Dissatisfaction Guaranteed

I wondered about all the news of defection to IS(IS)(IL) by Westerners, and looking around at other movements in the western world I think I figured out something:

People are joining themselves to groups with whom they share something – not a shared value system necessarily, but a shared dissatisfaction over life in the west.

If you look around America and Europe today, you see folks looking for something. The American Dream sounded great when you were just getting out of World War II, or coming to the Land of Freedom from somewhere that was ruled by autocrats and poverty. Nowadays you look around and you just don’t see it panning out like it was supposed to.

“Like it was supposed to.” That’s a sentence that has Unfulfilled Expectations written all over it.

We expected stuff growing up in America. We were indoctrinated with the basic Life Script that went kind of like this:

·         you graduated High School

·         you got a job

·         you entered a career

·         you dated

·         you got married

·         you bought a house

·         you had children

·         you retired with your spouse and occasionally watched the grandchildren

·         and finally you died at a ripe old age , fulfilled and successful. You won the game!

If you didn’t successfully complete this game, you were somehow a failure. You got divorced, you got laid off from your job, you couldn’t have children, you couldn’t afford a good house, your child turned out to be gay or selfish and therefore uninterested in providing you with grandchildren, whatever it was that caused your particular train to derail.

If some event came along to make sure you didn’t pass Go and collect your $200, even if it completely wasn’t your fault or within your control, you couldn’t shake the feeling that you were somehow a loser. You didn’t make it to the end of the game by following the Script, and you felt disenchanted, disenfranchised, dissatisfied.

Resentment set in. You were upset that your life didn’t work out the way it was supposed to. It wasn’t fair, because you did everything you were supposed to. You played your role in the Script to a T, and still you failed! How could that be?

It was my ex’s fault. It was my religion’s fault. It was my government’s fault. It was the Illuminati’s fault. It was white people’s fault. It was black people’s fault. It was the Mexicans!

It’s always someone else’s fault, because if I can find someone else to blame then I can get some relief from the voices in my head that whisper day and night, reminding me that I’m a loser. See, it was someone else’s fault that I didn’t win.

Now I personally don’t subscribe to the Victim Mentality that gives people a false sense of relief over their lives not working out the way they wanted them too. It’s an illusion, a sleight of hand that distracts us from the real issue.

No, the real issue isn’t that in the end I’m still a loser. The real issue is that I built my expectations on an outmoded rulebook, and those expectations just couldn’t be realistically met.

The Life Script itself is a lie.

By having expectations of life as if Eisenhower was still president and the WASP nuclear family was the norm, we are setting ourselves up for dissatisfaction. We can’t be happy with who we are, or how our life is, because we are still dragging out this archaic yardstick to measure the validity of our lives.

Once upon a time the Life Script worked. Everyone had their role and followed it, so that most of the time everything worked out fine. Today people romanticize The Old Days to the point of fetish. “Back in my day” was a phrase that made children roll their eyes, and here we are decades later, the children all grown and using the same tired expression.

“Life was so much better back when we spanked, or when we had strong unions, or when we had good men leading this country… wait, don’t you roll your eyes at me! We played outside, we didn’t have cable TV or video games… I said don’t roll your eyes! And stop texting when I’m lecturing you!”

Then black people, and women, and folks with mental illness, and Liberals, and ecologists, and gay people, and religious reformers all started making noise and stirring up CHANGE! Oh no! That’s not in the script! Why are they messing up everything with their improvising?

Well, they’re messing everything up for me, anyway. I’m sticking to the script, and they aren’t. If things are awful, then it’s the fault of the black people, the women, the Liberals, the Conservatives, etc.

So people begin looking for something to provide their lives with direction since they’ve been deprived of the guaranteed Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness they used to believe in.

Dave Barry once wrote how shocked he was hearing young people in the 1990s complaining how they wished that their generation could have a Vietnam. Christopher Titus said people were looking for that galvanizing moment that brought back that sense of community and America we heard so much about. Yet war after war, the coalescing hasn’t occurred. So now folks are following the tune of other pipers.

Perhaps it’s some militia that wants the United States government overthrown. Maybe it’s some Islamic movement that wants to force everyone to convert to their particular flavor and will kill anyone who refuses. It could be a religious group that purports to be the True Religion and is therefore no part of this crumbling world.

In whatever case, there is a lure to join with zealots, extremists, or “visionaries.” At least they are offering a new Script to replace our severely flawed one.

Therefore a person who hooks up with an extreme agenda may not be fully on board with every tenet and rule of the new group, but at least they have found family, community, support, fellow feeling over the same dissatisfactions, and direction in life. They find identity where they didn’t perceive one before. They are now someone, part of a movement that has purpose, living a life that has a real goal and therefore now means something.

That also means that the old system is kind of the enemy now. They let us down, so they have to go. We’ll rebuild everything to our better specifications.

Man has been trying that for about as long as there has been Man. Every political, religious, or ideological uprising has been reactionary to the failure of whatever was in place at the time.

I think that simply waging war against extremist forces is a faulty half-measure. It drives folks into holes and restores the temporary illusion of security, but it also reinforces their view of the world and galvanizes their resolve to make the old world pay.

What we’ve been lacking is a concrete movement to ensure our children have identity of self. Not everyone lacks that, but as I watch people streaming to the Middle East while their friends and families say “I don’t understand it! He wasn’t like that a year ago! She was always such a loving Christian!” I can’t help but wonder why they didn’t just look at this extreme group of self-proclaimed Islamic champions and just go “Yeah, right. NOT!”

I guess it’s because someone got dissatisfied with things in America as it is today. Crime, sex, greed, impurity and immorality wasn't supposed to be the stage where we played our parts in the Script. I think dissatisfaction is pretty much guaranteed.

And as long as no one helps these people find their way in the New America with realistic expectations, groups standing for something that resonates with the disenfranchised will continue to draw them. And it will just leave the Script Players over here blaming yet another group for their unhappiness.