Stefan Molyneux finally released a video addressing and confirming that he has abandoned Libertarianism and Voluntarism for Statism and the Alt-Right.
A Logical Fallacy
His argument is that because Libertarians (generalized to conform to his experience) are not against spanking children, are not against Feminism, are not against circumcision, think human-biodiversity facts are just thinly veiled racism, and won’t let go of their government-tenured academic positions, therefore he has abandoned Libertarianism, Voluntarism, and the reason and logic that underpin Libertarianism wholesale.
His argument: Many or most Libertarians don't follow the Non-Aggression Principle consistently across every aspect of their lives, therefore I have abandoned the Non-Aggression Principle and embraced the coercive violence of Statism by supporting Donald Trump and the Alt-Right.
This is known as the "Tu Quoque Fallacy" or "Appeal to Hypocrisy" which states that a certain position is false or wrong or should be disregarded because its proponent fails to act consistently in accordance with that position. Even if no Libertarians acted consistently with the principles of Libertarianism it would not be grounds to abandon the principles of Libertarianism.
As it turns out, about 70% of this video is one long Logical Fallacy.
Confirmation Bias Is Not An Argument
“Libertarians spend massive amounts more time calling Donald Trump a Fascist, calling him literally Hitler, and his followers Neo-Nazis, I mean this is what Libertarians are wasting their time on. Now, Hillary Clinton has helped to destroy the entire Middle East and get hundred of thousands of people killed, provoking a migrant crisis that is going to swamp and destroy Europe, that seems to me a little more important.”
Funny thing about Libertarians: We are against both the Right and the Left equally. As Trey Parker put it, “I’m a registered Libertarian… We find just as many things to rip on the Left as we do on the Right. People on the far-Left and the far-Right are the exact same person to us.”
A co-worker of mine who is a passionate supporter of Hillary Clinton thinks Libertarians “spend massive amounts more time” calling Hillary Clinton a warmongering, corrupt, liar because as a Hillary supporter, that’s the perspective of Libertarianism he keeps hearing from me. Molyneux on the other hand, as a Trump supporter, is constantly hearing the Libertarian’s disdain for Trump, so he assumes unequal treatment as well, only in the opposite sense.
If you support Trump, Libertarians are going to tell you what they don't like about Trump, if you support Hillary, Libertarians are going to tell you what they don't like about Hillary. Their time is wasted on neither.
Confirmation Bias: Stefan has the pre-existing belief that Libertarians are liberal leftists in disguise, Stefan keeps being confronted with anti-Trump messages from Libertarians, Stefan concludes his pre-existing belief about Libertarians has been confirmed by the evidence.
Side Note:
I’d also like to quickly point out that I have witnessed first-hand a movement of swastika-flashing, self proclaimed white-nationalist, neo-nazi fascists, posting memes about the virtues of Hitler and National Socialism in social media political groups. In debates with these proud self-proclaimed Neo-Nazi’s who support Trump, I was shocked as a long time listener to see them cite Stefan’s videos in debates against me. But Stefan seems rather blithe and unconcerned about this.
A Psychological Term: Enabling
Stefan has passionately argued in the past against ANY AND ALL political participation. He argued that participating in politics to any degree is to vindicate the violence and coercive-force of the State, and that to even follow politics is to invigorate and underwrite a fundamentally unethical system. His own argument.
But now he is saying it is okay for him to vehemently promote the political campaign of Donald Trump because if we don’t point the guns of the State at the people who want to cross our imaginary line on the ground they will come here and vote for the opposing political party, undermine our culture, and ruin our entire civilization as we know it.
Stefan Molyneux has already thoroughly refuted every one of the arguments he is now making.
States always grow. Governments always grow. No human being has ever been shown to be able to handle political power in a positive and benevolent way. No government has ever stayed in a stable state. They grow, they cause social collapse, they cause wars, they put people either in the hard prisons of incarceration or the soft prisons of the Welfare State. They enslave the masses, they run up massive debts, they print money, they cause inflation, the rob people blind, they indoctrinate children, they destroy medical advance, they slow technological innovation, they are a consistent drag on prosperity and growth.
There are no exceptions. No human being can handle the violent coercive power of the State. BUT STEFAN HAS A GUY HE THINKS CAN DO IT!!
Violence corrupts. Power corrupts. Stefan knows this. Yet Stefan has been arguing with passion and urgency, with every fiber of his being that we hand over power and violence to Donald Trump.
How does he know Trump wont instantly become a tyrant once in power? He doesn't. How does he know Trump wont have an aggressive foreign policy and instigate wars once in power? He doesn’t. But what he does know is that no human being has ever been able to handle the power and violence of the State ever in the history of mankind. He knows that no State has ever shrunken save through bankruptcy and social chaos. He knows that every politician does the exact opposite of what he says he’s going to do once he’s in power.
So what is Stefan doing?!? He knows that no human being can handle power, he knows that no government does anything but expand it’s attacks on it’s own citizens and those overseas and there are no exceptions. He therefore knows that Donald Trump will not be able to handle the violent power of the State, and that under Trump the government will continue to expand it’s attacks on it’s own citizens and those overseas.
There is a word for what Stefan is doing in psychology: Enabling.
Like the wife of a raging alcoholic who continues to buy her husband liquor if he promises to cut back, Stefan is enabling the violence of the State by fighting to get Trump into the the driver’s seat because he’s a “small government guy.”
The point is not to “cut down” on our drinking. That is simply going to enable us to drink again and it’s going to cause more problems and more destruction, we have to GIVE UP on this FANTASY that the violence and coercion of the State can be used for anything but EVIL, just like the only solution available to a raging alcoholic is to GIVE UP alcohol entirely.
Enabling: Stefan knows no human being can handle political power, Stefan knows the State will expand regardless of who is in power, Stefan wants to give Donald Trump political power of the State so he can “cut back” the size of the government a bit.
Stefan Fears The Left So Much That He Has Abandoned His Principles
Libertarians are not revolutionaries, they want to win by reason, they want to win peacefully, but that means that people have to be willing to accept reason and evidence.
Stefan hints repeatedly that he has “broken up” with Libertarianism because, “Libertarians are more on the talkie-talkie side and less on the doey-doey side.” He suggests that Libertarians have an “emotional attachment” to a specific set of principles, but they don’t actually implement them in the real world, and they don’t actually change anything or get anything done.
Libertarians have been involved since the foundation of the Libertarian Party - for decades - and never got more than a few percentage points of the vote and never made any particular progress, and [are] not having much of an impact.
And so, though he has consistently been a vehement and aggressive opponent of support for Libertarians like Ron Paul on the grounds that political participation can only abet and lead to more evil in the world…. now he has abandoned Libertarianism and is in vocal support of Donald Trump and the Alt-Right Political Movement.
It’s kind of like saying that the thinkers of the Enlightenment never got anything done in the real world during the time they were formulating their ideas and philosophy. They only wrote books and articles and had debates with each other and assumed they could persuade the world and win peacefully with reason. When Kant, Locke, Descartes, Bacon, and Voltaire were meeting in coffee houses and saloons and writing pamphlets and articles and books, they were making no real progress.
Following the same line of thought, Stefan would have abandoned the reasoned logic of the early Enlightenment thinkers and embraced the rise of Louis XIV in 1643. He would argue that the only way to actually get things done and have an impact was to have a King in power who could eliminate the remnants of feudalism by pacifying the nobles and aristocracy through the powers granted him through absolute monarchical rule.
The cultivation of the ideas of the Enlightenment paved the way for the revolutions which later.
We are living through the New Enlightenment in which the territorial Nation-State shall bury it’s nugatory pith in the dirt of eternity - we are living through that transition - and instead of cultivating the ideas that will vanquish it just as the ideas of the Enlightenment undermined and replaced the authority of the Monarchy and the Church, Stefan is enabling the Monarchy and broadcasting it’s legitimacy to the world!
Don’t You Get It?!?
It’s not about getting the right President in power for 4 or 8 years. It’s not about opposing the political left and the Democratic Party. It’s not about “cutting back” on Statism a little bit. It’s about cultivating the ideas that will be conducive to the new external circumstances of reality as a result of the technological innovations of the Information Age.
The territorial Nation-State based on violence and coercion has exhausted its potential and is no longer compatible with the external circumstances of the world. It is our duty now to cultivate the ideals of liberty and freedom to ensure that when the inevitable happens and the bankrupt grasping Nation-State is in it’s death throws, what is there and ready to replace it is robust and fail-safe.
All we know of Donald Trump is what he wants to do once he’s in power, and what he is promising to do once he’s in power. That’s it.
Even in the best-case scenario, he’s only in power for at most 8 years. Then what? The pendulum will swing back to the left in response to the inevitable expansion of the State, the inevitable mistakes Trump made, the inevitable expansion of attacks on citizens, and “CHANGE” will be the chant once more.
All of those socialists and communists that supported Bernie Sanders will start sounding pretty good, and we are right back where we started. What did we accomplish? Borders will be opened. Guns taken away. Socialism established. You’ve just postponed the inevitable, and you did it by wasting invaluable time, and energy, and worry, and years of your life that could have been spent helping to make the world free and ethically consistent.
We require the Stefan of 10 years ago to come back and spread the ideas of Liberty and Freedom. There is simply too much charismatic authority to have lost it to Statism.
The Real Problem: Libertarians (which Stefan loved), Didn’t Love Him Back
Getting to the real core of the issue:
It seems that Stefan felt betrayed by his followers when they weren’t responsive to his rhetoric against spanking, circumcision, feminism, etc. Particularly though, it was when he was attacked for telling people to cut friends and family members who were Statists out of their lives that he really felt betrayed by his followers. That was the turning point. His audience turned his back on him, so he has turned his back on principled logic.
Furthermore, we mustn’t neglect the mighty pull that is the incentive to increase one’s financial situation and life situation by appealing to a much larger audience rather than a much smaller one.
When you are a Libertarian Voluntarist, you don’t get very many book sales, you don’t get all that many donations, and you don’t get the lions share of Youtube views and website hits.
On the other hand, when you are a political commentator narrating the rise of the Alt-Right’s charismatic leader in the United States Presidential election, presumably, you gain a much larger, much more passionate audience. Your views go up, your subscribers go up, your donations go up, income goes up, and financial and life situation is much improved.
All For The Low-Low Price Of Your Intellectual Integrity
Not to mention, whereas a following consisting of anarchists and Libertarians is like a following of discordant cats that enjoy nothing but biting, scratching and attacking you constantly… a following consisting of Authoritarians and Statists is more like a following of floppy-eared obedient and loyal Doberman Pinschers.
Libertarians and immigrations, that’s a whole other subject…
Go here for rebuttal of Stefan's immigration argument:
https://steemit.com/anarchism/@kierkeguardian/stefan-molyneux-s-trump-support-rebutted
- KG