that's it in a nutshell, esp. the last sentence

what was your product if I may ask?

Whose last sentence -- mine or Stewart's?

I don't want to get into particulars about the business, but suffice it to say, we thought we had built a better mousetrap, but no one beat a path to our door. Looking back on it, I see the flaws in the design, and there's a product on the market that is a slightly better-designed -- and far better-promoted -- version of our product.

Donations are down and tensions are high! Hopefully this'll be the glorious fall of Stefan Molyneux!

I really liked in the podcast, around the 25 minute mark, where he talked about the non-statist/anarchic creation of the massive propaganda campaign designed to engineer widespread hatred of the word "Anarchy" and how he refers to this as "Anarchy working". What good is it to say "Anarchy works" without some kind of argument justifying "Anarchy works and it is preferable"? If Everyday Anarchy is nothing more than "oh look at how voluntarism worked for your marriage...........don't you see how voluntarism will work in all cases?" it'll be an even bigger failure than UPB because Anarchy working in Stef's eyes doesn't seem all that different from Statism working.

"Look at how we have been enslaved through Anarchic means, how can you deny that Anarchy works?"

It gets something done, well alright....why should a statist give up his belief in democracy now that you've given him this frightening vision of anarchic oppression?

The whole reason economists and philosophers go about writing scholarly articles and books about social order in the absence of government is because you can't just assume that because something works nicely in one place it'll work perfectly well in some other cases without putting a little bit of fucking thought into it.

"Anarchy works"

Well so the fuck what? It works well for children on the playground fine, justify it in all places or stop calling yourself the greatest philosopher the world has ever known. And if Anarchy works doesn't have any normative punch to it than ...well why even say it. Yeah ok, anarchy got shit done, so did Statism, Your point?

Just...argh...DAMNIT!

I'm puzzled. I was under the impression that Stefan's advocacy of anarchy was based on its being the only system of social organization which was consistent with a moral population. Approached from this perspective, it seems like Stefan would be relying on the axiom that anarchy can work. "Ought" seems to imply "can," and if anarchy were inherently unworkable, it doesn't seem reasonable to say that people ought to live in an anarchistic society. So I see why it would be important to show that anarchy can work.

But beyond establishing that anarchy is workable, I don't think Stefan's would want to argue in favor of anarchism on utilitarian grounds; the argument here is not that anarchy would produce the best results, but rather that it is the only system consistent with morality. And Stefan has emphatically distanced himself from the notion that what is morally right is that which produces the best results.

I haven't listened to Stefan's podcast, but I guess I'm not sure why people are objecting to his approach of showing only that anarchism can work without showing that it works better (if in fact that's what you guys are saying). I think the more substantive objection is the one which focuses on Stefan's hasty generalization. Or if Stefan doesn't provide a compelling argument for the idea that anarchism is the only morally legitimate system, that would also be a problem.

Well, good luck to him...I mean, if he's not going to address the moral or the consequentialist argument in depth, then I'm not sure how much more really needs to be said about the subject. That's especially true if, as I anticipate, Stefan doesn't spend his 65 pages addressing the past literature and the state of the contemporary debate (see The Machinery of Freedom, The Voluntary City, Chaos Theory, The Market for Liberty, For a New Liberty, etc.) But I haven't read the book, so I won't hate on it.

What I gathered from listening to the beginning of it is that this is a book about how we can "live" anarchic principles in our daily activities. Its a glorified version of the deFoo argument. Basically he starts with the premise that AnCap is right and therefore we should seek to promote it, and the best way to promote it is to live our lives as if we were anarchists. That means basically deFoo, don't associate with statists, don't accept obligations in your personal life, etc.

My criticism was of the linked podcast in which Stef rambles on and on about why people aren't promoting the book because the changes that the book suggests people make are too scary. Frankly, I don't see what is so scary. If you live a reasonably independent life and subscribe to AnCap you have probably largely made these changes already.

The suggestion that we completely disassociate from anyone with any statist beliefs is scary, but only because it is so juvenile.

i think the book is more about arguments that show thatr anarchy works in practice, I am not sure whether it is about defoo'ing and the like. i don't think so. the reason that people feel anxious about the book according to Stef is that the arguments for anarchy that he gives are so simple and so convincing that people are afraid to show them to their family and friends because if they don't even accept these ultimate and simple self-contained argyuments it means that they are corrupt and that is something the FDR'ers who don't spread the book or use the arguments are unwilling to face

The thing is, though, that Robert Murphy's Chaos Theory already provides a reasonably well accepted (by anarcho-capitalists) lay-person's introduction to the philosophy, which can be found online for free. It wouldn't make sense to write another book simply because there wasn't an easy introduction to the idea out there (Murphy's book is actually shorter!). It would be much more understandable if Stefan had something new to add, which could most obviously take the form of a connection to the rest of his body of work. Otherwise I just don't see what he was trying to achieve.

If he were advocating a sort of separationism, I'd be interested to hear how it compares to Konklin's Agorism.

I don't get the impression that Stefan actually reads any philosophy. He's always saying "Philosophy is amazing! Philosophy will change your life!" but he never talks about anyone else's work except in the vaguest ways. And even then he only mentions big names, like Hume and Nietzsche, in ways that don't suggest that he's read anything beyond excerpts. So what he's really saying is, "My philosophy is amazing! My philosophy will change your life!"

Danny, I think you are consistently giving Stefan more credit than he deserves. His body of work (by which I mean his books and articles, not his podcasts) is hardly worth consideration. He shows a lack of intellectual consistency and rigor that almost seems intentional. He cites no one else's work in the fields of his interest, gives no indication that he's even familiar with the relevant literature, and yet simultaneously claims that his work is revolutionary and original. I mean... how would he know?

Perhaps you're right. On the other hand, he could be acting within the mold of Ayn Rand, who seemed familiar with a lot of others' ideas although she rarely cited her sources. The structure of his arguments is often so reminiscent of other people's (Kant on the categorical imperative, Hoppe on self-ownership, etc) that I wonder how those ideas got there. I mean, if I'm not mistaken, I think he claims some familiarity with the Austrian school of economics, which leads me to believe that he would have at least some experience with the relevant literature. I mean, no one just wakes up one day and is an anarcho-capitalist. It's a complex position that developed over the course of the past century. Stefan had to get it from somewhere; the question is where.

I have no doubt that Stefan is familiar with quite a lot of ideas. His history with libertarian philosophy, as I understand it, was pure Objectivism a la Rand for most of his adult life. It was only in the last ten years that he's embraced full-on anarchism, and I suspect that's due mostly to the World Wide Web. You can learn a little bit about anything from the Internet, but it takes a more directed, focused approach to really understand the nuance of philosophical argument (not that you need me to tell you that!). Stefan never shows evidence for that sort of understanding, though; even for the few philosophers that he occasionally name-drops.

My assessment of Stefan comes mostly from his behavior towards other sorts of thinking. When he criticizes other philosophies, or even other approaches to his own philosophies, it usually takes the form of a rather unspecific dismissal. So-and-so is a nihilist, a relativist, a statist toady, or some other pejorative description. He never goes into any detail, I think, because he doesn't have the depth necessary to do so.

Just think back on the abortive effort you put into UPB. Has Stefan ever done even that sort of analysis for anyone else's work? It's doubtful. I imagine that he doesn't think it's worthwhile. Since he's the only person he knows of who is talking about what he's talking about, and since he believes that he's spot-on in his work, then it stands to reason that everyone else must be essentially mistaken. The specific reasons, at that point, aren't terribly important.