Without going too deeply, I sympathize with the writer on an extremely personal level.
At some point, you have to make a decision- do you continue to maintain a relationship with your father, or do you choose to sever your relationship like most people he knew.
If you choose the former, then you will accept that he will never change, and some day he will even harm you, if he has to choose between you and his beliefs. It's not that your father is out to do bad things- an aggressive dog does not intentionally try to bite your legs off. It's just doing what it believes is best for itself. You will have to learn to accept it, hard as it might be.
If you choose the latter, then realize that your father spent decades of his best life holding behind his beliefs to raise you, and that the least you can do is to make sure he doesn't die alone.
From my armchair research, this kind of change stems from a deep-seated sense of paranoia/threat, that was seeded by childhood traumas. A schizophrenic sense that everything in the world is trying to cause harm to him. When the person was young and was trying to make a living, he can keep those thoughts away. But as he gets older and can see the end of his life, these paranoia thoughts gradually overwhelm him. Having all the sudden free time post-retirement doesn't help either.
Are you not being a little simplistic, and wholly presumptuous, here? This is a sad story and, from your armchair, you can explain it all? The man has beliefs; they might be slightly nutty, but he seems unlikely to bite your legs off. He's not a dog. What's your justification for believing that he has any sense that "everything in the world is trying to cause harm to him"? There's no evidence of that in the original post. What make you think that "these paranoia thoughts gradually overwhelm him"? Again, not supported unless you turn your head and squint a little (lot). If you dropped all the paranoia/trauma/threat threads, maybe you could weave a whole cloth from something you do know.
This is a story of a man becoming radicalized. He is prioritizing these radical beliefs above his marriage, friendships, and relationships with his children.
I will drop an observation here that many perpetrators of mass casualties were seen in retrospect to go down a similar path. Friends and family knew something was up, but nothing could be done.
My view is that there is a straight line from this guys story to a catastrophe where this guy harms himself and others. At a certain point he has lost everything that matters and will be consumed by this paranoia
> He is prioritizing these radical beliefs above his marriage, friendships, and relationships with his children.
Was he? Maybe I missed something, but I didn't see any indication of that in the article. Unless by "prioritizing these radical beliefs" you mean he wasn't willing to just abandon his sincerely held beliefs because his family was threatening to leave him if he didn't? I actually think that's an admirable quality. You shouldn't ignore reality just because it would be convenient for you personally. (In this case he's wrong about what reality is, but that's a separate concern.)
He was wagering $10k of the family's funds to back his predictions. And spending money on gold and survival supplies. Those aren't necessarily bad things, but you should definitely talk over it with your spouse to make sure they are in agreement. I don't completely disagree with his decisions, storing some food and water is common sense. It depends on the severity of his actions.
The problem is that you're viewing this as a tragedy of untrue sincere beliefs. These beliefs are not sincere, they are a mask for an emotional desire. I do blame them for valuing their own emotions over the well-being of their family. It is a massive and shameful failure of character.
So your position is that he placed a $10,000 bet on something he didn't actually believe in? That he's lying and doesn't really believe in those things, and is just claiming he does because he has an "emotional desire" for... something? Something that matters more to him than his family?
That's a pretty wild claim; do you have anything to substantiate it?
If a seemingly intelligent person goes against all reason to do something stupid, they're not stupid, they're a liar if they know it or not. At this point he would rather lose his family and die than admit he was played, so he's going to keep playing his role in the conspiracy theory until he does.
There's no straight line. It's true that, "many perpetrators of mass casualties were seen in retrospect to go down a similar path", but it doesn't work faultlessly in reverse. Lots of people on that "path" cause no casualties at all, some of them don't even do harm, even to themselves. They're just a little bit off beam.
Per the story, the father has immersed himself into the beliefs and convictions of a widespread social movement that we're all familiar with. While his beliefs seem it has pulled him away from his everyday relationships, they've brought him in ideological alignment and community with many, many others.
Perhaps that social movement is dangerously paranoiac and may even lead to violence and conflict in society, but it's a meaningfully different thing to become part of a community that pulls you away from your prior relationships than it is to be lost in your own idiosyncratic fantasies of violence or threat as you seem to be implying. Conflating the two means conflating what their root causes are and how they might be addressed.
Having some degree of personal experience with this situation myself, I don't see why you'd ever sever a relationship over something like this. Like sure, maybe his beliefs are insane, but why would you let that affect your personal relationship with someone you're close to? Just talk about something else.
> "Why am I going to abandon the truth?" he insisted. "I can't abandon the truth."
In a way, that's actually kind of an admirable attitude, it's only sad in this case because he's so wildly wrong about what the truth is, and because some members of his own family decided to abandon him over those beliefs.
Because the paranoia will worsen, and one day he will accuse you (or your siblings/wife/his siblings) of doing harms to him, even though it's pure paranoia.
Examples include trying to steal assets from him, belittled him with offhanded comments, or betrayed him even though he helped you in some distant past.
>In a way, that's actually kind of an admirable attitude, it's only sad in this case because he's so wildly wrong about what the truth is.
I totally agree. It is indeed admirable that someone can be so convicted in his beliefs. There is a certain beauty in that.
The situation described in the article isn't schizophrenia or bipolar disorder; or at least it doesn't seem to be. His father just started believing online conspiracy theories
You can try to set boundaries like this, but typically the beliefs are so deeply held this isn’t possible. Sure the son could try to base the relationship totally on their shared loved of Ohio football, and make it clear he doesn’t want to discuss other things. But the chance the father doesn’t make snide comments or try to convince his son to buy gold is near zero. His beliefs are more important than anything, certainly more important than trivial things like boundaries set by loved ones.
It becomes exhausting to love someone when they are constantly choosing to be annoying or hateful. At a certain point it becomes a betrayal of your beliefs as well. If the father in this piece keeps bringing up bigoted views, it’s a betrayal of the author’s sister to keep a (negative) peace and not confront him on them.
I agree it's one thing to hold different beliefs, and another thing to be constantly starting arguments over them and refusing to discuss anything else.
Maybe that was happening, but if it was then the article completely omits that very important piece of context.
What is “some degree” and why does that make you think that’s relevant experience? The author didn’t sever the relationship, the wife and daughter did. The wife who had to live with him far beyond “some degree” and the gay daughter whose very identity the father rejected, years after the rest of the family knew.
I'm not going to go into the details of my relationships with the people I'm close to here. And yes, I'm specifically talking about the wife and daughter when I say that some members of his family decided to abandon him over his beliefs.
Maybe there was more going on that the article didn't discuss, so I'm not going to judge the people involved in that specific situation, but severing relationships with your family over an intellectual disagreement that has close to zero direct impact on your everyday life is rather petty in my opinion. If you really love someone, it ought to take more than that to damage your relationship.
Just want to call out, totally fine to not want to share the details of your relationship online, but if that's the case, you can't really make the appeal to "being in a similar situation" if you can't back that up in some meaningful way.
It reads as being willfully misleading. It seems apparent to me from your other comments that your situation is not really like the one described, because you're not really familiar with the hallmarks of it. But it doesn't matter one way or another since you're just asking the question 'why would you sever a relationship like this?'
Which is a fine question to ask on its own without making the appeal to "I've been in this situation", which you don't want to verify.
It would honestly make your first comment more solid if you just asked the question instead of alluding to being in similar situation, and then backing off from it here.
> but severing relationships with your family over an intellectual disagreement that has close to zero impact on your everyday life is rather petty in my opinion.
The issues being discussed are not intellectual disagreements that had close to zero effect on the lives of the people involved, though.
The gold example the author mentioned is a good indicator.
Would you agree, that in a marriage, that money in a shared account is property owned by both husband and wife? And yet, because of the father's belief, he took the money out and converted them into gold without telling his wife. Is this a mere intellectual disagreement, or is this a physical betrayal rooted from his belief? The trust has been broken and the disagreement is no longer on purely hypothetical ground.
Realize that today the money became gold bars, next time the money might become a donation to a far-right group in Montana. Can the wife trust him after this?
Uh, no, it says that, e.g., for the wife it involved a significantly altered home life, spending, and stockpiling in the home on which she was not consulted and which her concerns about were ignored. And while it doesn't discuss the details of the impacts, treating the daughters sexual orientation as both a choice and a wrong choice is not a mere intellectual disagreement, and certainly did not have trivial impacts.
The only person who the "intellectual disagreement that has close to zero impact on [...] everyday life" description might even approximately work for (and even then it is a stretch) is the son, who...is the only one who didn't sever relations.
Maybe. I guess it depends on how much of an impact that had; the article doesn't go into detail. Was this just an unusual hobby that his wife didn't like? Or was it completely consuming their life and financial resources?
But you're right, saying it had zero impact is an exaggeration. It does seem like it had a small impact, at a minimum.
It’s not an “intellectual disagreement” and viewing it in that lens is part of why the family abandoned him. They’re not debating the merits of Wittgenstein.
In my experience, people talking about "truth" are rarely talking about the truth. They escalate to the highest epistemological levels in order to avoid talking about the fact that they are Just Plain Wrong.
People who talk about the things, talk about things. Talking about "truth" often seems to be a deflection.
> I don't see why you'd ever server a relationship over something like this.
I don't know more about your situation, so I can't help you with what you're missing. What I can say is that I have been in the same situation, and it seeps into every interaction. It starts off as one thing, and it becomes all-consuming, until you can't have a normal interaction with the person that doesn't get pulled into the conspiracy web.
I used to have a list of topics I would avoid around my Dad. What was truly devastating was watching all of the things I could relate to my dad about slowly get consumed into that web of topics that were all connected. What was more devastating was that my dad is a smart guy, and he's painfully effective at making the leaps he wants to make from where he's at. If you brought up any topic on the list, he would immediately run you around all of the topics on his list, and any time you make a substantiated claim on one thing, he'll jump to another thing, just to argue.
This story was devastating to me, because I wanted them to find a way to make this work out. And I was hopeful the father was going to be willing to believe that he was wrong given that he brought up the idea of the bet in the first place. But the giveaway to me was that when they discussed the stakes, the dad wasn't really considering losing as an option.
I considered that list and thought to myself "Yeah, I would take all of these bets, and yeah, if I was wrong about all of these I'd be willing to tell the person I was seeing something wrong about the world." But it was clear from the bet setting that there was no world where the father could believe he was wrong. He just wasn't anywhere in the same world as the rest of the world, and honestly, that's what scares me the most.
It feels like we have this incurable disease that makes people believe things irrationally, and there's a risk that anyone can catch this disease just by spending enough time online. What truly scares me about the 'cutting them off' piece here, is that it's a measure to protect yourself and it also represents giving up on the person.
When I cut my dad off, I explained to him my concerns that led to the decision, as well as that I was willing to talk again if he was willing to work on this and at some point I called in to check on how he was doing, and if he was making any progress, and the most baffling thing to me was that he didn't even register the part of my communication (written down) that explained I'd be willing to talk to him if he worked on this. Like, working on this wasn't even something he would consider doing to salvage the relationship, which was pretty devastating because of how long I spent trying to fix this relationship and make it work.
The problem is sometimes people can't help but share their ish with you. Getting a text at random hours saying that you're a dumbfuck, for thinking X, from someone you still love, because if only they share this one post with you, you'll finally be convinced, and join their side, gets tiresome.
Painful to read. I have had similar conversations with my own father, though nothing quite extreme. There is no moving them from their warped reality.
I have theorized some root causes:
- They cannot differentiate between well-meaning friends and high quality information i.e. there is a fallacy of "this person is honest, hence this forward they just sent me is true".
- Starting from at least my generation (born in late 80s), there is an understanding of "echo chamber effects", personalizing newsfeeds for engagement etc. There is some inoculation against content meant to trigger/resonate with specific sub-groups. I have found this to be completely lacking in discussions with my parents/their generation.
All these make it hard to move them out of the dis-information locus they fall into.
> Painful to read. I have had similar conversations with my own father, though nothing quite extreme. There is no moving them from their warped reality.
Perhaps you just haven't registered them doing so, but every day, people of all ages who feel clear and confident in their own convictions say the same thing about others of all ages: their peers and coworkers, their children, their elders, the youth.
For most people, it's just the nature of conviction to believe that you believe what you believe for good reason and the people who disagree with you are misinformed, stubborn, or both.
While you might be able to find surveys and polls that show some nominal bias about purported "wrong thinking" when segmented by this demographic or that one, the differences are always relatively marginal, with whatever "wrong think" worht investigating almost always slicing throughly through all segments in a substantial way. Susceptibility to "wrong think" is not meaningfully generational, and nobody's especially immune -- it seems to be just part of life that different people get convinced of different things and can sometimes be quite stuck to their convictions.
It's tragic when entrenched disagreement divides families and communities, as in this story, but it's something we can identify throughout all of history and there's no particular evidence to suggest we're likely to escape it any time soon. It may not even be wise to aspire towards it, as deep and stubborn conviction almost certainly has great merit of its own.
You're quite right. We all develop a bias about the world, and even as I say that I'm pretty good at "critical thinking", there's no telling whether I actually am. Anyone at any level of knowledge, experience, or culture can plausibly come to an implausible belief. It's easy to think ourselves correct and others, if they disagree, incorrect. Always keep that in mind. I am not the beginning. I am not the end. I have my views and my veracity will be perceived diversely by others with their own rich worldviews.
For sure, but I think GP's point (certainly mine) is that the opposite end of the spectrum is also a commonly trod landmine. The world is not split into, say, people who believe global warming is completely bunk and people who are fully informed on the best forecasts of global warming. There are levels to the information people have, and then to how people perceive that information, and then to how people communicate that information, and so on. Science is generally the correct tool for most jobs, but it would be a mistake to say that our implementation and realization of science is necessarily correct. And that's without mentioning what people then do with their knowledge.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I hereby appeal to the guidelines. Comments like mine or GP, that may come off as controversial or offensive (which is a function of the reader), should be read and responded to with time to breathe. Considering the topic of this thread, even more so. Anyone's immediate interpretation relies on more primitive modes of cognition that are generally more emotionally saturated. I'm not bashing science or whatever. I know some people do (on here?). I want to say that intellectualism is a journey and a struggle. If the truth was easy to come by, only malicious people would be an obstacle. But people aren't generally malicious, just hurt and confused.
Here I'm saying your interpretation of my comment is wrong. You can be wrong. And as you're reading this, keep in mind that I can be wrong. I'm not just including myself to let you save face or something. I mean it. The core of intellectualism is not doing science or whatever, not in practice at least. A rational agent has no stubbornness. But as humans, having humility and self-awareness is necessary.
The scientific method is currently our best method to try to remove our biases and move towards the truth. It's certainly not perfect (funding can introduce systemic biases and can direct research away from certain topics), but it's so much better than the alternatives.
There's also the issue of people/scientists not being willing to adjust their beliefs when presented with new information. Science advances funeral by funeral
There are degrees of things. The father from this story wants all Democratic presidents of the last 35 years prosecuted for treason. For "murder" apparently as well. I mean, that's pretty far out by any standard. Never mind adjusting his entire lifestyle towards his political views (buying precious metals, survivalist gear, separating from his wife and becoming estranged from his daughter).
Everyone has "negative" impulses of all sorts. Most of us are an asshole sometimes. That's not great, but, you know, people are people. But some people are an asshole most (or all) of the time. That's not the same thing at all than being a flawed human being.
I don't think it is far out that every U.S. president in the last 35 years has had serious abuses of power, many authors argue this point eg Whitney Webb
I don't know who Whitney Webb is, but I think we both know this is not about the general trend and problems in US politics and the office of the presidency, but bollocks like Vince Foster, Benghazi, "but her emails", Barack HUSSEIN Obama from KENYA etc. etc. etc.
Something that I was quite surprised not to see in this story were questions about mental illness. There’s obviously a huge modern tendency to medicalise things, but the link to the grandfather made me wonder. What we call mental illnesses like depression, schizophrenia, anxiety are all obviously extremes on a continuum. (I’d love to see evidence to the contrary, but seizures or infarcts are probably one of the few binarized events related to the brain and even those have micro-versions.)
Two generators could be pretty rational. I've got two generators, one an automatic standby generator that covers the house, and another portable generator for my well (because it's on a different meter). We just had a ~ 30 hour utility outage this week, and it's nice to be able to take a shower. There was a longer outage a few months ago.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to have two generators if you have frequent outages, and the generators might need maintenance during an outage. Of course, most people buy generators, ignore the maintenance, don't have frequent outages, and then the generator won't start when they need it to. Having a second generator doesn't help with that, because it's likely if you don't maintain one, you don't maintain the other either, or you only ever run the primary and never the secondary, and it doesn't start when you need it to either. I've got to start and run my portable generator once a month; it doesn't like to start if you let it sit two months, and I wouldn't be surprised if I couldn't get it to start without rebuilding the carburetor if it sat for three months. (My 1981 VW has fuel injection, not sure why small engines from 2020s don't have it :P) I'd love to replace my portable generator and a vehicle with a replacement vehicle that can power the well, but I'm waiting for the invisible hand of the market to figure out that I'd buy a hybrid/PHEV single cab truck with a 240v/30a output if it's available.
All that said, age related mental decline affects a lot of people, even before it becomes clinical dementia. :(
That cursive is perfectly legible. One bit of particular note is the father bet $1000 in cash for each prediction, while the son would owe him $1000 in "podcast services."
I wonder if that part is covered in the podcast, it could be a father unwilling to take money from his son or a man trying to gain a platform to further spread his views.
Emotional intelligence is not something we're born with. Sounds to be like the guy, the father, knows he feels things but then quickly equates them to the intellectual IRL truth. That's where emotional intelligence can come in and say well no these are just feelings.
Super tragic that the whole family had to push him away from themselves, because of the guys intolerable behaviors.
Counseling can be pretty helpful, though the people going to it need to want to go, otherwise counseling is a no-go.
It is so strange to me that some people find this revolting and other people think it’s quite nice. I wonder if the audience roles would be reversed if the subject roles were reversed.
Here's a thought process: Dad was trying to make sense of things that did not make sense to him. These things that did not make sense to him were seen by him as ultimately dangerous, even to his own family. That compelled him to seek to find the truth about whether they are real threats. Along that journey, he became convinced that they were in fact real. He sought out the long term implications and those implications became his 10 predictions.
As a concrete example, he heard there was massive illegal immigration into the US. His first encounter with this information could have come from many places, Fox news, a Republican senator, RFK Jr.'s report from the border, or a story in the New York Post. He wondered, is it true or not that millions of people entered the US through the southern border, and, that this had been happening for many years? Was it also true that there was a fleet of 'NGOs' that were providing aid to these millions of people as they made there way to the US? Was it also true that these people were being further aided and extorted by cartel membership along the way? Was it also true that hundreds of thousands of children were 'missing'? Finally, was it true that the US was funding logistics to fly hundreds of thousands of Haitians into the US?
There is information on both sides of these questions. Plenty of accounts on X have information that it's all happening, and worse. But those who would know with authority, like Secretary Mayorkas, President Biden and VP Harris conclusively stated it was not happening at all.
Dad's sources from his investigation led him to believe there was a preponderance of truth. The son's that there was not, (presuming that he did an investigation). It's too bad that the different opinion became a wedge between them.
I am confident that most disagreements among people are an outcome of their differing sources of information during their lifetime. It's self-evident, but if they endeavoured to agree on what was true and what was not true first before developing opinions about those truths, the schism can largely be averted.
Very sad to read (I think the grandfather isn't relevant to conspiracy theories though, it was IMO a different though similar problem of feeling alienated with a perspective certain people (institutions, authorities, local govt, health dept, etc) were not there to help him.)
Much of this emerging problem of conspiracy and BS mania the last decade IMHO is psychological manipulation capitalising on a less well educated / informed population than it was in the 70s, and the older population now more often not being as sharp as they once were or not equipped to deal with the information overload that the near endless News in various forms can be.
Roughly summing up, for the many people dealing with a family member who has gravitated to news items and other stories that have a very different narrative: more often it's the appeal of a seemingly simple answer all wrapped up as being some person or group's is to blame, any logic pointed their way is met with denial, cognitive dissonance or wishful thinking syndrome. (What I've experience with my own father it's most often in the form of they don't like ... anyhow, this validates it.)
I refer to the psychological manipulation more often as zombie grooming and less sheep grooming which aims to slowly transform the more vulnerable into zombies / sheep that'll do their bidding even if it's the lowest level, it still counts to their greater aspirations and motivations which are 99% political or involving the big money end of town. People are quick to blame the net / web / online crapfest but I see the problems starting more in certain tv and radio media areas which can expand to other more reputable news if folks there haven't engaged their thinking caps.
One would think the manipulation would be easily spotted and dealt with when a stitch saves nine, but much is designed to fly well under the radar, what most of us might disregard as some poorly informed news team, is actually something aimed just for their targeted audience they plan to groom.
The problem is akin to saturating the air with alarm bells or sirens a person is familiar with, and that the faint voice nearby saying it's just some DH with their finger on a button doesn't seem at all important or relevant.
Its unconscionable to me that the author would take $10,000 from his own father who is clearly not only mentally vulnerable but not rich as the author states. The father is very much at fault for what happened here, but something is deeply wrong with American society normalizing the annihilation of what should be sacred familial bonds over political matters. As somebody who generally aligns with the left, the last 10 years of overzealous liberal woke-scolding has done nothing but further increase this alienation of others that results in a complete mental split between families.
The son being an NPR correspondent and the mother moving out of their room on the day after Trump's election is highly indicative of this. To the author's credit, he is somewhat aware of this and mentions it in the article.
What about the familial bonds the other way? No respect for the wife’s opinion on how to spend the family money? Telling the daughter her lifestyle is wrong/immoral. The daughter should suck it up?
An intelligence asset whose job was to blackmail the rich and powerful dies in his cell before he can testify when cameras stopped working and both guards fell asleep. Come on.
It helps to stop seeing it as a conspiracy but as a projected inebt negotiation of people ready to defect on civil society.
Its not a THIS will happen , but a "if we do not renegotiate a not working social contract, to be more fair, something like THIS will be happening, brought on by my fellow defectors. We might not have cultural air superiority , but frankly what have we to loose. It cant be worse than THIS."
And defect they did. In germany the youth basically mass seceeded from liberal democratic society during the last vote. If you refuse to negotiate and compromise in a society, you fight and society ends- with digit number signs to come.
Very sad, have some of these types in my own family. I agree with the assessment that this is a form of emotional coping. All of these conspiracy theories are strangely comforting, despite how apocalyptic they might seem. Not only can you externalize all blame, they are fun to think about, they have a very sticky epistemology, and a high degree of consistency that lets you feel superior to the non-believers. It's actually very hard to debate someone that's really into flat earth, since there is always some esoteric argument about physics, and the conspiracy always goes deeper. You find this type of thinking everywhere, but somehow we've gotten the most comically extreme versions as mainstream beliefs now.
Well said. I have an aunt that is into this. And I think your point about a superiority complex has merit. She uses it as a psychological instrument to disparage other people in her family who don't share her views. Every conversation it comes back to "I just hope I can reach him/her [with bogus views] before it's too late".
What's interesting is her choice of bogus views. She's never gone flat earth, but she thinks radio waves cause all health issues. And satellites started wildfires, and the gov controls the weather, and drops chem trails. And the vaccine makes everyone sick. It's remarkable how anti-science it really is. She doesn't care about inverse-square law of radiation. If I did a blind test with 10 trials of a wifi transmitter on/off behind her back, she would fail the test and still not be deterred. She wants to believe the vax caused every single sickness people have, but doesn't acknowledge the source of sickness before the vax. Finally, I know the sources she follows have a massive amount of anti semitic tropes, yet she is Jewish. I know she's seeing people in these communities blame Jews, yet she ignores it and still consumes the conspiracy. Nothing would convince her that she is wrong.
Any top ones you might like to share? I have not seen far-right-level of belief and sticking to false predictions even when proven wrong among people who might be called far-left.
Tthat's exactly what a good friend of mine said when predictions from 2021 - 2024 failed to materialize. I do care about him a lot but its getting harder over time because nothing seems to change the convictions.
Wouldn't you say that the approach taken by the son is what we need as a society though? polarization and parallel-universes do not seem to be helping at all.
I disagree. It's a way to talk about fear which is not a little thing. We're all afraid. We're humans. It's a great skill, to be afraid, because it allows us to avoid so many dangers. There's no shame in being a human. :-)
The point is the father is afraid to die. And he's coping with it by spending a lot of energy thinking about other things that he thinks he can control. He simply factually wrong in this case but the work effort, the strength that he's exerting is admirable. He's got his list, it's 10 things, he's organized $10,000, he says he's thought about this, "a million times".
I think it's actually pretty useful and helpful as an article. A cautionary tale in some ways. Plus it seems factual.
They are not saying that the father is little, or belittled. They're saying that the father's perspective is rigid. And that it causes external problems when changes happen around that father.
Q: Am I overlooking something in the article? Did they actually say, "my father is worthless etc etc?"
Eg When the daughter needs to talk about the part of her identity that she's been hiding for decades, the father doesn't want to hold that conversation, which proves to be an insurmountable amount of distress for the daughter as she needs support, so she has to separate. And This rigid rejection is because of the issues that are discussed in the article.
In a way it's interesting to see how a functioning family can fall apart. In that way it's a cautionary tale: Don't expect the way that you relate to your father or your father relates to you will remain a stable constant throughout their lives. People change.
Fear of death is pretty distracting and devastating for many.
How is he belittling his father? The piece is incredibly emphatic to his father.
If anything, the author’s fault is agreeing with his father too much, to the possible exclusion of the rest of his family. I doubt his sister and mother will let him hang out in the middle ground forever.
This is playing out in a whole lot of families, and has been for some years. Collective recognition of this illness, an understanding that we’re not alone in struggling with it, reflections on how to cope with or reverse it or at least eke out a few decent moments with these once-normal people (even if it’s just things that didn’t work) are very much needed.
I imagine the story is likely accurate (conservative father adopts increasingly bizarre right-wing conspiracy theories and family becomes alienated - is it dementia or something else?) and it also may fit NPR's editorial angle. To me it does seem like something of an invasion of privacy, particularly if it was published without permission.
Without going too deeply, I sympathize with the writer on an extremely personal level.
At some point, you have to make a decision- do you continue to maintain a relationship with your father, or do you choose to sever your relationship like most people he knew.
If you choose the former, then you will accept that he will never change, and some day he will even harm you, if he has to choose between you and his beliefs. It's not that your father is out to do bad things- an aggressive dog does not intentionally try to bite your legs off. It's just doing what it believes is best for itself. You will have to learn to accept it, hard as it might be.
If you choose the latter, then realize that your father spent decades of his best life holding behind his beliefs to raise you, and that the least you can do is to make sure he doesn't die alone.
From my armchair research, this kind of change stems from a deep-seated sense of paranoia/threat, that was seeded by childhood traumas. A schizophrenic sense that everything in the world is trying to cause harm to him. When the person was young and was trying to make a living, he can keep those thoughts away. But as he gets older and can see the end of his life, these paranoia thoughts gradually overwhelm him. Having all the sudden free time post-retirement doesn't help either.
Are you not being a little simplistic, and wholly presumptuous, here? This is a sad story and, from your armchair, you can explain it all? The man has beliefs; they might be slightly nutty, but he seems unlikely to bite your legs off. He's not a dog. What's your justification for believing that he has any sense that "everything in the world is trying to cause harm to him"? There's no evidence of that in the original post. What make you think that "these paranoia thoughts gradually overwhelm him"? Again, not supported unless you turn your head and squint a little (lot). If you dropped all the paranoia/trauma/threat threads, maybe you could weave a whole cloth from something you do know.
This is a story of a man becoming radicalized. He is prioritizing these radical beliefs above his marriage, friendships, and relationships with his children.
I will drop an observation here that many perpetrators of mass casualties were seen in retrospect to go down a similar path. Friends and family knew something was up, but nothing could be done.
My view is that there is a straight line from this guys story to a catastrophe where this guy harms himself and others. At a certain point he has lost everything that matters and will be consumed by this paranoia
> He is prioritizing these radical beliefs above his marriage, friendships, and relationships with his children.
Was he? Maybe I missed something, but I didn't see any indication of that in the article. Unless by "prioritizing these radical beliefs" you mean he wasn't willing to just abandon his sincerely held beliefs because his family was threatening to leave him if he didn't? I actually think that's an admirable quality. You shouldn't ignore reality just because it would be convenient for you personally. (In this case he's wrong about what reality is, but that's a separate concern.)
He was wagering $10k of the family's funds to back his predictions. And spending money on gold and survival supplies. Those aren't necessarily bad things, but you should definitely talk over it with your spouse to make sure they are in agreement. I don't completely disagree with his decisions, storing some food and water is common sense. It depends on the severity of his actions.
The problem is that you're viewing this as a tragedy of untrue sincere beliefs. These beliefs are not sincere, they are a mask for an emotional desire. I do blame them for valuing their own emotions over the well-being of their family. It is a massive and shameful failure of character.
So your position is that he placed a $10,000 bet on something he didn't actually believe in? That he's lying and doesn't really believe in those things, and is just claiming he does because he has an "emotional desire" for... something? Something that matters more to him than his family?
That's a pretty wild claim; do you have anything to substantiate it?
If a seemingly intelligent person goes against all reason to do something stupid, they're not stupid, they're a liar if they know it or not. At this point he would rather lose his family and die than admit he was played, so he's going to keep playing his role in the conspiracy theory until he does.
There's no straight line. It's true that, "many perpetrators of mass casualties were seen in retrospect to go down a similar path", but it doesn't work faultlessly in reverse. Lots of people on that "path" cause no casualties at all, some of them don't even do harm, even to themselves. They're just a little bit off beam.
Per the story, the father has immersed himself into the beliefs and convictions of a widespread social movement that we're all familiar with. While his beliefs seem it has pulled him away from his everyday relationships, they've brought him in ideological alignment and community with many, many others.
Perhaps that social movement is dangerously paranoiac and may even lead to violence and conflict in society, but it's a meaningfully different thing to become part of a community that pulls you away from your prior relationships than it is to be lost in your own idiosyncratic fantasies of violence or threat as you seem to be implying. Conflating the two means conflating what their root causes are and how they might be addressed.
Having some degree of personal experience with this situation myself, I don't see why you'd ever sever a relationship over something like this. Like sure, maybe his beliefs are insane, but why would you let that affect your personal relationship with someone you're close to? Just talk about something else.
> "Why am I going to abandon the truth?" he insisted. "I can't abandon the truth."
In a way, that's actually kind of an admirable attitude, it's only sad in this case because he's so wildly wrong about what the truth is, and because some members of his own family decided to abandon him over those beliefs.
Because the paranoia will worsen, and one day he will accuse you (or your siblings/wife/his siblings) of doing harms to him, even though it's pure paranoia.
Examples include trying to steal assets from him, belittled him with offhanded comments, or betrayed him even though he helped you in some distant past.
>In a way, that's actually kind of an admirable attitude, it's only sad in this case because he's so wildly wrong about what the truth is.
I totally agree. It is indeed admirable that someone can be so convicted in his beliefs. There is a certain beauty in that.
The situation described in the article isn't schizophrenia or bipolar disorder; or at least it doesn't seem to be. His father just started believing online conspiracy theories
True. It would be wonderful if the decades of gradual-but-major mental changes in his father somehow stopped progressing...
> Just talk about something else.
You can try to set boundaries like this, but typically the beliefs are so deeply held this isn’t possible. Sure the son could try to base the relationship totally on their shared loved of Ohio football, and make it clear he doesn’t want to discuss other things. But the chance the father doesn’t make snide comments or try to convince his son to buy gold is near zero. His beliefs are more important than anything, certainly more important than trivial things like boundaries set by loved ones.
It becomes exhausting to love someone when they are constantly choosing to be annoying or hateful. At a certain point it becomes a betrayal of your beliefs as well. If the father in this piece keeps bringing up bigoted views, it’s a betrayal of the author’s sister to keep a (negative) peace and not confront him on them.
I agree it's one thing to hold different beliefs, and another thing to be constantly starting arguments over them and refusing to discuss anything else.
Maybe that was happening, but if it was then the article completely omits that very important piece of context.
What is “some degree” and why does that make you think that’s relevant experience? The author didn’t sever the relationship, the wife and daughter did. The wife who had to live with him far beyond “some degree” and the gay daughter whose very identity the father rejected, years after the rest of the family knew.
I'm not going to go into the details of my relationships with the people I'm close to here. And yes, I'm specifically talking about the wife and daughter when I say that some members of his family decided to abandon him over his beliefs.
Maybe there was more going on that the article didn't discuss, so I'm not going to judge the people involved in that specific situation, but severing relationships with your family over an intellectual disagreement that has close to zero direct impact on your everyday life is rather petty in my opinion. If you really love someone, it ought to take more than that to damage your relationship.
Just want to call out, totally fine to not want to share the details of your relationship online, but if that's the case, you can't really make the appeal to "being in a similar situation" if you can't back that up in some meaningful way.
It reads as being willfully misleading. It seems apparent to me from your other comments that your situation is not really like the one described, because you're not really familiar with the hallmarks of it. But it doesn't matter one way or another since you're just asking the question 'why would you sever a relationship like this?'
Which is a fine question to ask on its own without making the appeal to "I've been in this situation", which you don't want to verify.
It would honestly make your first comment more solid if you just asked the question instead of alluding to being in similar situation, and then backing off from it here.
> but severing relationships with your family over an intellectual disagreement that has close to zero impact on your everyday life is rather petty in my opinion.
The issues being discussed are not intellectual disagreements that had close to zero effect on the lives of the people involved, though.
The gold example the author mentioned is a good indicator.
Would you agree, that in a marriage, that money in a shared account is property owned by both husband and wife? And yet, because of the father's belief, he took the money out and converted them into gold without telling his wife. Is this a mere intellectual disagreement, or is this a physical betrayal rooted from his belief? The trust has been broken and the disagreement is no longer on purely hypothetical ground.
Realize that today the money became gold bars, next time the money might become a donation to a far-right group in Montana. Can the wife trust him after this?
How so? The article doesn't give any indication of that. It just says they disagreed.
> It just says they disagreed.
Uh, no, it says that, e.g., for the wife it involved a significantly altered home life, spending, and stockpiling in the home on which she was not consulted and which her concerns about were ignored. And while it doesn't discuss the details of the impacts, treating the daughters sexual orientation as both a choice and a wrong choice is not a mere intellectual disagreement, and certainly did not have trivial impacts.
The only person who the "intellectual disagreement that has close to zero impact on [...] everyday life" description might even approximately work for (and even then it is a stretch) is the son, who...is the only one who didn't sever relations.
Maybe. I guess it depends on how much of an impact that had; the article doesn't go into detail. Was this just an unusual hobby that his wife didn't like? Or was it completely consuming their life and financial resources?
But you're right, saying it had zero impact is an exaggeration. It does seem like it had a small impact, at a minimum.
It’s not an “intellectual disagreement” and viewing it in that lens is part of why the family abandoned him. They’re not debating the merits of Wittgenstein.
> Just talk about something else.
My experience is that this is very hard with people like this, as all they want to do is "enlighten" you and/or rant about "the truth".
exactly, there is nothing else. And worse, everything becomes a part of the 'enlightenment' or 'the truth'
In my experience, people talking about "truth" are rarely talking about the truth. They escalate to the highest epistemological levels in order to avoid talking about the fact that they are Just Plain Wrong.
People who talk about the things, talk about things. Talking about "truth" often seems to be a deflection.
> I don't see why you'd ever server a relationship over something like this.
I don't know more about your situation, so I can't help you with what you're missing. What I can say is that I have been in the same situation, and it seeps into every interaction. It starts off as one thing, and it becomes all-consuming, until you can't have a normal interaction with the person that doesn't get pulled into the conspiracy web.
I used to have a list of topics I would avoid around my Dad. What was truly devastating was watching all of the things I could relate to my dad about slowly get consumed into that web of topics that were all connected. What was more devastating was that my dad is a smart guy, and he's painfully effective at making the leaps he wants to make from where he's at. If you brought up any topic on the list, he would immediately run you around all of the topics on his list, and any time you make a substantiated claim on one thing, he'll jump to another thing, just to argue.
This story was devastating to me, because I wanted them to find a way to make this work out. And I was hopeful the father was going to be willing to believe that he was wrong given that he brought up the idea of the bet in the first place. But the giveaway to me was that when they discussed the stakes, the dad wasn't really considering losing as an option.
I considered that list and thought to myself "Yeah, I would take all of these bets, and yeah, if I was wrong about all of these I'd be willing to tell the person I was seeing something wrong about the world." But it was clear from the bet setting that there was no world where the father could believe he was wrong. He just wasn't anywhere in the same world as the rest of the world, and honestly, that's what scares me the most.
It feels like we have this incurable disease that makes people believe things irrationally, and there's a risk that anyone can catch this disease just by spending enough time online. What truly scares me about the 'cutting them off' piece here, is that it's a measure to protect yourself and it also represents giving up on the person.
When I cut my dad off, I explained to him my concerns that led to the decision, as well as that I was willing to talk again if he was willing to work on this and at some point I called in to check on how he was doing, and if he was making any progress, and the most baffling thing to me was that he didn't even register the part of my communication (written down) that explained I'd be willing to talk to him if he worked on this. Like, working on this wasn't even something he would consider doing to salvage the relationship, which was pretty devastating because of how long I spent trying to fix this relationship and make it work.
The problem is sometimes people can't help but share their ish with you. Getting a text at random hours saying that you're a dumbfuck, for thinking X, from someone you still love, because if only they share this one post with you, you'll finally be convinced, and join their side, gets tiresome.
Painful to read. I have had similar conversations with my own father, though nothing quite extreme. There is no moving them from their warped reality.
I have theorized some root causes:
- They cannot differentiate between well-meaning friends and high quality information i.e. there is a fallacy of "this person is honest, hence this forward they just sent me is true".
- Starting from at least my generation (born in late 80s), there is an understanding of "echo chamber effects", personalizing newsfeeds for engagement etc. There is some inoculation against content meant to trigger/resonate with specific sub-groups. I have found this to be completely lacking in discussions with my parents/their generation.
All these make it hard to move them out of the dis-information locus they fall into.
> Painful to read. I have had similar conversations with my own father, though nothing quite extreme. There is no moving them from their warped reality.
Perhaps you just haven't registered them doing so, but every day, people of all ages who feel clear and confident in their own convictions say the same thing about others of all ages: their peers and coworkers, their children, their elders, the youth.
For most people, it's just the nature of conviction to believe that you believe what you believe for good reason and the people who disagree with you are misinformed, stubborn, or both.
While you might be able to find surveys and polls that show some nominal bias about purported "wrong thinking" when segmented by this demographic or that one, the differences are always relatively marginal, with whatever "wrong think" worht investigating almost always slicing throughly through all segments in a substantial way. Susceptibility to "wrong think" is not meaningfully generational, and nobody's especially immune -- it seems to be just part of life that different people get convinced of different things and can sometimes be quite stuck to their convictions.
It's tragic when entrenched disagreement divides families and communities, as in this story, but it's something we can identify throughout all of history and there's no particular evidence to suggest we're likely to escape it any time soon. It may not even be wise to aspire towards it, as deep and stubborn conviction almost certainly has great merit of its own.
You're quite right. We all develop a bias about the world, and even as I say that I'm pretty good at "critical thinking", there's no telling whether I actually am. Anyone at any level of knowledge, experience, or culture can plausibly come to an implausible belief. It's easy to think ourselves correct and others, if they disagree, incorrect. Always keep that in mind. I am not the beginning. I am not the end. I have my views and my veracity will be perceived diversely by others with their own rich worldviews.
Science is a thing for a reason. Reality isn't the blind toss up you imagine. We're not all equally wrong.
> We're not all equally wrong.
For sure, but I think GP's point (certainly mine) is that the opposite end of the spectrum is also a commonly trod landmine. The world is not split into, say, people who believe global warming is completely bunk and people who are fully informed on the best forecasts of global warming. There are levels to the information people have, and then to how people perceive that information, and then to how people communicate that information, and so on. Science is generally the correct tool for most jobs, but it would be a mistake to say that our implementation and realization of science is necessarily correct. And that's without mentioning what people then do with their knowledge.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I hereby appeal to the guidelines. Comments like mine or GP, that may come off as controversial or offensive (which is a function of the reader), should be read and responded to with time to breathe. Considering the topic of this thread, even more so. Anyone's immediate interpretation relies on more primitive modes of cognition that are generally more emotionally saturated. I'm not bashing science or whatever. I know some people do (on here?). I want to say that intellectualism is a journey and a struggle. If the truth was easy to come by, only malicious people would be an obstacle. But people aren't generally malicious, just hurt and confused.
Here I'm saying your interpretation of my comment is wrong. You can be wrong. And as you're reading this, keep in mind that I can be wrong. I'm not just including myself to let you save face or something. I mean it. The core of intellectualism is not doing science or whatever, not in practice at least. A rational agent has no stubbornness. But as humans, having humility and self-awareness is necessary.
The scientific method is currently our best method to try to remove our biases and move towards the truth. It's certainly not perfect (funding can introduce systemic biases and can direct research away from certain topics), but it's so much better than the alternatives.
There's also the issue of people/scientists not being willing to adjust their beliefs when presented with new information. Science advances funeral by funeral
There are degrees of things. The father from this story wants all Democratic presidents of the last 35 years prosecuted for treason. For "murder" apparently as well. I mean, that's pretty far out by any standard. Never mind adjusting his entire lifestyle towards his political views (buying precious metals, survivalist gear, separating from his wife and becoming estranged from his daughter).
Everyone has "negative" impulses of all sorts. Most of us are an asshole sometimes. That's not great, but, you know, people are people. But some people are an asshole most (or all) of the time. That's not the same thing at all than being a flawed human being.
I don't think it is far out that every U.S. president in the last 35 years has had serious abuses of power, many authors argue this point eg Whitney Webb
I don't know who Whitney Webb is, but I think we both know this is not about the general trend and problems in US politics and the office of the presidency, but bollocks like Vince Foster, Benghazi, "but her emails", Barack HUSSEIN Obama from KENYA etc. etc. etc.
Something that I was quite surprised not to see in this story were questions about mental illness. There’s obviously a huge modern tendency to medicalise things, but the link to the grandfather made me wonder. What we call mental illnesses like depression, schizophrenia, anxiety are all obviously extremes on a continuum. (I’d love to see evidence to the contrary, but seizures or infarcts are probably one of the few binarized events related to the brain and even those have micro-versions.)
I listened his This American life episode on Monday morning and had to compose myself before my stand up.
It is heartbreaking what happened to a generation of men.
What do you mean men? It's not confined to one gender.
"Multiple generators?" (later says two).
Given the age and family history described, I wouldn't rule out dementia.
Two generators could be pretty rational. I've got two generators, one an automatic standby generator that covers the house, and another portable generator for my well (because it's on a different meter). We just had a ~ 30 hour utility outage this week, and it's nice to be able to take a shower. There was a longer outage a few months ago.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to have two generators if you have frequent outages, and the generators might need maintenance during an outage. Of course, most people buy generators, ignore the maintenance, don't have frequent outages, and then the generator won't start when they need it to. Having a second generator doesn't help with that, because it's likely if you don't maintain one, you don't maintain the other either, or you only ever run the primary and never the secondary, and it doesn't start when you need it to either. I've got to start and run my portable generator once a month; it doesn't like to start if you let it sit two months, and I wouldn't be surprised if I couldn't get it to start without rebuilding the carburetor if it sat for three months. (My 1981 VW has fuel injection, not sure why small engines from 2020s don't have it :P) I'd love to replace my portable generator and a vehicle with a replacement vehicle that can power the well, but I'm waiting for the invisible hand of the market to figure out that I'd buy a hybrid/PHEV single cab truck with a 240v/30a output if it's available.
All that said, age related mental decline affects a lot of people, even before it becomes clinical dementia. :(
That cursive is perfectly legible. One bit of particular note is the father bet $1000 in cash for each prediction, while the son would owe him $1000 in "podcast services."
I wonder if that part is covered in the podcast, it could be a father unwilling to take money from his son or a man trying to gain a platform to further spread his views.
That's really tragic. Mental health.
Emotional intelligence is not something we're born with. Sounds to be like the guy, the father, knows he feels things but then quickly equates them to the intellectual IRL truth. That's where emotional intelligence can come in and say well no these are just feelings.
Super tragic that the whole family had to push him away from themselves, because of the guys intolerable behaviors.
Counseling can be pretty helpful, though the people going to it need to want to go, otherwise counseling is a no-go.
Did he actually get the money? I couldn't find any reference to it one way or the other.
> And for those of you wondering, yes, I took the money. Absolutely.
Thanks. I managed to glaze over that.
It is so strange to me that some people find this revolting and other people think it’s quite nice. I wonder if the audience roles would be reversed if the subject roles were reversed.
Here's a thought process: Dad was trying to make sense of things that did not make sense to him. These things that did not make sense to him were seen by him as ultimately dangerous, even to his own family. That compelled him to seek to find the truth about whether they are real threats. Along that journey, he became convinced that they were in fact real. He sought out the long term implications and those implications became his 10 predictions.
As a concrete example, he heard there was massive illegal immigration into the US. His first encounter with this information could have come from many places, Fox news, a Republican senator, RFK Jr.'s report from the border, or a story in the New York Post. He wondered, is it true or not that millions of people entered the US through the southern border, and, that this had been happening for many years? Was it also true that there was a fleet of 'NGOs' that were providing aid to these millions of people as they made there way to the US? Was it also true that these people were being further aided and extorted by cartel membership along the way? Was it also true that hundreds of thousands of children were 'missing'? Finally, was it true that the US was funding logistics to fly hundreds of thousands of Haitians into the US?
There is information on both sides of these questions. Plenty of accounts on X have information that it's all happening, and worse. But those who would know with authority, like Secretary Mayorkas, President Biden and VP Harris conclusively stated it was not happening at all.
Dad's sources from his investigation led him to believe there was a preponderance of truth. The son's that there was not, (presuming that he did an investigation). It's too bad that the different opinion became a wedge between them.
I am confident that most disagreements among people are an outcome of their differing sources of information during their lifetime. It's self-evident, but if they endeavoured to agree on what was true and what was not true first before developing opinions about those truths, the schism can largely be averted.
Often the need to be right is a sign of a hurt ego overcompensating.
That was a well-written piece, very moving.
Very informative, but painful to read. Hopefully neither of the children inherited their father's mental issues.
This resonates with me heavily, except it's my entire family. Much worse.
Very sad to read (I think the grandfather isn't relevant to conspiracy theories though, it was IMO a different though similar problem of feeling alienated with a perspective certain people (institutions, authorities, local govt, health dept, etc) were not there to help him.)
Much of this emerging problem of conspiracy and BS mania the last decade IMHO is psychological manipulation capitalising on a less well educated / informed population than it was in the 70s, and the older population now more often not being as sharp as they once were or not equipped to deal with the information overload that the near endless News in various forms can be.
Roughly summing up, for the many people dealing with a family member who has gravitated to news items and other stories that have a very different narrative: more often it's the appeal of a seemingly simple answer all wrapped up as being some person or group's is to blame, any logic pointed their way is met with denial, cognitive dissonance or wishful thinking syndrome. (What I've experience with my own father it's most often in the form of they don't like ... anyhow, this validates it.)
I refer to the psychological manipulation more often as zombie grooming and less sheep grooming which aims to slowly transform the more vulnerable into zombies / sheep that'll do their bidding even if it's the lowest level, it still counts to their greater aspirations and motivations which are 99% political or involving the big money end of town. People are quick to blame the net / web / online crapfest but I see the problems starting more in certain tv and radio media areas which can expand to other more reputable news if folks there haven't engaged their thinking caps.
One would think the manipulation would be easily spotted and dealt with when a stitch saves nine, but much is designed to fly well under the radar, what most of us might disregard as some poorly informed news team, is actually something aimed just for their targeted audience they plan to groom.
The problem is akin to saturating the air with alarm bells or sirens a person is familiar with, and that the faint voice nearby saying it's just some DH with their finger on a button doesn't seem at all important or relevant.
Its unconscionable to me that the author would take $10,000 from his own father who is clearly not only mentally vulnerable but not rich as the author states. The father is very much at fault for what happened here, but something is deeply wrong with American society normalizing the annihilation of what should be sacred familial bonds over political matters. As somebody who generally aligns with the left, the last 10 years of overzealous liberal woke-scolding has done nothing but further increase this alienation of others that results in a complete mental split between families.
The son being an NPR correspondent and the mother moving out of their room on the day after Trump's election is highly indicative of this. To the author's credit, he is somewhat aware of this and mentions it in the article.
What about the familial bonds the other way? No respect for the wife’s opinion on how to spend the family money? Telling the daughter her lifestyle is wrong/immoral. The daughter should suck it up?
Smugly dismissing all conspiracy theories is as stupid as believing them all. Epstein didn't kill himself. And he didn't work for himself either.
> Epstein didn't kill himself.
You sound quite certain here, how come?
An intelligence asset whose job was to blackmail the rich and powerful dies in his cell before he can testify when cameras stopped working and both guards fell asleep. Come on.
It helps to stop seeing it as a conspiracy but as a projected inebt negotiation of people ready to defect on civil society.
Its not a THIS will happen , but a "if we do not renegotiate a not working social contract, to be more fair, something like THIS will be happening, brought on by my fellow defectors. We might not have cultural air superiority , but frankly what have we to loose. It cant be worse than THIS."
And defect they did. In germany the youth basically mass seceeded from liberal democratic society during the last vote. If you refuse to negotiate and compromise in a society, you fight and society ends- with digit number signs to come.
Very sad, have some of these types in my own family. I agree with the assessment that this is a form of emotional coping. All of these conspiracy theories are strangely comforting, despite how apocalyptic they might seem. Not only can you externalize all blame, they are fun to think about, they have a very sticky epistemology, and a high degree of consistency that lets you feel superior to the non-believers. It's actually very hard to debate someone that's really into flat earth, since there is always some esoteric argument about physics, and the conspiracy always goes deeper. You find this type of thinking everywhere, but somehow we've gotten the most comically extreme versions as mainstream beliefs now.
Well said. I have an aunt that is into this. And I think your point about a superiority complex has merit. She uses it as a psychological instrument to disparage other people in her family who don't share her views. Every conversation it comes back to "I just hope I can reach him/her [with bogus views] before it's too late".
What's interesting is her choice of bogus views. She's never gone flat earth, but she thinks radio waves cause all health issues. And satellites started wildfires, and the gov controls the weather, and drops chem trails. And the vaccine makes everyone sick. It's remarkable how anti-science it really is. She doesn't care about inverse-square law of radiation. If I did a blind test with 10 trials of a wifi transmitter on/off behind her back, she would fail the test and still not be deterred. She wants to believe the vax caused every single sickness people have, but doesn't acknowledge the source of sickness before the vax. Finally, I know the sources she follows have a massive amount of anti semitic tropes, yet she is Jewish. I know she's seeing people in these communities blame Jews, yet she ignores it and still consumes the conspiracy. Nothing would convince her that she is wrong.
I'm hearing conspiracy theories all the time now from many of my liberal friends. I'm wondering how we finally stop all of it.
Any top ones you might like to share? I have not seen far-right-level of belief and sticking to false predictions even when proven wrong among people who might be called far-left.
"I may be early, but I'm not wrong."
Tthat's exactly what a good friend of mine said when predictions from 2021 - 2024 failed to materialize. I do care about him a lot but its getting harder over time because nothing seems to change the convictions.
This is a really sad story.
Frankly I’m shocked the conspiracy theorist paid up. Him then immediately doubling down and finally killing his marriage isn’t a shock.
I both admire and detest the son for sticking with his Dad, the other family members being done is probably a more healthy approach.
Wouldn't you say that the approach taken by the son is what we need as a society though? polarization and parallel-universes do not seem to be helping at all.
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Please don't post trashy articles from trashy media, government funded.
I know there are weirdos everywhere, but not much related to "Hacker News"
Shame on the author for writing a nationally syndicated article belittling his own father, regardless of how much they disagree.
I disagree. It's a way to talk about fear which is not a little thing. We're all afraid. We're humans. It's a great skill, to be afraid, because it allows us to avoid so many dangers. There's no shame in being a human. :-)
The point is the father is afraid to die. And he's coping with it by spending a lot of energy thinking about other things that he thinks he can control. He simply factually wrong in this case but the work effort, the strength that he's exerting is admirable. He's got his list, it's 10 things, he's organized $10,000, he says he's thought about this, "a million times".
I think it's actually pretty useful and helpful as an article. A cautionary tale in some ways. Plus it seems factual.
They are not saying that the father is little, or belittled. They're saying that the father's perspective is rigid. And that it causes external problems when changes happen around that father.
Q: Am I overlooking something in the article? Did they actually say, "my father is worthless etc etc?"
Eg When the daughter needs to talk about the part of her identity that she's been hiding for decades, the father doesn't want to hold that conversation, which proves to be an insurmountable amount of distress for the daughter as she needs support, so she has to separate. And This rigid rejection is because of the issues that are discussed in the article.
In a way it's interesting to see how a functioning family can fall apart. In that way it's a cautionary tale: Don't expect the way that you relate to your father or your father relates to you will remain a stable constant throughout their lives. People change.
Fear of death is pretty distracting and devastating for many.
How is he belittling his father? The piece is incredibly emphatic to his father.
If anything, the author’s fault is agreeing with his father too much, to the possible exclusion of the rest of his family. I doubt his sister and mother will let him hang out in the middle ground forever.
This is playing out in a whole lot of families, and has been for some years. Collective recognition of this illness, an understanding that we’re not alone in struggling with it, reflections on how to cope with or reverse it or at least eke out a few decent moments with these once-normal people (even if it’s just things that didn’t work) are very much needed.
I imagine the story is likely accurate (conservative father adopts increasingly bizarre right-wing conspiracy theories and family becomes alienated - is it dementia or something else?) and it also may fit NPR's editorial angle. To me it does seem like something of an invasion of privacy, particularly if it was published without permission.