Who would have thought I would be writing so much about the social situation of the Nordic countries? Maybe it is because they are heading for tragedy and tragedies are fascinating. This latest was inspired by a comment Kelly made that pointed to an article in the Atlantic about how the Danes are always at or very close to the very top of the self-identified happiness list. This interesting article says it ain’t so:
A surprising number of Danes agree with me, though: They also think their homeland is stultifyingly dull. Newspaper columnist Anne Sophia Hermansen, of the broadsheet Berlingske, caused a small kerfuffle recently when she expressed her feelings about what she saw as Denmark’s suffocating monoculture: “It is so boring in Denmark. We wear the same clothes, shop in the same places, see the same TV, and struggle to know who to vote for because the parties are so alike. We are so alike it makes me weep.”
Another prominent newspaper commentator, Jyllands-Posten’s Niels Lillelund, pinpointed a more serious side effect of the Danes’ Jante Law mentality: “In Denmark we do not raise the inventive, the hardworking, the ones with initiative, the successful or the outstanding; we create hopelessness, helplessness, and the sacred, ordinary mediocrity.”
I suppose there is nothing wrong with such a monolithic culture. I certainly grew up in such a culture here in Oregon. This really reminds me of the current zeitgeist of the establishment educational mono-culture in the west. I do not think anything is improved with the very specific kinds of acceptable “diversity” of race, artificial gender boundaries and political thought enforced in so many draconian ways in so many of the universities in the western world today. That kind of diversity is not really diverse. It creates a false knowledge about what is “right” coupled with a grating smugness that will be the death of western culture unless something is done to change it.
I believe in absolute truth. There is a right way to think and be. When a culture, whether it be that of the Danes or an entire educational system is monolithically wrong about what is right and demand that others conform to their sense of it all, unhappiness well ensue. It might not be in the short term, but it will happen.
There is a quote from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle that pretty much captures these ideas, “No! Alike and equal are not the same thing at all!”
Betty Blonde #308 – 09/22/2009
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