The Problem with Stefan Molyneux

Post 1

Stefan Molyneux’s central premise for some of his most abhorrent views is that the level of property rights in a society is determined by the IQ of its members, IQ is determined by genetics, and thus some races are genetically socialist.

This is wrong, not because I’m disputing his data, but because he’s got the causation backwards.

In reality, systems of property rights select for more intelligent people. Property rights evolve a population towards higher intelligence. Socialism works in the opposite direction. You can take a group from any culture or genetic line, put them into a libertarian minarchist system, and that group as a whole will become more successful. Their descendants will be more intelligent.

To illustrate this, all we have to do is look at how socialism and high intelligence come together in Academia. Or look at Chile or the UAE, both of which were dragged kicking and screaming into strong systems of property rights, and now are filled with successful, intelligent people.

This isn’t a difficult argument to understand. Yet, so many people assume the reverse causation because they’re looking to justify their own racist biases. If you so easily let yourself fall into that trap of collectivist thinking, you are not thinking of people as individuals, each with an individual right to liberty, and you are therefore NOT a libertarian.

Post 2

Here’s why I’m on the warpath against Stefan Molyneux:

He represents everything that is wrong with anarchocapitalism, acting as a sinister pied piper, who leads people away from libertarianism into alt-right nationalism. He is the leak between these two philosophies.

Anarchocapitalists believe that property rights are great, but no entity has a right to force anyone else into a system for the protection of those property rights. So if you can’t force people to abide by property rights, how can you create a population that respects property rights? You have to teach people. But when most people reject your philosophy, what do you do? Do you reevaluate your philosophy and try to understand WHY even the most die-hard libertarians most often reject anarchocapitalism? NO, that would require too much honesty and self-reflection. Instead, you blame their stupidity for their failure to “get it.” Stroking your own ego, you think to yourself, “If only people were smarter. Then we’d have an anarchocapitalist society.”

And that right there is the pathway to eugenics, where you try to filter out or eliminate the “stupid people” in the hopes that it will make people think more like you. If you’re like Molyneux or Trump, you start looking for factors that correlate with IQ (here, we’re just going to ignore the fact that IQ is a shitty measure of true intelligence). Causation doesn’t matter. Only correlation matters. You start racially profiling. It doesn’t matter how many innocent people are harmed, because at least the society, on average, is being made smarter. So as we weed out the inferior groups of people, we’re making our society more anarchocapitalist, right?

NO. You’re engaging in fascist genocide. You’ve followed in Hitler’s intellectual footsteps.

So how can we be libertarians without being led down this dark path towards genocidal fascism? We apply just a little bit of force way back at the beginning of this diatribe, compelling people to obey the laws necessary to enforce property rights. We don’t need to engage in social engineering or genocide when we admit to ourselves that there will always be people who disagree, no matter how intelligent they are, and this necessitates and justifies the use of force in defending property rights. Even then, we operate this enforcement on a legally-bound, individual basis, rather than engaging in any sort of profiling.

Minarchism is the only functional form of libertarianism. Anarchocapitalism, like anarchocommunism, is a gateway to all kinds of atrocities against liberty and humanity. And Stefan Molyneux is the gatekeeper.