Increasing family estrangements for socio-political reasons | Hacker News Reader

Increasing family estrangements for socio-political reasons

bbc.com

Political issues can be resolved in one election cycle. People who cut off their own family have no idea of the misery they are causing that will last generations after them.

Adhering to the social norms is more important than family ties... When has that ever gone well? It might even be speculated that when social or religious demands grow that costly, it is in itself a bad sign.

Yes, but I have a feeling that these socio-political reasons are merely "the straw that broke the camel's back", and almost never the actual motivating factor. I could be wrong, but it would take one heck of an argument to walk away from a multi-decade relationship based on those differences alone.

The hardest part is arguably for the children that follow, unfortunately.

Fundamentally I agree that it's not one argument causing the fracture, it's a cumulative process that exposes underlying incompatible beliefs. I think this article is getting at the speed with which people seem to adopt to their new viewpoints. There also seems to be a the lack of civility, and incoherent dismissal of reality seem to be new.

The best model I've seen is people are being radicalized with nonsensical viewpoints. With the new belief system comes toxic aggressive self assurance that dismisses others.

Ultimately I fear we're too far gone and the generations who survive this will have to pick up the pieces.

> The best model I've seen is people are being radicalized with nonsensical viewpoints. With the new belief system comes toxic aggressive self assurance that dismisses others.

I agree, although I hope people start finding middle ground, in general.

> she said “a lot of really awful racist things” [..] a link to a white supremacist video [..] his parents could not comprehend the reality of people being victimised because of their background, especially given his own [Jewish] family history.

Tangential, but it is interesting, and typical, how not even a single specific thing the parents said is relayed to us. Only the son's broad characterization. Does he really believe his Jewish-with-family-killed-in-Holocaust parents are unable to comprehend prejudice? Or do they merely disagree on the extent to which prejudice is to blame?

Reminds me of an article about estranged parents - how when they talked about their children, they never described the reasons their children gave for cutting them out of their lives:

What was in the "prepared speech"? Why did her father expect her to move out at 18? The mother has two different sources of explanations at her fingertips, and she turns to neither. Nor does she repeat so much as a scrap of her daughter's allegations. - https://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-mis...

> He says other adult children in his online support group have fallen out due to value-based disagreements connected to the pandemic, from older parents refusing to get vaccinated to rows over conspiracy theories about the source of the virus.

Unintentionally this was quite apt.

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