Our Sibling Society (1) and the Problem of Mentoring Young Men who have never met a Responsible Developed Adult
“Sibling society” describes a society that is not run by adults but is rather run by the impulses of children, adolescents, and half-adults that display the mannerisms and mentalities of immaturity.
The phrase “sibling society” indicates a society that is not run by parents and adults but is rather run by the preferences and impulses of children, adolescents, and half-adults that have the age, appearance, and positions of adulthood but still have the mannerisms and mentalities of adolescence, immaturity.
THE SIBLING SOCIETY is another—along with IRON JOHN—of Robert Bly’s books that is both descriptive and predictive. Unfortunately, SIBLING SOCIETY was published in 1996 when the internet became public and books and social commentary became digitized—SIBLING SOCIETY was somehow lost or forgotten in that transition. I was gifted a copy of the book in 1996, and it is among the few books that I have protected from loss or triage during my national and international relocations.
SIBLING SOCIETY describes and predicts the problem of our American society that is losing its social structure generally and—more specifically—the problems presented when adults are weak or completely absent in the society and thus the whims and impulses of children come to dominate.
In Chapter 3 titled “Swimming among the Half-Adults”, Bly writes, “In many ways, we are now living in a culture run by half-adults.”
Imagine that statement in 1996 and look at how much worse everything is now nearly 30 years later in 2024, when national/international politics (ie, the highest tier of governance in society) resembles a circus, comedy show, or food-fight much more than it does reasonable adult-level thought and seasoned discourse.
The phrase “sibling society” indicates a society that is not run by parents and adults but is rather run by the preferences and impulses of children, adolescents, and half-adults that have the age, appearance, and positions of adulthood but still have the mannerisms and mentalities of adolescence, immaturity.
Beyond the book itself, Bly produced several lectures distributed as audiocassettes—again lost in the digital transition—to further detail the problems and solutions presented in SIBLING SOCIETY; these included WHERE HAVE ALL THE PARENTS GONE and a separate (or perhaps subtitled) A TALK ON THE SIBLING SOCIETY. From one of his spoken presentations, I clearly remember Bly quoting a police officer from some major city—perhaps Detroit or Chicago—who stated:
“The young men that I arrest not only do not have a responsible adult in the house, they have never met one.”
I consider this observation frequently when I am mentoring young men. The young men I work with are obviously (if not superficially) trying to improve and grow into men—certainly better men than they’ve known or seen. However, one of the shocking realizations to consider is the complete or near-complete lack of social foundation from which teachers and mentors have to begin their work with young people these days. As teachers and mentors—whether at the informal/social level or the structured/graduate level—we are working with mentees/students who don’t simply need to learn skills and information but who also lack awareness of (let alone respect for) any social or intellectual hierarchy of knowledge, talent, and experience; they are fully comfortable in both their ignorance and their confidence because they have no idea of the difference between child and adult, initiate and elder, novice and expert.
Young people these days—in addition to their lack of depth and breadth of experience—have a previously unimagined number of protections and distractions that keep them from having the types of realizations that many of us took in stride—and were forced to accept—growing up in and around Generation X.
Some of the things I’ve seen quite by surprise include:
Young boys (8-10years) who cry and run away when receiving gentle instructions on how to do simple age-appropriate tasks such as cleaning and painting.
Young men (including 30-35years) who treat everything as a joke—all advice, all correction, all reprimand for errors, including errors that can damage expensive equipment or harm other people.
Young men (including 30-35years) who ask others for permission for decisions that are personal to them and clearly within their autonomous purview.
Undergraduate students arrogant and clueless enough to “correct” their professors on topics that take years of graduate/doctorate-level study.
When I first started teaching Pharmacology, I recall giving the students a midterm examination that I thought was embarrassingly simple—not because I wanted to give them an easy exam (indeed my goal was to give them a challenging exam that approximated the difficulty and reality of clinical practice)—because writing clear questions with clear-yet-challenging answers is actually quite difficult. The average score on the exam in a class of 60 students was ~68% which is a failing score when 70% is the minimum passing score; keep in mind also that this was a multiple-choice exam with only 4-5 options per question. Making the situation worse was the half-adult administration who didn’t care about quality education and just wanted the faculty to pass all the students without delay or complication.
Half-adult college/university administrators who have the faces and positions of adults but who simply run their programs as adult daycare centers and diploma mills by passing all the students and undercutting the faculty—hence the reason that so many of us qualified dedicated teachers have left the industry.
Young men (including 30-35years) who ALREADY HAVE CHILDREN and yet have no supporting income and have no direction in their lives, neither to support themselves nor support the families that they are either creating or neglecting.
UPDATE: PRECISELY THE DAY AFTER I WROTE ALL OF THE ABOVE, one of the young men I have been working with for about a year—a young (~30yo) man with no father, no direction, and no plan—asked me why I had not started a [biomedical manufacturing facility] in a [foreign country with notoriously complicated infrastructure and tax/import structure that eats 40% of any profit] to which I replied with a durable list of the 5 reasons that I had not done so—including 1) the need to have a building constructed from zero in order to meet drug manufacturing standards, 2) import fees, 3) export fees, 4) international shipping in both directions for all products, 5) hassles with employees and unions, and 6) again the fact that the government of this particular country usurps at least 40% of the cashflow in taxes/tariffs/fees, 7) the need for specific international certifications, 8) the need to hire professionals to coordinate and ensure all of the above is done competently/completely/synchronized—to which he replied “This is easy”, thereby announcing to the world that he has absolutely zero idea what he’s talking about and that his hubris is going to lead him to failure unless he has either constant supervision and help (99.99999999% probable) or unless he somehow gets moonshot lucky with his “easy” fantasy.
Sure, these characteristics make for caricatures that some find offensive (but isn’t everybody offended these days?) but these jokes and sit-coms have at least some basis in reality, while others are near-perfect:
What do you think about the name and concept of the Sibling Society? Do you think it captures the phenomenon or would a different descriptor be better?
Leadership Knowledge Protects Society VIDEO (May 3, 2021)—included below in its entirety
Without education in Leadership, people cannot enact Leadership and cannot critique Leadership to protect themselves and their communities
1. The topic of leadership is notably absent from public dialogue
2. We all need to be aware of essential concepts in leadership
3. We all need to have the ability to discuss and articulate the topic of leadership
4. Training in leadership is notably absent from all/formal/graduate education whereas it should be included throughout
5. Leadership requires the participation (feedback, input) and enrollment/agreement of the people being "led"
6. Different types of leadership are appropriate for different situations (eg, political vs military vs employer-employee vs owner-manager vs parent-child vs teacher-student) but all leadership has at least four common characteristics
7. Lack of leadership always has consequences: error, injury, death(s) or simply wasted time and effort
8. All good leadership has defined common characteristics
1) Defined specific goal(s), clearly communicated, along with the supporting strategies and tactics: The goal must be defined (after input and agreement) and the strategies and tactics specified. Undefined specific goals are never accomplished; therefore, for a group to achieve any complex or worthwhile goal, that goal must be defined, then subdivided, and then each facet has to be addressed with a specific strategy supported by implemented tactics.
Goals (organizational targets) are defined, then subdivided into components (jobs); then, each subcomponent is addressed with a specific strategy (teams) which is then implemented with tactics (skills)
2) Enrollment of participants: When the goal has been determined, the leader must then communicate the goal and enroll the participants to gain their full participation. This may be simple or may require some great deal of education in order to convey the importance of the goal and the means to achieve it.
3) Welfare/maintenance of participants: Good leadership protects the welfare of the participants/implementers. Any leader who doesn’t look out for his/her participants isn’t leading them but rather simply using them, as if they were tools or implements. This is not a successful strategy for achieving the goal because eventually people will get sick, injured, burnt out, bored or exhausted and when the troops leave the war cannot be won. Enthusiastic and incentivized participants are the driving force behind the implementation of worthy goals, strategies and tactics.
4) Success: Good leadership is generally successful in achieving the goal; failure to achieve the goal(s) is accepted and incorporated into a revised plan until success is achieved.
9) The prevailing power structures want followers and "managers of predetermined goals" -- not leaders -- and they want to keep people ignorant about the criteria and implementation of leadership
Because most people are ignorant about the implementation and evaluation of leadership, they are mute and helpless and ineffective when confronted with incompetent/manipulative leadership; when people cannot articulate their discontent, they cannot seek agreement from others as necessary to effect public/social change; this leads to the persistence of bad leadership. When people cannot articulate and clarify their discontent, they tend to distrust it or ignore it and allow themselves to be distracted by other trivia; this also leads to the persistence of bad leadership. Thus, by various mechanisms, ignornance about leadership leads to the perpetuation of bad leadership, of which we appreciate two types.
You can also note the converse of this: a population (of troops, citizens, workers) knowledgeable about leadership will hold the leaders to higher standards of performance and/or eliminate the incompetent/manipulative bad leaders. As such, any true leader who is more committed to the success of the group than to maintenance of his/her position would therefore seek to train his/her subordinates in leadership in order to create a culture of competent leadership and high-performance.
10) Because most people are ignorant about the implementation and evaluation of leadership, they are mute and helpless and ineffective when confronted with incompetent/manipulative leadership; when people cannot articulate their discontent, they cannot seek agreement from others as necessary to effect public/social change; this leads to the persistence of bad leadership. When people cannot articulate and clarify their discontent, they tend to distrust it or ignore it and allow themselves to be distracted by other trivia; this also leads to the persistence of bad leadership.
11. "Bad leadership" has two types: 1) incompetence, and 2) manipulation
a) "Honest incompetence" occurs when someone lacks experience, knowledge, talent; these people are / should be open to correction and eager to learn. Honestly incompetent people will remove themselves from positions they cannot handle.
b) "Manipulators" will not remove themselves from the failures they refuse to acknowledge; manipulative incompetence usually implies self-deception and lack of insight/intelligence, eg, Dunning-Kruger
12. Anytime you ask for clarity and do not receive clarity 1) you are being lied to, and/or 2) you are being manipulated. As such, asking clear and reasonable questions is a very specific and effective tool for differentiating the two types of bad leaders. (Note: this also applies to bad bosses, bad employees, bad contractors, bad friends, etc). Asking a clear and reasonable question should elicit a clear and reasonable answer; anything less is a problem, of which two categories exist: 1) Unknowing: an unclear answer could represent incompetence/unknowing, in which case the honest person might search for an answer and/or acknowledge that they don’t know the answer and don’t have the information, after which they will seek the answer. 2) Evasion and manipulation.
13. You can only recognize manipulation if you study and can thereafter identify the techniques; 1) gaslighting: changing the fabric of reality to make other people think they are going crazy, 2) shapeshifting: Karpman drama triangle
14. Clear questions deserve clear answers; anything less than clarity is evasion and manipulation. Period. Anything less than clarity is evasion and manipulation.
15. Good leadership requires the establishment of goals that are reasonable, clearly defined, achievable, worthwhile. This perspective/perspectivism requires honest and unfiltered inquiry with peers, experts, implementers, and the affected population.
16. If the goal is not clear then the leader has already failed. Good leadership defines the vision, mission, goal, strategies, and tactics. Good leadership defines how the people and systems will be physically/ socially/ financially/ spiritually/ emotionally supported during the mission.
Please share this information with your friends, colleagues, family, and favorite trolls
Excellent discussion. I need to read this book. I had previously watched the “interview with a millennial” video and was not surprised by it. The concept of “ half adult” is so true!