Jante Law right here.
Janteloven is a set of rules,
that supposedly dictates how you should behave.
You’re not to think you’re anything special.
You mustn’t think you’re good at anything.
Thou shalt not think you are better than me.
You’re not to think you can teach us anything.
Everyone knows what it is,
and they know what they should do if they want to fit in.
And they also know what will happen if they don’t fit in.
It’s a way of…
And, maybe there is something in that
that has created these incredibly successful societies.
I’m pretty sure there is no Scandinavian utopia
but to the extent that there is one,
I’m sure that janteloven is a part of it
because what people often fail to realise
is that you can’t have it both ways –
complete individuality,
where everyone just ignores the rules,
and still have a harmonious, equal society.
It doesn’t work that way – so you get to choose.
I’ve felt it a lot of times,
and I think most people do.
The cosmopolitan Scandinavians love to say,
“Jante Law, that’s something for the people out in the provinces,”
but it exists in every city as well.
And that affects the choice of cars that people buy,
it affects how they dress,
it affects how they behave…
The British society has a class distinction
where you can do a lot of things because you’re rich,
or because you have a background,
whilst janteloven is trying to say, “No you can’t,
because we’re a lot of people here,
and we get to decide the rules, not you alone.”
Jante Law started off as a work of fiction.
I think it’s translated as A Fugitive…
…Thank you…
A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks.
As a satire on small-town Scandinavia in the 1930s,
it was part of a novel by Aksel Sandemose.
This is Aksel,
this is my grandmother,
and here is one of the mistresses.
He is my grandfather,
and he was an author.
He was drinking a lot,
he was not very nice to his children and wives.
And here is Aksel when he heard the name Jante.
He called the town Jante,
but it was based on Nykjobing.
He thought about the mentality that he felt there was there
and crystallised it in this concept of janteloven.
Anything you do that seems out of the ordinary, or ambitious,
or not conforming,
would be punished, by the community looking down on that.
Now, he meant it as a satire,
over time, over the decades
it’s almost become like…
an informal Scandinavian Ten Commandments.
The satire aspect has almost been forgotten,
and people kind of think it is how they should behave.
I want to do my own stuff, in my own way,
and not be labelled as an outcast.
“You’re not like any other girls,
you’re not like typical Norwegians.”
No, we’re not.
I think it can become sort of a prison,
because you don’t encourage
greatness.
How many people would want to belong to a vision like that?
Jante Law is something that we’re stuck with inside of us.
I think it’s always there.
That way of thought, may well simply be so deeply embedded,
maybe it won’t go away.
The interesting thing I think,
is that every society has those social stigmas.
The great thing about janteloven
is it forces you to think about what those unspoken rules might be,
that govern your life.
And so there’s the first road to freedom,
and getting away from those rules.
What you should do, is choose those that make the better society,
and those janteloven that we have,
which is, ” you shouldn’t think you’re better than everyone else,”
is probably the best way of organising a society.
If you could click your fingers right now and Jante Law would all go away,
would you do it?
No.
