Your son keeps sending you articles about government overreach, complete with highlighted passages and urgent requests that you just read this one. At every family dinner, the brother who used to talk about sports now derails conversation into Austrian economics. Your old friend has started talking about bitcoin and “parallel institutions” and the state as a “dangerous superstition.” You’ve watched someone you care about change, and the change worries you.

The conversations are exhausting. What used to be comfortable family time involves navigating around topics that seem to make them agitated and you defensive. You’ve tried ignoring it, hoping the phase would pass. Engaging left you backed into corners by arguments you had no preparation for. Setting boundaries kept failing because they found ways to circle back. You’re beginning to wonder if they’ve been radicalized, whether they’ve joined something like a cult, whether you’re losing them to ideas that sound, frankly, extreme and dangerous.

Your frustration is legitimate. The relationship strain is real. And some of what they say probably does sound frightening when stripped of context and delivered with an intensity that leaves no room for measured response.

But consider this: why would someone who loves you spend so much energy on something that strains the relationship? These conversations make family gatherings tense, and they know it. They know you find some of their views troubling. They watch you grow uncomfortable and persist anyway, despite that discomfort. What would make someone do that?

The answer, almost certainly, is that they stumbled onto questions they found impossible to stop asking. Questions that, once asked, refused to go away. Their inability to set those questions aside drives them to share with the people they love most.

It probably started with something small. Perhaps they wondered why a license is required to cut hair, or why they needed permission from the city to build a shed on land they own. One exposed government lie seemed to connect to others, and then to others still. A question arose that seemed simple at first: if I had no say in this arrangement, why am I bound by it?

That question tends to lead to others. If taxation is justified because I benefit from services, does that mean anyone who provides me an unsolicited service can demand payment under threat of imprisonment? How did people organize societies before states existed, and were those societies more chaotic? If democracy legitimizes government because it represents the will of the people, what happens when I’m in the minority? Am I bound by the will of others solely because there are more of them? If a private company did what the government does, taking a portion of my income by force, dictating what I may put in my body, deciding which foreigners I may hire or trade with, would I consider that company legitimate? If the answer is no, what makes the state different?

These questions are uncomfortable. Once you start asking them, you find yourself examining things you had always taken for granted. And the person you love has been sitting with these questions, sometimes for years, unable to find satisfying answers within the framework they were given growing up.

What they are trying to share is a set of questions they believe you deserve to ask, not conclusions you must accept. They remember what it felt like before they asked them, when the world seemed simpler and the authorities seemed trustworthy and the system seemed fair even if imperfect. The pull of that simpler world is understandable, and they understand it. They also believe that the simpler world is built on assumptions that collapse under scrutiny, and that living within unexamined assumptions carries costs you have yet to see.

Imagine discovering that something you trusted was not what it appeared to be. Finding that the questions you were taught to consider settled were open questions, that serious thinkers had been asking them for centuries, that entire bodies of scholarship existed outside the curriculum. Then wanting desperately to share this discovery with the people who matter most, and watching them deflect the questions because the questions themselves seem dangerous.

That experience repeats every time they bring up these topics at dinner. The intensity that feels like aggression is more likely desperation born of care.

You need not adopt their conclusions. But you might consider engaging with their questions, aiming to understand. What would it mean to apply the same skepticism to political institutions that you apply to corporations, religious authorities, or salespeople? What would it mean to ask whether the services you receive from government could be provided another way, and whether the costs you pay in taxes, in freedom, in compliance with rules you never agreed to, are costs worth bearing?

The person who keeps sending you articles has encountered questions that changed how they see the world, and they cannot in good conscience keep those questions to themselves while watching people they love proceed on unexamined assumptions.

Where did those questions lead them? In most cases, to conclusions something like these: that human beings possess inherent dignity and should be treated as ends, not means; that voluntary cooperation produces better outcomes than coerced compliance; that skepticism toward those who claim authority over your life is prudence; and that the capacity to live peacefully with your neighbors does not require an institution claiming a monopoly on legitimate force.

These conclusions may sound radical. But they follow from questions that are not radical at all, questions that children ask before they are taught to stop asking, questions that anyone might ask if they looked at the state with the same skepticism they apply to any other powerful institution.

The question is whether you trust this person enough to take their questions seriously, to recognize that their persistence is evidence of love, to engage with what they are trying to say.

They believe you deserve to think freely. They are trying to offer you questions they found worth asking. Whether you want to ask them is, of course, your choice.

That choice, freely made, is precisely what they are fighting for.