The Triple Package (20 page)

But whether or not the Amish have a superiority complex, there’s one thing they definitely don’t have: Triple Package insecurity.

Insecurity in Triple Package cultures is a discontented, anxious uncertainty about your worth or place in society, a feeling that what you’ve done or what you have is in some fundamental way not good enough. This insecurity is stingingly personal, goading you to constantly compare yourself with others, to crave recognition
and respect. This is what creates the hunger to rise, to “show the world.”

It’s barely an exaggeration to say that the entire thrust of Amish culture is to
not
instill Triple Package insecurity. The Amish teach their members to be indifferent to their place in American society. They reject the idea that their worth is measured by American material values. They aim not to “show the world,” but “
to be separate from the world.” They have successfully turned inward, shunning the rest of the country’s judgment, values, and criteria of success.

More than this, the Amish are taught precisely to feel that the few, simple things they have
are
good enough. They rigorously
try to suppress the kind of thinking that leads individuals to strive against one another, to compare themselves against their fellows, to compete over who has accomplished more.

For example, when Amish boys began playing and winning in local softball leagues, Lancaster bishops opposed it. “What if the motive is no longer relaxation and diversion, but a
spirit of competition?” one Amish newspaper asked. “What if these teams compete in tournaments and win the state championship in their class, and then go on to the nationals?” Ball games are not per se sinful, but they are to be condemned “when batting and catching a ball becomes more than play—when it becomes serious competition.”

Of course
the Amish have their worries—about making ends meet, about their crops, about their kids—but the overwhelming impression described by visitors is one of peacefulness and acceptance. The Amish don’t seem to have any chip on the shoulder. They aren’t stung by “English” perceptions of them. They
aren’t worried about proving themselves in America’s eyes at all.

Thus the Amish demonstrate one way a group can avoid the Triple Package: by using religion to stay outside the system altogether.
America’s most successful groups, as we’ve said, are all outsiders, but they are outsiders
who want in—
or, at a minimum, who want success as America defines success. Groups like the Amish, turning their backs on America, find security within their group and within their faith, suppressing the insecurity that makes others crave outward signs of success like money, prestige, and power.

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T
HE
A
MISH ALSO HIGHLIGHT
how foreign the Triple Package is to the millennia-old strand of Christian teaching that repudiates all striving for worldly success and wealth. (“The
love of money is the root of all evil”; “the last shall be first”; “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”) Christianity excelled at teaching the poor to seek security in faith, love, and salvation, not in worldly possessions.

A theological revolution was required to bring the Triple Package into Christianity, and—at least according to Max Weber’s famous account of early Protestantism—precisely such a revolution took place at the time of the Reformation. When it did, those who followed the new Christian faith rose to economic dominance all over the world, including America.

Weber’s classic study of the Puritans and other early Calvinists,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
, was arguably the first systematic sociological inquiry into disproportionate group success. That book famously began by documenting, as Weber put it, a “
remarkable” fact: that Protestants dominated Catholics economically throughout Europe and the United States. Weber explained this phenomenon by uncovering in early Protestantism an unusual set of cultural traits that, while of course not expressed in the same terms, essentially track what we’re calling the Triple Package.

According to Weber, Protestant sects such as the Puritans, heavily influenced by Calvinist doctrine, viewed themselves as a chosen people, a tiny minority elected by God for salvation while the rest of humanity foundered in darkness and sin. But they also had a whopping case of insecurity.
Calvinist doctrine taught that mankind could not know who was saved and who wasn’t. God had already predestined your fate, and nothing you could do—no good deeds, no confession of sins, no magical sacraments—could change His plans. “
The question,
Am I one of the elect
?
must sooner or later have arisen for every believer and have forced all other interests into the background.
And how can I be sure . . . ?
”

To make matters worse, doubt about one’s own salvation was evidence of imperfect faith and therefore a sign of damnation. This condition of personal, theological, and epistemological insecurity led to a “
doctrine of proof” through worldly success. The purpose of material wealth was not luxury. Rather, the early Protestants believed that men’s occupations were or should be their “
calling”—the work God intended them to do on earth. Thus a person could prove his faith and election through relentless hard work, thrift, self-discipline, and ultimately profit. “Above all,” said Weber, a Protestant businessman “
could measure his worth not only before men but also before God by success in his occupation.”

In other words, Protestant success in America was a version of Triple Package success. The reason the Puritans toiled and saved (impulse control) was that they simultaneously believed they were special (superiority) and literally had something to prove (insecurity) at every moment of their lives.
They had to show everyone—Catholics, other Protestant sects, their congregation, themselves—that they were indeed God’s chosen, and the way they would do so was through the accumulation of wealth.

—

P
ART OF WHAT LED
W
EBER
to a cultural explanation of Protestant economic success was that no other explanation worked.
Inherited wealth, Weber observed, might explain some of the disparity between Protestants and Catholics, but not all. Nor could political or national differences account for Protestant success. It wasn’t, for example, that all Protestants were English, and the English were richer and more industrialized than everyone else. No, whether you started with Huguenots in France or Puritans in America, and whether you looked at countries with Protestant minorities or majorities, you found the same puzzling pattern of Protestant economic dominance—requiring an explanation within Protestant culture itself.

It is a striking feature of Mormon success in America that it too defies all the leading explanations of group economic performance. Obviously Mormon accomplishment isn’t a by-product of immigrant selection bias, because most Mormons aren’t immigrants. And what is the proponent of IQ explanations to say—that a mass genetic mutation in Utah made Mormons smarter than other Americans? Scholars like Jared Diamond have shown how
geography can shape people’s economic fate, but it’s hard to think what a geographical explanation of Mormon success would even look like.

Mormon success defies biological, geographical, and demographic explanations because it’s Triple Package success. In fact, the Mormons’ Triple Package parallels the early Protestants’. Mormons have inherited the Puritans’ sense of chosenness, their immense self-discipline, and their faith not only that they have been placed on earth with a calling, but that, as the author and historian James Carroll puts it, achieving worldly
success is a “sign of divine favor.”

Even the timing of Mormons’ rise to prominence conforms with the theory of the Triple Package. It was only in the twentieth century
that the Triple Package consolidated in Mormon culture, laying the groundwork for their present disproportionate achievement.

Today, strict self-discipline is a fixed star of Mormon culture, manifest in their abstemiousness, their grueling two-year missions, and their sexual conservatism relative to the permissiveness more typical in America. But none of these elements of Mormonism was clearly established until the twentieth century. The
Word of Wisdom, which is the textual source of Mormonism’s injunctions against alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and drugs, was viewed as merely good advice until 1921, when the Church made it a code that Mormons had to follow in order to participate in temple rituals. The Mormons’ “
Family Home Evening”—a night set aside each week for family hymn singing, prayer, and religious reading—also began in the early twentieth century, as did a new emphasis on encouraging Mormon youth to participate in church activities.

Missionary work increased stunningly as the century wore on. From 1830 to 1900, the Church estimates that roughly 13,000 Mormons went on mission; from 1900 to 1950, 50,000; from 1950 to 1990, 400,000; since 1990, well over 650,000. And as for sexual permissiveness, until the Church
banned polygamy in 1904, the Mormons were the libertines.

The Mormons’ renunciation of polygamy also brought to a close what might be called their separatist “Utah phase,” a period of isolation in which Mormons sought refuge in the remote Salt Lake Valley from a country that spurned and attacked them. As they sought to put the polygamy issue behind them,
Mormons turned outward, engaging with America, hanging U.S. flags in the Salt Lake City tabernacle, forming alliances with the Boy Scouts. In Triple Package terms, nineteenth-century Mormons were like the Amish, finding security in their own faith, values, and insularity, heedless of what the rest of the country thought of them. But in the twentieth century,
Triple Package insecurity became much more predominant. As this outward turn came to define twentieth-century LDS culture, Mormons became eager to prove themselves to America, to show they could succeed in America—indeed that they could lead America, that they were the most American of Americans.

It’s impossible, of course, to prove that the arrival or strengthening of these Triple Package elements in Mormon culture drove their success, but there’s some interesting indirect support. A century ago, some Mormon communities
refused to go along with the renunciation of polygamy and splintered off from the main church. One such group, the
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), retains a significant number of followers even today (perhaps 10,000), located mainly in Colorado City, Arizona. The FLDS broke away before the main church made the Word of Wisdom binding and in other ways began moving Mormon culture toward increased self-discipline and self-denial. As a result, the FLDS
don’t refrain from alcohol, cigarettes, or coffee. They retained, moreover, the inward focus of earlier Mormon history, living their own way regardless of what the rest of America thinks of them. And as it happens,
Colorado City is one of the poorest cities in the United States.

—

T
HE CHILDREN OF
H
OLOCAUST SURVIVORS—
so-called second-generation survivors—have been studied extensively over the last several decades. To no one’s surprise, symptoms of
post-traumatic stress disorder have been found in this group, both in their behavior and in higher levels of cortisol, a stress hormone. (It has even been suggested, on the basis of new discoveries in epigenetics, that the parents’ trauma may have affected their children’s genetic inheritance, leaving so-called genetic scars on the next generation.) The surprise, rather, came
in a very different finding: that second-generation survivors
outperform other groups economically, not only non-Jewish groups, but Jews as well, including Jews who immigrated at about the same time.

This unexpected finding prompted sociologists to take a closer look at the causes of success in Holocaust-survivor families, and what they found was—the Triple Package.

One of the most powerful and poignant impressions conveyed in interviews with the children of survivors is the extent to which they felt they had to hold themselves in check, to suppress their own feelings, needs, or rebelliousness, out of care for their parents:

I remember as a child always worrying. I felt I had to take care of my parents. I think [my mother] looked up to me as being a mature person and someone she could count on even though she didn’t want to count on me. I felt children around me had much more freedom, a carefree attitude. . . . I was more burdened in feeling responsible for my parents. I was very mature. I was never a child, able to play and have fun.

In his book on Holocaust survivors’ children, psychologist Aaron Hass, himself a member of the “second generation,” writes:

‘
For this I survived the Nazis? For this I survived the camps?’ This was my parents’ frequent anguished refrain—if I talked back to them or if I came home later than I said I would. . . .

I, my needs, seemed to slip away in the face of their horrible past. Given my understanding of what they had experienced, how could I cause them more grief? How could I electrically prod an already exposed, frayed nerve? . . . Their reservoir of pain was already straining the limits of the fragile structure enclosing it. My parents, I believed, were always on the edge. . . .

Acts of rebellion were not a part of my childhood or adolescence. . . . After having learned more details about what actually happened to Jews in Europe, it has been even more difficult to act contrarily, to criticize, to say no.

In agonizing fashion, these statements describe a heightened need for impulse control, communicated to children at a very young age. Researchers have even found that as young children, second-generation survivors often seem to have been “
inhibited from making noise.”

As to insecurity, the anxiety of survivors’ children is in some ways too obvious to require description. In addition to worrying about their parents’ fragility, they were often taught that the world might turn on them, that they needed to work harder at school and in life precisely because of life’s precariousness. Helen Epstein, also a second-generation survivor who has conducted extensive interviews with other survivors’ children, quotes a twenty-nine-year-old Canadian man: