Boris Cyrulnik, a world-renowned neuropsychiatrist, almost 86 years old, analyzes for La Vanguardia the causes of the French revolt. Orphaned by victims of the Shoah, Cyrulnik developed the concept of “resilience”. This expert thinks that a key problem is the lack of verbal baggage of children from poor and broken 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, kids between 14 and 18 years old?
Because in many countries, in France, the US, perhaps even 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 megacities, there is a majority of children left adrift. With hardly any family ties, the mother is overwhelmed, often depressed. The father is violent or absent. They do small jobs that change every two or three months. These children arrive at nursery school, at three years old, speaking badly. They have a stock of only two hundred words, while the children of a rich and cultivated family come up with a thousand words, which will enable them to be good students. The first feel humiliated, they do not understand the orders of the teachers. They have wasted the first thousand days of their existence. They learn to hate the school, to hate the elites.
Can the school correct it?
Some children are indeed better off at school than at home. Even if they come from poor families, if they have learned to speak they benefit. It will be a resilience factor. But those who come with only two hundred words hate school and develop a phobia. In all cultures, hatred of elites is a warning sign of fascism. Remember what happened in Germany. In that highly 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. That was repeated in Mao’s China, with Stalin, in South America with all the dictatorships.
It has always been like this?
Before, what structured society was the body. When I was a child 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 has completely disappeared. It’s the school, the diplomas. But the school haters stay among themselves, they form gangs. They are archaic processes of socialization, the clan, with the head of the gang and initiation rituals through violence. These guys are proud to fight the police. In this way they show their courage and believe they are repairing their wounded dignity due to the humiliation suffered at school, the lack of family, of culture.
You compare the situation with the favelas in Brazil.
Yes, several Brazilian universities invited me to work in the favelas. A similar phenomenon occurs. Presidents before Lula sent the police and the army. Those children’s favorite game, their pride, was to fight with them. 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. In a few years he managed to direct 50% of these delinquents 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 also 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. Today, on the planet, there are many democratically elected dictators.
Do social networks and mobile phones accelerate this phenomenon?
Exactly. The 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 achieved less than 3% of the vote. But then, in that cultivated German town, it went from 90%. An idiot 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 discontented, humiliated boys gather under the order of a clan chief to go out into the streets, break shop windows, attack banks.
You developed the concept of resilience. Are you optimistic?
According to the theory of resilience, we know the measures that must be taken, psychologically, socioculturally. Will this government and the following ones take them? Serge Moscovici said that a small convinced group, 3% of the population, can unleash a social phenomenon. It happened in Nazi Germany. These children have no family, no school, no diploma, and no job. They have nothing else to do than repair their dignity with fighting, stealing, crime, the pride of being brave.
So what should be done?
The first measure is to protect the development of families before children learn to speak so that they can arrive at school with a sufficient 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. There the family structure has been maintained more than in France. I go often and I love to see how Spanish culture has maintained this tradition, the rituals. The family has retained great importance, for children and for the elderly. That has disappeared a lot in France and even more in the United States, where the violence is even greater. There are young people who go to the institutes to kill the students and the teachers.
