Look to Denmark, the country that routinely leads the
world in happiness surveys. It’s also notable for having the highest taxes on
Earth, plus a comfy social safety net: Child care is mostly free, as is public
school and even private school, and you can stay on unemployment benefits for a
long time. Everyone is on an equal footing, both income-wise and socially: Go
to a party and you wouldn’t be surprised to see a TV star talking to a roofer.
The combination of massive taxes and benefits for the
unsuccessful means top and bottom get shaved off: Pretty much everyone is
proudly middle class. Danes belong to more civic associations and clubs than
anyone else; they love performing in large groups. At Christmas they do wacky
things like hold hands and run around the house together, singing festive
songs. They’re a real-life Whoville.
In the American liberal compass, the needle is always
pointing to places like Denmark. Everything they most fervently hope for here
has already happened there.
So: Why does no one seem particularly interested in
visiting Denmark? (“Honey, on our European trip, I want to see Tuscany, Paris,
Berlin and . . . Jutland!”) Visitors say Danes are joyless to be around.
Denmark suffers from high rates of alcoholism. In its use of antidepressants it
ranks fourth in the world. (Its fellow Nordics the Icelanders are in front by a
wide margin.) Some 5 percent of Danish men have had sex with an animal.
Denmark’s productivity is in decline, its workers put in only 28 hours a week,
and everybody you meet seems to have a government job. Oh, and as The Telegraph
put it, it’s “the cancer capital of the world.”
So how happy can these drunk, depressed, lazy,
tumor-ridden, pig-bonking bureaucrats really be?
The Jante Law
Let’s look a little closer, suggests Michael Booth, a Brit who has lived in
Denmark for many years, in his new book, “The Almost Nearly Perfect People:
Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia” (Picador).
Those sky-high happiness surveys, it turns out, are
mostly bunk. Asking people “Are you happy?” means different things in different
cultures. In Japan, for instance, answering “Yes” seems like boasting, Booth
points out. Whereas in Denmark, it’s considered “shameful to be unhappy,”
newspaper editor Anne Knudsen says in the book.
Moreover, there is a group of people that believes the
Danes are lying when they say they’re the happiest people on the planet. This
group is known as “Danes.”
“Over the years I have asked many Danes about these
happiness surveys — whether they really believe that they are the global
happiness champions — and I have yet to meet a single one of them who seriously
believes it’s true,” Booth writes. “They tend to approach the subject of their
much-vaunted happiness like the victims of a practical joke waiting to discover
who the perpetrator is.”
Danes are well aware of their worldwide reputation for
being the happiest little Legos in the box. Answering “No” would be as
unthinkable as honking in traffic in Copenhagen. When the author tried this
(once), he was scolded by his bewildered Danish passenger: “What if they know
you?” Booth was asked.
That was a big clue: At a party, the author joked, it
typically takes about eight minutes for people to discover someone they know in
common. Denmark is a land of 5.3 million homogeneous people. Everyone talks the
same, everyone looks the same, everyone thinks the same.
This is universally considered a feature — a glorious
source of national pride in the land of humblebrag. Any rebels will be made to
conform; tall poppies will be chopped down to average.
The country’s business leaders are automatically suspect
because of the national obsession with averageness: Shipping tycoon Maersk
McKinney Moller, the richest man in the country before his death in 2012,
avoided the national shame of being a billionaire by being almost absurdly hoi
polloi. He climbed stairs to his office every day, attended meetings until well
into his 90s and brown-bagged his lunch.
An American woman told Booth how, when she excitedly
mentioned at a dinner party that her kid was first in his class at school, she
was met with icy silence.
One of the most country’s most widely known quirks is a
satirist’s crafting of what’s still known as the Jante Law — the Ten
Commandments of Buzzkill. “You shall not believe that you are someone,” goes
one. “You shall not believe that you are as good as we are,” is another. Others
included “You shall not believe that you are going to amount to anything,” “You
shall not believe that you are more important than we are” and “You shall not
laugh at us.”
Richard Wilkinson, an author and professor who published
a book arguing for the superiority of egalitarian cultures, told Booth,
“Hunter-gatherer societies — which are similar to prehistoric societies — are
highly egalitarian. And if someone starts to take on a more domineering
position, they get ridiculed or teased or ostracized. These are what’s called
counter-dominance strategies, and they maintain the greater equality.”
So Danes operate on caveman principles — if you find it,
share it, or be shunned. Once your date with Daisy the Sheep is over, you’d
better make sure your friends get a turn. (Bestiality has traditionally been
legal in Denmark, though a move to ban it is under way. Until recently, several
“bestiality brothels” advertised their services in newspapers, generally
charging clients $85 to $170 for what can only be termed a roll in the hay.)
They need a drink
The flip side of the famous “social cohesion” is that
outsiders are unwelcome. Xenophobic remarks are common. At gatherings, the
spirit of “hygge” — loosely translated as cozy — prevails. It’s considered
uncouth to try to steer the conversation toward anything anyone might
conceivably disagree about. This is why even the Danes describe Danes as
boring.
In addition to paying enormous taxes — the total bill is
58 percent to 72 percent of income — Danes have to pay more for just about
everything. Books are a luxury item. Their equivalent of the George Washington
Bridge costs $45 to cross. Health care is free — which means you pay in time
instead of money. Services are distributed only after endless stays in waiting
rooms. (The author brought his son to an E.R. complaining of a foreign
substance that had temporarily blinded him in one eye and was turned away, told
he had to make an appointment.) Pharmacies are a state-run monopoly, which
means getting an aspirin is like a trip to the DMV.
Other Scandinavian countries (Booth defines the term
broadly, to include Nordic brethren Iceland and Finland in addition to Denmark,
Sweden and Norway) raise other questions about how perfect the nearly perfect
people really are. Iceland’s famous economic boom turned out to be one of
history’s most notorious real estate bubbles. A common saying in Denmark about
Icelanders: They wear shoes that are too big for them, and they keep tripping
over the shoelaces.
The success of the Norwegians — the Beverly Hillbillies
of Europe — can’t be imitated. Previously a peasant nation, the country now has
more wealth than it can spend: Colossal offshore oil deposits spawned a
sovereign wealth fund that pays for everything.
Finland, which tops the charts in many surveys (they’re
the least corrupt people on Earth, its per-capita income is the highest in
Western Europe and Helsinki often tops polls of the best cities), is also a
leader in categories like alcoholism, murder (highest rate in Western Europe), suicide
and antidepressant usage.
Their leading filmmaker, Aki Kaurismaki, makes features
so “unremittingly morose they made [Ingmar] Bergman look like Mr. Bean,”
reports Booth.
Finnish etiquette demands little in the way of
conversation (the men, especially, speak as if being charged by the syllable)
but much in the way of alcohol abuse. It’s considered poor form to leave the
party when there is anything left in a bottle. Although their overall alcohol
consumption is near the European average, they binge-drink more than almost any
other country on the continent. Booze-related disease is the leading cause of
death for Finnish men, and second for women.
The suicide rate is 50 percent higher than in the US and
more than double the UK rate. Party guests, even at upscale gatherings, report
that, around 11:30 at night, things often take a fighty turn.
It turns out that the “warrior gene” — actually the
enzyme monoamine oxidase A, which is linked to impulsive behavior, violence and
alcoholism — is especially prevalent in Finland. “Dark” doesn’t just describe
winter in the Arctic suburbs, it applies to the Finnish character.
Big bowl of oatmeal
Macho isn’t a problem in Sweden. Dubbed the least masculine country on
Earth by anthropologist Geert Hofstede, it’s the place where male soldiers are
issued hairnets instead of being made to cut their hair.
But Scandinavian cohesion may not work in conjunction
with massive immigration: Almost one-third of the Swedish population was born
elsewhere. Immigration is associated in the Swedish mind with welfare (housing
projects full of people on the dole) and with high crime rates (these newcomers
being more than four times as likely to commit murder). Islamist gangs control
some of the housing projects. Friction between “ethnic Swedes” and the
immigrants is growing.
Welfare states work best among a homogeneous people, and
the kind of diversity and mistrust we have between groups in America means we
could never reach a broad consensus on Nordic levels of social spending.
Anyway, Sweden thought better of liberal economics too:
When its welfare state became unsustainable (something savvy Danes are just
starting to say), it went on a privatization spree and cut government spending
from 67 percent of GDP to less than half. In the wake of the global financial
crisis, it chose austerity, eliminating its budget deficit (it now runs a
slight surplus).
As for its supposedly sweet-natured national persona, in
a poll in which Swedes were asked to describe themselves, the adjectives that
led the pack were “envious, stiff, industrious, nature-loving, quiet, honest,
dishonest and xenophobic.” In last place were these words: “masculine,” “sexy”
and “artistic.”
Scandinavia, as a wag in The Economist once put it, is a
great place to be born — but only if you are average. The dead-on satire of
Scandinavian mores “Together” is a 2000 movie by Sweden’s Lukas Moodysson set
in a multi-family commune in 1975, when the groovy Social Democratic ideal was
utterly unquestioned in Sweden.
In the film’s signature scene, a sensitive, apron-wearing
man tells his niece and nephew as he is making breakfast, “You could say that
we are like porridge. First we’re like small oat flakes — small, dry, fragile,
alone. But then we’re cooked with the other oat flakes and become soft. We join
so that one flake can’t be told apart from another. We’re almost dissolved.
Together we become a big porridge that’s warm, tasty, and nutritious and yes,
quite beautiful, too. So we are no longer small and isolated but we have become
warm, soft and joined together. Part of something bigger than ourselves.
Sometimes life feels like an enormous porridge, don’t you think?”
Then he spoons a great glutinous glob of tasteless starch
onto the poor kids’ plates. That’s Scandinavia for you, folks: Bland, wholesome,
individual-erasing mush. But, hey, at least we’re all united in being slowly
digested by the system.
http://nypost.com/2015/01/11/sorry-liberals-scandinavian-countries-arent-utopias/
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