I’ve never heard of any effective treatment, much less cure for dedicated CTism. You can only try to limit the damage they do to themselves and others, and if those most affected are content to be enablers, that strategy will yield few benefits.
The educational process aimed at developing critical thinking capacity has to start at a very young age.
I don’t think that matters. I don’t know what the hell it is, but even Ivy League people with, you’d think, critical thinking up the wazoo somehow end up down this hole. The friend I mentioned would fit that description. I do think he has mental illness that contributes, though. But there’s plenty of intelligent, seemingly logical and reasoned people who end up buying into conspiracies. I don’t think teaching critical thinking from an early age will have too much an effect. It’ll probably save a percentage of people, but don’t think it will catch most.
I know of no organized effort to teach critical thinking skills starting in elementary schools. So we don’t have any idea how effective that would be (obviously, a perfect result is unattainable). It makes sense, though, ithat teaching the young how to avoid these traps* will make them less susceptible to nonsense later on.
“These deadly vaccines are being pushed on us by Big Pharma to depopulate the world!”
“What sense would it make for Big Pharma to eliminate its customer base?”
“What is Big Pharma paying you to say that???!?”
Speaking of which, it’s amazing how many CTers refer proudly to “going down the rabbit hole”, like it’s a glorious achievement denied to others.
IMO it’s a proud variant of egoistic know-nothingness. I am clueless, proud of that fact, and full of hubris. I’m easy to convince, and once convinced, I am convinced utterly. Some folks fall for religious faith, others fall for UFO faith. But if you’ve got the fall-prone personality features, fall you will.
“Ann Arrrrbor”?? Yeah that is 100% a parody quote.
The strange thing is that, in 2016, she was a diehard Trump opponent, to the point where she’d try to persuade random strangers in supermarkets, etc. to not vote for Trump. Then in 2020 she voted for Trump. <<
How old is she? Is it possible that she has some organic medical problem (brain tumor, for example)?
Does she have any physical symptoms which might suggest that? Maybe you could get her to see a doctor on purely medical grounds.
But otherwise, it looks as if you are out of options. You are not going to change a seriously delusional person, and if your father won’t stand up for himself, all you can do is distance yourself from the situation, painful though it may be. But make sure she has no claim on your financial assets, of course.
You have my sympathy.
My condolences to you. My MIL was a social chameleon, and was liberal or conservative depending on whether she was married or divorced. She adopted the attitudes and beliefs of the people around her, even though it might contradict something she said or held earlier. She also stirred up drama when she felt that she was no longer the center of attention. It was draining and irritating to be around her for too long. I would hazard a guess that Trump’s outrageousness and charisma captured her attention when the more staid Biden couldn’t. I’ve found that people with poor or no critical thinking skills look for easy, pat, self-contained answers that someone hands them, and CTs, the Pat Robertsons, and the Joel Osteens of the world do that job quite nicely.
Assuming the person isn’t nuts, then your average conspiracy theorist is either:
Emotionally attached to a particular answer - probably because of feelings of guilt - and is semi-consciously lying to themselves as a defense mechanism.
Is part of a community and that community requires its members to maintain certain positions and ideas. Failure to do so would be exile and the loss of all the friendships and other relationships that had been built.
If the CTer is of the first type then the path is to figure out their guilt and focus on appeasing it. The example I usually use is a single mom who has married a child molester. She doesn’t want to accept that she chose and brought a predator into her home and invents excuses and conspiracies to protect him and (by extension) herself. Fighting those excuses isn’t they key, it’s telling her that it’s not her fault. Until you convince her that she was a victim, too, you’re not going to get traction.
If it’s of the 2nd type, it’s to build up a second, alternate community that they can move into. After that, you can start to push back on the nonsense.
It’s not quite the same as family, of course, but I’ve had something similar in my experience. There were a couple of guys that I was really good friends with in younger days: we played in a band together, drank beer and shared a lot of silly irreverent jokes.
But a few years later they both got into some kind of ‘personal development’, “spiritual” movements and became firm adherents. I’m not sure if those were actually cults, as such, but pretty close, I’d say.
I just had to accept that they were no longer the friends I used to know, and move on.
I don’t remember seeing you around the dinner table, but apparently we have the same mother.
Same thing with far right conspiracy theories, parroting propaganda from Fox News or worse. It doesn’t matter what the subject the discussion is, she will find somewhere to get in digs to derail it to be about how evil liberals are. She can go off on quite a diatribe about CRT, or how BLM is marxist, or how Biden pointing at the sandbag he tripped over proves that he blames everyone else. “Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s”.
I have no idea what to do about it, so I just limit contact to reduce the damage it does to my own mental well being. I spent years trying to “fix” her, and I think I probably just made things worse. Right now I am engaged in trying to get her to admit to a lie (a fairly nasty lie about me that is physically and temporally impossible to be true), in the theory that telling the truth makes you feel better than telling a lie, and that admitting to just one may help her to admit to others as well. I don’t have great hopes it will work, though, and question myself as to why I bother.
I mean, I bother because I care about her and would like to have her in my life, and the only other step I can think of is simply cutting her out of my life entirely, which is something that I’m on the verge of doing.
As to the question in the OP, no, one-upping a conspiracy theorist doesn’t get them to question their ways. At best they reject your conspiracy while maintaining their own, but it’s more likely that they incorporate your conspiracy into their own.
IME, it is a defensive mechanism that they don’t want to admit any fault for anything wrong in their lives. Everything is someone else’s fault. In order to admit the truth, they would have to accept responsibility.
Maybe I should have added sarcasm tags?
It seems to be a bug in the Human Brain operating system. Some people apparently have a hardwired need to BELIEVE in ‘something’, without evidence, especially if it is presented when they are young or by a charismatic charlatan. Fall they do, as you say.
Did it have some evolutionary advantage in the past (promoting social cohesion, perhaps)…
Who can say?
My one friend on Facebook obsesses over insults, slights, and betrayals she’s received. She posts pretty much every day about her festering resentments of things in the past; very tedious reading. At one point she said “Don’t tell me to get over it!”
So I commented:
“Don’t get over it. Keep gnawing at it until the flavor is all gone.”
I thought that was clever reverse psychology on my part, but she ignored it and kept on as before.
Does she have a Twitter account? Festering resentment is the order of the day there.
How to have a sensible talk with a delusional mind?
The mystic Ram Dass had a brother who was confined to a psychiatric institution. Kept insisting he was Jesus. Ram Dass visited him and said, “I believe that you are Jesus. What’s more, I’m Jesus too, and so is everybody else.” The brother went, “No, not you, not anybody else. Just me!” Ram Dass told him: “That’s why I’m free and you’re locked up. Because you deny that others are Jesus.”
Well, that’s the sort of thing a mystic would say. But think about it. A fresh take on an old subject.
“True Believers” are not amenable to facts, logic, or reason. You can try to persuade, but you might as well save your breath for cooling your soup.
It has something to do with starting with a conclusion first, and then working backwards, discounting anything that interferes with this cherished belief, or disbelief, or whatever.
I was arguing with a “Moon Landings Are A Hoax!” acolyte for a time. I pointed out, there are now orbiting lunar reconnaissance satellites that have taken numerous photographs of the landing sites that offer sufficient resolution to clearly show the lower half or descent module of the LEMs, the lunar rovers, rover tracks, the ALSEP gear, footprints, everything. Moreover they are exactly where we would expect them to be, you know, exactly where NASA claimed they landed. So, I reasoned, that ought (finally!) put this matter to rest.
His answer was kind of vague, at first he claimed that “maybe you aren’t seeing what you think you are seeing”. This made no sense to me. I mean, it isn’t an elaborate optical illusion. So I pressed further, and he basically claimed that even those images are elaborate fakes.
So there is no proof that is enough for some folks. He did allow that when humans return (or first go?) to the Moon that will settle it. “We’ll see”. Except, I rather imagine he will claim those guys are faking it too. LOL
@velocity, I hope you’ll give us updates on this. Whether or not you’re successful in changing her mind, let us know how it goes. And if you’ve decided, let us know what you’re going to do (if you want).
I also had to cut ties with a friend.
He was a good friend, but I don’t think there was a conspiracy theory he didn’t believe in. Moon landing was a hoax? Check. WTC was brought down by controlled explosives? Check. The Sandy Hook shooting was staged? Check.
I pretty much ignored them. But then he went full MAGA, and even attend the January 6 attack. (He didn’t go in the Capitol, though.) It was then that I distanced myself from him.
Thanks, I’m pretty sure it’s futile. I think we may have to do more a case of treat-the-symptoms than treat the cause. Almost nothing would change her mind, but at least we as a family might be able to financially restrain her the next time she wants to spend another $100,000 or something.