My parents were fairly clever in their prime, hence their financial success, but they still chose many of the wrong beliefs. By "wrong" I mean that their life philosophy was logically inconsistent, dishonest and unclear. Then when I came around trying to do things right, they resented me for pointing out the holes in the impossible dream world they were expecting me to exist within. They resorted to avoidance, passive-aggressive behaviour, subtle emotional bullying and financial coercion to try to force me to shut up.

By the time I got successful in my twenties, the problems they caused had driven us apart and forced me to go to war against my own family. This is the last thing they wanted, but a consequence of a philosophy that doesn’t make sense when you try to piece it all together.

In their defence, few people had logically-consistent beliefs in the '90s and '00s — but I did. It wasn’t impossible. By 15, I had discovered Ayn Rand, and was always trying to talk about Socrates and such, but nobody in my part of Canada was interested in such things. This solid educational foundation was the basis for my early successes, and partly due to the privileges my parents had worked to provide, but also the cause of the schisms in our relationship. They simply didn’t have the same quality of education in their formative years, and by the time I started pointing out the paradoxes in their thinking, they were already too set in their ways to bother changing.

But that wasn’t the end of it. As dumb as that was, they got worse later, and that is when they crossed the line from stupid to evil.

By 28, my various accomplishments and incredible investing success had removed all doubt of my abilities to pretty much everyone. When people asked if I might, sort of, be a genius… I was used to it. I had some selfish desires, like anyone, but for the most part, I was determined to put my talents toward doing something great for the world. But improving things requires change, which upsets the establishment, so I got hurt, and when my family took this chance to exploit my injuries to prove that their half-baked ideas were right all the while, I was livid. Not only had they failed to see the point in developing consistent philosophies, they actually contributed to the destruction of the rare and benevolent intellectual talent that they had paid to develop — ME. A person. Their son.

This insanity was partly a consequence of repressed problems in their subconscious and also just plain irresponsibility. The damages it caused were far beyond their capacity to recompense, which is why they were so adamant about staying blind in the first place. I suppose their plan, if they had one, was probably to become senile (or pretend to be) before the consequences could set in. We’ll see how that turns out. Not the fate I would have chosen for them. But that’s what happened.