[guardiangod]

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.

[Ajedi32]

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.

[guardiangod]

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.

[Ajedi32]

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

[bell-cot]

True. It would be wonderful if the decades of gradual-but-major mental changes in his father somehow stopped progressing...

[generj]

> 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.

[Ajedi32]

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.

[throwup238]

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.

[Ajedi32]

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.

[dragonwriter]

> 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.

[guardiangod]

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?

[Ajedi32]

How so? The article doesn't give any indication of that. It just says they disagreed.

[dragonwriter]

> 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.

[xracy]

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.

[Ajedi32]

The person I was replying to did exactly the same thing: "Without going too deeply, I sympathize with the writer on an extremely personal level." If you want to say I'm lying just because you disagree with my take on the issue then okay; I'm not going to expose intimate details of my life just to win an online argument. Just sharing my experience.

[xracy]

Communicating is hard, this is intended to be helpful and informative and I genuinely hope you take it that way. I'm being a little barbed with some of my feedback below, because you're engaging defensively, and I'm just trying to help because I was initially interested in having a different conversation with you based on your first comment.

Really importantly, I'm not saying that you're lying. I was offering some constructive feedback on what you said, because I was interested in your experience given that you've clearly reached a different conclusion from me. I was disappointed you weren't willing to talk about it, because I suspect if you're experiencing this and this is your advice you're just earlier in the process than I am. But if this isn't the case, I (and others clearly) were interested in this experience. I don't have a solution to this problem, and I came to this article looking for other ways people were navigating this experience.

> Just sharing my experience.

But you're explicitly not sharing your experience. You're just saying that you have experience, and then asking why someone would make a decision in this situation. In my response, I can either talk to:

1. Why someone would make a decision in this situation

2. You about your experience.

If you don't have experience in the situation, #1 makes more sense. If you do have experience in the situation, then I'm much more interested in the #2 conversation but to do that we have to be a little bit more willing to share some broad strokes about how things have fallen apart.

I shared my situation in response to this without making anything too personal/revealing about the family members involved. You'll notice I didn't make an appeal to having personal experience. I just described the experience, because I'm looking to have a conversation about what others have tried that has worked for them.

> The person I was replying to did exactly the same thing: "Without going too deeply, I sympathize with the writer on an extremely personal level."

2 things:

1. This is the age-old "if people on the internet jump off a bridge you'd do that too?" My initial response was trying to give you the tools to be better at this, and you're just being defensive here for no reason. I thought your question was still worth responding too, I'm just calling out to you that it's stronger without the appeal to experience that you're not backing up in any way.

2. This is a disclaimer on their own partiality towards one party in the original story. This is actually achieving the exact opposite of what your comment goes towards. It reads much more as "I am stating my bias and what I'm partial towards up front, but I think there is a difficult choice to make here and I'm not certain what the right path is."

By contrast your statements taken together read as "I have experience that tells me there's no reason to ever sever a relationship and you just have to take me at my word." But your initial statement could have been "Why would you consider severing the relationship?" and it would've led to less confusion from people interested in the experience.

[throwup238]

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.

[arp242]

> 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".

[xracy]

exactly, there is nothing else. And worse, everything becomes a part of the 'enlightenment' or 'the truth'

[jfengel]

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.

[lesostep]

> 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.

[fragmede]

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.

[xracy]

> 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.

[kayo_20211030]

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.

[mingus88]

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

[Ajedi32]

> 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.)

[gosub100]

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.

[derkster]

To you, it might be admirable. To others, it's just a constant reminder of existential threats. Kudos to you if you can handle it, but it's not anyones place to say just how much is too much to cut them off.

[Ajedi32]

I mean, people are obviously free to choose to associate with who they wish. But let's be clear: if a person decides to cut someone off merely because their beliefs are different, then they're the one "prioritizing their beliefs above their marriage, friendships, and relationships with their parents", not the other way around.

[zeroCalories]

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.

[Ajedi32]

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?

[zeroCalories]

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.

[kayo_20211030]

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.

[swatcoder]

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.