“If you want to perform the greatest service for political liberty, all you have to do is turf all of your unsatisfying relationships. Parents, siblings, spouse, it doesn’t matter.” –Stefan Molyneux
The father-led family is the sine qua non of human civilization as such. Hence, to be anti-family is necessarily to be anti-libertarian and anti-egoistic, both (among many other anti-values) as an inescapable consequence of being at war with the engine of human thriving.
Is Stefan Molyneux anti-family? Vide:
Do you think it extreme for me to say that almost all parents are horribly bad? Perhaps it is. However, if you look at the state of the world – the general blindness and the slow death of our liberties – the challenge you take on by disagreeing with me is this: if it’s not the parents, what is it?
Either the world is not sick, or parents are. Because, as my wife says, it all starts with the family. If you want to perform the greatest service for political liberty, all you have to do is turf all of your unsatisfying relationships. Parents, siblings, spouse, it doesn’t matter.
And, of course, this is exactly what Molyneux, his wife and their most devoted followers have done – destroyed not one life-long storgic relationship but every one they had, not for outrageous abuse but for being ‘unsatisfying.’
Saving Molyneux’s minions the time: Cherry-picking, contrary-examples, blah, blah, blah. Molyneux reasons like a child – in this case hyperbole and false dichotomy leading to a devastatingly disproportionate conclusion – but he and his closest followers are persistently, consistently anti-family.
The late Ayn Rand and her followers, too, it is fair to note, though perhaps less so. Officially official-Objectivism exalts entrepreneurs and creators, but practically-speaking official-Objectivist organizations are devoted to cultivating largely-childless academics. That’s comical, considering how wonderfully anti-academician Atlas Shrugged is, but it remains that while she and her oracles are not explicitly, overtly anti-family, big-O Objectivism is never pro-family, and every representative exponent of the salutary consequences of living Rand’s moral philosophy is childless. Likewise, to the extent that what Molyneux calls the ‘family-of-origin’ (foo) is ever represented, it is usually painted in a hostile light.
In sum: Ayn Rand was a deeply dissatisfied high-C INTJ who wrote a philosophy that is very appealing to deeply dissatisfied high-C INTJs. Her work ‘unfoos’ those kids: Half-assed Marxists become half-assed capitalists and devout theists become devout atheists instead. That much is not objectionable: All evangelical doctrines recruit by conversion, and ‘in with the new’ implies ‘out with the old.’ There can be conflicts as these young people try on their new ideas, but the name for this process is simply individuation.
The Molyneux ‘defoo’ is very different: “If you want to perform the greatest service for political liberty, all you have to do is turf all of your unsatisfying relationships. Parents, siblings, spouse, it doesn’t matter.” What Molyneux means by defooing – minus the hair-shirt demurrers – is destroying all of your long-term storgic relationships all at once on a whim. This is his experience, his wife’s and that of many of his followers, with zero deviations from this pattern that I know of.
That much is just crazy – albeit perhaps crazy like a fox, since de facto defooing is precisely what cult leaders do to take control of their prey. As with Rand, we should note that Molyneux is uniformly anti-family in the sense that family is rarely even praised, much less defended as the sine qua non of the uniquely-human life. That’s important: The hurdle defenders of either Rand or Molyneux must leap is not that they are not anti-family, but that they are in any way pro-family.
Both fail that test, and in failing it they fail magnificently. Both can continue to recruit among the niche populations they appeal to now, but neither can grow as only pro-family doctrines can grow – one father, one family, one fishbowl at a time. The future belongs to the children of parents, so the ideas of the childless are almost always self-extinguishing in due course.
But so much worse than that is the simple fact that the family is the only reliable redoubt against not just tyranny but all of chaos. To be implicitly anti-family, like Rand, or explicitly anti-family, like Molyneux, is to make war on the source of all human thriving. Without the enduring love of families there is no other love, nor any enduring values of any sort.
Who will win the battle for the future? Egoists, ultimately, people who hew to a moral philosophy like mine. But to the extent they uphold anti-family premises – as doctrine or just in their everyday praxis – putative libertarians are in essence de facto advocates of Marxism, since only thieves dance in the rubble of a vanquished freehold.
