I have a lot of seemingly unpopular opinions.

I don’t do this for fun.  I don’t enjoy having nearly everything I say become a fight.  I don’t get any kind of pleasure out of this.  So why is it that I end up with so many opinions that go against the grain for a lot of people?

There are a lot of ways of coming by an opinion.  One very popular way, is to have a set of opinions that are considered good opinions to have, and a set of opinions that are considered bad opinions to have.  And lots of people will argue for the good ones, and argue against the bad ones.  And people will read the arguments and believe them.  Or, given the way social things work, people don’t always even read the arguments.  Sometimes they just size up which opinions are right, and which ones are wrong, in that social group, and go with it.

I have never been capable of doing either one of those things.  I have sometimes tried, and it’s so cognitively exhausting that I couldn’t keep it up if I wanted to.  So I have to form my own opinions.

Additionally, most people around here form opinions in a highly intellectual, abstract fashion.  Meaning that they spend a lot of time fitting ideas together like Tinker Toys and seeing what is ‘consistent’ with each other, and what is not, and fitting together huge strings of opinions to create giant cognitive structures.  (I sometimes call those structures, mental widgets.)

I can’t do that.  Can’t.  My mind doesn’t work that way.

When I form an opinion, it’s mostly the real world, plus deep-held values, and a tiny bit of abstract intellectual ideas about the real world, rather than mostly abstract intellectual ideas and a tiny bit of the real world here and there.  To me, the real world — the context something is happening in — determines more about the ethics of a situation than any intellectual idea ever could.

All of this means that my entire mechanism for creating opinions is different from the mainstream ones that you’ll see frequently on tumblr.  I didn’t choose to be this way, it’s just how I work.  And I’m not the only person — I tend to gravitate towards other people who form opinions in similar ways.

Anyway, what this means is that I frequently have opinions that are completely at odds with received wisdom on tumblr and elsewhere.  Or I’ll have opinions that partially agree with the received wisdom, but that also partially disagree.  Or I’ll have opinions that are so far off in an unusual direction, that it can’t even be said to be either agreeing or disagreeing with the party line.

Want an example?

I’m pro-choice, meaning that I believe that people should be able to have an abortion any time they want one.  Yet other pro-choice people often assume I am pro-life because my views don’t exactly fit with standard pro-choice talking points.

I believe that a fetus is a life, and that calling it a fetus rather than a baby doesn’t make much difference in what it is.  I don’t believe it’s just a bundle of cells (at least not past a certain point), and I don’t believe that abortion is not killing someone.  More than that, though, I don’t think that our beliefs about whether a fetus is a “fetus” or a “child” make a damn bit of difference to what a fetus actually is.  I could be wrong about what’s alive and what isn’t, I could be right, but to me it’s all angels on the head of a pin anyway, because none of this makes a damn bit of difference as to whether abortion is ethical or not.

Because to me, the most fundamental thing about abortion?  This is all taking place inside someone’s body.  Pregnancy is not just inconvenient, not just difficult, it is dangerous.  Nobody should be forced to remain pregnant, who does not want to remain pregnant.  And nobody should be forced to risk their life in back-alley abortion clinics because abortion is illegal.  You may be taking someone’s life, and if you are, you should acknowledge that.  But when their life is dependent on being inside your body wreaking havoc on your body’s systems on every possible level, then your right to control your body trumps their right to stay alive inside your body.  It’s your body and that always comes first.

So even though I’m pro-choice, my views anger a lot of pro-choice people because they want me to talk about a fetus only being a “potential life”, they want me to see all fetuses as interchangeable when they’re so clearly not, they want me to pretend that I look at a fetus and don’t see a child.  And they want me to believe all those things, because believing all those things makes the killing part easier.  For many of them, the entire idea that killing is okay in this context, comes from the idea that you’re not really killing a life, or you’re not really killing a human.  (If it’s not a human then what is it, a fucking rabbit?)  This makes abortion palatable to a much wider range of people than who would otherwise support it, and this makes this kind of rhetoric important.

But to me it’s just rhetoric.  It has nothing to do with the reality of when a “clump of cells” becomes a “fetus” and when a “fetus” becomes a “baby” and when “life” starts and things like that.  I could be right about the way I see that part of things.  I could be wrong.  But with my reasons for being pro-choice, whether I’m right or wrong about those things doesn’t matter.  Which, to me, makes this argument for abortion far more robust than one that relies on what a fetus happens to be.

I also get in trouble all the time in abortion debates because I can’t use all the right words.  And this isn’t about my beliefs at all, this is about being autistic.  This is about I pull out whatever word works and I can’t always pull out the one that fits the vocabulary of the party line on something.  So sometimes I say baby instead of fetus and people assume that has to do with my views.  Sometimes I say “aborting someone” instead of “aborting something” and people tell me the conversation is over because I’m clearly a pro-lifer in disguise.  And I’m not.  I could never be pro-life.  I just don’t base my pro-choice ideals on the same principles that most other people do.

Imagine that, multiplied out to apply to just about every contentious issue on earth.  It’s not that I want to be contrary, it just happens, seemingly as a result of a large difference in cognitive style between me and people who are good at keeping to party lines and acceptable opinions.  

I tend to come at things from the bottom up rather than the top down.  I have a few basic principles.  I have the reality of the situation.  And combining the basic principles and the reality of the situation, creates the opinion.

This also means that I may have opinions that seem to completely contradict each other.  This is because so much of my opinions depend on the reality of the situation — the context.  So if you change the context, then even keeping the basic principles the same, you’ve got a good chance of changing my opinion.  It’s rare that I have an opinion that isn’t heavily susceptible to context.

But that isn’t how most people seem to do their opinions.  At least, not the most vocal people.  And a lot of the time, if an opinion differs even a little, you’re assumed to be on “the other side”, whatever the other side is.  There’s no room for people who are on the same side but for different reasons.  There’s no room for there being not two, not three, not four, but fifty sides to an issue, not all of which are mutually exclusive.  Those things don’t exist in a lot of people’s worlds.

It’s not that I think my way of forming opinions is always better, although I certainly think it works better in some situations.  And it’s not like I chose it out of a list of ways of forming opinions and said “Here, let me do it this way, it sounds like a lot of fun!”  It’s just that this is how my brain works, it’s how my brain has always worked, and I can’t do things in any other way.  Nor, at this point, would I want to.  I think there’s value in people like me.

Also understand that even if I disagree with you, this doesn’t necessarily mean I dislike you.  I don’t have a single friend that I don’t disagree with on something major.  Disagreement is totally divorced, for me, from whether I like someone or not.

So if you want a blog that automatically agrees with the basic party lines that you hear from ‘social justice bloggers’, for instance, then you won’t find it here.  It’s not that I don’t believe in the idea of ‘social justice’, but… you’ve seen what my opinions are like and how they’re formed.  They’re never going to match the ever-shifting mass of rules that community comes up with, even if I really wanted them to.

And I have some opinions that skirt very close to opinions widely considered offensive.  I don’t believe they’re the same as the offensive opinions.  I think they contain small elements that resemble small elements of the offensive opinions.  And in a culture where it’s all or nothing, people assume that I must hold that offensive opinion.  They assume connections that aren’t always even there.

So read at your own risk.  And understand, again, I haven’t chosen this.  This is just who I am.  There are a lot of people like me, although many of them have learned to shut up in public because they’re afraid of the social consequences — flames, dogpiling, being written off as hopelessly unethical, etc.  

I hope that if you stick around, you won’t take this all personally.

Further reading:  Politics, Ethics, and Mental Widgets