Independence and individualism
I’ve briefly touched on this topic in previous posts, but it warrants a hearing of its own because it is an aspect of Danish culture that is probably going to make the most initial impact on you.
Happiest people?
I spoke with a Danish woman recently who was so annoyed with her mother’s overbearing and intrusive behaviour, that she seriously considered breaking all ties with her. In other contexts this might be considered a joke, and this is how I perceived it at first, but in Denmark it is often a harsh reality.
Danish parents and children are almost always at loggerheads, and most of the time the struggle is about independence. Parents often find themselves struggling with the choice between helping their children and just letting them be. Children have been conditioned since birth to develop their own opinions about everything, and when parents try to give them advice they are sometimes spurned in the worst possible way. My friend’s case is not unique: it is not unusual for children to break all contact with their parents if they think they’ve interfered too much.
This sounds drastic, but Danes take their independence very seriously. It is part of what shapes their attitudes towards other people in general, and part of what makes them viewed as unapproachable by those who don’t know them. Foreigners talk about the Danes as being “cold”, but Danes just want to be left alone to do their own thing. They don’t want anyone to interfere in their carefully-crafted lives, and contempt is never so quickly bred as daring to get too familiar with a Dane.
However, it doesn’t take a major family feud for children to abandon their parents. In a society that values personal independence above all else, it is often just the natural outcome of things. Danes simply don’t prioritize their parents as, say, Italians do. Foreigners are often puzzled by how Danes can leave their elderly parents to fend off the ravages of oblivion, alone in their own homes, while the children themselves live just down the road, too busy living their own lives.
Denmark consistently ranks as the happiest country in the world, but for a country with such a special distinction, its people are among the loneliest. In fact, loneliness is the main reason for instances of suicide in Denmark. I would contend that Danes are perhaps more content with having their material needs met, but if suicide rates are anything to go by, it seems that people in the Caribbean and the Middle East are probably much less lonely.
Emotional support
Another salient consequence of this extreme individualism is a general lack of intimacy among Danes. Danes just don’t get too close to each other. It’s best to keep everyone at arm’s length.
Even among friends and family, emotional intimacy is always kept in check to a certain extent, and breaking down and spilling your guts is seen as a weakness by many. Families will disintegrate, friends will succumb to alcoholism and drug abuse, marriages will falter, but people will in most cases suffer in silence. Standing armies of psychologists have now assumed these functions of friends and loved ones, and daily focus on emotional health have come to occupy the slot between shopping for dinner and picking up the kids from kindergarten.
Land of paradoxes
Before I came to Denmark, I knew a group of Danes back home. One day I was visiting them, and they mentioned that someone called Henrik was arriving from Denmark. We went to pick him up at the airport. Everyone was speaking Danish to each other, so I wasn’t quite informed about the whole situation, but it took me a few days to figure out that Henrik was not part of the group. He was a complete stranger to everyone, and yet I got the distinct impression that everyone not only knew him, but that he was somehow related to one of the others. He simply integrated with the rest of the Danes, like a drop of water merging into a puddle.
Happy family
I remember how I envied being able to relate to others so easily, and I imagined what a big, happy family Denmark must be. I was attracted by the idea of egalitarianism and the implications it held for relationships among people in a greater society, how it can facilitate collective expressions of ordinary people’s wishes in a true democracy, how it can allow the individual to grow with others to attain his full potential, without fear and intimidation.
I foresaw endless scenarios of people realizing and expressing the full extents of their imagination. But in Denmark I found a paradoxical place, where such an environment exists, yet its imagination is held in check by an invisible power. The country’s character and essence is determined and defined simultaneously by a collective, consensus-driven will and an extreme individualism. People have a solid and intimate implicit understanding of each other, yet they choose to live in ways that isolate themselves from each other.
If you are not used to it, the aloofness and isolation that springs from this kind of individualism will seem unfortunate, and it will wrack your brain. But if you are going to live in Denmark, it will, for better or for worse, inevitably become part of your reality.
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