It's fascinating to me when people declare it awful that I, an author they admire, have opinions they dislike. It's never stuff like "Genocide is awesome," (to be clear, I do NOT believe this), but oh, "I disagree with you on X." Where X = just about anything.

Like, one person got hella mad at me a few days ago because I'm not into sports. A while back someone ranted at me for like 5 tweets because I said something good about an anime they disliked. Somehow "This was great!" turned into "Why do you, N. K. Jemisin, hate women?!"

I'm used to it at this point -- just life on Twitter -- but it *is* a change that I've noticed over the years on here. A kind of rigidity that's become more widespread with time. I used to think it reflected societal polarization, but I'm starting to think it's something else.

In counseling we recognize lots of developmental stages. At one stage people tend to be very binary in their thinking: you're with us or against us, smart or stupid, perfect or terrible. They defer to whatever they decide is an authority, and that authority is infallible.

In a supportive environment people don't stay in this stage long. They adapt a more multiplistic framework: authorities aren't infallible, and perspective matters. People can have different, equally acceptable, takes. Relativism becomes more OK. "It depends" becomes valid.

(This is a huge oversimplification. Also, my counseling education is 20+ years old, so take it with a cellar of salt. If you want to look it up, the dev theory I'm talking about is Perry's epistemology, and my God I can't believe I remember that. Go me.)

Anyway, it occurs to me that *for the past few years, our society has not been a supportive environment.* It has been exactly the opposite, piling on stressors, encouraging binary-ness on every level. Development happens when you feel safe. But who's feeling safe these days?

It's not just politics. We generally scorn "moral relativism" as if it makes sense to insist there's only one way to be good. We create environments (like Twitter) where supposedly free speech is enshrined, but in actuality only the loudest & most extreme get to speak freely.

This serves those in power, naturally; people who defer easily to the loudest are easy to control. Critical thinking becomes a threat. Our society has always been like this to some degree, but now it's like we're ALL stuck on binary. Arrested development on a societal level.

(Speaking of the US since I know it best. But on some level this applies to all of the online-connected world; globalization has a homogenizing effect, which we can see in social media behavior patterns. People get death threats for disliking X movie on every platform, now.)

I know there are whole disciplines devoted to studying this stuff in its media manifestations, so maybe there's a way to repair it; IDK. Anyway tho: if you've chosen to follow me on here, just understand that I'm going to have different opinions from you. And that's OK.

I strongly encourage you to stop following me if you find my opinions offensive! Block/mute me if you don't even want to see them. Please. I gain nothing from hate-follows. Quite the opposite; it's forced me to restrict myself more and more online, for my safety.

But also? I often see folks on here complaining that the problem is people like me (pick whatever "like me" you prefer) having noticeable opinions. Every few months someone declares that authors on Twitter should be seen but not heard, frex -- just shill books. Stay apolitical.

Which pretty much means that anybody whose existence is politicized -- like a Black woman -- won't be able to speak at all, about anything... but I digress. When you see this statement, ask yourself if the problem is authors speaking... or how you're processing what they say.

Have you somehow decided that Person X must be perfect? Do you need them to be completely in alignment with yourself? Does it *upset* you that they're not? If so... why?

(I repeat: I'm not talking about bigotry. That's not "an opinion," that's a threat to somebody's existence.)

Not really going anywhere with this, just thinking out loud, and curious to know if others have noticed this trend. OK, off to do laundry, woo!

::loses followers because I mentioned laundry::