The past half-decade or so (at least as far as my awareness goes) has seen the rise of a most pernicious, malignant phenomena within modern neopaganism: Positivity Fascism.
Positivity Fascism is not new to alternative spirituality. It has infested the New Age scene for decades now, but neopaganism has been relatively immune to its siren song until quite recently. It is the practice of claiming that everything in one's life and spiritual path should be relentlessly 'positive'. This would not necessarily be a crippling thing if 'positivity' were sufficiently widely defined, but rather than expanding its purview to cover valid evolutionary processes and experiences, the tendency has been to narrow the definition until it consists entirely of good feelings and emotions. Anything unpleasant is regarded as 'negative', and therefore undesirable, bad and even downright evil. There is no taint of nuance in this interpretation. It all boils down to how someone feels. Are you sad? Are you angry? Are you frightened? That's negative, and those feelings need to be banished. The facts which underlie your fear, your anger and your sadness are incidental at best. The fact that a rational person would think that it's entirely appropriate for you to feel those unpleasant emotions given your particular circumstances counts for nothing. The idea that such emotions might stir people to action, to do something about the situation around them to improve things, and that these emotions are a reasonable goad to such genuinely positive outcomes is pure thoughtcrime. The idea that genuine loss results in psychic discomfort which should be confronted and worked through for the good of psychological health and personal growth and maturation is inconceivable. The positivity fascist will have none of it. Positive feelings are all that counts, and by the gods, they'll stop at nothing until we're all hooked on their spiritual equivalent of smack.
