You Can't Have Denmark Without Danes

The trust that Danes have towards other people is slowly eroding, and it is making us increasingly xenophobic. It&#x27;s not that there aren&#x27;t criminal or untrustworthy Danes, of cause there is, but it&#x27;s easier to blame outsiders, like immigrants and roaming eastern European gangs.<p>As the article points out, we&#x27;re struggling to absorb outsiders. Teaching a Romanian immigrant, or a refugee from the middle east that it&#x27;s completely safe to trust others is extremely hard. Likewise when an outsider break that trust Danes become extremely upset and hostile.<p>We&#x27;re also becoming increasingly distrusting of other Danes, as people seem to become increasingly self-centred. This was a debate in a radio show a few weeks ago, sadly the reason wasn&#x27;t discussed, only the danger of losing trust. Trust is hard to build, and our government is increasingly looking towards control and surveillance to ensure safety instead. Stores are moving certain items up to the register, because thieve simply walk out with entire boxes of Nutella or instant coffee.<p>As a Dane this is extremely disheartening to watch. The feeling that the safe, stable, equal and embracing society, you grew up in, is slowly evaporating isn&#x27;t a pleasant one.

I&#x27;ve been a fan of the Scandinavian model for government for a while, and I used to be one of those guys who would say something like &quot;in NORWAY they blah blah blah&quot; when discussing some social&#x2F;governmental in a small group.<p>But later on I realized more deeply that Norway is a tiny fraction of the population of the USA as well as a very culturally (and let&#x27;s face it, racially) homogeneous population.<p>Similar arguments can be made about Denmark, of course.

Being from Denmark, but living in the US now, I see the main problem with Denmark that a lot of people are complacent. While the system works now, I doubt it will be positive in the long run. We are not hungry enough, and for too many people right now it isn&#x27;t worth it to work (Too little difference between working wage and welfare).<p>Again, this is just a few negative statements, there are lot of positive areas (Free hospitals and education comes to mind). If we could just be less complacent we would have a lot better future.

I notice the absorption of outsiders is portrayed as a goal, implying that it&#x27;s an unalloyed good, beyond question. Is there some good reason to think that? I mean America prides itself on it, but is there any good reason to think that (for example) Danes should be responsible for non-Danes? Or on a basic level, what&#x27;s wrong with having places exist in the world where the people there are mostly from there? Isn&#x27;t that what a nation is? And wouldn&#x27;t the people of such a place tend to exercise their sovereignty to decide, based on whatever criteria they want to use, how many and which people they allow to join the club? I dunno... Sure wish we could have a rational discussion about it, without it degenerating into nationalist race-baiting on the one side and jumping to conclusions and cries of xenophobia on the other.

I think you see these effects in microcosm throughout the US as well. I grew up in Wisconsin and there were definitely many similarities:<p>* Campfire wood for sale next to the highway with an unlocked mailbox for your payment (everyone else&#x27;s payment just sitting there...). * Car stuck in the snowbank? Every time it happened to me, the very first car to come along has stopped to help dig it out. * At least in rural areas: many people did not lock their doors. Why would they? No need to.<p>Definitely the best piece of writing I have seen in some time about one of the Scandinavian countries that American liberals (of which I count myself a member) always hold up as ideals. The model only works in the context of a society that doesn&#x27;t _need_ as much assistance, regulation, or policing. The author makes a persuasive argument that high levels of trust are an important, or maybe the defining feature of this society.

You can have perfect trains and bicycles everywhere or you can invent jazz and snowboarding. You can&#x27;t do both.<p>As someone who lives in the US but does business, and travels, in Europe frequently, I would prefer that the immigrants come to the melting pot (the US) and that the European countries retain their distinctiveness.

I wonder why five islamic terrorist attacks didn&#x27;t seem to have any impact on Denmark, while France and Germany have escalated their police states to incredible levels. Is it also because of all the trust? Do people in Denmark maybe trust that the police will catch the perpetrators, while we in Germany know that the Police no longer even tries to catch petty thieves and could never be trusted to avoid a terrorist plot?

A tangential concept that might be of interest to the commenters is the Arabic term &quot;asabiyyah&quot; [0]:<p>&gt;`Asabiyya or asabiyyah (Arabic: عصبيّة) refers to social solidarity with an emphasis on unity, group consciousness and sense of shared purpose, and social cohesion,[1] originally in a context of &quot;tribalism&quot; and &quot;clanism&quot;.<p>The 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun talked about it in a cyclical sense, related to rise and fall of civilizations, and had dire descriptions about when societies lost asabiyyah.<p>In general, it&#x27;s a sort of group feeling or solidarity, a sense that you and those around you are on the same side and have each other&#x27;s backs -- as opposed to a society where you don&#x27;t know your neighbors and you just happen to live among a bunch of other people who have no aligned interests or goals. Even the so-called &quot;rugged individualism&quot; mythos of early pioneer&#x2F;settler American colonists still was embedded in nested layers of communal structure, layers that can seem invisible when you&#x27;re constantly immersed in it.<p>What I think makes this and the Denmark article interesting is that they&#x27;re trying to point at a concept that is inherently fuzzy and qualitative (how do you measure units of social cohesion?), and yet seems to play an important role in how a social system works. Tweaking a policy knob here or adjusting a legislative knob there may have influences on this, but the possible effects are constrained and filtered through the ever-present culture. Everything is part of the system (think about the laws we have in which implicit expectation of selective enforcement is what makes it even functional, like speeding). People are both code (their DNA) and its expression in the environment (epigenetics). Programming teams are both the tools they use (IDEs, source control, Agile, etc) and the fuzzy culture that makes it work well in Company A and fail utterly when trying to apply it to Company B.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asabiyyah" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asabiyyah</a>

The internet is trumping geography. As we live progressively more of our lives online, we interact with progressively more different people. It becomes progressively less important how much trust we have for our meatspace neighbors. Most of us have had oodles of conversations and economic transactions with people on other continents while the people next door remain strangers.<p>With all of that online interacting, global interpersonal trust may rise, but won&#x27;t approach Danish levels in our lifetimes. We cannot base our social systems on trust. But we can base them on transparency, which, eventually, builds trust.

High trust societies are the way they are because of genetic traits of its citizens. Especially in Scandinavian and other northern countries for tens of thousands of years the individual was only able to survive the long winter when it was able to think ahead and to cooperate in large groups. Like the skin color that fact must have some evolutionary impact for behavior. However those are things of the past. Bringing in migrants from low trust societies will once and for all destroy this culture of trust. Every integration measure so far has failed the past and will fail in the future as long as people ignore the fact that it takes certain strictly inheritable traits to be part of those communities.

Denmark is not the only country we should be comparing to. What about Canada and New Zealand? Both Anglosphere countries with pretty diverse populations.