One of the trends in the Western world is the individualization of society, where the individual is more important than the collective, at least to himself. Only in times of tragedy to people in the West come together as a community to support and care for each other, and there is a growing idealization of the East's more collectivist societies. Many young people feel a need to belong to something, to have a cause greater than themselves and to have a place where they belong.
There is a certain comfort to uniformity, to being accepted into a group, especially for people who have never had a stable, caring, nurturing environment. Young people from troubled backgrounds can be more easily convinced to turn to alternative subcultures for this comfort. A lot of them are disenfranchised with a society they feel doesn't provide enough community support as a whole, but they may also have severe emotional problems stemming from things like neglect and abuse
Maybe they're from broken families, or their parents were absentee parents and let the TV, the school system, the kid's friends, the internet or whoever raise them, maybe their parents were workaholics or just were poor and never even got to know their kids because they were always at work, or maybe they were on drugs or alcoholics and were never sober enough to form relationships, or maybe a parent was in jail. The parents might have had a mental illness that made them unfit to be a parent. Maybe the parents or other authority figures were abusive, and they feel like not only their parents let them down, but so did the society that didn't stop the abuse.
So they are sold this idea of a great society where they're going to be taken care of and part of a global "family", and they'll be cared for and loved and given attention and all the things they've been looking for their whole lives. When you're that broken, and something looks like the thing you need to fix you up, it is hard to question if the thing you're being sold is the real McCoy. You want so desperately to be accepted and loved that you're willing to do almost anything if you think it will fix you.
This isn't a problem exclusive to Islam, Charles Manson was able to exploit the same principle and get his girls to kill other people. It's psychopathic behavior. The people swept up in it are usually not psychopaths, including the ones that recruit others or commit crimes after accepting that this is what they've been looking for their whole lives; the leader or leaders is/are the only psychopath(s).
Those reasons were very important to my decision to convert to Islam. After my super-dysfunctional, criminally insane, abusive parents threw me out on the street when I was 18, I was a mess. I went from relationship to relationship looking for someone to give me the love and attention I'd wanted my whole life. Unfortunately, the kinds of people who want to be around someone that insecure are almost all people who want to prey on your vulnerability, so I kept being abused.
Honestly, if someone like Charles Manson had swept into my life at that time, I probably would have ended up following them. Not because I am a bad person who wants to harm others; that's not it at all. I was a broken person who was looking for stability and love, and if I thought I could get that from someone, I'd have done almost anything for them. I had no sense of personal identity, never having been given a chance to even question who I was or what I wanted as an individual, and was very open to suggestion.
I was socially retarded, not because there's something wrong with my brain, but because I was isolated from everyone. I did develop language abilities and to a lesser extent mathematics abilities (with some problems; I can't answer a question given to me verbally in writing and vice versa), so I do not appear feral, but in terms of self-identity and social interactions, I had the abilities of a small child. I was probably a bit of a language prodigy, and if I'd been allowed to grow up normally, I'd probably be doing something like being a playwright or a translator. I could read books before my 4th birthday, and for the rest of my childhood tested for reading comprehension skills several grades ahead of my actual grade.
But emotionally? Socially? I was willing to do or believe almost anything if I thought it would make someone, anyone, like me. As a child I had not had friends; my parents had kept me isolated most of the time, and when they weren't isolating me, I was so uncomfortable with others that I did not know how to communicate or behave well enough to have friends, so I ended up being left out of the other children's activities and spending all my time alone, trapped inside my own mind. I had no sense of self, I didn't know who I was or what I wanted or believed, and I didn't even really understand that I had the right to decide those things for myself. In the years since, I went through the stages of emotional development that you'd normally see in a small child, usually in a pretty jumbled way and not in the predictable, linear ways you'd see in a child.
The approval and "love" (which was always conditional) of another person was more important to me than my own beliefs. I converted to Islam because I thought that it would make people like me, even if it wasn't popular people. And for a while, it worked. Then as I emotionally matured, I started to see the dark side of it, that people wanted me to be the "perfect" Muslim woman, whatever they thought that meant. When I did not comply to their standards of acceptable self-expression, I was no longer welcome in their lives.
It's only now, over 8 years since my parents put me on the curb, that I can say that I'm actually starting to have the kinds of skills needed to cope in society, being able to think, act, and advocate for myself. To not be afraid of forming my own opinions and expressing them. To not need constant approval or validation, and to be ok with being alone. To not be emotionally dependent on others. To decide what I want to eat, what I want to wear, what I believe, what I think in regards to things like sexuality and gender identity (both my own and as social issues), etc.
Here's a video that talks about caring what other people think, from someone who wasn't quite as broken as me, but still has some interesting thoughts.
No comments:
Post a Comment