Janteloven

A friend I made in Norwegian class is from Brazil and has lived in Norway for six years now.  I heard from her recently that she is moving back home.  She just can’t handle life in Norway any longer, even though she loves the country.  She’s an over achiever and puts her all into her job, but her hard work ethic is not appreciated in Norway.  Her co-workers and boss are constantly criticizing her because she stays late, works on the weekends and takes work home.  On the surface, it seems an awful lot like jealousy, or that she’s making the rest of them look bad, but I found out recently that what’s really underlying her situation at work is something called “Janteloven” – The Jante Law.

There has been an attitude in the Norwegian culture for centuries, it seems, that standing out is a bad thing – the exact opposite of the American mentality.  Everyone in Norway wants to fit in to certain stereotypes and parameters.  As the Chinese proverb goes, “It’s the nail that sticks out that gets pounded back down,” and no one wants to be pounded.  So Norwegians are content with mediocrity in the work place with no real drive to advance, since everyone makes a decent wage no matter what.

This Janteloven came to light in a book that was written in 1933, pointing out what seemed to be the pervasive culture of the day.  It was fiction, meant to highlight the absurdity in this way of thinking, but it was actually all the more embraced by Norwegians once they saw it in print.  The author made up what he thought were ten unspoken “rules” that pertained to this mentality.  The first rule is that, “You are nobody special.” Other rules point out that “you are not smarter, better, or more important than anyone else and you aren’t good at anything.”  It’s laughable to me, but it really is the thinking of many Norwegians, even today.

I know this “law” had to have been around long before 1933 because my mother’s great-grandparents all immigrated from Norway in the late 1800s and this mindset was obviously passed down to her.  Whenever I would tell her anything great anyone did, her response was always, “They still have to put their pants on one leg at a time,” which feeds right into the heart of Janteloven.

In today’s Norway, however, they are trying to reverse this way of thinking, and are now teaching the children that “we are ALL special.”  It still however, is not acceptable to brag about personal achievements.  Everyone accepts that they are just as good as everyone else, except of course, when it comes to the Winter Olympics.