Q: Your writing is making me look at authority figures differently including my parents. I used to think my dad was so mature and in charge, but in reality he spends hours

a day consuming doomsday propaganda. What do you think he gets from this fearmongering?

A: Most of us grow up assuming that the adults around us are operating from a deeper level of stability, clarity, and maturity. When that assumption is exposed, it’s surprising, or even disturbing, to see how much of adult behavior is still organized around things like fear, belonging, certainty, and identity protection. The same forces that drive children. 

This is a really common experience in Disruption where roles, identities, institutions, and especially authority figures, come into question. You get that first glimpse behind the veil of previously unquestioned beliefs and start recognizing that much of what you trusted was built on shared illusion. And once that happens, you can’t comfortably go back to the old story.

But the real disturbance isn’t the propaganda your dad consumes; it’s the collapse of the image you held of him.

What you’re really asking here is: If the people I believed were mature authorities are actually driven by fear and unconscious patterns, what does that say about the structure of authority I’ve built my life around?

This is something everyone faces on the road to Human Adulthood. For most of childhood, parents appear as stable, competent adults. Then at some point the illusion breaks and you’re left with the unsettling realization that they aren't authorities. Like most everyone else, they’re children in big bodies. This can be tough to see. 

But your father consuming fear narratives isn’t an anomaly; it’s the default condition of the dreamstate. I think we can sum it up nicely in one long run-on sentence:

Fear-based media, whether political, conspiratorial, or apocalyptic, is extremely common and addictive because it serves several functions at once by offering certainty in an uncertain world, simplifying complex events into clear oppositions like good versus evil or truth versus deception, and providing a sense of identity through group belonging among those who believe they “know what’s really going on.” 

Okay, maybe we need two:

It also delivers stimulation as doom narratives activate the nervous system much like thrill-based entertainment creating a continual rush of adrenaline and urgency while most importantly providing orientation because when the world feels chaotic and frightening it can feel stabilizing to believe someone has identified the threat and is explaining it.

Phwew, we did it.

But look, the deeper disturbance isn’t his behavior, it’s your recognition that the adults were never really adults. 

There’s a subtle trap to watch out for here. Once you start seeing these dynamics clearly, there’s a temptation to flip the old hierarchy from My father understands the world, to I see the illusion and he doesn’t. That shift recreates the same structure, just inverted. Authority gets replaced by counter-authority.

The real insight isn’t that your father is immature and you’re not. It’s that human beings at any age are vulnerable to narratives that regulate fear and provide identity.

Your father may be getting certainty, stimulation, belonging, or a sense of control from the material he consumes. But the more interesting question for you is what does seeing this in him evoke in you? Disappointment? Frustration? Sadness? A sense that the adults weren’t as solid as they once seemed?

Those reactions are part of the larger shift you’re going through, which is the realization that many people you once experienced as fully “grown up” are still operating inside the same psychological structures you’re now beginning to see more clearly.

Seeing immaturity in others is easy. Remaining curious about the mechanisms behind it without turning that perception into contempt or superiority is much trickier and that’s where real clarity lives.

Because the same human system producing your father’s fear-based certainty is the one you’re now learning to see more clearly in yourself. And that recognition tends to deepen understanding rather than sharpen judgment.

Instead of asking why your father consumes fear narratives, the question that actually opens the next door might be something like:

If the authorities were never truly adults, what have I been modeling my own identity on?

Now that you’ve seen the illusion slip, are you looking for a better authority to replace it, or are you ready to question the entire structure that required one?