The Danes have a dirty little secret. Look at the all the hype about happy Denmark – perfect social welfare community, tight knit and socially conscious.
But the social welfare community has roots with a pattern of group behaviour within Scandinavian communities, which negatively portrays and criticizes individual success and achievement as unworthy and inappropriate.
It has been observed as a form of behaviour for centuries, but was identified as a series of unwritten rules, the Jante Law, by the Norwegian/Danish author Aksel Sandemose in his fiction novel A fugitive crosses his tracks 1933, where he portrays the small Danish town Jante (modelled on his own hometown Nykøbing Mors as it was at the beginning of the 20th century).
Many Danes that you ask about Jante law are a bit ashamed of it – it is considered a snide, jealous and narrow small-town mentality which refuses to acknowledge individual effort and places all emphasis on the collective, while punishing those who stand out as achievers.
There are ten different rules in the law as defined by Sandemose, but they are all variations on a single theme and are usually referred to as a homogeneous unit: Don’t think you’re anyone special or that you’re better than us.
The ten rules are:
Don’t think that you are special.
Don’t think that you are of the same standing as us.
Don’t think that you are smarter than us.
Don’t fancy yourself as being better than us.
Don’t think that you know more than us.
Don’t think that you are more important than us.
Don’t think that you are good at anything.
Don’t laugh at us.
Don’t think that any one of us cares about you.
Don’t think that you can teach us anything.
Ask a Dane and they will tell you Jante Law is terrible, yes it exists but they hate it. They hate to admit it exists. Yet they almost feel powerless to change it.
But why is it so terrible? If carefully looked at the Laws could be re-written in a PR friendly, spinned way. Indeed, more like the way it is actually practiced in Denmark today.
Sandemose’s Jante law is harsh, and a bit mean but in Denmark, the unwritten and nearly unspoken actions behind Jante law are more subtle and almost polite. The idea is to avoid creating envy in others.
It is better to want what you have than to have what you want, Danish proverb
Several economists have stressed the paradox between high ambition and the stagnation of happiness in high-income countries. The creators of the Jante law realized that rising aspirations created by the desperate search for status would be detrimental to their collective community.
Why play that game? The creators of Jante Law changed the rules of the game by encouraging modesty and reducing envy by squashing individual ambition. They knew that individual success and prosperity was a zero sum game.
In normal competitions in order for one to win, others had to lose. But why should anyone value such as system? Why not create a system with different values? Values that are non material based. Values based on collective success and a win-win attitude. Values like the Danish system.
Like the young man in Sandemose’s book who moved to this fictional small town in Denmark, I too experienced that coming from one of the largest superpowers in the world provided me with no credibility on this island, called Denmark.
My money was useless, (dollar is worth nothing outside of USA), my attitude was too American and (that was not a good thing) and I thought Denmark should change – better work ethic (work longer and therefore harder?), shops should be open ALWAYS!, why weren’t people impressed with what I do?
If I was here to push my American ideals, on the Danes, I could just forget about it, turn around pack my Louis Vuitton suitcase and get on the next SAS flight out of here.
The Jante laws are here to preserve the idyllic, happy communal living standards in Denmark. And if I wanted to live here, I had to learn the unwritten laws, shut up and pay my taxes.