America’s Struggle with Success

Rather than being defeated by outside forces, great nations typically fall from within—they bring themselves down—as history teaches us so well.

Concern about the fragility of America’s continued dominance surrounds us. More and more often we hear warnings of American failures from politicians, academics and historians both here and abroad. Consider, for instance, geographer Jared Diamond’s recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.¹

Many world historians consider the 19^th century as England’s era of dominance, the 20^th century America’s, and they openly wonder which nation will dominate the 21^st century—possibly China, or even India—or can America hang on? The odds are not necessarily in our favor. As historian Barbara Tuchman noted in her book, The March of Folly, great nations tend to do foolish things at the peak of their powers. Witness Britain’s arrogant mishandling of their American colony which eventually led to the American Revolution in the 18^th century. If the colonial situation here had been properly managed, the United States would to this day be ruled by England who could have then owned both the 19^th and 20^th centuries and beyond.

But great individuals also often fall “from within”—due to their own hubris, miscalculations, self-destructive choices, or inability to take the final step. It’s a sad fact that people unconsciously retreat from success.

Nations can, in effect, behave virtually identically to individuals. Often we can see ourselves most clearly as a nation via the microcosm of the individual—how successful people manage or mismanage success. My forthcoming book on this very subject, Why Men Choke: The Fine Line Between Winning and Losing could easily be entitled Why Nations Choke. The basic premise is that individuals (women as well as men) choke on success—that they are commonly ruled by a fear of success which oftentimes trumps their fear of failure.

Success phobia or the fear of success is not a new idea but, given the amount of carnage left in its path, it deserves to be studied and discussed in much greater detail. Look around and you will see a veritable epidemic of success sabotage starting with politicians (John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton, Trent Lott), Hollywood entertainers (Britney Spears, Kurt Cobain, Robert Downey, John Belushi, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley) and prominent athletes (Greg “Choke” Norman, Mike Tyson, Barry Bonds who cheated and lied about it despite the possibility of ending up in jail, Roger Clemens who likewise ruined his good name, and the great Pete Rose). And this is just the tip of the iceberg. In most instances, these individuals who self-sabotage serve as striking object lessons of precisely what we’re doing as a nation.

The Blink Mind

To understand both the prevalence and power of success sabotage we must grasp one central matter. What we must never forget is that it is an entirely unconscious choice. Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller, Blink, offers us an important clarification of the power of this hidden chamber of our minds. Gladwell repeatedly demonstrates how the unconscious mind chooses for us as it reads situations in the blink of an eye without us having any conscious awareness of the process—as though our mind is on autopilot.

Gladwell cites a key example. Four art experts extensively analyzed an art object supposedly from antiquity before declaring it was authentic. Later, after only a brief look at the piece, four other experts judged it—correctly as it turned out—to be a phony even though they couldn’t explain their reasons. Time and again Gladwell showed how the unconscious mind operating in the blink of an eye was far more accurate than deliberate conscious thought. This “deeper intelligence” functioned completely outside of conscious awareness and often had the exact opposite take from the conscious mind.

The author did a remarkable job of underscoring the importance of our unconscious mind and of removing the stigma of “psychobabble” with which it’s too often associated. While he portrays the rapid-fire decision-making of the unconscious in a very positive light as “the power of thinking without thinking,” Gladwell did not address the next step: the tremendous breakthrough discovery of the specific language of the unconscious—how it actually speaks to us revealing that indeed it is a vastly superior deeper intelligence, even far beyond what Gladwell described.² And this superior intelligence shows us how and why people can develop an unconscious phobia of success.

This deeper intelligence specifically sheds new light on success sabotage—on the enormous hidden pressure which success exerts on us as it secretly urges us to retreat from success. While the conscious mind sees success as its greatest desire, the unconscious mind simultaneously sees success as one dangerous, threatening entity. As New York psychoanalyst Robert Langs, the man who discovered the deeper intelligence in 1971 noted, “There is nothing more frightening than success.”

We have also learned there are clear principles of success which invariably are prone to being violated at the moment we’re on top. We will see five specific fears associated with success, and three specific types of hidden retreats from the very success we so highly cherish. As I will explain, the conscious mind is under the influence of an unconscious misguided fear of success from which the deeper intelligence attempts to free us. Deep down there is a secret battle over success and failure going on inside of us.

Success Reluctance

American business executive and political leader Ross Perot, for one, is quite familiar with the idea of success retreat. As he put it, “Something in human nature causes us to start slacking off at our moment of greatest achievement.”

We saw a sterling example of the urge to not only slack off but come to a complete success halt in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. In a scene beyond her wildest dream, American runner Joan Benoit was leading the women’s marathon by an unbelievable distance as she approached the finish line, completely dominating her opponents when experts had predicted a close race.

As she entered the tunnel to the L.A. Coliseum just beyond on the other side awaited a hundred thousand spectators in her own country and millions more following the race on television all prepared to cheer her on during one final “victory lap.” As brilliant a runner as Benoit was, she couldn’t have imagined so spectacular a victory--and in her home country, besides.  How seemingly bizarre, then, what was going through her mind at that exact moment she first set foot in the tunnel, acclaim beyond belief only seconds away-- as she would later remember--“It’s still not too late.  I could hide in here, and not come out the other side.”3

While aptly demonstrating the fear of success she overcame to indeed win a gold medal, Joan Benoit could not tell us what secretly prompted her urge to retreat. Only the unconscious mind can tell its own story—the specifics of that ‘something in human nature’ which wants us to step back from our best. Actually, for a long time it’s been telling us the story, but only lately because of the breakthrough to the deeper intelligence, to the language of the “blink mind” can we hear it.

Success Problem Tip-Off: No Energy, No Power

This point of view explains most of America’s problems handling success and the downward slide witnessed by many observers. First let’s take our energy problem. Dependence on foreign oil with billions of U. S. dollars empowering foreign nations who do not have our best interests at heart qualifies as a bona fide success retreat. Continuing to tie our own hands by failing to use our own oil and nuclear resources out of misguided fear and concern for the environment also contributes greatly to our country’s continuing economic downturn.

Misguided fear because the environmentalist's conscious mind both over-analyzes fear and attributes it to the wrong reason. Consciously the environmentalist believes that nuclear power and drilling for oil are going to destroy us while, deep down, the real misguided fear is that continued success will destroy us, a common and deeply held myth.

Clearly at this point radical environmentalism is excessive because its practitioners fear global warming by dishonestly refusing to acknowledge the lack of distinct scientific proof while adopting a reverse scorched-earth policy at the cost of actually scorching America. The facts: Hundreds of scientists dispute the assertion that global warming is occurring. Extreme environmentalists are trying to force a victory when it isn’t theirs. Maybe they are right but they have not proven their case yet. Until we have definitive proof of global warming such activists are quite probably playing a cute theory game while Rome, make that America, is burning. Or perhaps the Land of the Free will slowly freeze to death as our leaders turn down America’s thermostat.

Throw the second type of overly sympathetic environmentalist—the animal rights version —into the mix, and we have a powerful duo to whom we have turned over the country both determined to handicap America. Those folks who bend so far over backwards they literally equate the importance of animals with human beings—a loss of identity of catastrophic proportions we will see again and again in other areas. (I love my dog but nothing like I do my children.) Some very confused people have been controlling America, failing to see that limiting our energy production weakens our country economically and our emotional energy-- a high price to pay until we are certain of the facts. Tying our own hands when our vision on environmental threats is so foggy points to a self-sabotaging tendency.

We can’t consider our mismanaged national energy problem without mentioning the failure to develop a conservation and alternative-energy program after we’ve had decades of warnings about our dependence on foreign oil. (Where was the leader who grabbed us by the nape of our neck and insisted we pay attention to growing energy dependence on foreign nations thereby steadily ceding them control?)

And we’re only to first base—oil and energy—in the ongoing high-stakes success game the world has been playing since the beginning of time. Already the evidence of a success retreat in this arena is startling, to say the least. Parenthetically, the great American auto industry, totally lacking in perspective, years ago gift-wrapped the small car business for the Japanese and, in the end, guaranteed its own demise. Incredibly, the U.S. auto industry relegated itself to second-place before our very eyes.