Male Dysfunctionality and Learned Behavior

I had success blogging from my journal (that I keep very sporadically). I thought I would share another past entry. I feel my last post of lyrics was a perfect prelude. You might find interesting to re-read that post after reading this one.

August 27, 2003
I am reading Pat Conroy's My Losing Season. The dialogue between the basketball players, the derogatory jaw-jacking, brings back memories from my days of organized sports and private high school (Conroy played basketball at the Ciadel).

The abusive intercourse between teammates presented as a perverse form of camaraderie. Don't they see it for what it is? I did even in my youngest years, and I detested it. I did not know the term for it then--dysfunctional behavior--but I recognized its manifestation. Males not secure or happy with themselves and masking it with a defensive, often aggressive exterior; and so many times this behavior resulting in the degradation of others.

I saw so much of this in organized, ritualistic or segregated groupings such as private school activities. It did not take place with my 2 or 3 closest male friends, or with my neighborhood playmates before junior high school and suburban lifestyle seperated us even though we still lived in the same neighborhood. I did not witness such becahvior near as much in public school clicks, teams, and organizations. It seemed that the wider diversity of public school versus private promoted more tolerance and acceptance. Maybe the reason was you could always find a group in which you fit and these clicks tended to leave each other alone.

At a small private school, the school was the click and you were either in or out. The absolute worst existence for a human is to be on the inside, physically in the midst, while knowing you are on the outside in every other aspect. On the inside looking out--captive yet excluded.

I think most males from at least half-way normal environments are fine until around 10 years of age. Then the world rips us apart. The pressures of hormones, acceptance, and awareness coupled with the false teachings of advertising and other social influences rob us of the inner peace and confidence we had. All these things pull at us and tell us we aren't what we should be. Who we are is not enough. We aren't cool enough, tough or strong enough, attractive enough, athletic enough, etc.

Who is teaching us to love, to care, to discern? Who is teaching we are not Christ enough and that is the real problem?

Around ten, all of a sudden we don't fit in. What really changed? It is like Adam and Eve eating of the forbidden fruit. We suddenly have awareness disguised as knowledge, but we lack maturity and experience. We are left on our own to be functional, and therefore dysfunctionality reigns.

We all are just seeking a common ground of acceptance. But, we don't have the total self-awareness, knowledge, and maturity to build each other up to a higher common plane. So we react rationally to the system and drag each other down trying to reach a common level.

Do our parents, teachers, and churches see this happening and help? In most cases, no. Help is sparse and infrequent. By being so, we disregard wisdom with our defensive bravado when we hear it. We know there is truth there, but we look around to see if our peers are too saying yes. No one is, no collective dropping of the guard, so no change.

Why don't our adults help? They are probably not even aware of what we are feeling. Wrapped in our insecurity and pain and unreality, we think we are the problem so we do not open up to our adult community. In addition, they are too busy to slow down to ponder what are our children going through at this age? What should I be watching for? How did I feel at that age?

Besides, how could they really help? They have already been through this cycle, and they think it is the norm thus reinforcing and perpetuating the brainwashing. It will pass. It is part of life. Suck it up, life ain't fair.

Young people need a constant barrage of love, truth, and compassion, and discipline to counter the constant influence of the opposite.

But when a couple of hundred of these southern French boys were thrown together in the prison of that Lycee, a sublte change was operated in their spirit and mentality. In fact, I noticed that when you were with them seperately, outside the school, they were mild and peaceable and humane enough. But when they were all together there seemed to be some diabolical spirit of cruelty and viciousness and obscenity and blasphemy and envy and hatred that banded them together against all goodness and against one another in mockery and fierce cruelty and in vociferous, uninhibited filthiness. Contact with that wolf pack felt very patently like contact with the mystical body of the devil: and especially in the first few days, the members of that body did not spare themselves in kicking me aournd without mercy.

--Thomas Merton. The Seven Storey Mountain: An Autobiography of Faith. Harcourt Brace & Co. 1948, renewed 1976 Merton Legacy Trust.