Why the senseless killing of innocents at the Sandy Hook Elementary School on 12/14/12? To help answer, I’ve excerpted a few pages from my book on the American (increasingly global) obsession with external indicators of social status. As of this writing, we do not know whether accumulated status defeat (long-term bullying, self-perceived low social status, child abuse) triggered the killer’s rampage.

Given that there are already an estimated 300 million guns in private hands in the U.S., what can we do to prevent or at least reduce the incidence of such mass killings in the future?

1. Do not publicize the name or likeness of these killers, as many are motivated by a desire for fame or notoriety, as you can see in the examples in the book excerpt.

2. Private and government health insurance providers must be required to make access to and compensation for mental healthcare as available as physical healthcare. There is no scientific or ethical basis for withholding or rationing evidence-based treatment for depression to a greater extent than for heart disease.

3. Peers of those threatening or contemplating violence must be strongly encouraged to report these potential acts to their teachers or school leaders. In many cases, perpetrators signal peers about their specific plans days and even weeks in advance.

4. Willing individuals working in schools can be trained, certified, and equipped as armed marshals. This would provide a deterrent effect if widely implemented. (PS: this was posted before NRA issued a statement making a similar suggestion.)

Alone in his Vermont prison cell in 2008 and accused of kidnapping, drugging, raping, and murdering his 12-year old niece, child-sexual abuse victim and serial sexual predator Michael Jacques wrote letters to his friend plotting a scheme to pin the blame on a concocted international child abduction ring.

But Jacques’ letters, released by prosecutors to the media last week, also show Jacques intoxicated about the prospect of his becoming rich and famous.

“Being a celebrity of sorts appears to have some [serious] financial potential,” wrote Jacques. “So far I have gotten requests from Larry King, Dr. Phil and Dateline. Dude, we are talking like $50,000 for an appearance! … When I win this case I should be able to rake in over a million between the talk show circuits, book deals, speaking engagements, etc. I will definitely be buying you that boat you’ve always wanted.” (Valley News, November 13, 2010)

Now flash back to the Columbine High School massacre of April 20, 1999.

Some say that the killings could have been prevented if the parents of one of the perpetrators, Dylan Klebold, had been alert to the firearms poorly concealed in their son’s room and clothing. Or if police had investigated reports that the second killer, Eric Harris, had made death threats and openly fantasized about building bombs. Or if Harris had not been taking Luvox, an anti-depression drug reported by its manufacturer to induce mania in four percent of children and young people who take it. Or if the pair had not been superbly trained to hit moving targets with firearms by the then-popular videogame Doom. Or if they had not been subject to their peers’ incessant and vicious taunting.

In a set of five home videos, carefully left behind for discovery in Harris’ bedroom, the two teens offered their own explanations for why they murdered thirteen people and then killed themselves. Klebold vents his rage against “stuck up” kids who put him down ever since his years in daycare. Harris, the mastermind, expressed bitterness toward his military family and their constant moves, each new school forcing him to start out “at the bottom of the ladder … [where peers constantly mocked] my face, my hair, my shirts.”

But all these potential explanations miss another that compels us to contemplate the role models that come at us via screen-based entertainment. Klebold and Harris’s T-shirts bore the acronym NBK, referring to the film, Natural Born Killers. Lead Columbine investigator Kate Battan spent months reviewing the evidence, including Harris’ journal and the never-made-public bedroom videos. Battan concludes that Klebold and Harris were motivated primarily by a desire to achieve fame in avenging their loser status. “All the rest of the justifications are just smoke,” she concluded. Deputy District Attorney Steve Jensen seconded, “It is obvious that these guys wanted to become cult heroes of some kind.” 

“We’re going to kickstart a revolution,” said Harris, seeking to upend a school status hierarchy with them at the bottom. Klebold bragged to his video camera that Hollywood would engage in a bidding war to tell his tale: “Directors will be fighting over this story.” 

What connects Jacques to Klebold is the gutter into which American commercial culture has fallen so deeply. Larry King, did you offer $50,000 to Jacques?

Check this chart showing the U.S. debt to GDP ratio. As of June 30, 2010, the most recent data available, total household, business, and government debt stood at $52.1 trillion, a slight drop from the $52.3 trillion at the end of last year. Debt stands at a near-record 357 percent of gross domestic product, and more than double the 1980 debt ratio, and – ominously – well above the previous record 264 percent set early in the Great Depression.

Over the past three decades, Americans have become willing to absorb strikingly higher financial risk in their pursuit of lifestyles beyond our means. Enveloping materialism and the death of delayed gratification are at the root of our debt binge. Starting in almost exactly 1980, our debt growth abruptly accelerated, saddling today’s America with the most highly leveraged major economy in world history.

In the early 2000s—when the handwriting was already boldfaced on the wall—we staved off a deflationary pop in the debt bubble only with another massive new surge in borrowing. Between then and mid-2007, zero percent auto financing, 100 percent loan-to-value mortgages, and high-risk lending to people of blatantly marginal creditworthiness were the tottering props under our debt-fueled consumer economy. To keep the music playing after the exhausted consumer began shedding debt in 2008, the Federal Reserve Board went into overdrive printing money to buy mortgages and government debt. We will become sober, promises the Fed, but not this year.

To restore U.S. debt to manageable levels, we’d need to reduce it by about one-third to its 1990 ratio.

OverSuccess: Healing The American Obsession With Wealth, Fame, Power, and Perfection

By Jim Rubens, Greenleaf; 451 pages

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1840574,00.html

Sept 11, 2008

The author’s own brush with American urgency has soured him on the 24/7 work life: “The intention of this book is to free me and tens of millions like me from the hamster’s treadmill,” he says. Rubens ties mindless ambition in the U.S. to major depression, addiction, personal and public debt and even the popularity of American Idol. “Unless we change our nation’s culture,” he cautions, “we will die alone and unhappy with our basalt countertops, Sub-Zero wine storage and massive credit-card debt.” Wait–is that bad?

Buy at Amazon 

Buy at your local independent bookstore

My Midwest published a Q & A interview with Jim Rubens on OverSuccess in its September/October issue.

As reported in today’s New York Times, since the start of this recession, men have suffered 82 percent of the nations job losses. Net: for the first time in US history women are poised to hold more jobs than men.

The collapsing number of male jobs in the increasingly female-centric economy just adds to the already harsher impact of OverSuccess on males:

·     Women now earn 58 percent of college degrees and 61 percent of masters degrees, slight majority of advanced degrees … to become 6/10 by middle of next decade.

·     For the first time, as of 2005, median annual earnings for never-married, childless women and men aged 25-44 were statistically identical. Census data. Smaller female paychecks caused by child rearing responsibilities, which continue to and will always fall more heavily on women until we reengineer brains.

·     Full time women earnings up 33% since 1972, down for average male (up only for top 20% of males).  Census data.

• Women already outnumber men in management, professional, and related occupations.
• Men are charged with 82 percent of violent crimes and 89 percent of murders, women with 53 percent of embezzlements and 45 percent of frauds.
• Over the period 1974 to 2000, 71 percent of school shooters—all of them were males—had been previously bullied, persecuted, or physically injured.
• Over the last century, between 75 and 85 percent of the world’s serial killers were American and 90 percent were men. Serial killing victimization rates exploded by about 35 times between the 1950s and 1980s.

Bottom line: the collaborative, flexible, amorphously-hierarchical American economy is shutting out ordinary men who were once the nation’s breadwinners in living-wage labor and manufacturing jobs. Because status success is more vital to the male psychology, males are falling over the edge in increasing numbers.

Jim Rubens

Not since gas lines and Jimmy Carter’s sweaters has America’s self-confidence been so shaken. Consumer economic expectations are trawling their lowest level recorded in the 40 year history of this index. Rasmussen Reports polling pegs Congress’ job-approval rating at 9 percent, deep in record low territory. Last year, for the first time since the Great Depression, household saving had plunged to about zero.

I’ve just begun ticking off the economic, social, and psychological indicators registering multi-decadal extremes. According to Federal Reserve Board data, total public and private debt relative to the size of our economy has reached its highest level in a century, our debt load doubling since just 1980. We’ve gorged on expensive houses, cars, wars, and bridges to nowhere to the point of threatening the entire world financial system.

One in four of us tell the General Social Survey that we have no close friends, more than double the friendless rate in 1985. Spouses in dual-income families with children spend an astonishingly small twelve minutes a day talking with each other. Almost 30 percent of working Americans take no vacation time at all, our average vacation being only thirteen days, half that of the next lowest industrialized nation. We say that having sex is our single most favorite thing to do, but we are so busy on our career and debt treadmills that we spend only three minutes a day doing it.

Gallup polling finds a record 80 percent of Americans viewing our moral values as weak and declining. Ethical collapse is ubiquitous: Tax cheating has tripled since 1990. Sixty percent of high school and college students anonymously admit to academic cheating. Ninety percent of job seekers falsify their resumes.

Since 1960, obesity has tripled to one in three of us. Roughly one in four of us are addicted to at least one substance or behavior. The most extensive-ever survey of American mental heath found that the lifetime risk of major depression for today’s young adults is seven times higher than for those born two generations earlier.

What connects these and a host more of the dark indicators that fill two chapters of my book? Unlike previous recessions, it’s about more than high oil prices and a faltering GDP. After three decades of pedaling harder and faster to meet our culture’s increasingly lofty goals and progressively more inaccessible role models, even the economically secure have reached psychological exhaustion.

The good news is that we are ready to question these goals and role models and, in the process, to redefine the meaning of success in America.

*   *   *

I log on to AOL, one of America’s top four websites, to check my email. I can slightly customize my initial welcome screen, but I cannot bypass the daily flux of iconic images. Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett, Bono, Princess Diana. One click takes me to exactingly descriptive profiles of America’s twenty-five most envied people, all smarter, richer, more famous, and with better hair and sex than mine. Another homepage click takes me to the top ten most expensive homes, cars, and vacations.

Human interest in high status people is nothing new. It’s a healthy shortcut in selecting competent leaders. What’s new is that the typical American adult now spends nine hours each day—more than any other waking activity— consuming some form of media. What’s new is that over these past few decades, media culture has grown to saturate our psychologies with the managed images of toweringly famous, wealthy, and beautiful people, their flawless real estate and gold-dusted deserts luring us in vivid, intimate detail. The saturation has warped our aspirations and made us delusional. Thirty percent of us think we will become famous; 45 percent think we will become wealthy.

What’s also new is the global economy. It’s eclipse of local life and endeavor has left most of us with no place to satisfy our healthy need for recognition of our modest talents and contributions. As recruiters in many forms scour five continents to find the celestially brilliant and talented, competition has hyper-intensified. The ever-more gargantuan rewards lavished on the winners have inflated success benchmarks at every level down the ladder.

Thirty years ago, the average, pay for the top hundred American CEOs was $1.2 million in today’s dollars; in 2006, it was $51 million. Alpha male pleasure yachts have grown by 50 feet a year during this decade, the longest now surpassing a WWII battleship. Personal aircraft leaving no doubt about one’s status have become flying palaces with interior fit ups costing in excess of $100 million. Even being vastly rich is no longer sufficiently distinguishing. Among the world’s more than 1,000 billionaires, wealth has become only a platform for the latest status benchmark, global philanthropist, à la Bill Gates or George Soros.

Millionaires—nine million in the U.S—have become as ordinary as Babbitts. People with half million dollar incomes (the bottom third of the top one percent), look enviously at the aspiration group above themselves and describe American society as “unfair.” For middle-class Americans, benchmark inflation has filled our highways with over-powered SUVs, our homes with unneeded rooms, and those rooms with unused toys.

Today, being visibly successful for longer than fifteen minutes requires preeminence in multiple disciplines. A recent full-page ad in The Economist features Dr. John Halamka, who is selling us far more than his BlackBerry:

Being the CIO of Harvard Medical School is just one of my jobs and passions. I’m also an emergency room physician and a worldwide lecturer. No matter where I am, not matter what time zone, I need my virtual team at my fingertips … Without my BlackBerry smartphone, I couldn’t … balance it all with being a rock climber, winemaker, husband and father.

SWAT teams of plastic surgeons, clothing engineers, makeup artists, and digital retouchers manage the physical appearance of the celebrities against whom we compare our own imperfect and mortal bodies. So, 80 percent of women dislike their own appearance. Plastic surgeries are up by over four times since 1992.

Thirty years ago, American childhood was a time for tree forts, sandlot baseball and unsupervised play with friends who lived in your neighborhood. Today among the aspirational classes, childhood is just another part of the resume-building process that starts before birth. Parents play fugues through placenta walls misguidedly hoping to garner their progeny an edge in mathematics. Fifteen years of shuttle to afternoon and weekend extracurricular activities gives our kids an ever slimmer shot at a premium brand college, where applicants have never been more qualified and acceptance rates never lower.

What happened in 2008 is that our exaggerated goals and expectations have finally crashed against reality. In this swamp of OverSuccess, by comparison, most of us are failures. Our pervasive social defeat, in part, explains our overconsumption, overwork, overeating, depression, addiction, and moral decline.

*   *   *

Social critics have long suggested that Americans downsize our goals. But I, for one, would not trade high-speed ski lifts, artisan chocolate, and a cancer cure for Wonder Bread, Bakelite, and a bowling renaissance. One thing we can downsize without wrecking America’s unique formula for greatness is the size of our social groups.

Rather than living, working, and comparing ourselves to the status icons that populate media culture, we can create, revitalize, and join human-scaled groups of a few dozen members. In these new villages, ordinary people play vital roles and everybody knows your name. Each of these villages—whether a small business, a community nonprofit, or an obscure hobby—will define its own relevant skills, talents, goals, mentors, and benchmarks, a “multiple intelligences” approach to success.

W.L. Gore—the $2 billion, highly profitable, rapidly-growing manufacturer of Gore-Tex fabric and thousands of other high-tech, materials-based products—has proven that small villages work exceptionally-well in the big-business world. Gore is consistently ranked one of the world’s top employee-friendly workplaces. Employees own most of the company and have no rank or title, using their own judgment to select new projects or products, becoming leaders and launching products by recruiting team members from within the company.

To maintain new villages in a multinational company, Gore builds plants large enough for no more than 150 to 200 employees, forcing new product groups to break off into separate buildings when they grow above that number. Within these settings, people can assess themselves based on realistic benchmarks—and find the satisfaction that comes from actual success.

The new-villages solution to benchmark inflation and social defeat can be applied across our business, voluntary, and personal lives. Today’s economic and psychological stresses can become a turning point for America where our individual goals become better aligned with our real needs, interests, and talents.

OverSuccess: Healing the American Obsession with Wealth, Fame, Power, and Perfection will be published in October by Greenleaf. Amazon pre-orders, here.