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 didpossess, 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
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 didpossess, 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
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