Gaslighting Danes

From time to time I am asked to give a talk to companies or institutions about the five Nordic tribes - introducing them to each other, and to the other nationalities present - or, as is more often here in Denmark, just focussing on the Danes. 

Who are you, and why? Why are you so good at everything, to the point where it gets frankly annoying? What is the best way to approach a Dane (I usually suggest ‘bring strong alcohol and Haribo’)? Why do you suddenly get so angry when you ride your bicycles? That kind of thing.

I also talk about whether the Danes are really as happy and trustworthy as you say you are: my take is you are happy without ever actually being happy. It's a eudaemonic vs hedonistic thing; you are ‘satisfied’, like someone who has managed to unload the dishwasher in the time it took the kettle to boil-kind of way, rather than uninhibitedly ‘joyous’ in a sombrero-tossing, Snoopy-dancing, heel-clicking-down-the-street-kind of a way. As for the trust thing: there is a difference between being ‘trusting’ of other Danes, and actually being ‘trustworthy’ in the real world, a difference which your mink farmers, waste management companies and political leaders are these days so effective at illustrating. 

I gave one of these talks for the the Australian and British ambassadors and their guests in Copenhagen recently. It was the day after the United Nations published their latest global happiness ranking, and the Danes were once again in second place, this year clawing their way even closer to the first-ranked Finns.

(Permit me a brief side-bar here: the fact that the Finns, who are arguably the most dour people on earth after, I don’t know, Glaswegians, have been number one of the UN’s happiest list for the past few years, seems to fatally undermine any shred of credibility in this self-reported survey. It’s as if the Japanese self-identified as the most gregarious, or the Russians named themselves the most peaceable people.)

As usual, I finished my talk with a quiz to find the most Danish person in the room - Question 3: “It is 2.30pm on a Friday afternoon. Are you still at work?” - and then opened up for questions and a discussion. Something one woman said during the latter stuck with me. She was an Australian, and rather than ask a question, gave a long, heartfelt speech about how difficult she had found it to make friends with Danes, how coldly she was treated by the Danish mothers at the school gates and so on, concluding that she had been gaslit by the Danes.

“They make me feel like, ‘This is how we do things in Denmark, and this is the best country in the world, the happiest people, there must be something wrong with you if you don’t agree’,” she said.

Had she really been gaslit by an entire nation. I wondered afterwards as I drove home. Was that even possible?

I suspect that many people feel a bit like that if they go to live in another country, especially if they marry into a local family with strong traditions and fixed ways of doing things. I felt a bit that way with my Danish wife’s family at first (can it really be true that, on Funen, English people are not allowed to speak after 9pm? I am still in doubt). And there must be an even greater sense of isolation if you move to another country without knowing any natives. 

So the more I thought about it, the more I have come to think, yes, being gaslit by a nation could definitely be a thing. After all, what was the whole British empire if not a monstrous, global gas-lighting enterprise? “No, no, we are not here for your material- and human resources, we come have to civilise you with cricket and trains and our laws. Aren’t you grateful? No, well, pipe down anyway. You will be in the long run.”

And America’s twin propaganda machines, Hollywood and Madison Avenue - the movie and advertising industries - what were they if not the most successful gas-lighting operations in the history of mankind, persuading everyone from Ireland to India, not to mention the Americans themselves, and all those huddled masses who clawed their way to the shores of the the US, that the American Dream was within their grasp? 

I suppose it might have been once but, these days, not so much.

Which actually brings me back to Denmark because, if any country can claim to offer its inhabitants, and even new arrivals something resembling the American dream, that anyone, regardless of their background, or class, or who their parents are, or even - at a push perhaps - their race or religious persuasion - can self-actualise, can use the relatively flat playing field of free, reasonable quality education in order to fulfil their potential, then it is Denmark. This is the real land of opportunity.

Perhaps it is best, though, that I didn’t say any of this to the woman in the audience at my talk. I suspect it might have pushed her over the edge. 

But I would encourage her to stick with Denmark at least little longer. With Novo Nordisk making you even richer, your seas now entirely cleared of any threatening wildlife, and of course the new Rejsekort App which is sure to work flawlessly, there has to be a good chance that, next year, the Danes may well pip the Finns to the Number one spot as the world’s self-reported happiest people.