Will we raise boys with the capacity to achieve harmony and integration—at the center of the river—or will we raise our boys to either reject new ideas (rigidity) or destroy anything that upsets them (chaos)?
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In my quest to engage the world in a conversation about the world around us, I’ve concluded that coping with extremism is one of the principal struggles of our time, and further that raising boys into men plays a crucial role in determining our collective success or failure. In my last article I wrote about how boys and young men (as well as girls and young women) are sometimes lured to radical organizations such as ISIS because of the emptiness they experience in their day-to-day lives (https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/raising-boys-and-isis-dsh/). The unintended consequences of modernization, upending traditional systems, and focusing life on material consumption sometimes lead to “purposelessness.”
Now, in this installment, I’d like to explore why this happens and share some ideas as to how we can make conscious decisions about where to go next.
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Why does this happen? How do people go from living in relative stability—especially those from relatively prosperous backgrounds—to taking up arms and slaughtering civilians?
Modern brain neuroscience may provide some of the answer.
Daniel Siegel’s book Mindsight talks about the connections between traditional psychotherapy and emerging brain neuroscience. It explores conventional beliefs from psychology and the relatively new data available from technologies such as functional MRI scans of brain-pattern activity.
Siegel uses a river as a metaphor for his thoughts on mental health. The body of water—the river itself—represents a healthy flow that feeds, nourishes, and sustains. It’s channeled, then, by two opposite banks: chaos on one side and rigidity on the other. The healthy middle is where good things happen. It’s where people feel sane and steady.
When I consider this view of mental health, and I consider the world that we live in, I believe that many people are swimming near the edges of their river, in some potentially dangerous ways. So many of the traditional structures for people of all ages—though especially youth—are unraveling. While many of these structures, admittedly, leaned to the side of rigidity, they nonetheless offered a sense of stability in which people could function and integrate information.
Nowadays, these structures are morphing, disintegrating, and, in some cases, exploding. Information, mobility, and decentralization are whipping through cultures as breakneck speed, casting aside old ways of thinking and operating.
Sounds great, right? The socially acceptable answer, at least in the West, is an emphatic yes. If we go another step forward, though, and agree with the answer yes, then what is replacing the old?
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I believe that many traditional societies are replacing rigidity with chaos. Said another way, many people of the world are transitioning from a psychological state of simplicity and conformity to wildness and anarchy. Not because someone is demanding that they do this, but rather because there’s no track to run on in the middle. There’s no healthy flow of integration and harmony to support new information and challenging ideas.
If a person is told his entire life that something is a certain way without exception, and then one day he’s sees fifteen examples of how it’s not, what’s this person supposed to think?
How we raise our boys in this era to cope with all the swirling and contradictory information in the world will go a long way towards determining the outcome of all this modernization. Will we raise boys with the capacity to achieve harmony and integration—at the center of the river—or will we raise our boys to either reject new ideas (rigidity) or destroy anything that upsets them (chaos)?
This is not just a question for current hotspots of military conflict, such as the Middle East or North Africa. This is a question that haunts the developed world where rates of depression continue to rise, random acts of homicide frequently breakout, and scores of youth depart for extremist movements across the globe.
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How do our boys learn to live in a world of openness and fluidity? How do we avoid raising them in rigid systems that limit their potential? And how do we avoid raising them in chaotic free-for-alls that leave them feeling untethered and alienated?
These are some of the most challenging questions of our time.
If we create a world where rigidity is replaced by chaos, we all lose. If we create a world where chaos is replaced by rigidity, we all suffer the consequences.
What can we do to guide boys and young men down the middle of the river towards a life of awareness, conscious decision making, and internal peace?
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Photo credit: Flickr/Randen Pederson
