Stefan Molyneux: Part One

Insofar as any individual is THE public voice and face of anarcho-capitalism these days, it is not me (alas) but Stefan Molyneux.

Be sure to spell his first name properly when looking for information about him. Though there is a well-known Stephen Molyneux, he's different person.

At any rate, Stefan's rise to prominence has made me grateful that I am no longer editor of a publication on anarcho-cap and related subjects. Were I still at The Pragmatist, I would be expected to say something about him. And the sort of thing one can say must be either (a) ranks-closed against the mutual statist foe, or (b) shocking/edgy/pointed. My own reaction falls between the two stools.

I have had no journalistic responsibilities within the world of libertarian and anarcho-capitalistic theorising since well before 2005, the year Molyneux founded what has been his punditry base ever since, FreeDomain Radio, out of Ontario.

I fear that Molyneux, on balance, harmed rather than advanced the cause of anarcho-capitalism by mixing it up in the minds of those he reached with ideas about FOO and DeFOO which made him sound a lot like a cult leader.

For the uninitiated, FOO stands for "family of origin," .... and the idea is that anarcho-capitalists should think of themselves as each other's real family, and should be able to DeFOO -- purge from their lives the bad influence of Mom, Dad, bro, sis, and so forth.

The idea gets special bite because it is linked in Molyneux's mind with a Freudian and misogynistic view of psychology. In 2014 TIME quoted Molyneux thus: "If we could just get people to be nice to their babies for five years straight, that would be it for war, drug abuse, addiction, promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, ... Almost all would be completely eliminated, because they all arise from dysfunctional early childhood experiences, which are all run by women."

He sees De-FOOing as the proper course not just for particular individuals but as a general matter, because as he has also said, "I do not believe that there are any really good parents out there -- the same way I do not believe that there were any really good doctors in the 10th century."

Anarcho-capitalism would be better off without any admixture of that, surely.

What can be said in Molyneux's favor? Well ... he has a vivid way with stating the critical truth that the wearing of a uniform doesn't turn wrong into right or vice versa. I'll go back to the well for another quote:

"A man goes to a foreign country and kills someone who is not aggressing against him. In a Hawaiian shirt he's a criminal, in a green costume he's a hero who gets a parade and a pension. So that, as a culture, we remain in a state of moral insanity. To point out these contradictions to people in society is to be labelled insane."

So can I leave it at that? Alas, no. There is a good deal more that might be said about Molyneux. He claims to be a systematic philosopher, and has offered a theory of the foundations of morality pitched at a properly abstract level. I'll say something (though not much) about THAT tomorrow.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog