The Law of Jante, a Nordic Specialty: It Grants You Equal Satisfaction, and Forbids You Ever to Stand Out

An equality with no privilege — and an equality with a touch of force in it. In a society ruled by collectivism, everyone is a victim.

For a long time, First World countries have treated the Nordic region as an answer book for every stubborn problem. Wondering which home design is most fashionable? Look at what Scandinavian style does. Not sure where your city's transformation should go? Take a look at the Copenhagen model. Life feels unhappy and not worth living? Get acquainted with Hygge, the secret to a happy life.

They have minimalist design, the most livable cities, the soundest welfare systems, and they top resident satisfaction and happiness rankings year after year — they have all the glow of "the perfect kid next door." Yet their image stays blurry, pieced together from hearsay: supposedly everyone there knows the secret to a happy life, and yet they also have one of the highest rates of depression in the world; they love parties, and they are also famously socially anxious. So what exactly makes them different?

What actually governs Scandinavia — defining it and tormenting it at the same time — is a secret every Nordic person feels in the bone and few outsiders understand. The secret is called the Law of Jante. It is the code to the Nordic character and the social-psychological bedrock of the welfare state; it is also, some argue, the reason the Nordic countries are so dully mediocre.

The Law of Jante was first laid out by the Danish-born Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandemose in his 1933 satirical novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. In it he invented a Danish town called Jante, modeled on his own hometown of Nykøbing Mors. It was a typical Danish community, and the unwritten demands its residents made of one another became what we now call the Law of Jante — these ten rules:

1. You're not to think you are anything special.

2. You're not to think you are as good as we are.

3. You're not to think you are smarter than we are.

4. You're not to convince yourself that you are better than we are.

5. You're not to think you know more than we do.

6. You're not to think you are more important than we are.

7. You're not to think you are good at anything.

8. You're not to laugh at us.

9. You're not to think anyone cares about you.

10. You're not to think you can teach us anything.

The novel adds an eleventh line, treated as part of the Jante code: Don't think we don't know a few things about you.

Under these rules, doing anything out of the ordinary, refusing to follow convention, or openly showing personal ambition was improper. Any resident of Jante who broke them drew suspicion and hostility from everyone else, and could even be seen as a threat to the harmony and stability the collective maintained.

Sandemose did not invent the Law of Jante. He summed up, too precisely and a little cruelly, a Danish peasant-farming tradition that prized the collective and pushed individual achievement down. Nor is it only a Danish matter. The Law of Jante is widely recognized outside Denmark too: Norwegians know it well, and in Sweden it also does real work in holding social norms in place.

Critics still attack its effects in the press. Writing in 2016, Christopher Follett, a reporter for the Copenhagen Post, called it the collectivist ghost riding the Danes — the thing that turns geniuses into mediocrities and makes a whole country dull. The Economist once proposed a Yawn Index to measure how boring a country is, and Denmark, first in the happiness rankings, also ranked near the top of this one, and once took first place. Follett's reading of the law's core message: intelligence will not make you a more remarkable person.

The Law of Jante is a Nordic version of tall poppy syndrome, or of the saying that the nail sticking out gets hammered down. Inside the group, everyone knows your business, everyone has a view on what you ought to be doing, and any attempt to rise above the rest is killed off early.

But all of this seems to belong to the past — a "national character flaw" written into a novel a century ago. So much time has passed. Denmark has since given the world Lego and Carlsberg; Sweden has Spotify and Ikea. Does this expired ghost still hold their citizens?

"Screw Janteloven" — To Hell With the Law of Jante

People say they have thrown off the Law of Jante — at least according to everything we could find.

Michael Booth, a Monocle columnist and the author of The Almost Nearly Perfect People: The Truth About the Nordic Miracle, says that if you raise the Law of Jante with a Dane today, you will probably get an eye-roll and a deep sigh, and be told it is a backward thing from the past, long since extinct.

When Booth went to Nykøbing, the model for the town of Jante, looking for some trace of it, all he came up with was one rather strained piece of evidence: the local shop names are extremely plain. "The barbershop is bluntly named 'Barber,' the bar is just called 'Bar,' the shop selling clothes and shoes boldly grabs the attention of passersby with the dazzling name 'Clothes and Shoes,' and the bookstore is called Bog Handler, meaning 'bookseller.'" Booth reads the locals' refusal to give their businesses loud, distinctive names as a physical trace of life still lived under the Law of Jante — though the town is small, and if only one business works a given trade, there is nothing strange about not needing a name to tell it apart from the competition.

On social media, when young Danes want to announce something great they have done or a prize they have won, they have started tagging it "Screw Janteloven" (to hell with the Law of Jante). In Norway someone even put up a tombstone for the Law of Jante, announcing that it died in 2005.

It looks as though people really have said goodbye to it. Look a little longer, though, and you find it rooted deep in Nordic culture, still binding people in another guise — sometimes even as mutual encouragement.

Before I left for Denmark, I watched a video on Bilibili of a Danish girl studying in Beijing, listing "five things I can do in China but not in Denmark." One was putting a blinged-out phone case on her phone. In Denmark, a case with an unusual shape or bright colors gets you looked at sideways; people generally use no case at all, or a minimalist one.

A perfect case of Jante-law damage: you always have to be careful not to make yourself too visible. I assumed most people, asked about the Law of Jante, would grumble along these lines. The answers surprised me. Not "the Law of Jante keeps us from expressing ourselves or chasing our own achievements," but "it taught us to be modest, low-key people."

"You're No Better Than Anyone Else, So Don't Show Off"

When we got to Denmark and stopped people at random in Copenhagen and Odense to ask what they made of the Law of Jante, almost everyone pulled the same face — "Ah, the Law of Jante! That one's a bit awkward to talk about" — and then gave roughly the same answer. To them, the Law of Jante is mainly a rule of conduct: you're no better than anyone else, so don't show off.

Von Plast, who works part-time recycling plastics at Raffen, a creative market that opened recently in Copenhagen, told us: "In Denmark, bragging about yourself is very rude, and that's the core of the Law of Jante. You can't go around telling people you're pretty good at something, because someone will always challenge you on it. Staying as modest as possible is never wrong."

He agreed that the law is still at work in daily Danish life. In the business pages of Danish newspapers, for instance, "articles about business leaders always put more weight on how they balance work and life, how they've built good relationships — not, like CEOs in other countries, going on about their business achievements and how they plan to make more money."

Showing off wealth is the worst taboo of all. Annabell Pejah Bennekow, sunbathing by the harbor through her summer holiday, explained: "You can't show that you're rich or successful, or people will assume you must have broken the law to get it. Denmark is famous for high taxes and a small wealth gap, everyone earns about the same and gets about the same opportunities — so why should you get more than me?" Even the royal family is bound by it: post luxury goods on Instagram and they get accused of squandering taxpayers' money. None of which means you can't be ambitious, or build wealth by your own effort. There is just one rule: never show off.

Danes are not the only ones who read the law this way. Xiao Wei, at the Funen tourist board, is a Chinese immigrant who came to study in Denmark years ago and stayed. Her understanding of the Law of Jante is that because "you're not much better than anyone else," flaunting wealth or showing off does not exist in Denmark. Every Dane is modest on the inside and lives a self-sufficient life with no need to measure up against anyone; what matters instead is whether a thing suits you.

Anne Katrine Harders, a senior project manager at the Danish Architecture Center (DAC) who studies bicycle culture and urban planning, cleared up my confusion. The way we use the phrase "Law of Jante" today, she said, is probably very different from the way it was first put forward. Originally it was ten specific rules, but ask a Dane at random now and they most likely couldn't tell one from another (true). The line that has been reinforced is: don't think you're better than us, don't brag about yourself, don't show off where you live, what you've bought, your class, your kid's IQ, and so on.

Everyone still has their own unspoken markers of status. In Denmark those markers just have little to do with money and much more to do with how you live. In Copenhagen, riding a cargo bike — a bicycle with a pram-like box fitted to the front — to drop your child at daycare is a status symbol: it says you're from Copenhagen, that you've kept a low profile, that you've protected the environment on the way, and that you've made the wisest choice for yourself and your child. Owning an expensive car is not.

We were talking near Nyhavn, one of Copenhagen's most famous sights, and Harders said that driving around here, or in the neighborhood where she lives, would be humiliating: "It would make me look really stupid." A local friend of hers bought a car because of where his job was, and got mocked for it for a long time; people thought that living in Copenhagen and still having to drive was idiotic.

Harders thinks this present-day version of the Law of Jante, the one that keeps people modest, is a good thing. She is in fact planning to write an article in its defense, because it is under pressure from other countries' cultures, the American Dream among them. Plenty of people now say: I don't want to be bound by the Law of Jante, I want to achieve my great ambitions, I want to show the world who I am. She thinks this needs care. From society's point of view, people who know how to listen to each other do far more good than people who talk about themselves without stopping.

But this is a long way from the ten narrow, ugly rules we started with. How did the Law of Jante turn from a piece of critical satire into a cultural norm Scandinavians consciously protect?

No One Holds Privilege at the Level of the System

Kim Orlin Kantardjiev, a Norwegian politician and education advisor, says that although it began as an object of satire, the Law of Jante is now treated in schools as a social norm that encourages teamwork; because it puts the individual behind the collective interest, it also gets credit for the equality and harmony of the Nordic region.

Asked for an example, Lis Poulenc, a grandmother out for a walk near Queen Louise's Bridge, remembered the summer she was eight and her parents took her to Jutland, then a relatively poor part of the country. She was a girl from the capital, and her parents warned her that she was no different from the people there, that she was not to look down on them, that she should talk to them kindly — even though the accent was such that she couldn't understand a single word they said.

Our guide in Copenhagen, James Li, is from Shanghai and has lived in Denmark for 20 years. While we were touring the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, he offered an example off the cuff: the Law of Jante means nobody has privileges. Even if the Queen were touring alongside us at that moment, she'd have to queue to get in.

Everyone is equal; no one holds privilege at the level of the system. Turned into welfare policy, this belief in equality really is reassuring. The education you get and the treatment you receive are equal; when you see a doctor at the hospital you'll be treated fairly too. Everyone is the same.

It may even be one reason Denmark and its neighbors score so high on happiness indices. In a Quartz report, Lindsay Dupuis, a clinician living in Copenhagen, says that "everyone is the same, you're nothing special" lowers what people expect: reaching the average is enough to satisfy them, and they ask for no more, so that when something above average does come their way, they are especially happy.

Danes grow up inside these rules from childhood. Kay Xander Mellish, in her podcast on what it is like to raise children in Denmark, says:

Danish schools work hard to build an environment without competition. There are no honors tracks, no elite Olympiad math classes, and no standardized tests or grade rankings before children turn 15 or 16. If a child is outstanding in one subject, their job is to help the kids who are learning more slowly. Children's social lives matter most: schools care about whether kids have made friends and how they get on with classmates, in the belief that if children feel comfortable in the school's social atmosphere, they will be happier to come to school, and their grades will rise accordingly.

And No One Truly Has the Freedom to Be Different

Grow up in an environment like this and the harder you try to shake off its influence, the more you see how deep it goes. Renate, a blogger, described her struggle against the Law of Jante in detail. Her rebellion was to hang her own paintings on her bedroom wall — but at first she was uneasy and kept wanting to take them down, afraid people would think she considered herself a good painter. Only later could she tell herself, "I really am good at painting." "So, screw you, Janteloven."

Her blog was the same. The first time an advertiser approached her about a partnership she was delighted and shared it with her boyfriend at once. Then she heard that he had told his friends, and Janteloven was prickling at her again. She couldn't stop asking herself: "What if people think I believe I completely deserve these partnerships? Am I being too proud?"

Only when you move from the "we" whose collective will the law shapes to the "you" who is trying to be different do you feel the social pressure it puts on people — an equality with a touch of force in it.

Almost every Dane, for example, plays some amateur sport. Tell a Danish friend you never exercise and they will be genuinely shocked, and then they will very kindly and very persistently invite you to join a thousand different sports. Everyone believes you ought to exercise, and that you should take up some sport, any sport, and become a "normal" member of the group like them.

Another example: Denmark seems to have certain household items every citizen must own, Kähler vases and PH lamps among them, and people dress much alike. If you are a woman, you most likely have a look built on skinny jeans, a black leather jacket, sneakers, and a messy bun. None of this is bad in itself; in every country people chase the same things. But in Denmark it means you can hardly ever spot someone who stands out. Allison, an American living in western Denmark, says she can count on her fingers the people she has seen in Denmark with bright hair, striking clothes, or an unusual tattoo or beard. Everyone works at not looking too different.

Locals are used to reasoning from "you're nothing special" to "so you shouldn't show off." But the point is not "don't show off." It is: don't draw attention to yourself, because if people find out you aren't so impressive after all, how embarrassing would that be?

Kjeld Meiling, our driver in Odense, said that if you want to start a small business, everyone around you, friends and family alike, is likely to keep pouring cold water on it, asking who you think you are and what makes you think you can pull it off.

Desiree, the lady of the Skjoldemose estate, runs exactly that kind of small business. She hosts tour groups at the estate, teaches people to make butter cookies, and has built a sizable high-ropes and zip-line course on her farm; plenty of Chinese tourists take it in as a stop on their route through Odense, Hans Christian Andersen's hometown. But Desiree has never discussed the business with the relatives and friends around her. "You can't say, look how well I'm doing, and you can't act pleased about it. They'll only give you credit once they find out on their own that you're doing well. Otherwise you're just an obnoxious oddball."

"The Law of Jante isn't something we learned. It's part of our life," Desiree said. "We're not proud of it at all, not one bit. We even make fun of it ourselves. But the truth is, every one of us is a victim of it."

Illustrations: Zheng Shuya