The Triple Package (17 page)

Which is not to say that all the old Jewish Triple Package insecurities and pathologies are gone. On the contrary, the fear of persecution, which has pushed Jews to success throughout the world for centuries, has long had its own corrosive effects on the Jewish psyche. This fear shaped the lives of many Jewish immigrants to the United States.

Consider, for example, Meyer Guggenheim, the German Jewish immigrant who literally rose from rags to riches, first peddling stove polish on his way to founding one of the great fortunes of the Gilded Age. Guggenheim, as described by his biographer John Davis, was “
a caricature of the nineteenth-century Jew. He was a small, reticent, suspicious loner” “single-mindedly devoted to making money.” He trusted only his family members and was “always on the alert for an ulterior purpose on the part of both friend and foe.” Davis continues:

It was a cardinal point of Meyer Guggenheim’s creed—conditioned by centuries of oppression and tyranny in Germany and
Switzerland—that safety and happiness in this world lay only in money. . . . [O]nly money could protect you from being devoured or swept away.

Many contemporary American Jews, notwithstanding the safety and affluence they may enjoy, continue to suffer from a similar anxiety. This is particularly true of Jews with family connections to the Holocaust. “
I have a bit of a phobia,” George Soros once said. “Why do you think I made so much money? I may not feel menaced now but there is a feeling in me that if . . . I were in the position that my father was in in 1944, that I would not actually survive.” A Jewish American attorney recalls how Germany’s attempt to exterminate the Jews hung like a cloud over his family’s table:

My grandparents were Holocaust survivors who literally met each other on the way to Auschwitz. Their entire families were wiped out (with the exception of one uncle). It was odd for anyone in my parents’ generation to have grandparents. Food was not to be left on our plates. If we intermarried, we were finishing Hitler’s work. The Holocaust was omnipresent.

The precarious nature of the Jewish people was often emphasized during my youth. Would America just spit us out if it became convenient? Would Israel be wiped off the map with one push of a button? Did that police officer give my father a ticket just because he was wearing a
yarmulke
?

The fiercely protective, defensive attitude so many Jews hold toward Israel is probably due in large part to Israel’s near-mythic status (among Jews) as a bulwark against worldwide anti-Semitism—the one country on earth that will never turn on its Jews, the one place where Jews can really be at home. With Triple Package
indefatigability, Jews have gained in wealth and power, but the fear underlying it all should not be minimized. Radio host Dennis Prager says:

Jews are probably the most insecure group in the world. This may come as a surprise to most non-Jews since Jews are widely regarded as particularly powerful. But Jews’ power and Jews’ insecurity are not mutually contradictory. In fact, Jews’ power derives in large measure from their insecurity. The stronger the Jews’ influence, Jews believe, the less likely they are to be hurt again.

If insecurity is a spur to Jewish success, it comes at a psychological price.

—

S
O FAR WE’VE EXAMINED
pathologies associated with extreme insecurity and (in the case of some Asian Americans) impulse control. The pain these pathologies inflict is typically suffered by the individuals afflicted with them, like the child made miserable by internalizing too much parental pressure. By contrast, the harms associated with superiority complexes tend to be inflicted on others, which makes this element of the Triple Package potentially the most nefarious. Group supremacy claims have been an unrivaled source of oppression, war, and genocide throughout history.

To be sure, a group superiority complex somehow feels less ugly when it serves as an armor against majority prejudices and hostility. America’s disproportionately successful groups are all ethnic or religious minorities; it’s easier to get away with a superiority complex when your group is a minority in a society that harbors lingering hostility or suspicion toward you. America’s Triple Package groups are fighting fire with fire, so to speak. But the dark underside of their superiority feelings shouldn’t be forgotten.

Being “deeply proud of Chinese culture” can easily shade into “We’ll disown you if you marry someone non-Chinese.” Anti-Zionists such as Noam Chomsky point out that early-twentieth-century Jewish settlers in Palestine viewed the Arab population with contempt, calling them “
half-savage peoples,” “wild men,” “dishonest,” and “cowardly.” Persian superiority implies the inferiority of all other Middle Easterners. The insistence by many Cubans that they are “not Hispanic” is loaded with unspoken premises.
West Indian and African immigrants are often accused of looking down on American blacks.

Superiority complexes don’t have to be invidious. They don’t have to espouse notions of innate group differences. But the unfortunate reality is that many members of immigrant groups in the United States have embraced all-too-familiar racist attitudes. “[T]he move into mainstream America,”
Toni Morrison writes, often “means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African American.”

The Mormon superiority complex is no more invidious than any other—in some ways much less, because Mormonism has opened its doors to individuals of all races and made millions of converts all over the world—but it highlights a feature worthy of special attention. A group’s superiority complex isn’t always distributed equally among all group members. It can raise one class of people over another
within
the group.

Officially, Mormonism holds that women and men are spiritual equals, but as in Catholicism,
women are excluded from the priesthood and therefore from the higher offices of Church leadership. No woman has ever served in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, a primary governing body of the LDS Church, or in the First Presidency, the highest Church body of all. The Church has not been
reticent about its expectations for women. In 1987, Church president Ezra Taft Benson preached, “
In the beginning, Adam—not Eve—was instructed to earn the bread by the sweat of his brow. Contrary to conventional wisdom, a mother’s calling is in the home, not the marketplace.”

In the 1990s, several women professors who criticized Church positions on women’s issues were forced out of Brigham Young University. A few Mormon
women have been excommunicated because of their feminist views. In 1995, the Church issued a “
Proclamation to the World,” regarded as near-scripture by most Mormons, stating that “[m]arriage between man and woman is essential to [God’s] eternal plan,” and that “[b]y divine design, fathers are to preside over their families” and “are responsible to provide the necessities of life,” while “[m]others are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.”

Joanna Brooks, author of
The Book of Mormon Girl
, writes movingly of her position as a faithful Mormon whose belief that women should have the same opportunities and aspirations as men put her at odds with her Church:

For years, I cried every time I set foot in a Mormon ward house.
*
 . . . Crying that the Church had punished women like me, people like me, leaving us exiled among our own. . . . How badly I wanted to belong as I had when I was a young Mormon girl, to be simply a working part in the great Mormon plan of salvation, a smiling exemplar of our sparkling difference. But instead I found myself a headstrong Mormon woman staking out her spiritual survival . . . .

Mormonism by no means forbids professional success to women—there are many prominent Mormon women in academia and the arts—and recently the Church took steps to create more opportunities for young women in missionary work. In 2012 the Church announced that women could begin serving missions at age nineteen (previously it was twenty-one), and a new leadership position was created for women missionaries (“
sister training leaders”). Nevertheless, Mormon patriarchy still exists, adding an extra layer to the superiority complex of Mormon men. According to the theory of the Triple Package, this should help Mormon men succeed, but it can potentially come at some expense to Mormon women.

If sex inequality in Mormonism seems backward to modern Americans, it should be remembered that inequality and even intolerance characterize virtually all of America’s successful groups. The ugly corollary of a superiority complex is all too often a propensity toward bigotry, exclusivity, insularity, or parochialism—an intolerance of other groups and other ways of life.

In fact, such intolerance in many cases is a condition of the group’s very existence. At the most concrete level, ethnic or religious groups can maintain their identity only by condemning marriage “outside the tribe.” For just this reason, many American Jews, who as a group out-marry at very high rates, worry that Jews will
out-marry themselves into oblivion. East Asian and Indian cultures traditionally had
strong taboos against marrying outside one’s group, although in the United States such traditions are hard to maintain. (For Chinese who still remembered the Rape of Nanjing, marrying a Japanese was anathema; today, especially in California,
inter-Asian marriages are becoming more and more common.) In their values, beliefs, self-conception, and marriages, these groups survive only by being intolerant, by denying the complete equality of all mankind; and the groups with the strongest superiority complexes have the best chance of surviving.

—

E
VEN WHEN THE
T
RIPLE
P
ACKAGE
works relatively unproblematically as an engine of success, without causing obvious harms or neuroses, it can still be imprisoning—because of the way it defines success.

Triple Package cultures tend to channel people into conventional, materialistic careers. This is a direct result of the insecurity that drives them. The “chip on the shoulder,” the need to show the world or prove yourself—these typical Triple Package anxieties tend to make people crave
obvious tokens of success such as top grades, merit badges, high salaries, luxury cars, and “respectable” careers.

Triple Package cultures often seem like they’re in
a defensive crouch, more concerned with avoiding failure than promoting meaningful, fulfilling, or path-breaking success. The floor that Triple Package cultures impose on acceptable achievement—a selective college, respectable graduate school, good professional job—may inadvertently create a ceiling as well. If you’re aiming to do well by conventional standards, there’s a reasonably clear path; a kind of box-checking approach might be all you need. Get good grades: check. Be a diligent student: check. Be polite to powerful people who can help you: check. The path isn’t easy, but it’s clear. If, however, you want to be an innovator or artist, if you’re looking for meaning rather than money—if you want to make a difference in the world—there’s no predetermined path. On the contrary, getting there may require flouting convention, taking risks, and infuriating authority figures—not the sort of values embraced by most Triple Package cultures.

To be crystal clear, there’s nothing wrong with a high salary or a luxury car. “Respectable” professions are often the most socially valuable. To state the obvious, doctors save lives; even lawyers occasionally help people. A Nobel Prize is certainly a merit badge, but that
doesn’t make it degrading to win one. (Conversely, there’s a lot of conventionality in what is considered an “unconventional” career.)

The danger, rather, is judging your own worth solely by external measures—allowing your life to be defined not by values, interests, or aspirations of your own, but by others’ expectations, or more precisely by the fear of failing to satisfy those expectations. Unfortunately, promoting this fear and those external measures of self-worth is another Triple Package specialty. “
When I was younger, I thought achievement had to do with gaining approval from other people—my parents, my teachers, then higher-ups,” says Amy Tan. “That was what achievement was. . . . People would give you the feedback and tell you if you had done the achievement.” Children raised this way may well, as they grow up, make important life decisions based primarily on parental and social expectations. “[
T]hey won’t have the guts,” one young Indian American woman commented, referring to her peers’ unwillingness to reject career paths selected by their parents. “[A] lot of them will always have other interests in other things, [but] they won’t be willing [to pursue those things]. A lot of them will be like, I might as well just do this, make money and all, because I want to make my parents happy.” The result, observes an Indian American sociologist, “is often self-denial, guilt, and frustration.” Another result can be a sense of not having lived your own life—of having spent your whole life striving for goals you didn’t even want.

Which is why the best thing about the Triple Package may be that it can empower people to break out of it.

—

B
ORN TWO WORLD WARS
and a hemisphere apart, the novelist Saul Bellow and the filmmaker Ang Lee had something in common: a father contemptuous of his son’s chosen occupation. Bellow’s father wanted him to be a businessman. “
You write, and then you erase,” he
said disdainfully. “You call that a profession?
Was meinst du
‘a writer’?” Lee’s father wanted him to be a professor. When Lee won an Academy Award, his father told him there was still time. “
You’re only 49,” he said. “Get a degree and teach in universities, and be respectable.”

Bellow and Lee shared something else too. They both grew up in extremely demanding, high-expectation, Triple Package households. Lee’s father, the principal of a prestigious high school in Taiwan, imposed on Lee at a young age the strictures of Confucian discipline; “
the only purpose in life,” Lee’s younger brother would later recall, was to succeed academically. “I didn’t know what I wanted from life,” Lee has said, “but
I knew I had to please my father.” According to biographer James Atlas, Bellow’s mother was a “
devout believer in the gospel of self-improvement”; her husband’s failure “only intensified her aspirations for her youngest son.” Like many Jewish immigrant parents of that era, she forced on Bellow an exacting regimen of classical music practice: