The Triple Package (10 page)

INSECURITY

W
E TURN NOW TO
the second component of the Triple Package,
insecurity
.

It’s been almost two hundred years since the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville noticed a peculiar difference between America and Europe. There were places in the “
Old World,” he said, where the people, though largely uneducated, poor, and oppressed, “seem serene and often have a jovial disposition.” By contrast, in America, where “the freest” men lived “in circumstances the happiest to be found in the world,” people were “anxious and on edge.” They were “insatiable.” They never stopped working—first at one thing, then another; first in one place, then another. Americans suffered, said Tocqueville, from a “secret restlessness.”

The anxiety Tocqueville described was not spiritual; nor was it a mere wanderlust
,
a craving for new experiences; much less was it what a future era would call existential. It was material: Americans wanted more. “
All are constantly bent on gaining property, reputation, and power.” They “
never stop thinking of the good things they have not got,” always “looking doggedly” at others who have more than they. This thirst for more prevented them from enjoying what they did
possess, distracting them from the happiness they ought to have felt, placing them under a “cloud.” Ultimately, Americans’ anxiety was connected to their “
longing to rise.”

In short, Tocqueville was describing a people in the grip of insecurity in precisely the sense we have in mind: a goading anxiety about oneself and one’s place in society, which in certain circumstances can become a powerful engine of material striving.

Everyone is probably insecure to some extent. Insecurity may be fundamental to the human condition, an inevitable product of the knowledge of mortality or self-consciousness itself. Perhaps this is why people who are insecure are often described as “self-conscious.” But insecurity is not all or nothing. You can be more or less insecure, and you can be insecure about different kinds of things. Nor is insecurity a fixed and stable quantum throughout a person’s life. Most people are much more insecure during adolescence, for example.

Above all, you don’t need to be a member of any particular group to be insecure. But certainly it isn’t true any longer, if it ever was, that all Americans feel the goading, insatiable longing to work and rise that Tocqueville described. Some groups’ insecurities differ from others, in both kind and intensity.

The great puzzle for Tocqueville was
why
Americans should feel insecure “
in the midst of their prosperity.” We’ll return to this question later. Here, we want to take a closer look at the particular anxieties of America’s successful groups. With striking frequency and remarkable consistency, members of these groups are afflicted with certain distinctive insecurities that—in combination with insecurity’s seeming opposite, a superiority complex—are especially likely to fuel a drive toward acquisitive, material, prestige-oriented success.

Among the most powerful sources of these insecurities are
scorn
,
fear
, and
family
. We’ll discuss these in turn.

—

S
CORN IS A LEGENDARY MOTIVATOR.
(“
Hell hath no fury,” as the playwright William Congreve didn’t quite put it.) All of America’s disproportionately successful groups are strangely united in this respect: each is or has been looked down on in America, treated with derision, disrespect, or suspicion. Every one of them suffers—or at least used to suffer, when on the rise—scorn-based insecurity. And to be scorned socially can create a powerful urge to rise socially.
Everything can be borne but contempt, said Voltaire.

Scorn, contempt, and above all resentment: these levers of motivation, so well-known in literature, are wholly uncaptured by the useful but bland terms “human capital” and “social capital.” In explaining the Cuban American success story, it’s invariably pointed out that the Cuban Exiles brought with them considerable “human capital,” much more than most other Hispanic immigrants. Which of course was true:
about a third of the first wave of Cuban immigrants (the so-called Golden Exiles) had been elites in Cuba, already trained as professionals and executives. But their Cuban degrees and résumés typically counted for little in the United States, where they were
forced to take any work they could find, whether semiskilled or unskilled, as factory hands or domestic servants.

Among the groups with the highest human and social capital in the United States are surely the “blue-blooded” WASPs, who still populate America’s finest boarding schools and have old-boy networks going back generations. But as members of this class themselves often observe, a culture of lassitude, of nonstriving, seems to have set in at the upper echelons of WASP society. The “
less-advertised corollary” to the Protestant work ethic, writes Tad Friend, “held that if you were born to success, nothing further was required.”
(According to one of Friend’s cousins, “it was customary for the top executives, most of whom had inherited their wealth, to leave their offices between half past three and four; and Father, having spent the morning reading the newspapers, would join them for backgammon, bridge, billiards, and alcohol.”)
A culture that “once valued education, ability and striving,” adds Peter Sayles, “now looks upon these qualities as optional accoutrements. Intellectualism is also frowned upon within these circles—that’s for Jews and nerds.” After “generations of affluence,” says an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, “[l]ots of people just
got lazy.”

Laziness was something the Cuban Exiles could not afford, either economically or psychologically. Humiliated by Castro, who had called them “
the scum of the Earth and worthless worms,” many of the Cuban émigrés felt an almost personal mission to prove Castro and Communism wrong by making good in the land of the free. As one Exile puts it, “prevailing in the economic arena” to “bolster their wounded collective pride” became for Cuban Americans “
an ideological quest.” At the same time, they encountered in Florida the unexpected
contempt of discrimination. “
When we first arrived in Miami,” another Exile remembers, “there were signs on the doors of many houses for rent that said
NO DOGS, NO CUBANS
. After reading a sign like that, you can imagine how I felt. I had never been discriminated against.”

The Exiles’
plummet in status was itself an additional blow and extra goad. A successful Cuban American professor—whose childhood memories include a mansion in Havana with a private amusement park in its backyard—describes what it was like for her father to work as a waiter in Miami. “Many times while at work at a restaurant or hotel
my father would run into people who knew him back when he was worth millions. It was very embarrassing for him to work in
these menial positions, but the embarrassment just propelled him to work harder.”

Capital is never enough for success in a capitalist society; drive is equally essential, and resentment can fuel drive. No emotion is cleverer than resentment, as Nietzsche scholar Robert Solomon wrote. It is “
the one dependable emotional motive, constant and obsessive, slow-burning but totally dependable and durable.” For groups who arrive in America with a superiority complex, the sudden—sometimes traumatic—experience of disrespect and scorn can be a powerful motivator. Iranian Americans are another case in point.

—

I
N THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
—and the West generally—antiquity means classical Greece and Rome.
Ancient Persia is seen, if at all, through a Greek lens. Because the earliest Persian rulers left virtually no written histories of their own empire, most of what we know about Achaemenid Persia comes from a very limited number of Greek sources, including Xenophon’s
Anabasis
, Aeschylus’s
Persians
, and most important, Herodotus’s
Histories
. But the Greeks and Persians were bitter enemies, so Greek authors weren’t exactly impartial; imagine Saddam Hussein writing
A History of the
United States, 1990–2006.
Greek historians refer to Persians as “the barbarians of Asia,” frequently portraying the ancient Persian kings as unctuous and decadent.

To the ire of Iranians in America and around the world, Hollywood recently did the same. In the 2007 blockbuster film
300
, the Spartan king Leonidas (played by Gerard Butler) exudes integrity and heroic masculinity, whereas the Persian king Xerxes is depicted as effeminate, corrupt, and monstrously body-pierced. As one Iranian American blogged, “
I just can’t get over the humiliation that this stupid movie has brought us.”

The film was humiliating to Iranians because they identify so deeply with the glories of ancient Persia. Many Americans may not know it, but
Iran
is
Persia (Iran was called Persia in the West before 1935), and Persia once ruled the world.

Founded around 500
BC
, Achaemenid Persia was “
a superpower like nothing the world had ever seen,” governing a three-continent-wide territory
larger even than Rome’s would be. At its height, Persia ruled up to 42 million people—nearly a third of the world’s population at the time. This grand history is taught to every Iranian child and underlies what Middle East experts often refer to as the
Persian “superiority complex.” “
All Iranians,” says one Iranian American writer, “learn about their great empire.” They are taught that “Iran was the equal, if not the better, of Rome and Athens.” As Middle East analyst Kenneth Pollack observes, history is “a source of enormous pride” to Iranians:

It has given them
a widely remarked sense of superiority over all of their neighbors, and, ironically, while Tehran now refers to the United States by the moniker “Global Arrogance,” within the Middle East a stereotypical complaint against Iranians is their own arrogant treatment of others.

Iran’s superiority complex has powered through the centuries, even in the face of stubborn historical realities.
Alexander the Great may have conquered the Achaemenids in 324
BC
, but Iranians turned this defeat into a source of cultural pride. As explained by Hooman Majd, grandson of an ayatollah and now a U.S. citizen, Iranians think of Alexander as:

such a brute and ignoramus that he burned magnificent libraries along with the greatest city in the world, Persepolis, to the ground.
But in a good example of the Persian superiority complex, even this villain is shown to have ultimately had the wisdom to recognize the superiority of the Persians by settling down (until his death) in Persia and marrying a blue-blooded Persian. What could be a better endorsement of the greatest civilization known to man?

The Arab conquest of Persia in the mid-seventh century was another blow to Iranian pride, but once again not insurmountable. For hundreds of years afterward, Iranian literature depicted Arabs as “
savage bedouins” who eat nothing but “camel’s milk and lizards” and “
constantly fight among themselves.” With European domination of the Middle East, Iranian intellectuals were able to blame Iran’s backwardness on the Arab-Islamic destruction of Persia’s glorious civilization. In the novels of Iran’s
most famous modern author, Sâdeq Hedâyat, Arabs were likened to “
locusts and plague”; they were “black, with brutish eyes, dry beards beneath their chins, and ugly voices.” For much of the twentieth century, Iranian writers “
equated Arab domination of Iran (and hence the advent of Islam) with Iran’s political and cultural downfall and glorified the pre-Islamic heritage of Iran.”

Even today, a millennium and a half after the Arab conquest, Iranians insist they’re not Arab—they speak Farsi, not Arabic—and Iranian condescension toward Arabs remains strong. “
Iranians don’t like being called Arabs,” says one Iranian American, self-critically, in an online Iranian newspaper. “If you call them Arabs by mistake, you might as well be calling them trash.”

But centuries of subjugation and upheaval have taken their toll. Alongside the Iranian superiority complex, Middle Eastern experts have long observed a “
tremendous sense of insecurity that runs right through the Iranian psyche.” This insecurity is particularly acute in relation to the West, which as Robert Graham has written,
causes Iran to show two very different faces: “
with its immediate neighbours . . . a sense of superiority,” while “with the West . . . a sense of not wanting to look inferior.” Historian and Yale professor Abbas Amanat, a native Iranian, believes this insecurity fuels Iran’s contemporary foreign policy; Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, he argues, is “in effect a
national pursuit of empowerment” driven by “the mythical and psychological dimensions of defeat and deprivation at the hands of foreigners.”

Thus, in addition to a deeply ingrained superiority complex,
insecurity, too, was part of the cultural inheritance carried by Iranian immigrants to the United States. In America, this insecurity was exacerbated.
Status loss, anxiety, resentment, and even trauma have been dominant themes of the Iranian experience in the United States, beginning with the hostage crisis in 1979.

Like the Cuban Exiles, many Iranians suffered a precipitous
status collapse when they fled to this country after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Professionals, scientists, and once powerful figures suddenly found themselves poor and almost unemployable. Particularly for the men, this was a traumatic loss of stature, which Hollywood has twice captured: in the tragic figure of Colonel Massoud Behrani in
House of Sand and Fog
(played by Ben Kingsley), who puts on a suit every morning so that his wife won’t know he works as a trash collector; and in the Iranian shopkeeper in
Crash
, whose medical student daughter barely saves him from committing a terrible, racially motivated crime.

Moreover, Iranian Americans have frequently encountered severe prejudice and animus. When American hostages were seized in the U.S. embassy in Tehran,
Iranian flags were burned in public, and demonstrators carried signs saying,
GO HOME DUMB IRANIANS
,
10 IRANIANS EQUAL A WORM
, and
GIVE AMERICANS LIBERTY OR GIVE
IRANIANS DEATH
. This was a bitter irony for those Iranians who had
fled to the United States precisely to escape the Islamic Revolution.