"Give me a child...

...and I'll shape him into anything."

-- B. F. Skinner

Apparently Our Mr. Brooks could have saved himself just oodles of time (from Will Wilkinson's scalding review)...

The Social Animal by David Brooks: A Scornful Review

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“This is the happiest story you’ve ever read,” Brooks begins. It isn’t. It is depressing. “It is about two people who lead wonderfully fulfilling lives.” Actually, it is about two boring people who lead muted, more or less satisfactory lives in the successful pursuit of achievement as it is narrowly defined by their culture. That such emotionally straitened, humorlessly striving characters are cast as romantic leads in the science-certified “happiest story” of all is baffling and sad. More baffling still is that Brooks’ intends this chilling portrait to offer consolation, to persuade us there is much to gain, and little to fear, in losing our unscientific illusions about human nature.

Something in The Social Animal is badly awry.

We follow Harold from the first twinkle in his parents’ eyes, through his marriage to Erica, to the mawkishly-rendered moment of his death. We pick up Erica’s story at childhood and drop it when Harold expires. Harold and Erica go to good schools, and pass through a series of haute bourgeois jobs—museum curator, freelance consultant, corporate marketing functionary, author of mid-list historical biographies—until, finally, the hyper-achieving Erica arrives as the chief executive of a cable company, and the ponderous Harold scores a sinecure at a neocon think tank, where he pastes David Brooks opinion columns into papers on public policy.
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by just basting together his many, meandering columns nibbling at the edges of the science and pseudoscience of others. wrapping a big, shiny Centrist bow around it and calling the whole wobbly mess "Walden Three: Ken and Barbie Decorate Their Davos Dream House" (from Wiki):

Walden Two is a science fiction novel written by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner and first published in 1948.

In the novel, the author describes an experimental community named Walden Two. The community is located in a rural[ area and "has nearly a thousand members." The members are portrayed as happy, productive, and creative. The community encourages its members "to view every habit and custom with an eye to possible improvement" and to have "a constantly experimental attitude toward everything".

When the members find a problem in their community they may design and experimentally test a possible solution, carefully documenting the results of their experiment in accordance with the scientific method. If the results of their testing indicates that the proposed solution would be an improvement over their current cultural practices then they may make that experimentally validated improvement into a component of their community's culture. This cultural optimization process is called "cultural engineering."
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Excelsior, bitches!