On Danish Exceptionalism

Metadata

• Author: Ed West
• Full Title: On Danish Exceptionalism
• Category: #articles
• Summary: Denmark is a unique and progressive country known for its happiness, equality, and strong national identity. Danish social norms prioritize open dialogue, and the country has strict immigration policies aimed at preserving its cultural cohesion. Despite criticism and controversy, Denmark remains committed to maintaining its distinct Danish identity and values.
• URL: https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/on-danish-exceptionalism?r=d63vk&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

Highlights

• Denmark’s happiness, relative equality and sense of cohesion will never be imitated by Britain, let alone the United States. Denmark is like it is because it’s full of Danes — and they’re quite keen on keeping it that way. (View Highlight)
• Sociologists sometimes talk of ‘tight and loose societies’, the latter defined by lower feelings of outside threat and therefore higher generosity and liberalism, and Denmark is the loosest of loose. But such high levels of trust depend on strong external barriers. (View Highlight)
• This is even true of the Danish idea of hygge, comfort or cosiness, which as Richard Jenkins wrote in Being Danish, is ‘doubled-edged: it is necessarily exclusionary, because there are always boundaries to a magic circle’. Hygge does not scale. (View Highlight)
  • Note: Hygge does not scale
• ‘The metropolitan skilled found that they got more esteem from the identity conferred by their job than by their nationality and withdrew from shared identity with their less fortunate citizens. They justified their selfishness by transferring their regard to the immigrants coming to the metropolis: these, not their fellow-citizens, were the needy. Non-reciprocal concern for the entitlements of immigrants displaced reciprocal obligations to citizens just as it became time for those obligations to be met. (View Highlight)
• since the sort of personality type with socially egalitarian views doesn’t tend to feel comfortable with nationalism (View Highlight)
  • Note: High dimensional value signals summarized correctly, vs. value personas interpreted without approp dimensions
• the Danes are happy because they are largely surrounded by other Danes, and they consider their future wellbeing dependent on that continuing, something that somehow surprises the English-speaking media. ‘Why is the world’s second-happiest country so averse to immigration?’ the *Economist*recently asked, sort of answering its own question. (View Highlight)
• no getting to Denmark without Danes. (View Highlight)