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

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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".

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.

> 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

The reasons were explicitly given in a written piece: the daughter severed herself because it hurt her when her dad insisted that she was lying to him. His wive was hurt because it is very hard to plan your retirement with someone who is convinced that the world would change in a year.

Note that the son stayed connected and the actions of his dad never explicitly hurt him. Made him feel sad and disconnected, but never hurt.

The problem wasn't that the others never accepted his believes or weren't considerate of them; the problem was explicitly the dad who decided that he knew better about his daughter sexuality and shared house budget, without taking anyone views on the things the rightfully belonged to them (their thoughts and the money that partially belonged to the wife).

It is hard not to sever relationship with a person when they decide that they have a right to choose for you. Either you pretend that they have this power over you or hurt them when you make your own choices, making them feel betrayed and powerless.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

Not to stir anything up, but my own observations have been that it is mostly men falling for the political conspiracy theories and _often, but not always,_ their wives follow them.

These things all seemed like possibilities, but not certainties. And some of them did at least partly come to be: there was an attempted Muslim travel ban, and abortion was banned in vast swaths of the US. The internment camps are definitely being talked about seriously.

Further, the 2016 list wouldn't have possibly guessed "will badly mishandle a pandemic, turning the US into one of its worst victims", but that is indeed what happened. He didn't outlaw gay marriage, but he did ban trans people from the military.

We did benefit from one important thing: his incompetence prevented him from accomplishing much of anything in his term. He has now had time to prepare -- or rather, the right-wing think tanks have had time to prepare. He's implementing their priorities as fast as he can.

Michael Lewis' (author of Moneyball, The Big Short) podcast Against the Rules had an episode about why we question experts, this was during the tail end of COVID. He asked, I'm paraphrasing from memory here, why is it we don't have people who argue that you could jump off bridges and tall buildings and lived, but so many people arguing that you don't need the vaccine. Perhaps because no one had jumped off tall structures and lived, but there are lots of stories about how someone who got the vaccine died anyway, or didn't get the vaccine, got COVID, and is still alive and thriving. There's also a lot of "Dad was a pack-a-day smoker and lived to be 95", "Every year that I got the flu shot, I got the flu, this year I said the hell with it and skipped the shot, no flu." Every time I hear that I desperately want to correct the person, but nobody wants to hear the "akshually ... there's no correlation" bit. I don't want to be "that guy". But the more these pithy sophism are said and heard, the more it becomes ingrained in the aggregate of common beliefs. There's not even a scientific nuance there, it's utterly wrong. To erase those beliefs one has to wipe away years of repeated exposure and reinforcement to this casual sort of ignorance. No one has the time to do that. In this story, the son also exposed the father to ChatGPT hoping it can overcome his father's beliefs with an overwhelming amount of facts, and it didn't work.

Sometimes a hot stove must be touched. If I were the son, I would ask the father to double down for another $10K, or even $20K. I believe that somewhere deep inside the father, there is a ghost of an understanding where the line of reality exists. He's just so deep into his world that he can't see where he mixes up the hope that these things will happen, vs the belief that these things will happen. But if you ask him to put real stakes on the line, say, even $100K if he has it, he will not be so unwavering in his belief.

Fair enough. I guess the original post doesn't give that amount of background. You're discussing the hard details about managing a farm of generators, the original article suggests something more like generator hoarding.

Thanks. I managed to glaze over that.