The Danish Secret Revealed: The Jante's Law

This is one of the first posts I write about Danish culture in my blog. There are many reasons and excuses for that, which I might comment later. After over one year living here, and trying to understand the complexity of the simple way of life of the Danes, I might now be able to "guess" something.

Everybody who comes here can easily see how Danish people are open to other people, lovers of individual freedom, rich and egalitarian (social welfare system, for example), having a high standard of ethics. Especially when I compare with the country I come from.

Under the surface, someone ask her/himself: how come this country can be so liberal, so capitalistic, so individualistic, and at the same time to egalitarian, so socialistic??

Well, under the water there is a huge iceberg of cultural assumptions and truths that even the Danes themselves deny! Or they try to deny...

A long time ago, in 1933, a Danish-Norwegian author wrote a novel about a little village in Denmark called Jante, a typical small town where nobody is anonymous. The 10 rules that define life there are:

1. Don't think that you are special.
2. Don't think that you are of the same standing as us.
3. Don't think that you are smarter than us.
4. Don't fancy yourself as being better than us.
5. Don't think that you know more than us.
6. Don't think that you are more important than us.
7. Don't think that you are good at anything.
8. Don't laugh at us.
9. Don't think that anyone cares about you.
10. Don't think that you can teach us anything.

The law is meant to preserve social stability and uniformity, and the Janters who break the "unwritten" law are treated with suspicion or even hostility.

The movie Dogville was filmed in Sweden and directed by Lars von Trier, a Dane. Although it's a clear critics on the American culture, some might speculate saying that it has many elements of the Law of Jante: Grace (Nicole Kidman) arrives and people accept her as long as she seems inferior to them, and as soon as she becomes too special, too important for the eyes of the people around her, the negative attitude starts: "who does she think she is...?"

Being here has taught me a lot and living "with" the Jante's Law is very difficult sometimes. But you got to admit that it brings a lot of benefits as well...

For another article on Jante's Law, I recommend this one written by a Turkish journalist:
Janteloven: Egalitarianism or restrictiveness?