[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.

[Ajedi32]

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.

[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.

[Ajedi32]

My point is that the article doesn't give any concrete reasons _why_ this man's family cut him off other than that they disagreed with him. It doesn't explicitly say he was ruining them financially, or that he refused to talk about anything other than politics, it just says he started believing online conspiracy theories and the author was unable to convince him otherwise.

I have some personal experience with that situation, and I find it unconscionable that his family would leave him under those circumstances. That's all I'm trying to say. If that comes off as "willfully misleading" to you, then so be it.

Now maybe there was more going on with this guy which would explain his family's extreme response, but if so the article doesn't explicitly say so. Re-reading your other response to my initial post, the reason I didn't feel a need to respond was because I felt like I had already addressed it in a reply to another comment. Your situation includes additional factors beyond what was described in the original article; that's totally fair. "It's one thing to hold different beliefs, and another thing to be constantly starting arguments over them and refusing to discuss anything else."

[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.