Has Stefan Molyneux hooked you?

[TackleTheWorld]

This Stef guy is being referenced here more and more.  He uses logic charm and humor to persuade people into free-market-anarcho-capitalism.  He emphasizes psychological healing, discourages political activities, and is the metaphor-making-machine.

[Pat K]

Yeah you and stef make me loose sleep.

[TackleTheWorld]

I must admit, I'm being convinced by Stef.  I'm on podcast 200 out of 930 something. 

Ayn Rand said psychologizing is not an argument, and dismissed psychology.  That is true but psychology seems to be the reason you can't convince people of simple logic.  Some mental scar is inhibiting their natural thought processes. 

[Pat K]

Yep the scar, probably gets put there from soon
after birth. Then is reinforced regularly.
We are born helpless and ignorant.

Nature seems to have put a believe every thing
big people tell you, program in our heads, to
keep us from getting killed early on in life.

Trying to break free of that is a bitch.

[David]

His logic and his straightforwardness is great.  I'm not too much into the podcasts though.  I am a reading type of guy. 

[dalebert]

He helped inspire the cartoon that I'm working on now. It should go up sometime early tomorrow; maybe even late tonight.

[Pat K]

He helped inspire the cartoon that I'm working on now. It should go up sometime early tomorrow; maybe even late tonight.

Yay! great, awesome , terrific.

(you have to cheer Dale early and often he is a
very tempermental artist. He gets all pouty if ya don't.)

[Mike Barskey]

I have listened to a few hundred of his podcasts (maybe 400-600), and I used to participate on his forums (actually, I lurked and read there a lot, and posted a little). There is a lot of good, a lot of truth to be found at FDR, but there is a significant amount of danger, too. And I mean that literally. There is a forum called Liberating Minds (http://liberatingminds.com) where people (including a number of people Stef has banned from FDR*) are talking about the same issues, while helping each other avoid the pitfalls Stef is mired in. And he is mired in problems: defense mechanisms, hypocrisy, lies, double-standards, etc. It should be obvious that I am "anti-Stef," so read my words with a grain of salt. But if you seek truth, you can't dismiss my claims without evidence to the contrary. And there is plenty of evidence to support my claims. One of the forums on Liberating Minds discusses FDR, and there are numerous threads describing Stef's mistakes and problems, including many quotes from and references to FDR forum posts and Stef's podcasts. The goal of this forum of Liberating Minds is to expose FDR's problems, the contradictions, the mistakes, and extract the golden nuggets of truth that Stef reveals.

As you continue listening to FDR, please be very wary that if something sounds or feels wrong to you, it may be so! It took me over a year to fully realize that, as intelligent and correct and wonderful as Stef was, he did get some important things wrong, and lead a few (or maybe a lot of) people to cause themselves psychological damage and havoc in their personal relationships.

I hope you'll check out Liberating Minds. You might like it, if you already like the topics Stef covers. We talk about psychology, AnCapism, Ron Paul, poetry, dogs vs. cats , the NAP, rights...anything you want to bring up.

[Faber]

I'm a huge fan of the podcasts.  He has clearly taken from some of the best thinkers in psychology (there are deep veins of Alice Miller and Nathaniel Branden) and philosophy (Ayn Rand, Aristotle, and Socrates being the biggest influences).  Toss that together with a very healthy dose of libertarianism (especially Harry Browne), and you get very powerful, compelling ideas about the nature of statism, religion, and general disfunction in the world.

As for the liberating minds forum, I've perused it in the past.  The fact that they are ex-FDR members really interferes with it.  It's hard to get past the anger to really come up with anything productive in the way of critique of Stef.  There seems to be a lot of internal conflict about it, too.  I almost get the sense of a bunch of spurned lovers getting together to complain about how awful that man really was, all the while really mourning the fact that the man wasn't interested in them.  It's hard to take criticisms by ex-lovers very seriously, for obvious reasons.

[Mike Barskey]

Actually, the reasons aren't obvious. Or rather, the obvious reasons aren't rational. There is definitely a lot of anger and feelings of being spurned by LM members. But does that invalidate their arguments? It doesn't. Perhaps their arguments are incorrect on their own merit, but if you're dismissing their arguments merely because they were spurned or feel spurned, then you may as well say that every person that has ever been spurned is in the wrong.

First, there are LM participants who were never FDR participants. Second, not all the people who were FDR participants were banned from FDR - some still participate. Third, not all the exFDRers feel spurned. I didn't feel spurned, but I was definitely angry for a while - you may have read some of my posts. But thanks to some of the discussions there I learned how that was unproductive to me, and now I don't participate in those threads that are anti-FDR.

While Stef's philosophy indeed "takes from" Branded, Rand, Socrates, Mises, and other great minds, Stef has also said numerous times that those thinkers were failures, and he has even claimed that he reached his conclusions without the help of past thinkers. Have you heard or read any of that in Stef's work?

It's a shame you only perused Liberating Minds. You apparently saw some of the anger people had with Stef and nothing else (or you disregarded everything else). It's definitely true that there is anger, sadness, and even internal conflict, about FDR, but there is so much more there. Some of that is even directed towards itself in efforts to eliminate those negative feelings, and some of us have overcome them and can now see and accept the truth that Stef offers, without the negatives that we identified.

[Russell Kanning]

I have no idea what you guys are talking about.

[Mike Barskey]

There's a guy named Stefan Molyneux (http://freedomainradio.com) that podcasts prolifically about personal liberty. He's stronger with libertarian/ancap ideals, but he focuses on psychology. Some people tried to ask him questions about contradictions he's made or whatever, and he banned them. They (and others who weren't even involved with Stef) started participating in another forum (Liberating Minds) to discuss the same topics but without the banning or inconsistencies. That's all.

[dalebert]

To read the associated blog entry or to leave comments, click here. I encourage people to leave their comments, positive or negative, on my site so that everyone who sees the cartoon can get your take on it. It helps to clarify the message and most of them won't see your comments here. Also, I don't want to hijack a thread that's about Stefan.

If you like the cartoon, please digg it.

[Pat K]

Well I said a lot of his pod-casts make me
think. I am not going to start a cult around him.

If your looking for perfect your gonna look a long time.

[Faber]

I'm rejecting the arguments on their own, and noting some of the dynamics at play in the liberating minds forum, so people know what they're walking into.

I didn't mean to turn Lauren's thread into an FDR-LiMi bitchfight, so I'm going to drop that bit of it for now.

While Stef's philosophy indeed "takes from" Branded, Rand, Socrates, Mises, and other great minds, Stef has also said numerous times that those thinkers were failures, and he has even claimed that he reached his conclusions without the help of past thinkers. Have you heard or read any of that in Stef's work?

I remember Stef saying several times the exact opposite of what I bolded.  It's the old "standing on the shoulders of giants" thing.  Stef has called those past thinkers failures relative to the truth they sought (Socrates, Rand) or the effects they desired (Mises, Hayek, etc.).  I don't think that's a terribly blasphemous thing to say.  Obviously he thinks his contributions are better than theirs, otherwise he wouldn't contradict them.  Most of the improvement stems from his ability to synthesize the different disciplines, but there's certainly no shortage of original thought in there.

Great cartoon, Dale   Damn, you're talented!