Book Store Directory at Therapist-Psychologist.com

Enter Keywords:

Index : Product Listings : Product Details

Back

View Larger

The Sibling Society

By Robert Bly ( Vintage )

Release Date: 1997-05-27
Average Customer Rating:

List Price: $14.00
Price: $11.20
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25.
Availability: In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served.

Add to Cart

Product Description
Where have all the grownups gone? In answering that question with the same freewheeling erudition and intuitive brilliance that made Iron John a national bestseller, poet, storyteller and translator Robert Bly tells us that we live in a "sibling society, " in which adults have regressed into adolescence and adolescents refuse to grow up.

Amazon.com
Poet and storyteller Robert Bly takes the baby boomers to task in this highly charged exposure of midlifers' values. Having become jaded by the abuses of authority, the boomers of North America have torn down the traditional hierarchy within their families and within their communities. What's left is a "cultural flatness," says Bly, where adults cling to self-absorbed adolescent values, television talk shows have more clout than elders, children are spiritually abandoned to fend for themselves, and in the place of community we have built shopping malls. As always, Bly relies on mythology, legends, and poetry to illustrate the morals of his stories. Ultimately this is a hopeful piece of work, nudging midlifers to take on the responsibilities (and therefore the rewards) of adulthood.

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Iron John: A Book About Men	A Little Book on the Human Shadow	The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine	King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine	Power in the Helping Professions

Product Reviews:

If the Metaphor Fits, Don't Wear It ( bornus )
Just the title alone inspired me with many observations on modern society, in which no one wants to be/respect the authority figure, we all collaborate instead of taking orders from anyone, there is no right or wrong, only "your truth" and "my truth," and the most important thing is for everyone to be self-actualized.

However once I began reading the book I found it to be somewhat rambling and unfocused, with many allusions to various myths, straining to fit them into preconceived interpretations to align with his theme. There are many isolated nuggets providing fruitful food for thought. But it is necessary to take these nuggets and develop them on one's own in order to derive maximum benefit. Nevertheless, providing the nuggets at all is a valuable service from this book.

Bly's thesis is that the wonderful age of the 1960's somehow went awry, resulting in generations of unparented children who become sullen and resentful, and ultimately socially necrotic. Bly fails to realize that this outcome is the inevitable result of a narcissistic generation that distrusted all authority and sought to discredit and dismantle it. The "baby boom generation" has now reached late maturity and wonders where their parents have gone. Their parents, the "greatest generation," strove and gave them so much, and they grew up feeling entitled to the benefits of engaged civic society without realizing also the dues required in its maintenance. As a result the baby boom generation continues to mortgage their children's futures, in the form of a massive national debt which has been consumed to continue to provide the quality of life that they have come to expect, provided by the modern-day omniparent called government. The culture has evolved from a culture of authority to one of argument. In this argument, money and mass media have the loudest voice, and society and government do their bidding.

The unanswered question is whether the baby-boomer "sibling society" is a transitory phenomenon to be succeeded by a new "greatest generation" in posterity who will once again have to sacrifice, strive, and take up the slack. Or, whether we have permanently abandoned the responsibility to take our turn as the parent, only to find that we will now be parented by our creations (mass marketing, technology, etc.), fascinating us, directing us, and telling us what we want.

In writing the book, Bly's goal is to extirpate the sibling society that he has described. He hopes to accomplish this by encouraging our generation to reach out and mentor youths. However, the erosion of culture means much has already been lost and may be beyond retrieval. The sibling society may never know how to move beyond only crude efforts of being Big Brother.

Are We Squandering the Nation's Bounties? ( paulocal )
It has taken a poet to tell us what we normally expect from the Psychologists, Political Scientists, and Sociologists. Robert Bly, in "The Sibling Society," has, as he did in his seminal work in social criticism, "Iron John," told us things about ourselves that we needed confirmed by an independent source. "The Sibling Society" is that source. It confirms that we have become a culture that sanctions adult juvenile behavior. By ignoring our deeper responsibilities as parents, we have learned to ignore the difficult problems of our society; and in the process, we have lost an essential element of what it means to be an adult society. In effect, we have become the children of our children.

At least that is Bly's theory.

It is a powerful and beautifully told theory. One related to us through allegory and morality-based fairytales. It is centered on what the author sees as the nation's rapacious greed, its narcissistic self-absorption, and the neurotic need for unearned (one-way) love, and attention -- especially from our own children who we try to make our friends.

Bly is not alone in having isolated these factors as the key symptoms of a much less orderly American culture. John Ralston Saul in "The Unconscious Civilization" comes to similar conclusions -- as does Theodore Dalrymple in "Life at the Bottom." However, it remains arguable whether these factors are in fact the true root causes of the American dilemma of its emerging adult adolescence.

And alternative theory that, arguably fits Bly's anecdotal data with equal facility is to view Bly's factors as symptoms of a deeper cause. That cause being the desire to take credit for things that have been bequeathed to us but for which we have yet to take direct responsibility, and which we have not been actively engaged in accomplishing or furthering. In effect, America has become a culture that lives on psychological and emotional credits, mostly off the "past achievements" of its forefathers. By "pocketing" past achievements, with little real effort on our part, we derive a vicarious but undeserved, false and thus exaggerated sense of our own achievements. The byproduct of this "taking of unearned credit" and of becoming comfortable living on psychological and emotional credit, is a life lived beyond our psychological and emotional means as a nation. It is this false sense of achievement that leads to self-doubt, lost of confidence in our selves as a nation, and to Bly's factors as collective compensatory behavior.

We Americans are fortunate to have inherited both natural, societal and spiritual bounties that make us the envy of the world. But the democratic freedoms we have inherited are a "work in progress," not the end of history as at least one scholar has declared. Both our natural and our spiritual endowments are things that require adult supervision for proper maintenance, safe-guarding and further development, on to completion, lest they be squandered along the way.

What Bly seems to be saying is that by reverting back to adolescence, America has begun to squander these bounties. It is a powerful but disturbing read. Five Stars.

Now more than ever ( spinoza1111 )
Bly's prophesies of ten years ago, in this book, have come true.

America is a mob of frightened children being systematically taken advantage of by precisely the sort of uncaring Elder Brothers named in this book.

Like an uncaring Elder Brother, the Bush administration will do anything it can to get elected, including lie so systematically (as does the sibling in the absence of an adult narrative) that the ecology of truth itself breaks up.

Maureed Dowd recently passed on a mere rumor, created by the clinically insane over-focus on Bush's National Guard service (which we know was exploited for his selfish ends, and his selfish ends alone). The rumor is that the stories of failure to serve are true, but the documents passed to CBS in September were fakes created by Karl Rove deliberately as a double-cross, created strictly to discredit CBS and the opposition.

When this rumor emerged, it was as if a very large segment, as large as the Ross ice Shelf, broke off never to rejoin our structures of trust and belief.

The stunt is precisely the sort of games siblings play. Precisely the sort of nonsense that occured between my own children which I wearily tried to forestall after 14 hour shifts and long-distance: for a Sibling Society hates parents and punishes parents, from welfare mothers to divorced dads, for the crime of having sex.

In a Sibling Society, siblings recognize that they have been cast into Bly's Euclidian hell in which in a post-human fashion, their ability to use language has been destroyed (as a Kant would have predicted) by systematic use of language and (in the hate-filled sneering of talk radio) "reason" to lie and to cover up.

The previous poster calls the book an "over-generalization", a favorite phrase of my generation. Seemingly so neutral, responsible, and academic, the phrase in actual use is a post-human phrase because out ability to create "generalizations" is what makes us human.

The horror is complete. Bush will be re-elected to the outrage and despair of the rest of the world, and, shortly after the election, a massive terrorist event will occur. The Bush administration (like any Elder Brother left in charge by alcoholic parents) will do nothing to stop the horror, which it will take a Steven King to recount, assuming there's anything left.

But Steven King doesn't really narrate the deepest structures which have led America to her tragic predicament, whereas Robert Bly does.

He knows why the "sixties" so quickly curdled, in a few short years, from genuine hope to Altamont and vicious cults. Western society has lost its soul.

A Commentary on The Way It Is ( barbaraspring2 )
In the Sibling Society, Robert Bly has found our culture's shadows: we have failed to provide a moral compass for the young. By refusing to become fully mature themselves parents have abandoned their children to inadequate day care and hours of television and computers rather than passing on the values of the culture on a one to one basis. The effects of turning young children over to unlimited hours of television has affected their ability to focus and apply themselves to the tasks of school.

Yet school also takes some lumps from Bly. He believes that education is not what it should be because it is in collusion with the valueless sibling society that is; it does not consider what the past has to teach us.
A seeming contradiction is Bly's discomfort with authority of any sort yet he expresses a longing for the order that mature uses of authority would bring.
Promise Keepers, a men's organization that asks for responsible maturity, has missed the mark according to the author by ignoring the good gains made by women in the past thirty years. He recognizes the need for mutuality between men and women.
At the age of 70, he reflects upon the changes brought about by neglecting to teach the collective wisdom everyone took for granted a generation or two ago. He has lived through turbulent times and given a great deal of thought to what has happened in families, the leadership of this country, the media and their effects upon the young generation. Bly's view will not be popular with those who have taken popular culture for granted. For example, he believes that western movies have affected the psyches of males in our society by overturning the bases for a civilized and moral society in favor of a macho male code.
Reagan and Bush come in for hard criticism for leadership styles that disregarded the good of the whole by favoring the rich to the detriment of the environment and to the detriment of those who work hard to get ahead and cannot.
Poet and storyteller, Bly loves metaphor and for this reason, his ideas are sometimes difficult for readers to understand. He often quotes transcendent writers from our culture such as Emily Dickenson and Henry David Thoreau as well as from cultures around the world including Kabir and Rumi. He is in love with the transcendent in a non traditional way.
While the Sibling Society deals with important issues in an original and provocative way, the book is an over-generalization, lacks clarity, and often sounds downright peevish and cranky by ignoring the outstanding work of some parents, teachers and youngsters. Bly has failed to give their successes any praise. But it was probably not his wish to give a more balanced view.

Bly's On Fire! ( nohealani73 )
You want to know what Britney Spears, Columbine, and Gary Condit have in common? Just read this book and you'll get your answer as well some great insights into our twisted little culture at the present. Yeah, yeah, yeah, online detractors, I heard it all before-he's stolen material from such classics as "The Culture of Narcisissm" and other works. He's unfocused, pompous,etc. Call him what you will, but I think it's brilliant how he uses myths and fairy tales to lead us into our modern day predicaments that we all sense on some vague level but can't articulate them clearly. And in the end, he is right on target with his arguments. There isn't a day that goes by where I don't whisper "sibling society" under my breath-whether it's that I see a 45 year old mother of 4 with a picture of a supermodel taped to her fridge to stop her from eating or the myriad of "reality programming" shows on every major network. Bly is a cultural prophet with a very thought provoking set-up that stays with you long after you finish the book.

THE THERAPIST PSYCHOLOGIST BOOK STORE