Weekly Musings #16 Celebrating Jante
Weekly Musing #16 — Celebrating the Law of Jante.
If you hail from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, or Iceland, you are bound to be familiar with the Law of Jante.
In Sweden, we often consider this a Swedish concept, subject to harsh criticism and contempt, particularly among entrepreneurs and startups for the past 30 odd years. On the surface, the entrepreneurial culture and the Law of Jante seem to be polar opposites, akin to yin and yang or black and white.
In this week’s musing, I’d like to add some nuance to that image and propose that neither principle is entirely harmful, just as neither is completely beneficial.
And to be a bit provocative and make the pendulum swing, I want to celebrate Jante!
But before you rip my head off and call me a “commie”, let’s do our homework and explain the Law of Jante, shall we?
According to Wikipedia, the Law of Jante is:
“A code of conduct originating in fiction and now used colloquially to denote a social attitude of disapproval towards expressions of individuality and personal success. Created by the Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose, it has also come to represent the egalitarian nature of Nordic countries.
The “Law” was first formulated as ten rules in Sandemose’s satirical novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (En flyktning krysser sitt spor, 1933), but the attitudes themselves are older. Sandemose portrays the fictional small Danish town of Jante, modelled upon his native town Nykøbing Mors in the 1930s where nobody was anonymous, a feature of life typical of small towns.
There are ten rules in the law as defined by Sandemose, all expressive of variations on a single theme and usually referred to as a homogeneous unit: You are not to think you’re anyone special, or that you’re better than us.”
Here’s the twist for all the Swedes: it’s not Swedish!
It’s Danish, named after a non-existent, fictional town in Denmark.
But, as the definition highlights, these attitudes are rooted in an older tradition of attitudes that are found in all Nordic countries.
Growing up in Sweden, the notion of “You are not to think you are anyone special or better than the rest of us” was deeply ingrained in society, bringing along its fair share of drawbacks.
It fostered jealousy, a “don’t make waves” mentality, and didn’t encourage people to express themselves and live as individuals. Failure was perceived as a personal disaster, and if you had tried to run a business and failed, maybe even gone bankrupt, you were stigmatized for life. Even if you managed to survive economically, the loss of face and reputation was enough to discourage anyone from trying again.
It simply fostered a risk-averse mindset.
Then in the 80s and 90s, we witnessed the rise of individualism. Everyone was encouraged to be “all they could be.” We started watching movies like Wall Street and began celebrating the “get rich quick” and “I am the most important person in my life” attitude, which, in moderation, can be healthy of course.
Encouraging people to take risks, develop themselves, strive for bigger goals, that’s all good.
However, I believe we have swung too far in the opposite direction. The pendulum that started swaying away from Jante’s side has swung entirely towards the other extreme. Over the past decade, we have witnessed a distasteful trend where everyone puts themselves first, prioritizing short-term wins over long-term visions, unless those visions center solely around their own personal (and often monetary) growth.
In the startup world, we started celebrating the notion of the lone hero, the formidable entrepreneur who managed to “win” and “beat” the competition and take home the trophy and prize money.
We began to glorify fundraising over doing actual business and satisfying customers. Customers were seen as headcount, a number in a chart depicting how much their life time value was, not people who you were there to serve.
Raising money became the norm, then raising even more money, and finally racing towards an IPO to cash in before the whole house of cards collapsed.
We even reached a point where we had a “unicorn constipation”, with too many rapidly growing companies passed around like a game of hot potato to the next investor until there was nowhere else to go but to launch an IPO.
This shift cultivated a completely different mindset; there was no sense of community, no “us”, no perception of oneself as part of something bigger.
You, and only you, mattered.
We started harvesting the fruits by cutting down the trees, without regard for the process of planting and long term cultivation that led to the fruit-bearing trees being there in the first place.
We had finally killed Jante.
In Norway, they even erected a gravestone for Jante, officially declaring it dead.
So then we can all sit back in our expensive villas and be happy and content?
Well, no, partly because that opposite extreme dictates never being content, never being happy with what you have because what you have is never enough.
The only other word as important as “me” is “more”.
And yet today many of the same people complain about society, wondering why healthcare is breaking down, arguing that the state needs to take a bigger responsibility and wished it worked as it used to (which is a totally romanticized image of a past that almost never was anyway) and them seem totally oblivious to that it’s the way they have reaped the harvest that put us here.
Oh you should have heard them during Covid, it was such a show, a bit like the banks demanding to be bailed out in bad times yet not lifting a finger themselves to help society when the times are good.
But more importantly, with the rise of the rich class, we are seeing a greater divide in society, never before have we had such economic inequality and all other inequalities that come with that divide.
So what do I propose? going back to the Jante society of the 70s?
Embracing communism? (as some would accuse me of).
No, of course not. Don’t be stupid.
What I am saying is that the world is not exclusively black or white.
There are always two sides to all stories.
When working with personal development, there’s an exercise called “The front of the medal,” which is a play on the Swedish expression “The back of the medal,” which in turn means that every good thing also has a downside (sounds like Jante, right? 😉).
The original expression can be translated to “the other side of the coin” or “the flip side.” However, you need the Swedish Jante version to emphasize the negative aspect 🙂.
In the mental exercise of “The front of the medal,” you list all your perceived negative traits, or what you believe others might list as your shortcomings. After that, you list the opposites, giving you a list of positive qualities directly connected to what you perceive as your negative traits.
This shows you that, just like a coin, the medal has two sides.
The world isn’t black or white; it’s not yin or yang. They are the extremes, the opposing forces.
So, what is Jante?
Jante merely an extreme opposite expression of the ultra-individualistic-care-only-for-yourself-and-ignore-everyone-else attitude.
Where one side argues, “Why should I pay taxes so others can benefit from what I have earned?” (often leading them setting up schemes so they don’t pay any tax all), then Jante will say, “Why do you need to earn that much money and if you do, you need to pay even more in tax than the others” (leading to people not being rewarded for working more or harder).
And one side sneering “If you can’t afford to send your kids to expensive schools (since all schools cost money right) it’s your fault for being a failure and a loser”, and then being countered by “You shouldn’t be able to pick a school, send your kids to the school they are assigned to”.
Neither extreme is wholesome.
Neither will create a society that has strong social cohesion and a sense of community, yet allows for individuals to express themselves, love whom they want, and to become what they want.
Yes, I know, the boring middle ground.
Yet, boring is often good.
Boring allows you to tell the difference when something fun happens. If everything is fun and games, you lose your ability to appreciate the smaller joys in life, to the point that you stop enjoying life itself.
Jante has many positive aspects, and in that sense, I love Jante.
With the “du” reform in Sweden, we did away with all the “Sir” and “Mr” titles and the more formal “Ni” form of addressing “you” and everyone became equals with no titles.
(No, not the Monty Python Ni, the Swedish Ni 🤣)
This also led to the first name (r)evolution, where everyone came to be on a first name basis with everyone else, no matter if it was your boss, your professor or the cashier in the supermarket, everyone was an equal.
We flattened our organizations (transformed them into IKEA-style flatpacks 😁) cut out middle-management and decentralized power. With more people in control and power to complete their tasks they also became more agile.
Critics argued that we spent too much time reaching consensus since everyone got to voice their opinion, yet, oh how creative and innovative we became and oh, how much more agile our organizations became when everyone, everywhere felt responsible for the end result.
We embraced a down-to-earth attitude, rarely starstruck.
Personally I still find it hard to feel starstruck when I meet supposed “stars.”
When people ask me who my idols or role models are, I never think of the celebrated lone hero entrepreneurs, since I consider them to be egocentric ********* and nothing I want to model my life after.
(That’s probably how they ended up where they are, and how I ended up where I am, but hey, it’s a choice I am happy with making.)
I usually mention my father, the surgeon or my mother, the nurse, people that spent their life giving service and actually helping people.
I even heard that Greta Thunberg has expressed appreciation for Jante since it lets her walk around in public in Sweden without being bothered, only here can she act and be treated like anyone else on the street.
Jante is simply the extreme version of a very strong “us”, where we all care for what is going on around us, where we all want to participate in building something for the collective.
Jante are the civil servants, the nurses, the teachers, the police officers and the others that goes to work, day in and day out, and are happy and pleased with doing a good job that benefits society, and that get paid a good enough salary to raise a family and own their own home, and where the rest of us consider them and their contribution well worth the taxes we pay to make it all work.
With that I want to celebrate Jante, or at least the more moderate version of it.
It is the foundation of an egalitarian, equal society, where anyone can become anything they want, where we are measured not for how we celebrate our strongest or the wealth of our individuals, but instead how we treat our weakest and and the health, happiness, and harmony of our people as a whole.
A society that encourages people to try and yes fail, because that’s the only way to learn and develop. And a society that backs us up when we fail, which we will, that will catch us and encourage us to get back up again.
We need to accept that the world is not black or white, not yin or yang, but infinite shades of grey.
So yes, I’m proudly celebrating Jante.
Let’s start talking about Jante again, but this time not as a bogeyman, but as a beacon to lead us to balance between individuality and community spirit.
