Boris Cyrulnik, world-renowned neuropsychiatrist, almost 86 years old, analyzes for La Vanguardia the causes of the French revolt. Orphaned by victims of the Xoà, Cyrulnik developed the concept of “resilience”. This expert thinks that a key problem is the lack of verbal background of children from poor and unstructured families when they arrive at school. This causes a first failure, a feeling of humiliation that pushes them to violence and to hate the elites.
Why are the protagonists of the riots so young, boys between 14 and 18?
Because in many countries, in France, in the USA, perhaps less so in Spain, society is divided. A minority of children shine, the children of the rich. They study, pass and have very good professions with good salaries.
And the rest?
Especially in the megalopolises, there is a majority of children left adrift. With almost no family ties, the mother is overwhelmed, often depressed. The father is violent or absent. They work small jobs that change every two or three months. These children arrive at nursery school, at the age of three, speaking poorly. They have a stock of only two hundred words, while the children of a rich and cultivated family arrive with a thousand words, which will allow them to be good students. The former feel humiliated, they do not understand the orders of the masters. They have wasted the first thousand days of existence. They learn to hate school, to hate the elites.
Can the school correct it?
Some children, in fact, are better at school than at home. Even if they come from poor families, if they have learned to speak, they benefit from it. It will be a factor of resilience. But those who get there with only two hundred words detest school and develop a phobia. In all cultures, hatred of elites is a harbinger of fascism. Remember what happened in Germany. In that cultivated town there were uncultivated Germans who hated those who wore glasses, because they thought they were the intellectuals. They hated the Jews, because they were intellectuals. They hated books and burned them. This was repeated in Mao’s China, with Stalin, in South America with all the dictatorships.
Has it always been like this?
Before what structured society was the body. When I was little it was the body of men and the womb of women. The men had to work in the mines 15 hours a day, without complaining, and the women had to bring into the world as many children as possible to worship God, and especially men to prepare for war or work in the mines. This is completely gone. It’s school, the diplomas. But those who hate school stay among themselves, form gangs. They are archaic processes of socialization, the clan, with the head of the band and rituals of initiation through violence. These guys take pride in picking fights with the police. They show courage and believe that they are repairing the dignity wounded by the humiliation suffered at school, the lack of family, of culture.
Compare the situation with the favelas in Brazil.
Yes, several Brazilian universities invited me to work in the favelas. A similar phenomenon occurs there. The presidents before Lula sent the police and the army there. The favorite game of those children, their pride, was fighting. They knew the alleys. They were hard to catch. When Lula was elected president, he stopped sending the police and the army and sent cultural and sports personalities there. In a few years he managed to direct 50% of those criminals to school.
Who is the political beneficiary of what is happening in France?
These children do not know that they are giving a gift to the totalitarian extreme right, to fascism, and to the extreme left, to all extremisms, including religious ones. When there is social and cultural disorder, people aspire to order and a savior arrives. Hitler was democratically elected. There are many democratically elected dictators on the planet today.
Are social networks and mobile phones accelerating this phenomenon?
exactly Ethnologist Germaine Tillion took a trip to Germany in 1929. She told her German friends that there was a very dangerous ridiculous theory. They laughed. They didn’t take her seriously. The Nazi party got less than 3% of the vote. But then, in that cultivated German town, it went from 90%. An idiotic theory works very well when there is social disorder. Tillion said that it takes ten years to trigger a psychosocial process of fascism. Today, the same process is carried out in a few minutes thanks to the internet and mobile phones. A riot is quickly organized. The Germans burned books, attacked synagogues. Today, many disgruntled, humiliated boys gather under the orders of a clan head to go out into the streets, break shop windows, attack banks.
He developed the concept of resilience. Are you optimistic?
According to the theory of resilience, we know the measures that need to be taken, psychologically, socioculturally. Will this Government and the following take them? Serge Moscovici said that a small convinced group, of 3% of the population, can trigger a social phenomenon. It happened in Nazi Germany. These children have no family, no school, no diploma, no job. They have nothing else to do but repair their dignity by fighting, stealing, crime, the pride of being brave.
What should be done, then?
The first measure is to protect the development of families before children learn to speak so that they can arrive at school with enough verbal baggage. In France there is the project of the Houses of the first 1,000 days so that young parents can meet, ask for advice and detect early problems. The second measure is to develop early culture. That is why this phenomenon does not exist in Spain. The family structure has been maintained there more than in France. I go there often and I love to see that Spanish culture has maintained this tradition, the rituals. The family has retained great importance, for children and for the elderly. This has largely disappeared in France and even more so in the United States, where the violence is even greater.
