How to Escape a "Controversial Online Community!"
(um - close your browser..? 
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For more about where the mother posts - and the almost certain source of "info" about FDR, click here (warning - very strong language).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/nov/15/family-relationships-fdr-defoo-cult
(This article was also the topic of a recent Sunday show, available here)
(I also did a podcast on this topic...)
I have already expressed my regret about how this article may affect Tom. Putting that aside for the moment, here are some of my thoughts.
There are particular biases in the article that I think are worth examining.
The most striking thing about the article is that the entire case against FDR is based on the hearsay of one aggrieved mother and entirely off the record "anonymous" sources. The reporter did not choose to interview any other members of Barbara's family.
For instance, Barbara reports what her younger son is supposed to have said about his childhood, but the reporter does not actually talk to the son directly -- which scarcely seems like a difficult thing to do. Furthermore, she does not interview the father, or say that he refused to be interviewed -- or talk to any extended family members. Of course, Tom did not wish to be interviewed either.
I am no reporter, but it seems likely that you need at least one corroborating statement when dealing with an aggrieved party, otherwise it is just hearsay. Since the presence or absence of significant family problems is the most essential question in this entire matter, not lifting a finger to verify the facts is highly significant. Since the younger son lives at home, it would have been simply a matter of Kate saying, "Please put him on the telephone, so I can ask him a few questions..."
Once you get beyond the mother's stories about how happy her family was, some striking facts do emerge. The father had significant mood swings, was verbally abusive and aggressive towards animals, and threw objects when he was angry. The family no longer ate meals together, and had not for some time.
Family communication was almost nonexistent, as Barbara says later regarding her new relationship with her other son. Also, the marriage was close to ending when all of this was going on, since it has ended recently, and that does not happen overnight, particularly in a lengthy marriage. Furthermore -- and most significantly -- Tom literally burst into tears during our conversation when talking about how terrified he was of his father, and you simply cannot fake or be manipulated into that kind of deep emotion.
These facts indicate significant family problems, which at the very least should cause any reasonably objective or curious reporter to investigate the matter further -- particularly if you are making the rather startling claim that the only significant problem in the entire family unit is some podcaster from Canada.
After Tom said that he intended to leave the family, he did stay in contact with his mother, since she says that she tried everything -- persuasion, negotiation, compromise and so on -- and yet the content of what is being discussed is never mentioned. What is being negotiated about? What is the content of the compromise? What is the compromise itself?
Then, the mother says:
"But Tom didn't seem interested in communicating, merely in throwing accusations - for instance that his brother John and me were fond of laughing at him, which wasn't true."
This completely denies Tom's genuine experience of his family and calls him an outright liar -- thus throwing accusations at
him, which is not quite the same as trying everything to come to a compromise.
The reporter then shifts from talking about FDR to talking about the Cult Information Center, as if the two are related in some unstated way. The CIC reports that:
"...several people have been in contact recently about family members recruited into cult-like organisations via chatrooms or other online means - recommends that families try to keep up some form of contact."
This statement could be associated with any website, and is not specific to FDR in any way. If the CIC had tagged FDR as a cult, doubtless this would have been mentioned. This is just a transparent form of guilt by association.
Now -- what has the net effect been of Tom's "absorption into a cult"? He is not begging for loose change at the airport, he has not shaved his head, he does not wear a bedsheet, he has not been charged any money, he has not been tattooed with the FDR logo -- in fact, I have not seen him around for months, or had any interactions with him at all.
The net effect is that he is doing fine at university, and I wish him the best. The sum total of this "cult" accusation is that I showed him deep sympathy when he burst into tears about his family -- a real surprise to me -- during a call in show. I will always show sympathy for the child over the parent -- that is not specific to FDR, but would be any compassionate person's approach to this kind of psychological pain.
I was pleased that Kate included this quote from me:
"[Stef] ...simply reminds people "that our family relationships are voluntary and you should really work, if you're unhappy in these relationships, to improve the quality of those relationships - but to remember they do remain voluntary. And that gives people the motivation, I think, to try to improve them. But if you can't improve them - and we can't change other people, as we all know - for sure you should have the option to disengage."
There is no reasonable therapist, psychologist or psychiatrist in the world who would fundamentally disagree with such a statement. If people have a problem with this basic reality, then they have a problem with psychology as a whole.
A little later, an interesting switch occurs about money.
After quoting my statement that I do not charge money, Kate responds that critics say people
do pay -- which is not the same thing at all. I do not charge money, but people who are grateful for whatever help, insight and wisdom they get from the site do donate if they want. If receiving voluntary donations is the same as charging people for goods, then the Heart and Stroke Foundation is actually a competitive business, and should cancel its charitable tax status.
Towards the end of the article, we see an interesting "argument from adjective."
"Tom does say that he is frightened by his father's mood swings, which sometimes cause him to throw things or shout at the cat. But the conclusions Molyneux jumps to, his manipulation of the conversation, is chilling."
So -- when Kate listens to a sensitive and hurt young man sobbing about his childhood, and his terror and humiliation in the face of his father's rages, the only thing that "chills" her is my side of the conversation? That to me is impossible to comprehend emotionally. Even if there were clear criticisms of how I handled this emotional eruption, surely the more chilling aspect is the behavior of the father throughout Tom's childhood.
There is no proof of my "manipulations" of course -- and the fact that Kate finds the conversation "chilling" is perfectly meaningless: it is a mere statement of subjective experience. If I say that I find the theory of evolution "chilling," clearly that contains no truth statements about its contents.
Also, it would have been very easy to include a link to the podcast itself, or at least provide the podcast number, which was not done, which seems very strange, especially when we remember how Alec Baldwin's verbal attack on his daughter was so widely distributed.
The media loves to reproduce truly chilling audio clips, like 911 calls, taped recordings with bad people, and so on. It is a shame that she did not give her readers the chance to easily find the podcast in question, and come to their own conclusions. The
podcast number is 1037. 1:27:00
I do stand by my statement that there are no "really good" parents -- I think that until a rational proof of objective ethics is more widely disseminated, parents have little choice but to substitute will and punishment for genuine and reasonable moral authority. If I have criticisms, which of course I do, at least I strain myself to the utmost to provide better solutions.
Saying that there are no really good parents is not the same as saying there are no good parents at all.
I also stand by my statement that it is wrong to use the media in this way -- to insult, degrade, attack and humiliate your son by implying that he is weak-minded, hysterical, defensive, aggressive, irrational, susceptible to cultism, a liar and so on -- and to not only provide a first and last name, but also the town that he grew up in, which is a complete non sequitur in the context of the story itself.
There is an even more essential question:
why is this article being written at all? Is it because FDR is some monster child-eating cult that is laying waste to families across the world? Of course not.
Did Kate find this story and then go looking for a parent? That seems highly improbable -- the most likely scenario is that Barbara contacted Kate with her complaints about FDR. Why would Barbara do this? Why would she subject her son to this kind of article, with all that it implies about him? Is it because she believes he is in a cult and wants to help him?
Of course not -- she is fully aware that the CIC instructs parents not to attack the "cult." Is it because she wants to warn other parents about FDR? If that were genuinely her goal, she would have demanded anonymity in the article to protect her son, and suppressed all personally-identifiable characteristics about herself or her son. This she did not do.
Furthermore, it was clear to both women that Tom did not want the article to be written or published. So -- what is the purpose of the article? The likely net effect is that Tom feels hurt, frightened, angry and exposed.
Imagine seeing a childhood photo of yourself splashed across a popular newspaper, and your mother bringing every complaint and accusation against you to the attention of millions of people, and on the Internet, permanently. This is an exercise in humiliation.
The fact that I suggest seeing a therapist to people with a great deal of emotional ambivalence does not exactly support the thesis that FDR is a cult -- this fact is summarily dismissed in the article:
"...by the time people go into therapy, it's probably too late - they've already decided they were abused and persuade the therapist as such."
The idea that a web site can implant false memories in people so permanently that they would completely fool a trained therapist is pure nonsense. Therapists are trained to assess, probe and evaluate -- and are not easily misled.
The only other thing that I wanted to mention was this ridiculous idea that people can somehow be imprisoned in a website. As Kate puts it, when she is attempting to comfort Barbara at the end of the article -- scarcely indicating impartiality or objectivity:
"Some people do manage to leave FDR, however, and I point out that Tom is only 18."
It is hard to imagine how an educated and intelligent person could conceivably make the statement that it is hard to leave a website -- freeing yourself from the "grip" of a web site is as easy as navigating to another web site, or simply closing your browser.
There is a fair amount of bias and manipulation in the article, but to me it is so obvious that it is impossible to imagine that it fools many people -- and those who are fooled by it, would be very unlikely to benefit from exploring philosophy anyway, so no real harm has been done to those who remain so frightened by hearsay that they will avoid exploring the truth.