The Triple Package Read Free Page B

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 thebinge-drinking culture widespread on college campuses, Mormons are working six days a week, ten to fourteen hours a day, 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 witheconomic 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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    B UT 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 ofsuccess, 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 anothing-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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    M UCH 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 poorergroups. As we’ll explain, confirming the basic