A son spent a year trying to save his father from conspiracy theories

> 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.

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.

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.

What do you mean men? It's not confined to one gender.

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 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.