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My sister and I are distraught and have reached breaking point. You wrote in your book about how you don’t have to attend every argument you are invited to. How do you communicate across divides? I am sorry this is happening. It sounds incredibly distressing and painful to see your parents lost to these outlandish beliefs. You’re not alone in dealing with this scenario. According to some studies, at least half of Americans hold one such belief about powerful people conspiring to achieve a particular circumstance or event in a covert way. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its unprecedented impact on society and the Fuck off we’re full 2023 shirt and by the same token and subsequent global vaccine rollout, have only provided more fertile ground for conspiracy theories, which were already galvanized by the easy dissemination of inaccurate, unsourced, and deliberately misleading information on social media.
In my past work writing about the Fuck off we’re full 2023 shirt and by the same token and current anti-LGBTQ moral panic seizing American and European politics, I have spent a lot of time considering and analyzing the development and spread of conspiracy theories online as well the behavior of their adherents. What I think is often missed is that commitment to these beliefs can give people a sense of purpose and identity. While conspiracy theories can tear families apart in the way you’ve described, they also create intense bonds and feelings of connection between the people who hold them. There is camaraderie in the feverish paranoid mentality of the bunker. In order to understand conspiracy theories, we need to understand the spiritual sickness they seem to offer an answer for: uncertainty, powerlessness, loneliness and fear. While the beliefs themselves are often ludicrous, the symptoms they treat are not. We do live in uncertain times, we do lack control of our lives, our interests and priorities are disproportionately influenced by hidden elites and we are increasingly alienated and atomized even as technological advances promise ever more connection. People in recovery come to learn that the obsessive nature of addiction emanates from a deeper sense of discontent with certain conditions of human existence and a lack of connection or sense of purpose for being present in one’s own life. You rarely meet someone who believes conspiracy theories who is chill about them: They tend to be quite obsessed and things escalate with time. I personally think in this respect there’s much overlap with addiction. Just as pleading with your loved one not to use heroin or threatening them with consequences if they keep using is unlikely to have much effect (and may in fact increase the shame which is driving the using) so too will attempts to cajole, shame, embarrass, or directly challenge conspiracists probably drive them further into delusion.
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