jantelagen

A response to the Wikipedia entry on Jantelagen (“Du ska inte tro att du a nagon.”):


Danish author Axel Sandemose was incredibly critical of Janteloven / Jantelagen, a term he coined in his 1933 fictional critique of Scandinavian integration, En Flytning Krysser Sitt Spor (“A fugitive crosses his tracks”).

Jantelagen is a cultural reflex that seems to threaten to stifle our cosmopolitan “Great Men” (Our own impression of ourselves?). Obviously, the small Scandinavian countries have a long, vast history of high economic, scientific, political, militaristic, education, environmental, and cultural exploration, innovation, achievement, and integration. Moreover, the critique of Jantelagen is Scandinavian. Therefore, it must be recognized as a self-reflexive narrative.

Centered on the exceptional/marginal perspective, the frustration and outrage experienced by a self-described genius immigrant at what he sees as inferior Scandinavians’ failure to defer to him, the critique of Jantelagen itself is part of Jantelagen culture–a cultural system of rigorously checking people’s narcissistic pretensions to monopolize power. Jantelagen is a reminder to a people indisposed to deference to leave some social space for extending credit and cooperation to newcomers–some of whom may be coming from a steep and immobile hierarchical culture laden with status-based deference norms.

And what exercise is more appropriate in such a frenetically self-aggrandizing yet deeply social species as humans in the context of global imperial capitalism? Although it’s always painful to have to deal with criticism, I very much doubt Jantelagen culture is stifling in the long haul.

Look at Jantelagen’s opposite–high-inequality, narcissistic Anglo-American culture, where billionaire and trillionaire elites, via their comprador delegates, enjoy absolute liberty to draw boundaries, delegate their agency, make and break rules and set the agenda, and are never compelled to confront and handle the idea that their interests might have sent society way off track, socially, ecologically, economically, and politically.

In the context of a social species, a systematic lack of responsibility is stifling, and crippling. Criticism isn’t necessarily stifling, if it’s not merely a habituated mode of talking that abjects your value system. Within bounds, educators know, criticism can help us learn (Smith 2022: 162-185). What can be overdone, and is all too common in high-inequality Anglo-American societies, is shame. Psychologist Julie Smith, author of Why Has Nobody Told Me About This Before? (2022) observes that in our inegalitarian global imperial capitalist society, we associate intense, crippling shame with any form of failure.  Yet of course all humans are fallible. Because of this insidious, toxic context, the answer is not, as so many Brahmin Tallest Poppies fanboys insist, plumping winners’ self-esteem. In the context of an inegalitarian culture, such as liberal-conservative Anglo capitalism, where success is identified with winning, standing out, being acknowledged by others, and wealth, we maintain a toxic, crippling winner/loser binary, and “associating a measure of ‘success’ to worthiness” inevitably makes it “difficult to truly connect with the people you are comparing yourself to.” When management centers the margins (usually the elite end of the margins, though they argue that they patronize the lesser margins as well), fretting over whether Tallest Poppies’ experience is truly optimized with adequate deference, they seek to divide and conquer. Centering “Tallest Poppy Syndrome” works as a passive-aggressive labour management technique. It is not rooted in social science. Psychologists clarify that “high self-esteem is not linked with better relationships or better performance” (Baumeister et al, 2003, cited in Smith 2022: 167). “But it does correlate with arrogance, prejudice and discrimination.” Precious hand-wringing over whether Tallest Poppies are sufficiently deferred to by their loser colleagues creates a toxic workplace in the global imperial capitalist context.

On Jantelagen and immigration:

The English-language Wikipedia entry treats Jantelagen as a threat to the Ayn Randian Anglo-American cultural ideal of the “Great Man” of business, because Anglo-Americans are centrally concerned with the deference “due” to the capitalist class, the exception/margin centered. However, Jantelagen is actually about how Scandinavians respond to the autistic/idiotic introduction of foreign culture by outsiders and newcomers who are prone to naturalize and decontextualize the “superiority” of their native “common sense,” culture, sacralized network, or technical patrimony.

Sandemose’s critique is excessive, inadequately reflexive, particularly when taken as something other than a marginal corrective to anti-deferential culture. Fetishized, it can be another case of the excessive centering of marginal justice in inegalitarian capitalism.

In fact, incorporating new, non-acculturated members (whether immigrant or youth) is a real problem, is not automatic–For society is the ongoing culmination of class and other conflicts, the exchange of information, ideas, and grievances, per Rousseau (1762) and Dewey (1916). When newcomers are introduced, organized factions can use them as a sort of naive “shock troops,” to antidemocratically undermine the egalitarian social contract hard-won against concentrated power in a region.

In this respect, Jantelagen refutes the naive approach that fails to see society in social terms, but only in market terms, eg. immigrants as merely new workers or new sources of wealth, or bringers of new techniques; or, in idealist philosophy’s under-conceptualization of change, youth as the fresh consumer model, superficially unspoiled by a lifetime of delegated and self-abnegating decisions.

Idealist philosophy has an impoverished conceptualization of change, as simply the altered structure imparted by the intercession of a divine exception.

A kind of newcomer, youth are fetishized in advertising because their vitality is not the result of good community decisions over time and in social and ecological context. They perpetuate the immemorial elite virtue/fiction of pleasure as atopic, achronistic, consequenceless, absolute, the strict lightningbolt of a divine or natural endowment of excellence (hormone-charged beauty as yet innocent of gravity). This is the Antienlightenment eros that sustains Capitolocene catastrophe.

Jantelagen’s approach, while risking failure to extend cooperation and credit to newcomers–who are of course already under-resourced or overburdened, forces perhaps the most crucial responsibility of democratic development (per Dewey 1916): Requiring social, historical awareness and learning. Whether youth or foreigner or both, the newcomer can be innocent and tuned out, which fits them to be used as economic or political pawns by opportunistic elites and their police/management delegates. (As for example where affluent African immigrants distance themselves from Black North Americans.) To moderate the ways that elites can game settler societies, Jantelagen demands that new members of society recognize that society is a social production with a material and cultural history. 

That recognition requirement is not cripplingly burdensome, but enabling. It allows newcomers to develop their own sovereign agency in the society. It can be relayed with education, as well as through civil and citizenship organizations. In a substantive democracy, such recognition and education must be the condition for receiving credit, cooperation, and citizenship beyond basic needs and negative rights.

Only if your intent was to dismantle a given, democratic society would you argue otherwise. That is a very particular and not universal interest. Jantelagen is a preferable ethos in introducing newcomers to a society, when compared with what we conceive of as  “cosmopolitanism” tuned to exclusive elite interests.

The kernel for this insight first came to me when I read Anthropology theory back in grad school in the late-1990s: Appadurai and Canclini. Per the Anthropology discipline’s para-imperial commitment to centering the justice of the marginal, cosmopolitanism was a marginally-amended parochial elitism. Anthropologists attempted to reductively classwash neoliberal immigration as a jetting-setting global cocktail party, ignoring power maldistribution and change over time, and merging–against the “average” middel-mass oppressors–the moral sanctity of the world’s meritocratic capitalist elite and the needful, colorful peasant Poors that elites must patronize.

What is cosmopolitanism, as we currently understand it? It’s self-celebratory accumulator-class parochialism hiding behind a peasant’s skirts. Jantelagen, inclusive of its cautionary self-critique, is much more sociologically-grounded, inclusive justice, politically uniting the 99%. The relative weakness of 99% internationalism is that it has a harder time securing patronage.

A side note on Jantelagen and marketing:

Anglo-American naive narcissism makes for an easy marketing environment, to be sure; but the Scandinavians manage to consume a lot in their own way. Pay attention to their motivator: public life. They get ideas for how to consume by walking around in the streets, looking at each other, and by dropping in their local design shops.

Notes on theoretical relations:

Durkheim’s work on solidarity produces the Goldilocks principle: There’s a “just right” level of social accountability that results in diminished anomie. By comparison, the social democratic society, per Pasi Sahlberg, distinguishes and privileges low-inequality, lateral relations of responsibility rather than the servant relations of accountability that predominate in conservative and liberal societies. While both are about social integration, responsibility permits widespread human development; accountability permits top-down control. Resuscitating Antienlightenment epistemology, Foucauldian philosophy fails to make this distinction.

Compare & contrast Durkheim’s Goldilocks theory of accountability with Carl Schmitt’s theory on The Enemy (1932). Per Agamben’s (2005) critical analysis, in the overly-controlling, authoritarian regime that conservative legal theoretician Schmitt favors, there is low tolerance for deviance, and it’s the state’s job to destroy people who diverge from the strictly-policed, rigid norms within the nation-state territory. Genocide is the population-regulation business of the state.

Conservative Schmittian, genocidal extreme-integration theory emerges out of the “crisis” experience of Germanic territories struggling to reorganize and catch up to Anglo capitalism in the wake of the collapse of 19th century absolutism and empires; but well-fit for militarized societies, it has also been extended and adopted into the legal systems of neoliberalizing imperial societies such as the influential, policy-exporting 20th-21st century US, and it extends as well to invasive colonial regimes that cannot tolerate pre-existing ways of life and modes of production, and the people and cultures who carry them or their memory.

Because they require discipline and performance out of their lowest ranks, militarized societies do not jettison human development in favor of elite Excellence and meritocracy, as less-militarized conservative and capitalist liberal societies do; but in militarized societies, human development is managed strictly within the constraints of absolute inegalitarianism. Lower-order life is developed only to the point that it is efficient to manage.

By contrast, socialist-influenced societies privilege universal human development in contextual balance over time, per philosophical materialism. This kind of developmentalism requires a distinctive network of built institutions and cultures. Consider the social democratic lagom ideal: Egalitarian solidarity is recognized as a crucial achievement of social democratic social order requiring coordinated reproduction, especially as it clashes with the inegalitarian capitalist context. However, socialism-backed social democracy is not maintained with belligerent rigidity as is capitalist conservatism. In social democracies, the Jantelagen critique culturally polices and limits the culture of solidarity to integrate difference and flex social boundaries.

The Jantelagen critique is a cultural resource, a fable that reminds Nordic social democrats to provide some accommodation for very prideful, different individuals, because people change in interaction and sometimes even destroyers (tricksters) may on the off-chance, nonlinearly contribute to society. After all, sometimes social relations, institutions, policies, and practices need to be destroyed to make room for improvement. The Jantelagen fable is functionally related to (it’s a more resentful, less fun version of) the role of tricksters, such as Loki, in an egalitarian society’s cosmology.

Of course, not all destruction is creative (Mazzucato, Mariana. 2013. “Financing innovation: creative destruction vs. destructive creation.” Industrial and Corporate Change, Volume 22, Number 4, pp. 851–867). And not all destruction is needed to make room for improvement. Recall Deweyian education for democratic development and Rousseauian General Will theories, as they theorize, contra Hobbes, how to reproduce democratic societies, as for example by institutionalizing in education democratic exchanges of information, ideas, and grievances, as well as cultivating the disposition to exchange information, ideas, and grievances.

The question is: How do we reproduce democratic achievements, where one or more inegalitarians prefer to, and has the capacity to, trash them and erect a warlord order in their place? Liberalism has a handful of facile, empirically-defunct answers, such as occasional, constrained rituals electing “representatives” from two capitalists’ patronage parties. We have to look to sustained egalitarian traditions to find real answers.

For example, in 2011 conservative, sociopathic mass-murderer Anders Breivik (who changed his name to Fjotolf Hansen, as his extremely-destructive actions crushed his father) slaughtered 69 children at a Social Democratic Party summer camp and 8 adults, in an effort to take advantage of and break the social democratic solidarity-Jantelagen balance. Breivik/Fjotolf wanted to destroy humans carrying social democratic social and cultural capital, and install instead a more intolerant, anti-solidaristic, inegalitarian conservative social order. Fjotolf provided a perfect example of how sustaining democracy requires boundaries. He was a genius, from a conservative perspective, advancing an idea that demanded the dismantling of the consensus democratic social order, and successfully obliterated part of the Social Democratic party’s reproduction. Because not all destruction is needed or beneficial, societies require protections for accumulated social achievements. Yet, though inegalitarians wish to elide this, democratic societies and inegalitarian societies have qualitatively-distinctive limits, as well as qualitatively-distinctive methods of policing boundaries. The distinction is presented at a micro-level (parenting) in Durrant, J & A. Stewart-Tufescu. 2017. “What is ‘Discipline’ in the age of Children’s Rights?” International Journal of Children’s Rights 25: 359-379.

An inegalitarian can assert that in “merely” slaughtering and excluding egalitarians (including with economic death and torturing and killing bodies and burning books, as is standard in inegalitarian regimes, see the Portguese slavery colonialism example in Taiwo 2022. As well, recall that by definition, the egalitarian’s/peasant’s/slave’s/woman’s/ecological community’s life is worth nothing, is counter to inegalitarian justice, so the cost of this violent obliteration is nil.), inegalitarianism preserves the joyful dance of the open possibilities valorized by idealist philosophy (centering the justice of the otherwise-marginalized unborn, preserving priests’ absolute sexually-fluid sovereignty, clearing out and constraining nonelites so that monks have the unalloyed sovereignty and societal resources to launch Renaissance). Inegalitarians insist that because egalitarianism cannot include conservative-genius action, it harbors no possibility for indeterminacy; thus, in inegalitarians’ philosophy, egalitarianism is the most totalitarian governance framework.

In Norway, the protective measure the state took was to (comfortably) imprison Breivik/Fjotolf as long as he maintained his sociopathic conviction that the democratic accumulation (institutionalization) of social democratic achievements, and the people whose dispositions reproduce those achievements, must be destroyed. In effect, in a social democracy, an implementing (but not theorizing) Carl Schmitt has to be imprisoned. However, notice that egalitarian imprisonment limits torturing the thinking body. Inegalitarian boundary policing–including Red Hunts and the lifelong torture of radicalized Muslims by the CIA in Guantanamo– embraces torture, economic death, social death, and murder, and can do so ethically because egalitarians have no recognized positive value in inegalitarianism. Whereas inegalitarians retain marginal value in egalitarianism, per the Jantelagen moral fable.

Another option that some societies have pursued is to export to a more consanguine society their members who want to destroy and replace the social order. Socialist Cuba, for example, allowed Cubans committed to exploitative/expropriative conservatism to emigrate and build a new, 100% conservative Florida community within the conservative-liberal, inegalitarian US.

A third option that other societies with lots of territory have pursued is to export intransigent members to labor in a remote region, as when the Soviet Union sent dissidents to work in Siberia, or when the conservative-liberal British Empire sent its criminalized working class men to labor in its far-off Australian colony. Monarchist extremists were transferred from the US to Canada, though political and territorial room was maintained for elite slaver monarchists. Their descendants used that inclusion to expand their inegalitarian justice telos in collaboration with the US military and police after WWII. By exclusively imposing a boundary on democracy and democrats after Shea’s Rebellion and with the rise of the Federalist bankers, and by failing to place a boundary on inegalitarianism and inequality (slavery and banking), US leadership killed off the reproduction of democracy in favor of the reproduction of oligarchy, exploitation and expropriation. After WWII, the collaboration of capitalists, capitalists’ political parties, and the US military rewarded soldiers and other men for three decades, while arranging the efficient abandonment of democratic infrastructure.

As Durkheim demonstrated, humans need society. But what kind? How integrated? No matter what kind of society, it has to have boundaries. However, as we see above, “boundaries” can range from the highly-intolerant and life-discounting, exclusionary, carceral and genocidal law and policy of the imperial state to a social democratic state that both preserves a positive-status “trickster” role for the dissident and incarcerates individuals comfortably when they presume the powers of a genocidal imperial state.