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

by Michael Booth

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.