How do I bring someone back to reality?

The Drift's advice column #5

Welcome to the May installment of Sophie Haigney’s advice column. Send your submissions to letters@thedriftmag.com with “Advice” in the subject line.

Dear Sophie,

Over the last few years, someone very close to me has become involved with a spiritual community that has all the trappings of a cult: a charismatic leader; a cartoonishly cult-y name; a website that, as my husband put it, looks like something they’d have created for a 30 Rock episode where Jenna joins a cult; opportunities to spend lavishly for access to esoteric self-improvement techniques; and most conspicuously, some weapons-grade preposterous beliefs about reality.

The twist is that their access to this community has been almost entirely mediated by the internet, and their real life otherwise remains totally normal. All their important relationships are intact (and then some), and the wacky beliefs seem to come up interpersonally rarely or never — which isn’t surprising, since they don’t touch on health or diet or sex or politics or any of the usual areas where cult-derived convictions tend to ruin lives most conspicuously. The expenditures, as far as I’ve been able to figure out, are regrettable but well within their budget and have not grown over time. They are succeeding at work.

So, my question for you: is there actually a problem here, at least one that’s any of my business? Do we have an obligation to try to steer our loved ones away from beliefs that are clearly untethered to reality if they don’t seem to be doing them any material harm? And if so, what’s the best way to bring someone back to this planet?

— Cult-Adjacent and Confused

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Dear Cult-Adjacent and Confused,

First of all, I’d just like to say: I’m sorry this is happening! It’s disorienting to watch a loved one drift like this. What you’re describing is familiar to me from a few instances of watching someone in my own life go down the rabbit hole, or into the wormhole. “What can I do?” is a natural response, because we are used to springing into action to help friends and family who are in need.

I think, though, that the right course of action here is to do nothing. Or mostly nothing. You might try some gentle dissuasion, as I imagine you already have. You could wonder out loud if this movement is really where they want to spend their money, point out that so much screentime is not good for them, or even more directly voice your concerns; it’s never bad to be honest about the behavior of someone close to you. But, given what you say about the relative benignity of this cult-adjacent organization, I would not take any more drastic steps than that right now. I draw my lines in policing others’ behaviors based on harms. If you observe that they’re causing harm to themselves (screwing up their work, draining their bank account) or others (messing up their relationships), that’s when I’d say you should step in. Stage the big intervention, get others involved, and sound the alarm on all fronts!

But in this case, your fear seems to be about what this person believes. Someone else buying into objectionable theories does not necessarily give you license to step in. They’re giving money freely to a cause they think is worthy; I give my money freely, and regrettably, to some expensive restaurants I happen to like. Their beliefs might seem crazy on their face, but the foundations of a lot of widely accepted religions must have looked pretty weird at first. They’re putting their faith in unproven self-help techniques — just as most of us do, at one time or another.

Living in the society we’ve constructed requires tolerating some pretty wacky, and occasionally odious, beliefs in people we love, and even in people we don’t. We don’t get to decide who our neighbors vote for, or even what they think about the new construction down the street — and we have to live with that. Up to a point: there are views that seem “beyond the pale” to me, as I’m sure there are to you. That line is personal and can be blurry. The line between belief and action matters too; fretting over someone’s beliefs is different from objecting to something they’ve done. (Though of course, what one person can experience as an abstract disagreement — a vote for a politician with an oppressive agenda, for instance — another may experience as an expression of disrespect or aggression.) We all get to decide where those lines are for ourselves, but generally I think we could make better peace with difference. It’s part of the bargain of living in a pluralistic society.

Culture-war polemics may distract us from the fact that most of the bizarre views we encounter, and with which we must find ways to coexist, are not “political” in the strict left-right sense. As you’re seeing with your loved one, these ideas are more often questionable amalgamations of views about the universe, health and wellness, the self, and how we should live our lives. I recently attended a conference where people were making many spurious claims about health and wellness. I was talking to someone about why she chooses to follow a strange, strict diet not backed by mainstream scientific evidence. She turned the question around on me: “You feel fine eating food pumped with chemicals, addicted to sugar, waking up with headaches from alcohol?” She saw my diet — which used to be hers — as the strange one. No study has confirmed that hers “works,” but I can recognize that my diet is not ideal by any standard, either. It’s up to each of us what we put into our bodies, and it should remain that way.

All of this reminds me of a scene from Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04. A student comes into the narrator’s office, in the throes of a mental breakdown. He starts rambling:

“Nobody thinks we’re being told the truth about Fukushima. Think about the milk you’re buying from a bodega, the hot particles there, I mean in addition to the hormones and what those do. There are rabbits being born there with three ears. The seas are poisoned. Look at this” — here, he pulled his hair back, maybe to indicate his widow’s peak, I wasn’t sure — “that wasn’t there when I lived in Colorado. And I know that some of the bone mass in my jaw has thinned, I can feel that when it clicks, but I can’t afford insurance. And now there is this storm, but who selects its name? You have a committee of like five guys in a situation room generating the names before they form.”

The narrator, Ben, struggles to respond to this, because the student’s speculations depart from insights that are on some level correct: the food system is fucked, the weather is getting more fucked and it’s our fault. And yet these insights, rather than bringing the student closer to the truth, have propelled him into a dark and conspiratorial spiral.

What can Ben do? Direct the student to mental health services, push back gently, try to talk him down from the ledge — and not much else. That is the last thing I would say about the situation you are in: even if (God forbid) this person’s engagement with this movement becomes more dire, the tools we have for changing people’s minds are very limited. When someone’s mental state has gone dark, we may not be able to do much about it even if we want to, except love them all the same. I hope that your loved one remains, for the most part, grounded in the reality you share.

If you enjoyed this installment, send Sophie your own question by writing to letters@thedriftmag.com with “Advice” in the subject line.

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Image credit: John Sloan, The Masses, December 1912