Your parents are idiots; they make the hypocritical arguments of idiots.
Unfortunately, for several decades in the US, we’ve been culturally conditioned to “respect” others’ beliefs, rather than hold up a mirror to their idiocy.
No more. They’re idiots. If they don’t want scientific solutions, if they want to undermine the work and intellectual efforts required to create a healthy society, then they’re a stone around our necks.
That’s exactly what happens; crisis capitalism wherein the upper wealth layer scoops up assets for pennies on the dollar, which it then uses to extort more wealth from the less advantaged. So even when the greater economy “turns around,” there are more people who have less access to the mechanisms that have historically allowed upward economic mobility.
The 2008 financial crisis is a perfect example, and much of what we are still suffering today stems from that manufactured catastrophe. Ultimately, none of the perpetrators were held accountable, while wealth simply flowed upward, concentrating even further at the top, while the average American has seen almost none of the benefits of our productivity growth, 17 years later. Big businesses, on the other hand, had nearly 14 years of open purse monetary policy from the Fed, and could therefore operate on nearly free debt. This long period of finance junkyism has created a capability trap of today, where most businesses don’t actually have many capabilities, ie don’t produce, service, or generate any real commerce, AND largely refuse to invest in their employees or business functions, which is why we have been gliding downward in a spiral of enshitification and massive inflationary pressure.
Ultimately, the “good jobs” of yesteryear have been dismantled through outsourcing, arbitrary job requirements, collapsing white collar work, and decades of demonizing trades and union busting, while further roadblocks have been erected through insane education costs and a dearth of the “starter homes” that Boomers used 50 years ago to launch themselves in financial prosperity. They promptly pulled up the very ladders they climbed afterwards, ensuring no successive generations would be able to participate. Boomers mortgaged their children and children’s children’s futures for their own well-being. Which has continued to today.
It’s probably a lot more than just one thing, or another.
There are a great many people who simply have no intellectual curiosity. People with zero interest in seeking out and verifying new information, who feel no impetus to figure things out for themselves, or who resent those more knowledgeable than themselves because they see that information asymmetry as a personal attack. People who aren’t curious about anything are idiots.
The issue that you describe- intellectuals treating idiots like idiots, is probably rooted in years, or decades of one-sided conversations, or trying to hold conversations with people who don’t feel the need to argue in good faith. At a certain point, low information people with low curiosity are a burden to engage with, let alone attempt to meet as peers. I’m not saying that’s right, but I can understand it.
For those who retain curiosity, Education and exposure are probably the best way to thwart the rise of idiots, which is probably why public access to high quality information and education resources have been massively curtailed, and/or monetized to the nth degree over the last 40 years. There is a distinct correlation between broad idiocy, and declining quality of life in industrialized nations, and that has certainly been the paradigm in the US.
So, we understand where the idiots are coming from and who benefits from their lack of understanding, we just need the idiots to understand WHO is depending on their remaining useful and WHY they have been denied a path toward bettering themselves. And, of course, the crux of the matter is that idiots cling to their idiocy as an integral aspect of their identity, which means any real changes will have to be long term solutions, wherein children of idiots are allowed to break the cycle leading to better understanding and insight. But there are challenges inherent in that evolution too, as you underscored poignantly; it can be stark and lonesome and heartbreaking for children to realize that their parents are idiots.