Chapter 9: Epistemic Collapse: The Loss of Shared Reality

The Rise movement traced how QAnon took shape within families and networks of trust, showing how political, media, and pandemic conditions created fertile ground for its spread. It also explored how SNCs tried to make sense of that turn, drawing on familiar cultural frames (crisis, cult, addiction, illness, and accident) to re-establish order amid chaos and confusion. In Rupture, our focus turns from understanding how QAnon entered family life to recognising what it did once inside. Relatives describe the moment they realised that disagreement over facts had become something deeper; an unravelling of a moral world they once shared.

For many, this unravelling came slowly. Often in the first instance through small conversational slips, then a slow erosion of common ground stances, and finally, with the hardening of moral distance. To trace this trajectory, we draw on four theoretical resources. First, Davies’ (2022) work on political talk in families helps us to highlight how minor intrusions in everyday humour, rituals, and speech can reconfigure relational life. Second, Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of doxa enables us to see how epistemic collapse emerged when shared, taken-for-granted assumptions about reality no longer hold. Third, Zerubavel’s (1997) notion of optical communities helps us to explain how QAnon sustains its own internally coherent reality – and why attempts at reasoning or persuasion often failed to ‘land’ for SNCs. Finally, we turn to Loseke’s (2007) analysis of narratives and the moral self, and Snow and Benford’s (1988) concept of frame alignment, to show how QAnon’s totalising moral universe leaves no space for neutrality or difference, which meant that SNCs were recast as the ‘Other’.