https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nIUf16wtx8U
It’s a real open question exactly when boys and girls as well for that matter, really most need their fathers. You know, and if your father is a target of emulation, it might well be that you most need him, especially when you’re a boy, about the time that you hit puberty. And I think part of the reason for that, I remember when I lived in Montreal, there was this kid that lived down the street, we lived in poor areas in Montreal. And there was this kid that lived down the street, one of the places we lived, who was the son of a single mother. She was about five, four, and he was about six feet tall and he was 14. You know, and he was out tromping around the streets in Montreal causing trouble. And we used to hear his mother, we didn’t know them, we used to hear them fighting in the hallway, for example. And like, what the hell could she do about it? You know, he was six feet tall. You know, short of telling him to get the hell out and then potentially enforcing that with the police. He had her cornered, you know, for all intents and purposes, especially when he had his little gang of friends around. You know, his mother wasn’t gonna be able to do a damn thing. And so, you know, it might well be that when you are around 12 and you’re a boy, especially if you’re temperamentally inclined to some degree to be challenging, that that’s exactly the right time for you to have a father who can step on you around. I know that there’s some evidence among elephants, for example, that the older males socialize the younger males and that when human wildlife curators have attempted to reformulate elephant societies, which are extraordinarily complex, the young males rampage around like mad unless there are older males to keep them in line. There’s a very good example of that. You know, culling of elephants is an unfortunate necessity. If you put elephants into the career national park without the saber-toothed cats that used to hunt them, they breed like crazy. They breed at a rate of about 12% per year. So then they destroy all the trees. And, you know, so then the WWF comes along and says, we’ll pay you not to shoot your elephants, which is to say, we’ll pay you to let all your trees get destroyed. So of course they do have to shoot the elephants and it’s a terrible thing. And so they’ve tried different mechanisms. And the one way that they used to do it was to go in and take out the oldest members, right? The dominant males and so on. But what happened as a result of that is they left young uncultured elephants. And those elephants would rampage, they would attack cars, they had never been taught. And so I think it is a really good example of the wisdom of elders, even in the animal kingdom, being very important to the developing community. Well, especially in those complex, I mean, elephants are unbelievably intelligent. They have a prehensile trunk, right? And anything that has a prehensile attachment tends to be extraordinarily intelligent, like octopuses, for example, only live three years, something like that, but appear to be at least as smart as dogs, which is pretty damn smart. And with that increased intelligence comes a necessity for deeper socialization and then the necessity for something like a continuous historical tradition. Because with all that additional brain expanse, that environmental specific programming that’s associated with socialization starts to become increasingly crucial. You see that too, even if you have a particularly smart breed of dog. Like it’s great to have a smart dog, but a smart untrained dog is a really bad dog. A stupid untrained dog just lays there like a stupid dog and who cares? I always say, especially if you have smart breed border collies, if you’re not training them, they’re training you. Yeah, yeah, well, that’s the thing about a dog. They’re training you. You have to be smarter than the dog and that’s not always that easy. Yeah, yeah, well, that’s also the case if you have a particularly pushy child they can be socialized very well. But this question of the role of the father, I think that there’s two distinct phases, at least it feels like to me. There’s the contrast between the nurturing mother energy and the disciplinary sort of structured father energy. And I think that that even has to be there, say, some three years old. Yeah. And I was lucky, I had that. It may have been better, it could have been better, but I had it. But then there does enter that next phase which is where it’s not now about boundaries, it’s not now about discipline, but it is about modeling. It’s about, and I was lucky that while I lost my dad for some time, I kind of lost it right in the middle and got it back right at the point that it was necessary again. Yeah, well, that maternal love is a kind of all encompassing acceptance and that’s precisely necessary in early infancy where the infant can do no wrong. The maternal role is more like boundary setting and encouragement jointly together. And that seems somewhat paradoxical that you can encourage people by setting boundaries. But the thing about encouragement is it’s goal directed and it means that you have to be on the pathway to genuine success and pathways have boundaries. [“Pomp and Circumstance”] [“Pomp and Circumstance”]