Quiet (6 page)

The scientist's job was not only to do the research but also to help sell it, and that required a hail-fellow-well-met demeanor. At IBM, a corporation that embodied the ideal of the company man, the sales force gathered each morning to belt out the company anthem, “Ever Onward,” and to harmonize on the “Selling IBM” song, set to the tune of “Singin' in the Rain.” “Selling IBM,” it began, “we're selling IBM. What a glorious feeling, the world is our friend.” The ditty built to a stirring close: “We're always in trim, we work with a vim.
We're selling, just selling, IBM.”

Then they went off to pay their sales calls, proving that the admissions people at Harvard and Yale were probably right: only a certain type
of fellow could possibly have been interested in kicking off his mornings this way.

The rest of the organization men would have to manage as best they could. And if the history of pharmaceutical consumption is any indication, many buckled under such pressures. In 1955 a drug company named Carter-Wallace released the anti-anxiety drug Miltown, reframing anxiety as the natural product of a society that was both dog-eat-dog and relentlessly social. Miltown was marketed to men and immediately became the fastest-selling pharmaceutical in American history, according to the social historian Andrea Tone. By 1956 one of every twenty Americans had tried it; by 1960 a third of all prescriptions from U.S. doctors were for Miltown or a similar drug called Equanil. “
ANXIETY AND TENSION ARE THE COMMONPLACE OF THE AGE
,” read the Equanil ad.
The 1960s tranquilizer Serentil followed with an ad campaign even more direct in its appeal to improve social performance. “
FOR THE ANXIETY THAT COMES FROM NOT FITTING IN
,” it empathized.

Of course, the Extrovert Ideal is not a modern invention.
Extroversion is in our DNA—literally, according to some psychologists. The trait has been found to be less prevalent in Asia and Africa than in Europe and America, whose populations descend largely from the migrants of the world. It makes sense, say these researchers, that world travelers were more extroverted than those who stayed home—and that they passed on their traits to their children and their children's children. “As personality traits are genetically transmitted,” writes the psychologist Kenneth Olson, “each succeeding wave of emigrants to a new continent would give rise over time to a population of more engaged individuals than reside in the emigrants' continent of origin.”

We can also trace our admiration of extroverts to the Greeks, for whom oratory was an exalted skill, and to
the Romans, for whom the worst possible punishment was banishment from the city, with its teeming
social life. Similarly, we revere our founding fathers precisely because they were loudmouths on the subject of freedom:
Give me liberty or give me death!
Even the Christianity of early American religious revivals, dating back to the First Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, depended on the showmanship of ministers who were considered successful if they caused crowds of normally reserved people to weep and shout and generally lose their decorum. “Nothing gives me more pain and distress than to see a minister standing almost motionless, coldly plodding on as a mathematician would calculate the distance of the Moon from the Earth,” complained a religious newspaper in 1837.

As this disdain suggests,
early Americans revered action and were suspicious of intellect, associating the life of the mind with the languid, ineffectual European aristocracy they had left behind.
The 1828 presidential campaign pitted a former Harvard professor, John Quincy Adams, against Andrew Jackson, a forceful military hero. A Jackson campaign slogan tellingly distinguished the two: “John Quincy Adams who can write / And Andrew Jackson who can fight.”

The victor of that campaign? The fighter beat the writer, as the cultural historian Neal Gabler puts it. (
John Quincy Adams, incidentally, is considered by political psychologists to be one of the few introverts in presidential history.)

But the rise of the Culture of Personality intensified such biases, and applied them not only to political and religious leaders, but also to regular people. And though soap manufacturers may have profited from the new emphasis on charm and charisma, not everyone was pleased with this development. “
Respect for individual human personality has with us reached its lowest point,” observed one intellectual in 1921, “and it is delightfully ironical that no nation is so constantly talking about personality as we are. We actually have schools for ‘self-expression' and ‘self-development,' although we seem usually to mean the expression and development of the personality of a successful real estate agent.”

Another critic bemoaned the slavish attention Americans were starting to pay to entertainers: “
It is remarkable how much attention the stage and things pertaining to it are receiving nowadays from the magazines,” he grumbled. Only twenty years earlier—during the Culture of Character, that is—such topics would have been considered indecorous;
now they had become “such a large part of the life of society that it has become a topic of conversation among all classes.”

Even T. S. Eliot's famous 1915 poem
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
—in which he laments the need to “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”—seems a
cri de coeur
about the new demands of self-presentation. While poets of the previous century had
wandered lonely as a cloud through the countryside (Wordsworth, in 1802) or
repaired in solitude to Walden Pond (Thoreau, in 1845), Eliot's Prufrock mostly worries about being looked at by “eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase” and pin you, wriggling, to a wall.

Fast-forward nearly a hundred years, and Prufrock's protest is enshrined in high school syllabi, where it's dutifully memorized, then quickly forgotten, by teens increasingly skilled at shaping their own online and offline personae. These students inhabit a world in which status, income, and self-esteem depend more than ever on the ability to meet the demands of the Culture of Personality. The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up. The number of
Americans who considered themselves shy increased from 40 percent in the 1970s to 50 percent in the 1990s, probably because we measured ourselves against ever higher standards of fearless self-presentation. “
Social anxiety disorder”—which essentially means pathological shyness—is now thought to afflict nearly one in five of us.
The most recent version of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV)
, the psychiatrist's bible of mental disorders, considers the fear of public speaking to be a pathology—not an annoyance, not a disadvantage, but a
disease
—if it interferes with the sufferer's job performance. “
It's not enough,” one senior manager at Eastman Kodak told the author Daniel Goleman, “to be able to sit at your computer excited about a fantastic regression analysis if you're squeamish about presenting those results to an executive group.” (Apparently it's OK to be squeamish about doing a regression analysis if you're excited about giving speeches.)

But perhaps the best way to take the measure of the twenty-first-century Culture of Personality is to return to the self-help arena. Today, a full century after Dale Carnegie launched that first public-speaking workshop at the YMCA, his best-selling book
How to Win Friends and Influence People
is
a staple of airport bookshelves and business best-seller lists. The Dale Carnegie Institute still offers updated versions of Carnegie's original classes, and the ability to communicate fluidly remains a core feature of the curriculum. Toastmasters, the nonprofit organization established in 1924 whose members meet weekly to practice public speaking and whose founder declared that “
all talking is selling and all selling involves talking,” is still thriving, with
more than 12,500 chapters in 113 countries.

The promotional video on Toastmasters' website features a skit in which two colleagues, Eduardo and Sheila, sit in the audience at the “Sixth Annual Global Business Conference” as a nervous speaker stumbles through a pitiful presentation.

“I'm so glad I'm not him,” whispers Eduardo.

“You're joking, right?” replies Sheila with a satisfied smile. “Don't you remember last month's sales presentation to those new clients? I thought you were going to faint.”

“I wasn't that bad, was I?”

“Oh, you were that bad. Really bad. Worse, even.”

Eduardo looks suitably ashamed, while the rather insensitive Sheila seems oblivious.

“But,” says Sheila, “you can fix it. You can do better.… Have you ever heard of Toastmasters?”

Sheila, a young and attractive brunette, hauls Eduardo to a Toastmasters meeting. There she volunteers to perform an exercise called “Truth or Lie,” in which she's supposed to tell the group of fifteen-odd participants a story about her life, after which they decide whether or not to believe her.

“I bet I can fool everyone,” she whispers to Eduardo sotto voce as she marches to the podium. She spins an elaborate tale about her years as an opera singer, concluding with her poignant decision to give it all up to spend more time with her family. When she's finished, the toastmaster of the evening asks the group whether they believe Sheila's story. All hands
in the room go up. The toastmaster turns to Sheila and asks whether it was true.

“I can't even carry a tune!” she beams triumphantly.

Sheila comes across as disingenuous, but also oddly sympathetic. Like the anxious readers of the 1920s personality guides, she's only trying to get ahead at the office. “There's so much competition in my work environment,” she confides to the camera, “that it makes it more important than ever to keep my skills sharp.”

But what do “sharp skills” look like? Should we become so proficient at self-presentation that we can dissemble without anyone suspecting? Must we learn to stage-manage our voices, gestures, and body language until we can tell—sell—any story we want? These seem venal aspirations, a marker of how far we've come—and not in a good way—since the days of Dale Carnegie's childhood.

Dale's parents had high moral standards; they wanted their son to pursue a career in religion or education, not sales. It seems unlikely that they would have approved of a self-improvement technique called “Truth or Lie.” Or, for that matter, of Carnegie's best-selling advice on how to get people to admire you and do your bidding.
How to Win Friends and Influence People
is full of chapter titles like “Making People Glad to Do What You Want” and “How to Make People Like You Instantly.”

All of which raises the question, how did we go from Character to Personality without realizing that we had sacrificed something meaningful along the way?

“Are you excited?” cries a young woman named Stacy as I hand her my registration forms. Her honeyed voice rises into one big exclamation point. I nod and smile as brightly as I can. Across the lobby of the Atlanta Convention Center, I hear people shrieking.

“What's that noise?” I ask.

“They're getting everyone pumped up to go inside!” Stacy enthuses. “That's part of the whole UPW experience.” She hands me a purple spiral binder and a laminated nametag to wear around my neck. UNLEASH THE POWER WITHIN, proclaims the binder in big block letters. Welcome to Tony Robbins's entry-level seminar.