YouTube's Ban of Stefan Molyneux
Please support my work by donating at my Patreon page. I receive ZERO support for writing my articles. I have spent many hundreds of hours - possibly thousands - researching and writing articles to ensure public health, and to uphold good, honest, scientific progress in the field of health and well-being.
Thank You.
Yoda Knight
Sleight of Hand, Smoke and Mirrors
Stefan Molyneux is all about tough love and uncomfortable truths. He’s the kind of guy who cautions about the iceberg hidden below the surface, who focuses on the disease rather than the symptom, on the root-cause rather than the effect. His intellectual habitat is the realm squarely at the pyramidal base of predictors and risk. For example, he tirelessly (and correctly) points out that healthy society is rooted most deeply in good parenting, solid family, and in the respect for a universal set of morals, values, and ethics such as the non-aggression principle.
His approach is at odds with the Orwellian nature of many of our core institutions. We have a predominantly leftist mainstream media — the “Ministry of Truth” — wherein truth isn’t a business model, which fails to respond to facts and reason, and who keeps its readers rage-baited through distortion and confabulation; using “nuance” only when it serves to obfuscate against the ratification of likely truths and simple facts — and oversimplification to keep relevant nuance from its audience. We have Big Pharma — the “Ministry of Health” — whose business model revolves around sickness and who extols a cadre of dogmatic skeptics and AstroTurf campaigns to minimize the idea that healthy lifestyle is the key to preventing chronic disease and to ensure healthy aging. We have Big Tech — the “Ministry of Love” — whose business model isn’t love and connection at all, but rather generates vast fortunes by inculcating the addiction to dopamine-kicks, rage-bait, and egoic, tribalistic wrangling. As Sam Vaknin points out, love and genuine social connection in one’s life is the antidote to becoming one of Silicon Valley’s monsters: a zombified creature of addiction and rage. And then we have the political ideology at the snug centre of the Overton window: modern leftism — the “Ministry of Peace” — who, like all good Marxists, keep the masses devoted to the cause by fomenting the sense of perpetual war and civil unrest against an ever-present “enemy” — even if the war is solely to defeat the “wrong think” inside your own head. The modern left, just like a dysfunctional ego, is nothing without its enemy. It doesn’t feel alive without it — and so must perpetually stoke a toxic brew of perceived wrongs and grievances — even as it instils a highly corrosive and infantilizing victim complex in its citizens, inflicting on them a huge opportunity cost to make something better of their lives, and robbing them of the impetus to genuinely transform and nourish the foundation of their lives through deep self-reflection and by choosing to adopt responsibility and self-ownership.
All these institutions are united by their focus on the tip of the iceberg — with effects and symptoms, not with origins or first principles.
In striking at the heart of the matter — or, as he puts it, by putting the sun at the centre of the solar system — Molyneux often says things which ruffles a few feathers, which makes people feel annoyed, or which can feel abrasive. This includes: critiquing the left’s celebration of single motherhood — and their enabling of it through the welfare state — in light of the documented negative effects on children; on the dangers of the unbridled promiscuity and hedonisms of a generation which has become morally vagrant and uprooted; and on the existential threat to western civilization as Marxist ideology and communist uprising gain a stranglehold. Here, Molyneux rightly points out that the left isn’t your friend — that it doesn’t genuinely care about blacks, or immigrants, or women — but that they’re riling up these groups, weaponizing them, and exploiting them for the Democrat vote. This was revealed in Joe Biden’s most recent gaffe “if you don’t vote Democrat, you ain’t black”. Further, Molyneux suggests that, as well as being a Democrat bribe, welfare dependency is a double-edged sword — an enslavement — which (over time) robs us of purpose and meaning in our personal lives and undermines the incentive structures in our social and economic systems, as well as ballooning the burden of debt to be carried by future generations.
He is also rightly concerned by the way state handouts cause rifts and shifts in the selection dynamics of modern dating. If the state can step in as protector and provider, then women are free to choose the “bad boys”. In a deep twist of irony then, the rise of feminism and the welfare state has thus ushered in a very real patriarchy in which the incentive structure for women to select for steady, reliable, good men has all but vanished. This compounds the seismic shift wrought by the contraceptive pill in the sexual revolution — for the first time in history, actions and consequences were uncoupled in the reproductive game. This had profound effects on behaviour for both men and women.
But, undoubtedly, Molyneux’s most controversial point is that average IQ differs between races — whether for reasons of nature or nurture. This sounds bigoted until you realize that Molyneux is using this to help account for some of the disparity in outcome we see in society — helping us move away from the knee-jerk reaction of seeing all disparity through the lens of discrimination and oppression. We don’t complain about the lack of white inclusion in the line-up for the 100 metre sprint finals at the Olympics, or about the underrepresentation of short people in the NBA — and we don’t complain of “East Asian privilege” when accounting for the fact that East Asians outperform other groups in America. East Asians have the highest IQs, on average, by the way.
[NOTE: personally, I feel uncomfortable with the IQ question because: (a) IQ and intelligence aren’t exactly the same thing, and — even if they were — standard psychometric tests don’t measure the multiple intelligences which many psychologists now believe exist; (b) secondly, wisdom is far more important in today’s world. Yet, the very same engineers who design Big Tech’s algorithms and programs to spot and ban IQ “hate speech” are themselves selected for IQ! This is one of the myriad hypocrisies of our establishment elite].
Ironically then, the most “hateful” thing Molyneux has ever said is that the inequalities and disparities of outcome which we’re constantly being told by the left is wholly due to hate and unfairness might not, after all, be due wholly to hate and unfairness. In trying to counter some of the left’s incessant rage-baiting and fomenting of resentment, Molyneux is accused of “hate speech”. Molyneux is echoing Thomas Sowell’s attempt 40 years ago to quell the media’s incendiary race-baiting by providing alternative explanations for disparity in outcome. Sowell, like many other great black intellectuals, has disappeared into the left’s memory hole as it pretends to protect and honour the voices of the black community.
Molyneux can at times feel abrasive — and perhaps aggressive — but not unlike many of the intellectuals and scientists the left has celebrated for decades. Intellectual debate and scientific dispute is a dog-eat-dog world after all (science proceeds one funeral at a time, as the saying goes) and we shouldn’t sanctify this rigour of free and open inquiry only for the ideological group we side with. Molyneux’s abrasiveness ranges from the sandpaper which rubs away our rationalizations for apathy, inaction and for blaming our circumstances on nebulous forces instead of choosing to take responsibility for our lives — “put down the cheesecake man and get off your ass” — all the way to a benevolent acid which strips away society’s most pernicious delusions which stultify and deeply sabotage our lives.
In some profound ways, Molyneux echoes the wisdom and insights of psychiatrist M. Scott Peck who suggested that the desire to escape “legitimate suffering” lies at the root of all societal illness. Molyneux has said a similar thing: that the “little sufferings” and sacrifices in our lives — including the choice to steer away from a life of instant gratification — help to prevent the big sufferings down the road. Molyneux’s counsel also aligns with Peck’s thesis that “evil people are ‘people of the lie’, deceiving others as they also build layer upon layer of self-deception”, and in how a predominant characteristic of those he calls evil is scapegoating: “they sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection…projecting their own badness onto the world”. Today, Peck would have considered the “woke” brigade of the left to have elements of evil — having defined evil to include “the exercise of political power — that is, the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion — in order to avoid… spiritual growth”, lamenting how “while they seem to lack any motivation to be good, they intensely desire to appear good. Their goodness is on the level of pretence. It is, in effect, a lie. This is why they are the people of the lie”.
Molyneux isn’t a white supremacist, nor a racist. He believes that western civilization, its culture and values, are supreme. So do I. And so do, apparently, the tens of millions of people around the world from different cultures and religions who seek to emigrate to the western world. The left’s most flagrant and toxic deception is to conflate culture with race — and to conflate religion with race. “The West is the best”, exclaims Molyneux. He never said that whites are the best. The left’s deception is a remarkably effective one: conflate race and culture for so long, and so hard, that even those who perpetrate the falsehood start to believe their own lie. Make believe that 2+2=5 — and start to believe it yourself.
If YouTube is simply a business swayed by political pandering and by public pressure to virtue signal, then Wikipedia is something markedly different — an unapologetic Orwellian propaganda machine straight from the pages of 1984. Wikipedia pre-supposes that people lack the ability to discern and distinguish, which is the extreme bigotry of low expectations.
This is how Molyneux’s profile shot appears on Wikipedia, emblazoned in red to signify DANGER! DANGER! The article goes on to totally mischaracterize, misinterpret, Ad hominem, and lie about Molyneux.
Yet, of course, communist ruler Mao Zedong — responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and dissents in China for simply having a difference of opinion — is represented on Wikipedia with borders of holy white:
[NOTE: a couple of days after publishing this article, the red border to Molyneux’s mugshot on his Wikipedia page ‘mysteriously’ vanished. Yet, it still appears to warn readers of the opinions of speakers like Sargon of Akkad and Paul Joseph Watson]:
Yet, it would be naïve to think that YouTube is simply an innocent and passive bystander in the “culture” wars. After years of shadow banning, silently unsubscribing his followers to artificially deflate his growing popularity and outreach, and using algorithms to bury certain content — whilst raising relatively unpopular, yet ideologically purposeful and Straw Man videos to the top of search results — YouTube’s last attempt before banning Molyneux’s “wrong think” outright was to remove the autofill function to his name. And bizarrely, once banned, YouTube elevated his supposedly most “hateful” content to the top of search results — as if in an act of political maneuvering to further deepen the mischaracterization of those on the political right. Apparently, YouTube is perfectly happy to promulgate and gamify so-called “hate speech” if it has the effect of satisfying its paymasters or to bolster its ideological narrative. YouTube and Twitter are happy to host our leaders who lie about weapons of mass destruction and who lead us into an illegal war in the Middle East — which cost countless lives and destabilized an entire geopolitical region. The message this sends is disturbing: unpopular opinions must be banned, but the most heinous hate and criminality is OK.
Being banned by YouTube is fast becoming a badge of honour.
Today’s left (and their intersections such as feminism, SJW’s, and Marxists) fail the Integrity Test on 3 fronts. They fail the science test because they only support science when it buttresses their narrative. They fail the consistency test because their worldview is overrun with hypocrisies and double standards — so much so that it seems like if it weren’t for double standards, they’d have no standards at all. And they fail the Victim Litmus Test — by not welcoming and rejoicing in data and evidence when it shows them not to be victims, but instead desperately clinging on to their cloak of victimhood.
Their “post-truth” world isn’t emblematic of a society which has dealt with facts head-on and then ventured on to higher realms of sensemaking. Theirs is the world which has stalled before this foundational step, which has regressed into the immature and pathological defense mechanisms of deflection and projection — just as the drunk in his quest for peace doesn’t rise above the level of thought, but drops far below it.
Though I disagree with Molyneux on some of his core arguments related to free markets and on the ability of society to function without significant state regulation, I am deeply grateful for the way he has rescued philosophy — the love of wisdom — from the clutches of Ivory Tower elites and reinstated it where it belongs: in the realm of the pragmatic and earthbound. His views present an antidote to the hypno-narcosis of our Brave New World, to the currency of distraction and rageful tribalism which is precisely what our increasingly technocratic and globalizing governments need in order to usher in 1984.
Rejoice to live in world where you can be offended. Protect that world. Being offended isn’t a sign of your oppression — it’s a sign of your freedom.
Comments
Post a Comment