My parents have always been left-wing hippies and entertained the odd conspiracy theory, but during the pandemic they got lost down YouTube rabbit holes and bought into Q-Anon and anti-vax ideas. They still don’t believe Covid is real (even though they blatantly had it…).
We’ve just kind of agreed not to talk about it anymore, but they’ve steadily become more and more batshit and I think they believe I have been brainwashed.
Anyone else’s familial relationships changed forever?
Intelligence doesn’t seem to have much correlation with belief in propaganda. In my experience, intelligent people can be more susceptible to being hoodwinked, since they assume they’re “smart enough not to fall for it.”
Once they adopt a belief, their conception of themselves as intelligent, rational actors causes them to invent all kinds of post-hoc rationalizations, and it’s extremely difficult to admit that they didn’t actually use the logical part of their brain at all when forming the belief.
My observation during Covid was that once they are “hooked” on a certain conspiracy, they go out of their way to discredit/ignore any facts that state otherwise. My assumption is that the longer this goes on, the harder they are fighting to stick to “their truth”. They rather accept obvious false news than accept that they were wrong initially.
Why? Because they would need to go back and acknowledge being wrong, " loosing their face" in front of a lot of people. They may have had angry conversations over the conspiracies with loved ones and may have even cut ties. (Experienced that first-hand with family.) The further down the rabbit hole they go, the higher the “costs” of going back up.