily because their parents were statist/religious and therefore ethically challenged), even though their own childhood accounts seem to stretch the definition of “abuse” to a significant degree. They tend to act as if part of embracing Molyneux’s philosophic views necessarily includes replicating Molyneux’s narrative of his own past–cutting off all communication with family and friends and consorting thereafter only with the “virtuous,” however Molyneux defines that.
Yet–even if those actions or beliefs could be considered damaging or cult behavior–can any blame for those actions be laid at Molyneux’s feet? If a fan of the Jonas Brothers hangs herself because her unrequited love for one of them, is it their fault? Here’s my thinking on that (as it stands today, at least!).
If there’s one thing I believe about Molyneux at this point, it is in his sincerity. So far, I think his intentions appear honorable and his attitude toward his members benevolent. Having said all that, there are some aspects of Molyneux’s focus or behavior that have always been worrying to me. First among them is the connection he makes between psychology and philosophy (in short, if you are not an ancap it is because you were the product of an abusive upbringing) and second that he and his wife apparently designed FDR to deliver that message specifically to young adults at the point of individuation.
I talk about those two aspects here (the psychology/philosophy/parenting connection) and here (the design and creation of FDR). I quote Molyneux extensively, perhaps overly so, in these two articles because I want to ensure I’m not “interpreting” or “reading into” his thoughts, but trying my best to accurately represent them. (Of course, my editorial bias is that I find these two aspects concerning and I don’t attempt to hide it.)
Despite my view that an interpretation of Molyneux as a “manipulative cult leader” may be wrong-headed, at the same time I find it concerning that he involves himself closely in the lives of some followers–some of whom are quite young. Here’s what I mean. He can do and has done the following: Without meeting with either parent or any other family siblings, with no other corroborating or conflicting evidence of a follower’s home life, and without benefit of a background in family therapy or counseling, he has conducted one-on-one “convos” with young members (all recorded and later released as .MP3 podcasts) during which he accepts at face value every criticism and description they have of their family distress. And at that point, he responds to their complaints with a series of logical arguments demonstrating why their situation is much worse than they imagine.
Certainly the most famous among those “convos” is the one conducted with the member named Tom, which was later part of an article by the UK Guardian. Following that controversy, I noticed a lot of people arguing back and forth about Molyneux’s motives, the role he may or may not have played in Tom’s ultimate departure from his family, whether FDR is a cult, etc.
I don’t know the answer to any of those arguments. I just keep coming back to the question “why does a 40-year-old man engage in the pattern of events I described two paragraphs above with an 18-year-old man (or woman, or those even younger)?” Why is this a repeated pattern of events with many other young members? Discussing the actions themselves shouldn’t engender a lot of heated denial, I would think–they’re empirically observable. I do know the question why begins to garner some angry responses and my follow-up question Is this healthy behavior? even more so. But, to me, that’s a more interesting place to focus than the grandiose “cult” issue.
There’s a part of Molyneux’s logic that makes sense; i.e., that there is a point in most people’s lives (usually adolescence or immediately post-adolescence) when they are most open to radically different world-views. Yet I tend to have two questions about his practices–by becoming so intimately involved with his followers’ lives does Molyneux push it too far? And–while one can easily see that it may take some lengthy argumentation to get someone to challenge the ethics of his/her parents–does Molyneux ever do so deceptively? (And–knowing what we know about the “storm and stress” of adolescence-into-the-early-20s–is his approach a healthy one, compared to what other counselors may provide?)
I reject the psychology/philosophy/parenting connection out of hand. Were such a thing to be true, then ancappery would only find a home in the minds of orphans and runaways. (I suspect there are a significant number of ancaps out there who actually like their statist parents!)
So, for the most part, I find all the other elementary questions above far more interesting and eventually illuminating than the heated arguments around whether FDR is a cult or not. However–now having said all that and winding back up to the cult question–here is what concerns me about that. If it can be said that a percentage of Molyneux’s members demonstrate what appears to cult behavior, what should Molyneux’s response be? And how does that compare to the response we see now? Should he ignore it? Discourage it? Encourage it? Something else?
Does what he should do and what he actually does do reflect on him and his personal ethics in any way?
I’d advise against that, only because I’ve seen where that argument always goes (spoiler: you won’t be able to define “cult” to everyone’s satisfaction).
My previous post suggests that it is more illuminating to talk about the material than the alleged cult claim.
Is there validity in the psychology/philosophy/parenting connection? Is there validity to the notion that nearly all parents are abusive? Is it true that parents have created a worldwide madness that has made it impossible for people to find their way to anarchocapitalism? Is it true that you cannot be a virtuous ancap and consort with your religious or statist parents/family/friends?
The above comprises a significant degree of Molyneux’s material. I agree I also went into Molyneux’s behavior as well (which I personally find to be illuminating, but only as it relates back to the material) but feel free to ignore all that.