Imagine you have a close relative (parent, sibling or child) that you love very much and don't want them to die or get very sick but they are refusing to get vaccinated. You could either keep pestering them about getting the shot, tell them they are stupid for not getting the shot, etc. Or you could sit down with them and listen carefully to their reasons and talk to them about why you decided to get the vaccinated. The first approach will most likely make them defensive and not likely to get vaccinated. The second approach may or may not work, but you would have made your best effort.
I don't need to imagine. You sit them down and you learn that they inhabit a completely different reality from your own. You try to describe your reality, and they dismiss it because it disagrees with their "reality". You try to anchor them in factual reality by pointing to people you both know who died of covid, but not before infecting others... who then also died of covid, etc., but they always have a way to dismiss whatever you have to say because it disagrees with their "reality". Because apparently online propaganda is more real to them than everything they see in person and everything their loved ones tell them.
I envy you if "sitting down" with them worked for you.
I think most people did give their best, repeatedly, only to be blown off, repeatedly. At some point, the people you care about stop being those people and start being abusive assholes, being personally responsible for killing your friends and family with their stupidity, and dragging us all deeper into this crisis.
I had come to accept my brother's COVID denial after this loop played out a few times. Now it looks like the world is going for another spin, and sure enough, the arguments rev up again.
Particularly, Rogan interviewing the quack Peter McCullough set my brother off again. I sent him info on McCullough's membership in AAPS[1][2], which seems to be made up of fringe pseudoscience-enamored doctors. That only changed the goalpost, "It's not about him dude, x and y and z and blah blah".
I find it suspect when my views align with abhorrent people, at the very least giving me a signal to reconsider my conclusions.
I'm sorry for the anecdotal tangent, but your comment fit perfectly with what I'm going through. I am doubly frustrated that I can't seem to muster the intellectual power to figure out how to get him to at least reconsider his viewpoints. I WANT TO FIGURE THIS PROBLEM OUT!
Or you avoid the topic, keep your fingers crossed that they won't get sick, and can at least have a normal conversation about the weather without hating each other.
That does not help your relationship, because interpersonal relationships where you can't express your honest feelings and ideas are hollow, fake – worse than useless.
That doesn't help anything about COVID, because they're still acting recklessly based on their delusions.
And that doesn't help their deteriorating mental ability as they succumb to propaganda, because their idiocy is left uncontested, only reinforced by their self-selecting ingroup.
At some point you gotta choose what you actually love about such people – their meat and bones, your nominal connection to them (e.g. blood relation), your past shared experience, their personality and ideas, or something else? Because some of those are unaffected by their progressing stupidity and selfishness, but others are poisoned more and more as time goes on and they sink deeper.
I don't have a solution. I just wish people would stop pretending that this brainwashing can be solved by talking, understanding, or simply by ignoring its existence. Often it can't. As a society we're in deep shit, and it has little to do with COVID. It will stay with us well after the pandemic too.
