Home » Archives » February 2007 » The Ecklund Corollary, or Why Britney Has No Hair
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02/19/2007: "The Ecklund Corollary, or Why Britney Has No Hair"
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By know, you've surely heard the story: A distraught, distracted Britney Spears enters a middle-class beauty salon in Tarzana and ask the owner to shave her head. When the owner questions the sanity of her request, Spears grabs the clippers and does the job herself. I'm not going to try and understand what's going on in her head, but clearly the Britney Jitney has jumped the tracks. When your week starts with you dancing on stage with strippers in New York, includes a midweek trip to Antigua to check in to rehab (only to check out the next day), and ends up with a bald head and two new tattoos, you need help bad. It takes a lot to knock Anna Nicole off the front page, but Britney did it. Somewhere, K-Fed is celebrating - he doesn't have enough money to screw up this bad, so it's a cinch he'll get the kids.
I'll leave it to others - and there will be many - to try and figure out just how Britney spun so far out of control. I'm really more interested in the big picture. It seems lately that we see more and more cases of people who simply snap, unable to deal with the reality of their lives. When they do, more often than not, they do so in spectactular fashion. From mailmen "going postal" to school kids with guns to celebrities with infinite wealth and a posse of enablers who weave a death spiral of amazing proportions, it's clear something is wrong.
Naturally, I have a theory. It's called Ecklund's Corollary to the Peter Principle. Any MBA grad can tell you about the PP, developed in the '60s by Lawrence Peter. Simply defined, "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." You achieve results in a particular position, so you are promoted to a more challenging one. You continue to achieve and rise until you reach a position in which you cannot achieve, and there you stay - your own level of incompetance.
Ecklund's Corollary takes the Peter Principle and applies it to modern life. Instead of our position changing, the requirements of the position - life - change. Cell phones, PDAs, text messaging, car pools, day care, play dates, STD, WMF ... life simply gets more and more complex. And at some point, a certain amount of society becomes overwhelmed. That's where the corollary come in: "As the complexity of life increases, so too does the number of people in society who will be unable to deal with the increased complexity, and the magnitude of their catastrophic reaction to that inability." As society moved from horses to cars to planes to rockets, the challenges life brought to bear increased. The threshold of ability needed to master the game of life rose, and so did the number of people unable to reach that threshold. And as they realized their own inability, and felt the pressure to succeed, some of them cracked - in an increasingly explosive and bizarre manner.
Admittedly, many of the most visible cases are people like Britney and Anna Nicole who bring extra pressure on themselves through their pursuit of fame. Maybe they didn't realize the additional challenges their desired lifestyle would bring, or maybe they just didn't care. In the end, though, it doesn't matter - they are just as broken either way.
