I started listening to Stefan Molyneux late 2006, first the stuff on economics and politics, but quite quickly I became especially interested in the stuff about psychology which I found immensely interesting and liberating.

Especially the following: the idea of no positive obligations, the influence that families have on one's personality, how paying close attention to one's emotions can teach one a lot about one's psyche and history, how interactions and conflict resolution can go in a much deeper and more meaningful way than I previously was aware of.

And I found it very liberating to try and apply what I learned in my own life.

Then in (I think) April 2007 I finally started participating on the FDR board, hoping to join in a wonderful conversation and make new friends, share experiences, get help and support and give help and support.

But I then very quickly noticed that not all was well on the FDR boards. In particular, Stef and other FDR'ers turned out to be thoroughly dishonest debaters, both in an intellectual and in a moral sense.

At first I just was not understanding of this, then I became more and more frustrated and wanted to talk about this on FDR. I tried to do that and actually had a wonderful Skype call with Greg G. about it, but things degenerated ever more, and so a confrontation became inevitable. I called Stef (and others) on both his dishonest debating and his bullying and not long after was banned. (check my post history as Conrad)

At the time I was at peace with my banning, thinking 'well, this is the way it is and it's all good. I did what i think was right and I'm accepting the consequences'.

Then after my banning Stef did a couple of podcasts about me (and others), one in the regular podcast feed and one in the new Premium section (it was the first Premium podcast), in which he thoroughly misrepresented my positions, insulted me, lied about his own behavior, and at least indirectly violated confidentiality by talking about things of my personal life that I had told him about in an e-mail (he didnt mention me directly, but since I was one of the three people he talked about and given the information that was publicly available the attentive listener would know the confidential info was about me).

Then I got pissed.

I posted or helped another person compose a post two new messages ( here and here on the FDR board about the dishonest behavior. (and later I posted for some time under the name LiMi) I did not mind violating the ban that much because Stef had earlier violated confidentiality and had been a douchebag quite generally.

Because I did like quite a few people who were on FDR and who had the same skepticism about Stefan and some FDR'ers as I had, and because I liked the idea behind FDR, I started LiberatingMinds, and soon quite a few people who used to be on FDR flocked to LM.

From LM we could see Stef and FDR change more and more.

1. Stef's grandiose claims, his delusions of grandeur came more and more to the fore (culminating in his claiming that UPB was the biggest intellectual achievement in the history of mankind, and in his claim to have solved the free will/determinism debate once and for all),

2. because more and more people started to question aspects of what he was doing he also started banning more and more people, a significant part of whom came (at least for a while) over to LM. See here for a near-complete overview of who got banned and why.

To be sure, quite a few bans were entirely justified because the poster was vulgar, rude, abusive and so on, but quite a few were just utterly unjustified in the sense that their behavior was by no means worse than the behavior of FDR'ers who agreed with Stef.

In all this time, I don't think Stef has ever banned somebody from a discussion who agreed with him in that discussion. Only dissenters have been banned. Never have the same standards of behavior been applied to both dissenters and FDR'ers.

That is also when Stef's banning policy started to change: formerly people supposedly were banned for abusive behavior, but (and I actually think this started with my banning) then he instead started to use the 'dinner party metaphor' which basically implies he bans whoever he doesn't like and doesn't even attempt to give an 'objective' reason anymore.

3. his emotional manipulation of people in call-in-shows or listener conversation podcasts became too prominent to ignore or dismiss.

in short, I started to realize that Stefan was not an idealist, but an ideologue.

Why the intensity of my fascination with FDR?

I think at first I did see Stef as a wonderful role model.

I never really had any such role models in my life and was often disappointed in the adults around me, their hypocrisy and pettiness. I had confrontations with my father and with elementary and high school teachers on a regular basis and found no way to respect them. I did much like one teacher in high school and one professor in university, but Stef seemed the first adult who had it all: brilliance, intelligence, humor, wisdom, virtue and integrity.

So finding out that Stef in fact was not the ideal type I had in my perception, but in fact one of the bigger douchebags in the world, was both painful, angry-making, frustrating and exhilirating.

Exhilarating because one I started to have my doubts I acted on them, was rational, open and persistent in questioning Stef and others, and did not shy away from it. I was able to confront his hypocrisy directly (and this may have been a proxy for tose events and people in my life in which I couldnt or wouldnt do that) and totally and rationally, and especially in the week leading up to my banning this was a very good and liberating feeling.

I realized that an essential aspect of truly learning and understanding what FDR had taught me was applying those insights to FDR and Stefan themselves, and not cling to the idealized misperception of them.

In an important sense in my opinion the only way to become an 'FDR-graduate' was by becoming an 'FDR-reject'. Or rather, by taking those actions that given the situation inevitably led to getting banned and 'excommunicated'.

My continued quite intense fascination with 'everything FDR' shows however that the 'graduation-process' has not been completed yet. So that's something to seriously consider and explore.

Another reason/cause for the continuing fascination I think is similar to the fascination people have with soap operas or reality shows. I follow FDR like others would follow a soap opera or reality show. it's gossipy and a weird form of entertainment. And it's likely not very healthy, so that too is something to seriously consider and explore.

Conrad, This is an excellent post. I think it is beneficial for those new to the situation, so that they may understand what was so compelling about Stef and FDR in the beginning. (you may want to run this by the spell chick, as several parts don't make sense until you spend the time to try and translate them.)

- NonE

I don't think it's unhealthy. I think you're performing a vital service.

a common thing...

http://br.youtube.com/watch?v=negQy5SouE4&feature=related

yeah, I saw that video some time ago. Very sympathetic, smart and independent person. I think many people have his and my experiene re FDR.

Funny, I was perusing my old posts on FDR, just to be clear about what happened and when, and I thought it would be a great idea to formulate a post like this, but of course, Conrad beat me to it. Excellent work, by the way, C'rad.

I'm going to follow his up with my own very soon. It occurred to me that I was at a very vulnerable time in my life when I found FDR, what with my terrible marriage coming to an end, and then my brother's being struck down and eventually dying. I made some posts on FDR about my brother, so my break with them must have been roughly coincident with his death. And if I think about it, it was they way that my family came together and offered each other so much love and support that it really put the lie to Stef's caricature of the family. I started to just writhe with loathing and discomfort when I would be listening to his podcasts and he would start in about all that corruption and stuff, because my experience at that very moment was just the opposite. It really turned me off and started me looking for critics and ideas that were counter to his assertions. Then, of course, I found LiMi and the rest is history.

Anyway, more to come later...

it's pretty much my history too. I listened to some podcasts for a while, thought it was great* ... joined the forums thinking it would be some grand stoa where people would meet and have deep and open phylosophical discussions, but was fairly dissapointed with Stef's blunt, one-answer treatment of divergent theories, plus his gang of sycophants,

Administrator's note

[post at least temporarily removed in anticipation of litigation case. The post can be viewed here on a page created by the accuser. I am - at least for now - not deleting this thread exactly in order to show that the accuser's claims are highly misleading. And I am referring to the article created by the accuser because I don't want to create the impression that I deleted the posts because i think he is right. Quite the contrary.

Because I understand that Forumotion has its own rules and the content of these posts may, even if they are considered in the original context, be in violation of Forumotion's rules, I will delete them for now in anticipation of the case and hope to thereby act in good faith with Forumotion's guidelines.]

*one thing that strikes me about the FDR "methodology", is how convenient it is to just chalk it up to a "fucked-up psyche" or having been "brutalized as a child" every damn time someone disagrees with you. It is like marxism and the "bourgeois logic". For a while I was swayed by that siren, but snapped out of it after hearing podcast after podcast where he would end with, "that is because they were brutalized as a child", it was like goddamn mad-libs.

oh, I was answering Conrad

Greetings.

I've been reading on the FDR and LiMi case before, but despite that have been exposing myself to and participating on FDR more and more. I guess you could say that I'm in those "beginning" stages that you all say you've been in. However all this stuff you're saying simply isn't enough to dissuade me from actually going further with FDR.

The way I understand the case of FDR and LiMi can be summed up this way. You both overreacted.

It turned into a pro and anti game. Stef posts some stuff on FDR which was meant to make LiMi look bad and I can't even say that he started it since the guardian article came first and was extremely misrepresenting.

And then LiMi incidentally or not, turned out to be a refuge base for everyone that has anything bad to say about Stef, regardless of whether their arguments are actually rational or just an expression of anxiety caused by their inability to face certain important truths about themselves.

And so the slippery slope was on.

To be perfectly honest, the overreaction to me seems evident in this quote as well:

conrad wrote:

So finding out that Stef in fact was not the ideal type I had in my perception, but in fact one of the bigger douchebags in the world, was both painful, angry-making, frustrating and exhilirating.

So you basically turned from idealizing him to finding him "one of the bigger douchebags in the world". That's quite a transition. Please excuse me for being so direct, but perhaps idealization was a mistake to begin with. It's one thing to have a "perfect" philosophy and quite another to have a perfect application of the said philosophy. You appear to have made that assumption and was thus set up for a major disappointment from the get go.

Even in these "early" stages of my admitted fascination with FDR I realized the imperfections. Stef is certainly no role model for me. He is simply a brilliant guy who has a lot to say that could be helpful, but if I had the insights he had I would've sometimes presented my thoughts in a somewhat different manner. I catch his occasional (possibly unconscious) self-contradictions, but most of them are minor compared to the largess of his message which itself empowers you to see his own contradictions, so basically the dude is giving you the entire thinking paradigm with which you don't need him to tell you anything.

That is, he is telling you to listen to yourself instead of himself. He is telling you NOT to treat him as a role model. Make yourself into a model of yourself! But some people are so used to the gravity of an authority that they apparently couldn't figure out how to use this thinking paradigm. So what happens when they fail? Well of course, they blame Stef, make him into this monstrous cult leader that destroys families (or in case of Tom and Barbara, the latter didn't even have a thinking paradigm to begin with and was biased from the start).

So this whole conflict as I see it was escalated by a lot of imprecise thinking, jumping to conclusions, generalizations etc. which makes me tempted to see the overreaction to FDR not as some sort of a reaction to something that lacks integrity and is a menace to be dealt with, but as a response of the corrupt world to the cure, as pretentious as that may sound to some people.

I'm not saying the LiMi discussions of FDR are necessarily all bad, nor that they can't and sometimes don't play a healthy role of a "watchguard". I'm saying it is doing this job badly by overreacting and allowing this board or a lot of people on it to become something slightly more - a launchpad for the corrupt world to abuse to launch a demonization campaign against FDR that goes beyond surgically identifying its imperfections and instead throws the baby out with the bathwater.

Some of you may deny that, but that's what the results undeniably were, which is a shame.

would be interesting to post a similar message at FDR btw