Andrew Bustamante was a CIA deep cover operative. The kind of man who blends into a region, discovers the highest value assets, and then works to flip them to be an informant for the U.S. government.
He is a civilian now and has made the rounds on quite a few podcasts. He’s worth the listen.
One of his most engaging points—and a question asked often of him—is how do you flip a normal person to suddenly betray everything in their life? People don’t just wake up and decide to commit treason. Especially if that treason may cost family and friends their lives.
Andrew’s answer: everyone has three lives
The Three Lives Problem
Everyone has three lives but only one of them can steer a man from loyalty to treason.
- The External Life
The external life is the life of filters and smiles. It’s the curated version of ourselves we put out in the world. It’s our lives at work when we are only superficially friends with most of our colleagues. The external life is our resume, our pictures, our Facebook posts—everything. But everything through the lens of what we are most comfortable sharing.
- The Private Life
The private life is the life that is not curated. Our private lives are the lives our wife and kids know, our extended families, and our closest friends. Most of what makes our private lives so different is when our true personality shines. When our pet peeves can override our politeness. This private self is the person men want talked about and laughed about at your funeral.
- The Secret Life
The secret life is the one no one knows about. It’s the hidden shame or problems that weigh on men’s hearts. It’s the pornography not even your wife knows about or the drinking problem you’re both ignoring and hope goes away. The secret self is where guilt goes to hide in the dark.
Andrew makes it very clear that the CIA has almost zero power to flip an asset if all the information they have is about their external or private life. The real secret is gaining access to a man’s secret life. Does he have a mistress? Is he almost bankrupt due to gambling debts? What is it this man wishes no one would ever know?
When the CIA gains access to that secret self, turning the person around to betray their country becomes a lot easier. What was perhaps the most fascinating part of Andrew’s talk—he seemed to have no issue believing that everyone, but especially men, are carrying secret shame. It was not a matter of if there was information to find, only when and how much dirt could they use.
A New Age of Problems
I am old enough to remember the start of the internet age. In my experience, access to technology has been an evolving sense of love/hate. Since college, my access has gone from a computer lab to AOL dialup and Nokia phones—to now I work remotely, live on my phone, and mostly get texts from my kids that start with the word “bruh”.
It’s been whiplash for me but for younger men it’s all they’ve known. And if shame thrives in the dark, we have unintentionally created a generation of men that are better at hiding things than even we were.
And this is not another rant about being on our phones or the increased rates of pornography use, all of which are valid points on their own. Rather, the point is that we have to analyze the current situation for younger men.
Statistics on male loneliness are alarming. The rate has risen five-fold to the point that 15% of men report not having even one friend. The remaining 85% faired little better, with most reporting a sense of isolation from the world.
A conservative estimate would be that at least half of men under 45 live with relationship anorexia. And that isolation can be the single largest catalyst for inviting chaos into a man’s secret life.
The problem in other words is not only that men have more isolation which in turn allows for the secret life to grow unchecked. The other problem is that younger men are living sometimes exclusively in the filtered world of their external self. A man may be focused so much on how his social media life presents to the world, he may not even have people who know him well in private.
Paradoxically, the desire to be socially connected online creates a strong sense that everything is based on the illusion of having a fun, happy life.
The Start of a Solution
Big problems are rarely solved with a silver bullet. Male loneliness and the problems of modern social interaction deserve a lot more attention if we are to understand their roots and fruits.
It is helpful now to discuss at least part of the solution. The one thing that does bring about almost instant relief is connection. Friendship. People being raw and unfiltered for a minute. Men’s Ministry organizations are sensing this, in particular, in the way we even approach younger man. Younger men show up less and less to larger group events like prayer breakfasts. But if they have the opportunity to talk and ask questions and be more engaged as a person—something like a Dad’s On Tap—younger men do show up.
That connection is the quest we should focus on in the coming decades with men.
It’s not enough to turn off phones, get a filter for mature content, or look at ESPN or the news a little less often. You can’t take away a toxic pattern without replacing it with something healthy. But if all we’re offering younger men are more opportunities to feel isolated and disconnected, then we are pursuing the wrong path in ministry.
The secret self will live and die by isolation and secrecy. But the presence of just one spiritual friend starts to impact a young man instantly.