Today we’re going to talk about initiation rites how a boy can’t make the transition from boyhood into manhood.
Historically, most stable cultures had a way to transition boys from a state of boyhood to a state of manhood. We’ve lost that by and large in our modern Western culture, with a few notable exceptions.
Initiation rites have had an extraordinarily powerful effect on keeping cultures stable and continuing. As a result, cultures that have those tend to keep having them. In other words, cultures that are – in the words of Nassim Taleb – “Lindy” also tend to be cultures that have initiation rites for their boys.
We don’t have such rights in the West anymore. And I think we are poorer for it.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how to help my boys make their transition from boyhood into adulthood. I was not really terribly satisfied with the results that me and my friends came up with.
My oldest son did get to participate in an initiation ceremony that we designed for him. I was living in Texas at the time, and us guys would fairly regularly pack up on a Friday afternoon and head out into the country to camp. I mean literally, all we did was we made a bonfire and pitched our tents around the camp and spent the weekend together as men doing whatever. That was really about the extent of it.
I decided that he would that be invited to participate in the campout. We would initiate my son into the fellowship of men. We had a little ceremony that we conducted for him when we invited him to come do that.
I’m not quite sure, but I think he may have had another friend that got to participate as well. We waited until he was 13, which was kind of traditionally the historical age for boys to be initiated into manhood.
It didn’t have a lot of emotional power. Frankly, I didn’t really understand much about the cultural aspects of initiation like I do now.
Fast-forward just a couple of years. I lost my two best friends into a cult. That initiated a thirty-year-long process of me studying cult psychology. That allowed me to understand culturally how these initiation ceremonies work.
An initiation ceremony has a dual effect of bringing a boy into the fellowship of men, and also into a position of responsibility as a man to perpetuate the culture that he is a part of.
So, the initiation rite has a dual purpose. It brings a boy into the Fellowship of men, where he gains the rights of being a man among men. But also gains the responsibilities of being a man among men. And those responsibilities should include the responsibility to preserve and protect the culture that he was born into and was raised in.
He is now responsible for keeping it going.
I’m a bit of a fan of Judaism. I’m not a Jew – I’ve voiced many times the wish that I was – and the reason is because of my study of culture and the psychology behind building strong cultures, (which is essentially what I studied when I studied the psychology of cults.)
The Jews have created an incredibly robust, resilient, and stable culture that has endured for at least thirty five hundred years. And God knows how many pogroms and persecutions and genocides.
Through all of that, the Jewish culture has remained. And I think a significant portion of that is embedded in their tools, one of which is the ritual of bar mitzvah where a boy makes the transition from the freedom from responsibility that a boy has into the freedom and responsibility that a man has, to carry on culture.
So, I’d like to hear from you my listeners and watchers and subscribers. Talk about how a boy should transition from being a a boy into being a man. What are the rights and responsibilities?
We’re gonna continue this conversation next time.
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