The Triple Package Read online

  This chip on the shoulder, this “I’ll show them” mentality, is a Triple Package specialty, the volatile product of a superiority complex colliding with a society in which that superiority is not acknowledged. It’s remarkable how common this dynamic is among immigrant groups: a minority, armed with enormous ethnocentric pride, suddenly finds itself disrespected and spurned in the United States. The result can border on resentment—and resentment, as Nietzsche taught, is one of the world’s great motivators.

  A particularly intense variant involves status collapse. Typically, immigrants to the United States are moving up the economic ladder, achieving a better standard of living. In some cases, however, they experience the opposite: a steep fall in status, wealth, or prestige—an especially bitter experience when their new society is wholly unaware of the respect they formerly commanded. Several of America’s most successful immigrant groups have suffered this additional sting. As we’ll discuss later, the Cuban Exiles offer a vivid example, and so too Iranian Americans.

  Superiority and insecurity can combine to produce drive in a quite different but equally goading way: by generating a fierce, sometimes tormenting need to prove oneself not to “the world,” but within one’s own family.

  In many Chinese, Korean, and South Asian immigrant families, parents impose exorbitantly high academic expectations on their children (“Why only a 99?”). Implicit in these expectations are both a deep assumption of superiority (we know you can do better than everyone else) and a needling suggestion of present inadequacy (but you haven’t done remotely well enough yet). Comparisons to cousin X, who just graduated as valedictorian, or so-and-so’s daughter, who just got into Harvard, are common—and this is true in both lower- and higher-income families.

  To further pile on, East Asian immigrant parents often convey to their children that their “failing”—for example, by getting a B+—would be a disgrace for the whole family. “In Chinese families,” one Taiwanese American mother explained in a recent study, “the child’s personal academic achievement is the value and honor of the whole family. . . . If you do good, you bring honor to the family and [do] not lose face. A lot of value is placed on the child to do well for the family. It starts from kindergarten.”

  The East Asian case may be the most conspicuous, but the phenomenon of extravagant parental expectations, with the same double-message of superiority and inadequacy, is common to many immigrant communities. Sixty years ago, Alfred Kazin wrote, “It was not for myself alone that I was expected to shine, but for [my parents]—to redeem the constant anxiety of their existence.” In Kazin’s Jewish immigrant neighborhood, “If there were Bs” on a child’s tests or papers, “the whole house went into mourning.” This dynamic recurs in various forms in almost every Triple Package culture, creating enormous pressure to succeed. The result can be anxiety and misery, but also drive and jaw-dropping accomplishment.

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  BEFORE GOING ON, because we use terms like “East Asian parents,” we need to say a word about cultural generalizations and stereotypes. Throughout this book, we will never make a statement about any group’s economic performance or predominant cultural attitudes unless it is backed up by solid evidence, whether empirical, historical, or sociological (see the endnotes for sources). But when there are differences between groups, we will come out and say so. It’s just a statistical fact, for example, that Mormon teenagers are less likely to drink or have premarital sex than other American teenagers. Of course there will be exceptions, but if the existence of exceptions blinded us to—or censored us from talking about—group differences, we wouldn’t be able to understand the world we live in.

  Group generalizations turn into invidious stereotypes when they’re false, hateful, or assumed to be true of every group member. No group and no culture is monolithic. Even a high-earning, “successful” group like Indian Americans includes more than two hundred thousand people in poverty. Moreover, within every culture there are competing subcultures, and there are always individuals who reject the cultural values they’re raised with. But that doesn’t make culture less real or powerful. “Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values,” writes author-provocateur Wesley Yang. “Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade-grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future.” Whether a person chooses to embrace or run screaming from his cultural background, it’s still there, formative and significant.

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  RETURNING NOW TO how the Triple Package works: superiority and insecurity combine to produce drive (or so this book will try to show), but it takes more than drive to succeed. In fact the metaphor of “drive” is misleading to the extent that it conjures up a car-and-open-highway image, where the only thing a successful person needs is a full tank of gas and a foot on the pedal. To invoke a different set of metaphors, life can also be a battle—against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, against a system that keeps slapping you down, against the almost irresistible urge to give up.

  Nearly everyone confronts obstacles, adversity, and disappointment at some point in life. Drive is offense, but success requires more than offense. One of the greatest chess players in history reportedly said of another grand master, “[H]e will never become World Champion since he doesn’t have the patience to endure worse positions for hours.” The Triple Package not only instills drive. It also delivers on defense—with toughness, resilience, the ability to endure, the capacity to absorb a blow and pick yourself up off the ground afterward.

  In part the superiority complex itself has this effect, providing a kind of psychological armor of special importance to minorities who repeatedly face hostility and prejudice. Fending off majority ethnocentrism with their own ethnocentrism is a common strategy among successful minorities. Benjamin Disraeli used it against British anti-Semitism. “Yes, I am a Jew,” he famously replied to a slur in the House of Commons, “and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”

  Much more powerful, however, is an interaction between superiority and impulse control—a belief in achieving superiority through impulse control—that can generate a self-fulfilling cycle of greater and greater endurance. A superiority complex built up around impulse control can be very potent. A person with such a complex eagerly demonstrates and exercises his self-control to achieve some difficult goal; the more sacrifice or hardship he can endure, the more superior he feels and the better able to accomplish still more demanding acts of self-restraint in the future, making him feel even more superior. The result is a capacity to endure hardship—a kind of heightened resilience, stamina, or grit.

  This dynamic is another Triple Package specialty. America’s successful immigrant communities nearly always build impulse control into their superiority complex. They tend to believe (probably because it’s true) that they can endure more adversity and work more hours than average Americans are willing to. They see this capacity as a virtue, incorporate it as a point of pride into their self-definition, and then try—frequently with great effectiveness—to inculcate this virtue in their children.

  But this phenomenon is not unique to immigrants. Mormons, too, weave into their superiority complex their discipline, abstemiousness, and the hardships they endure on mission (a usually two-year proselytizing stint in an assigned location anywhere from Cleveland to Tonga). Notice that impulse control is again understood here as a virtue—moral, spiritual, and characterological. It’s admirable and righteous in itself. When on mission, Mormons must give up dating, movies, magazines, and popular music. They are permitted e-mail once a week, but only from public facilities (not their homes), and can call home only on Christmas and Mother’s Day. While other American eighteen-year-olds are enjoying the binge-drinking culture widespread on college campuses, Mormons are working six days a week, ten to fourteen hours a d
ay, dressed in white shirt and tie or neat skirt, knocking on doors, repeatedly being rejected and often ridiculed.

  In itself, the capacity to endure hardship has nothing to do with economic gain or conventional success. In principle it can lead to hair shirts or Kafkaesque hunger artists. But when the ability to endure hardship is harnessed to a driving ambition—when grit meets chip—the result is a deferred gratification machine.

  Superiority plus insecurity is a formula for drive. Superiority plus impulse control is a formula for hardship endurance. When the Triple Package brings all three elements together in a group’s culture, members of that group become disproportionately willing and able to do or accept whatever it takes today in order to make it tomorrow.*

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  BUT THIS SUCCESS COMES AT A PRICE. Each of the components of the Triple Package has its own distinctive pathologies. Deeply insecure people are often neurotic. Impulse denial can undercut the ability to experience beauty, tranquillity, and spontaneous joy. Belief in the superiority of one’s own group is the most dangerous of all, capable of promoting arrogance, prejudice, and worse. Some of history’s greatest evils—slavery, apartheid, genocide—were predicated on one group’s claim of superiority over others.

  But even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the Triple Package can still be pathological—because of the way it defines success.

  Triple Package cultures tend to focus on material, conventional, prestige-oriented success. This is a function of the insecurity that drives them. The “chip on the shoulder,” the need to show the world or prove yourself, the simple fear that, as a newcomer who doesn’t even speak the language, you may not be able to put food on the table—all these characteristic Triple Package anxieties tend to make people put a premium on income, merit badges, and other forms of external validation.

  But material success obviously cannot be equated with a well-lived or successful life. James Truslow Adams, the historian who popularized the term “American Dream,” wrote that everyone should have two educations, one to “teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live.” Triple Package success, with its emphasis on external measures of achievement, does not provide the latter education. On the contrary, being raised in a high-achieving culture can be a source of oppression and rage for those who don’t or choose not to achieve. Deferring gratification can lead to a nothing-is-ever-good-enough mentality, requiring years of therapy to not fix. Hence the joke that making partner in a Wall Street law firm is like winning a pie-eating contest where the prize is—more pie.

  At its worst, the Triple Package can misshape lives and break psyches. Children made to believe they are failures or worthless if they don’t win every prize may realize in their twenties that they’ve spent their lives striving for things they never even wanted.

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  MUCH OF THIS BOOK is about America’s most successful groups—their cultural commonalities, their generational trajectory, their pathologies. But we’ll also look in detail at some of America’s poorer groups. As we’ll explain, confirming the basic thesis of this book, these groups lack the Triple Package, but—and this point is so important it needs to be highlighted in advance—the absence of the Triple Package was not the original cause of their poverty. In almost every case, America’s persistently low-income groups became poor because of systematic exploitation, discrimination, denial of opportunity, and institutional or macroeconomic factors having nothing to do with their culture.

  Moreover, in some cases, a group’s lack of the Triple Package was America’s doing. Centuries of slavery and denigration can make it difficult, if not impossible, for a group to have a deeply internalized sense of superiority. At the same time, if members of certain groups learn not to trust the system, if they come to believe that discipline and hard work won’t really be rewarded—if they don’t think that people like them can make it—they will have little reason to engage in impulse control, sacrificing present satisfactions for economic success down the road. Thus the same conditions that cause poverty can also grind the Triple Package out of a culture.

  But once that happens, the situation worsens. America’s poorest groups may not have fallen into poverty because they lacked the Triple Package, but now that they do lack it, their problems are intensified and harder to overcome. In these circumstances, it takes much more—more grit, more drive, perhaps a more exceptional individual—to break out.

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  GROUPS THAT DO ACHIEVE Triple Package success in the United States become enmeshed in a process of creative destruction that will change them irrevocably. America’s own cultural antibodies invariably attack these groups, encouraging their members to break free from their cultures’ traditional constraints.

  In one possible outcome of this process, the group does so well it simply disappears—as the once-extremely successful American Huguenot community has all but disappeared. A group’s demise can be celebrated as a triumph of the American melting pot, or mourned as the loss of a heritage and identity, but the bottom line is the same: a successful group, precisely because of its success, assimilates, intermarries, and Americanizes away. Lebanese Americans (who, along with other Arab Americans, have extremely high out-marriage rates) may be a twentieth-century example of this phenomenon.

  Another possible outcome is decline. Triple Package success is intrinsically hard to sustain. Success softens; it erodes insecurity. Meanwhile, modern principles of equality tend to undercut group superiority complexes. And with its freedom-loving, get-it-now culture, America undercuts impulse control too. WASP economic dominance in the United States declined under the weight of all these pressures.

  Many American Jews today fear the Huguenot outcome—disappearance through assimilation and intermarriage. Perhaps they should be more concerned about the WASP outcome, in which success is followed by decline. As Ellis Island and the Lower East Side recede into the past, and with a strong presence from Washington to Wall Street to Hollywood, Jews may feel less insecure in the United States today than they have been in any country in a thousand years. Moreover, as we’ll discuss later, Jewish culture today appears to be much less oriented around impulse control than it used to be. If so, and if the thesis of this book is correct, continuing Jewish success should not be taken for granted. In fact, mounting evidence today indicates a precipitous drop in performance among younger Jews across numerous academic activities in which American Jews were once dominant.

  But Triple Package groups are not condemned to either disappearance or decline. Another possibility is more tantalizing and volatile. As the children of Triple Package groups grow into adults in America, they learn to question what their family’s culture has taught them about who they are and how they should live. They begin to internalize American attitudes without, however, being fully Americanized. Instead they are likely to feel like outsiders both within their own culture and in the larger society.

  Straddling this cultural edge may make people feel that they don’t belong anywhere, that they have no cultural home. But it can also be a source of prodigious vitality and creativity. It can lead people to break free from their group’s cultural constraints—rejecting would-be limits on their personality, their sexuality, their careers—while retaining the core traits of the Triple Package. Thus, Triple Package groups can reinvent themselves across generations, and individuals can achieve forms of success, grand or simple, their parents never dreamed of.

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  THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK we’ll be referring to Triple Package cultures and Triple Package groups, but to avoid any misunderstanding, we want to emphasize two important points.

  First, a Triple Package culture will not produce the qualities we’ve described—a sense of superiority, a chip on the shoulder, a capacity to endure hardship, and so on—in all its members. It doesn’t have to in order to produce group success; it just has to do better than average. In 1941, baseball great Ted W
illiams got a hit only 4 times out of every 10 at-bats, but because the average Major Leaguer gets a hit about 2.6 times out of 10, Williams achieved a Hall of Fame feat that hasn’t been equaled since. Similarly, a culture that produced four high achievers out of ten would attain wildly disproportionate success if the surrounding average was, say, one out of twenty.

  Second, and conversely, an individual can possess every one of the Triple Package qualities without being raised in a Triple Package culture. Steve Jobs had a legendarily high opinion of his own powers; long before he was famous, a former girlfriend believed he had narcissistic personality disorder. His self-control and meticulous attention to detail were equally famous. At the same time, according to one of his closest friends, “Steve always had a kind of chip on his shoulder. At some deep level, there was an insecurity that Steve had to go out and prove himself. I think being an orphan drove Steve in ways that most of us can never understand.”

  Possibly Jobs was born with these Triple Package traits, or perhaps, as his friend speculated, being an orphan played a role. In any given family, no matter what the background, an especially strong parent or even grandparent can instill children with a sense of exceptionality, high expectations, and discipline, creating a kind of miniature Triple Package culture inside the home. Individuals can also develop these qualities on their own. Being raised in a Triple Package culture doesn’t guarantee you anything unique or inaccessible to others; it simply increases your odds.

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  EVERY ONE OF THE PREMISES underlying the theory of the Triple Package is supported by a well-substantiated and relatively uncontroversial body of empirical evidence. Later chapters will elaborate, but we’ll briefly summarize here.