The Strange Death of Stefan Molyneux (Repost)
Thoughts of his rise and fall and what it means for dissident thinkbois
Moving all my old content on Minordissent.com to here. Expect a post a day for the next few days. Original publish date: 3/30/21
Saw this tweet today and it inspired this tweet storm which has now been cleaned up and expanded upon to become the poast you are reading now.
Stef was a huge positive influence in my early intellectual life and his downfall has been very troubling to me.
Even more so has been how little I have really cared. Despite him being in many ways the first father figure I ever had (certainly the first man I ever respected), my relationship to him since his deplatforming has been disconcertingly transactional. I have felt a lot of guilt over the years for this and have thought a lot about him and what went wrong.
In my opinion, the crux of his mistake was to not understand that the only thing which protects a dissident is to always say something new.
Any dissident who picks a hill, will die on it.
To expand:
1. He didn’t understand that normies not caring about radioactive but true ideas was a feature, not a bug.
He dumbed down his content (or, at least, stayed focused on and doubled down on the high engagement content) to reach a wider audience, which only alienated his base and inevitably activated the immune response of his new mainstream audience.
He got traction in the late 2000’s, because he said novel things in uniquely articulate ways (I still have yet to find anyone who makes ancap arguments even close to as well as Stef), and early adopter thinkboi’s (I am retconning this word to be endearing) were engaged to the degree that he fed our addiction for intellectual novelty.
He only got huge in 2016 because he developed a completely-by-happenstance and, in retrospect, predictably temporary alliance with grug brain white proles over Trump.
Stef’s explicit goal has always been to try and teach people how to think. I can only conclude that his likely desperation to achieve this mission (is any man on a mission ever not desperate to achieve it?) allowed him to fool himself into believing their attention was their understanding.
In reality, the white grugs secretly hated him for just about everything else that came out of his mouth (anti-spanking, anti-USA, atheist, voluntary family, anarchist, etc), but temporarily used him. As soon as they believed they’d been cured from their ailment (with the election of Trump), their immune response quickly rejected his medicine.
And given that Stef had, like any good businessman, shifted his product from appealing to early adopters, to appealing to a wider audience: when his wider audience’s support almost completely dried up, it was only a matter of time before the incumbent narrative structure he’d fired a few dozen bullets into over the previous year went for a retaliation killshot.
I have little doubt he would have recovered from the loss of the grugs if his business were in any other industry, or even any other ideas. But he chose the most radioactive (but empirically sound) ideas he possibly could and sought to take them mainstream.
In retrospect, it probably should have been obvious that power would single him out for destruction.
2. He pushed too hard for rationalists to become activists.
Many more early adopters would likely have stuck with him through this transition if he didn’t try so hard to turn novelty seeking early adopters into long term sustainable business/a movement.
I tried living Stef’s recommended life and basically tore my life apart. Removing everyone from my life who weren’t rationality obsessed aspies (leaving me will zero people IRL), forcing myself to have public conviction about controversial ideas (most of which I no longer believe), and alienating 98% of the people in my life by unwaveringly “living my values”, etc.
I am certainly a better and stronger person after going through this, but 1. ultimately the way Stef lives and recommends others live just wasn’t for me and 2. I could have probably gotten similar results with way less trauma.
I have only minor regrets, and I certainly do not blame him. I truly believe he had the best of intentions. And even if he didn’t, all my decision were my own and made logical sense at the time. However, I would not be surprised if many early adopters in the middle of this phase were secretly (even to themselves) relieved when Stef was kill shotted. It almost certainly made their life far easier.
No more having to feel guilty for being uncertain about ideas. No more having to feel ashamed for not wanting to sacrifice everything in your life for some temporary ideological interest.
And that’s not to even mention all the wimps who never came out the other side.
The dozens if not hundreds if not thousands of former community members who, after ripping down their old OS, eventually found they didn’t have enough conviction or self-direction to implement his recommended upgrade (nor the creativity or intelligence to devise their own) who just restored from backup then became huge detractors.
This model—to try to get early adopter thinkboi’s who just want to try on everything in the store to go all in on the $10K coat— is also what led to all the cult accusations.
He was very persuasive in getting many to see how great the coat looked on him. And how the coat was objectively the best item in the store. And many (myself included) admired the swagger and poise with which he wore it. And likely were or still are occasionally if not frequently self conscious about our struggle to take action and commit to things. So it wasn’t too hard to convince us to go for it.
But many if not most who took the plunge and bought it found they did not have the temperament to pull it off (disagreeable, high self-assurance, high conscientious, etc; which early adopter thinkboi’s are almost universally not).
And given how great of a communicator he is, coupled with his mission to get as many people to buy the coat of "rational empiricist modernist”, he was bound to get way too many bad sales, thus creating a large anti-Stef community. This no doubt made distinguishing legitimate criticism from vengeful trolls majorly difficult, which likely caused him to double down rather than change direction in the face of reasonable criticism.
You cannot turn activists in to rationalists. And you cannot turn rationalists in to activists. They are fundamentally at odds on the conviction spectrum. A high conviction rationalist or a low conviction activist is an oxy moron. Stef’s downfall proves, if nothing else, that he himself had fallen too deeply into the excitement, status, power, and meaning of activism to remain as rational, empirical, and thoughtful as he so admired.
3. Conviction is a live-fast-die-young strategy for dissidents
Stef’s high conviction and commitment to his ideas of interest allowed him to make them clearer than anyone else could, which caused him to grow very fast.
But this same conviction and commitment is what ultimately killed him.
If he rewrote his own OS code enough to stay agile in the dissident space, he would have never had the certainty or clarity to work hard to become its defacto representative. Or If you consider Alex Jones a dissident (I don’t) then it’s second in command.
He could have stayed small and niche and evolving, like say, Yarvin, and survived. But that would have defeated his entire mission.
Stef often mentioned the idea of people whose only value was as a warning of others for what not to do.
Sadly, for all the value he provided to me and many others, I believe that he may go down in the history books as exactly this.
Stef was to right wing philosophy what Donald Trump was to right wing politics: he took people who had given up on movements and tried to make them believe again.
And he truly was the best person for the job. If it was possible, Stef or DJT would have done it.
But it was not possible. The patient is dead. Modernism is dead.
Truth is not moved forward by commitment and conviction. It never was.
Commitment and conviction have only ever been effective tools for powerful lies. Modernists (of which Enlightenment rationalists are a subset) simply don’t understand that what they perceive as truth, while less wrong, at the end of the day are still lies.
And thus, strategies that work for things like progressivism or Keynesianism or Christianity (powerful lies) will never work for things like HBD or Austrian economics or libertarianism (weak truths or at least weak less wrong lies).
That doesn’t mean we don’t need powerful lies. Without them, we’d never have produced anything at all.
Nor does it mean that we don’t need weak truths. Without them, we crumble into entropy when things change.
But any weak truth which becomes a movement will soon become a weak lie.
And weak lies are the greatest enemy of powerful lies.
Most dissidents hate this and reject it as nihilism and black pills. Because in their mind it means to give up on progress.
But black pills are just white pills you haven’t integrated yet. The white pill is: you are not giving up on progress. You are giving up on useless effort that only makes the problem worse.
This is so hard for most dissidents to even consider because very few are actually in this to win. If anything, they like losing. Because all that matters to them is that they get to fight. And you don’t get to keep fighting after you win. Or if you do, you end up like Progressives. They were only in it for the fight too. And now they have power but still think they are the resistance and it has turned them into what would be a comedy if they weren’t so psychotically destructive.
Most dissidents are the equivalent of the man who would rather spend 12 hours a day shoveling than to invent a digger. Or, further, the man who steps back to even ask what are we building and is it working?
Because to them, to constantly be working is more important than whether the thing we build actually works.
Personally, I am a lazy (and agreeable) fuck and I have utter contempt for the work.
I don’t like to fight. I like to win. And I believe the only way we actually win is without a fight. It is about engineering the incentive structure to where winning is automatic and unavoidable (like Bitcoin), rather than something which requires constant vigilance (which will always lose in the end)
I am content to never move an ounce of dirt until I know that what the hell we are building is not only actually buildable but actually better. Until both of these are satisfied, I am more than content to focus all my building energy on my own life, ideas, and community. And, if you asked my opinion, I would advise you to do the same.
Conclusion:
Learn from Stef’s (and most other dissidents) mistakes.
Understand that:
Normies will never be your ally and if you ever get fame, they will destroy you.
If you want the respect and engagement of those capable of thought, you must be evolving and updating (as of this writing, Yarvin is the best I’ve found, and Alexander is a kinda close second). This will reduce your influence in the short term. That is a good thing. If you try to be Socrates, you will get put to death.
Guilt, shame, morality, and calls for self congruency do inspire action. But they also inspire reaction. Be very careful how you use them. No matter how good your intentions, you are playing with fire.
Activism and rationalism are polar opposites. You can have retarded warriors who take action without question, or you can have brilliant thinkers who question everything and take no action. They are fundamentally different sets of people and trying to blend or change them will only destroy whatever you’re trying to build.
Being capable of independent thought is a talent, one very few have (and should have, for that matter). Yes you got really good at it with simply a little practice and education. You are the exception, not the rule. (How this is not obvious to you by now, given how few people you know like you, is evidence only of your own hubris and should make you feel embarrassed/question whether you are really as smart as you think you are. This will be good for you.)
Commitment and conviction are fickle and dangerous. Like guns, they are a tool. Able to be used for “good” or for “evil”. And also like guns: if you need them to enforce the truth, it isn’t truth it’s narrative. Also, the fact that everyone will try to use them to enforce their narrative is (a part of) the truth.
Nihilism and meaninglessness are painful. But they are only dangerous to the degree that you can’t handle them and go off the deep end into some high conviction dissident ideology. If you wish to stare into the void, you must embrace what stares back. If you can’t do this, it’d be better for all of us if you went back to being a Democrat or Republican or some other harmless worldview.
You can only tolerate so much chaos. Most normies have chaos in their personal lives but survive because their intellectual life is hyper rigid. If you want to have a fluid intellectual life, you must work on yourself and your life, and create stability there first before you will ever be able to make a decent contribution to the truth. Go watch some JBP (or even old Stef) and sort yourself out. If you are a mess, you are only going to make things worse.
If the truth were something one man could figure out in half a lifetime, we wouldn’t be 200,000 years into this game and still so far from winning it. You can contribute to the truth, but you can never know it all. If you think you know it all, or even anything close, it’s because you are actually at the peak of mount stupid.
That’s all for now.
PS in honor of our fallen comrade, here is my favorite molymeme of all time. I laughed for like a half hour the first time I saw this. Still laugh today.
Catch you next time, Space cowboy.