The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

by Michael Booth

The landscape of southern Funen (Fyn, Denmark’s central island), which undulates like a reclining nude. • The pleasantly woozy feeling after a lunch of pickled herring with red onion on rye, a Tuborg beer, and an icy schnapps. • Flødebolle—a chocolate-covered Italian meringue with a wafer base (sometimes they have a marzipan base, but those are to be avoided). • There’s parking. • The view from the room that houses the numismatic collection at the National Museum of Denmark (the Nationalmuseet) looking across to the royal stables at the rear of Christiansborg Palace, the Danish parliament building.

“If you want to redistribute wealth, then it is easier in a high-trust society because you believe that the money will be distributed well to deserving people. We’ve always had trust, and this trust is the cornerstone of the welfare state,” he told me. “Yes, today Denmark has low inequality and the greatest happiness, but if there was a correlation you would also expect it to be true for other countries with low inequality. But it’s not.”

1. You shall not believe that you are someone. 2. You shall not believe that you are as good as we are. 3. You shall not believe that you are any wiser than we are. 4. You shall never indulge in the conceit of imagining that you are better than we are. 5. You shall not believe that you know more than we do. 6. You shall not believe that you are more important than we are. 7. You shall not believe that you are going to amount to anything. 8. You shall not laugh at us. 9. You shall not believe that anyone cares about you. 10. You shall not believe that you can teach us anything. Knowing even just a little of their author’s biography, one would think it easy to dismiss these rules as the products of a somewhat unbalanced mind, an irrelevance, but the truth is, Sandemose really nailed the Danes. And not just the Danes: Jante Law sent ripples of recognition beyond Denmark—the Norwegians are all too familiar with them and, as we will hear, they act as an even more powerful normalizing force in Sweden.

As we can conclude from their alcohol, tobacco, hash, and sugar intake, the Danes deny themselves few pleasures. I am talking, for instance, about their denial of what it costs to be Danish—the literal cost, via their taxes and the cost of goods in their shops but also the spiritual costs in terms of their relative lack of ambition and dynamism, the denial of those sometimes necessary conflicts, and the loss of freedom of expression and individualism denied them by Jante Law and hygge.

It may be comparatively low level, the vestigial wounds of centuries of tension, rivalry, and betrayal, but it is there, trust me, and the Swedes are always the focus. It is there in the grudging way the Danes react to Swedish economic success and the global domination of IKEA (it hardly helps that the Swedish company insists on naming its least dignified products—doormats, and so forth—after Danish towns).

The abiding view of the Swedes from their neighbors to the south is of a stiff, humorless, rule-obsessed, and dull crowd who inhabit a suffocatingly conformist society and chew tobacco. The Danes love to tell each other stories of Swedish prissiness, drone-like obedience, or pedantry.

Sweden was beginning to sound like some kind of sci-fi dystopia where everyone could read each other’s mind and people no longer had the privilege of private thoughts, compelling them to suppress any emotion, opinion, or urge that might run counter to the prevailing ethos.

Lagom is another key Swedish watchword. It means “according to law” or “according to accepted custom,” but implies being “moderate,” “reasonable,” “fair,” “acting in a common-sense way,” “rational.”

The peace prize is awarded by a committee chosen by the Norwegian parliament; the other prizes—for literature, chemistry, physics, medicine, and economics—are give out by a Swedish committee. No one really knows why Nobel felt they should be split in this way, but at the time of his death Norway was ruled by Sweden, and perhaps he judged it to be the least warlike nation of the two.

“In a sense it is totalitarian,” he agreed as we sat in the canteen at the offices of the newspaper Expressen, for which he is a columnist. “Of course, you can’t compare it to Nazi Germany or North Korea, it isn’t as bad as that, but there is a creeping totalitarianism that is defined as conforming, to do like others. Nobody really questions the kind of society we have, that’s what I dislike so much about Sweden. Indoctrination is what you would call it.”

These three entities—the Social Democratic government, the unions, and the company owners—would cooperate to a remarkable degree over the coming decades on matters such as wage levels, childcare provision, women’s rights, employment law, economic policy, and even foreign policy, allowing some of the most progressive social innovations the world has ever seen to be imposed upon a broadly accepting (baa!) Swedish public.

As early as 1922 the Swedes had an Institute for Racial Biology, in Uppsala. A leading Swedish politician at the time, Arthur Engberg, wrote: “We have the good fortune to belong to a race that is so far relatively unspoiled, a race that is the bearer of very high and very good qualities,” adding that it was about time they protected said superior race. Such views led to the sterilization of “lesser” specimens in a program which, according to one commentator, was “second only to [those of] Nazi Germany.” The two regimes shared the same goal: the purification of a race of tall, blond, blue-eyed people. In 1934, laws were strengthened so that women deemed “inferior” were sterilized against their will, along with male juvenile delinquents. Even in 1945, after the world had become aware of what the Nazis had been up to, 1,747 Swedes were sterilized, and in 1947 the figure had increased to 2,264.

Everything I read about the Swedish Social Democratic government of the last century suggested an organization that was driven by one single, overarching goal: to sever the traditional, some would say natural, ties between its citizens, be they those that bound children to their parents, workers to their employers, wives to their husbands, or the elderly to their families. Instead, individuals were encouraged—mostly by financial incentive or disincentive, but also through legislation, propaganda, and social pressure—to “take their place in the collective,” as one commentator rather ominously put it, and become dependent on the government.

Swedish autonomy also seemed to me to be much more passive than the kind of independence the Americans strive for. It is not about achieving something, striking out on your own, grabbing life by the lapels and wringing every ounce of potential from it, it is about being able to get your teeth seen to on a regular basis, for spouses to be able to take separate holidays, or for retirees to be free to decide what to have for dinner. As the authors of Modern-Day Vikings put it, “The American wants the freedom to do, the Swede wants the freedom to be.”

“Culturally and intellectually the international contribution of Sweden is quite limited, but the typical Swedish intellectual believes the country is big enough for him to have a career, and not so small that he feels he needs to go outside and bring things in. It’s the tragedy of being a midsized country.”