Thread by @alon_levy

1. Is Nordic culture really collectivist? Some examples of how it really isn't by any common non-Nordic standards.

2. The method I'm using is to compare pairs of non-Nordic cultures, like the US and Germany, and see where the Nordics fit.

3. Exhibit 1: in the US, stores open 7 days a week; in Germany, they close on Sundays, justified on social and religious grounds.

4. In Sweden, supermarkets and shopping malls open on Sundays and even close at the same time as on weekdays, 10 or 11 pm.

5. Exhibit 2: in the UK, schoolchildren wear uniforms, justified on grounds of social control. In Germany, they don't.

6. In the US they mostly don't, but when they do, it's explicitly justified on social control grounds ("behavior").

7. Nordic schoolchildren wear what they want, and in general Nordic political attitudes are strongly supportive of children's rights.

8. Exhibit 3: in English, everyone is called by the same pronoun, you. French and German have politeness distinctions (tu/vous, du/Sie).

9. Sweden has the vestiges of this distinction but it's not really used anymore, and I don't think Finland ever had it.

10. Exhibit 4: in the US, I address people I email by first name. In Germany, I was told not to - it's Herr ___ or Herr Doktor ___.

11. In Nordic countries it's like the US - I send cold emails to Norwegian, Finnish, etc. planners, using first names.

12. Exhibit 5: gay rights are in many cases a good proxy for individualism. The US had gay marriage starting 2015, Germany starting 2017.

13. The first country to have SSM was the Netherlands, starting 2000-1. Nordic dates:
Norway 2009
Sweden 2009
Denmark 2012
Finland 2015-7

14. Of note: online social justice activists have collective attitudes about gay rights, but in the 2000s this was very much not the case.

15. These activists specifically hold SSM to be a mainstream individualist thing as opposed to their collective queer liberation attitude.

16. Exhibit 6: immigration rights. Again, held to be individual, to the point that collectivists on the left tend to shrug them off.

17. You can't even compare any two rich countries on this, because Sweden has been by far #1 in asylum admissions per capita.

18. Norway, Denmark, and Finland all hold themselves to be harsher by comparison with Sweden but are still near the top of the OECD.

19. Moreover, both Sweden and Finland have fast naturalization paths, even more so than Germany, let alone the US or the rest of Europe.

20. By most criteria of either social distance (not *physical* social distancing for corona) or legal rights, the Nordics are individualist.

21. And yet, there's a widespread myth of Nordic collectivism in both the US and the Nordic countries.

22. I'm subtweeting something (check my feed with replies), but I also read this in a bad comparison of US vs. Nordic LARPers years ago.

23. It stretched to find US individualism vs. Nordic collectivism in every tiny difference between Intercon and Knutepunkt cultures.

24. Moreover, there's this paper that immediately read US individualism vs. Swedish collectivism into Swedish history with emigration.

25. Swedish social democracy benefited from workers' use of emigration threat to extract concessions. osf.io/preprints/soca…

26. However, an older paper not doing as much analysis as my link above immediately concluded this was selection effect.

27. In fact, Swedish unions held English classes in Stockholm to strengthen their emigration threat!

28. So why do people falsely believe that Nordic culture is collectivist? It's partly Nordic social democracy, but can't be *just* that.

29. After all, Americans cite immigration rates and homophobia as reasons to dismiss (say) Japan as collectivist.

30. Rather, my suspicion is, using the word "individualism" as such, rather than just displaying individualist attitudes, is right-loaded.

31. It's not right-loaded worldwide (the SCI ruling legalizing gay sex extensively used the language of individualism) but it is in the US.

32. There's also extensive US-right soft power in Europe, so people who'd like their country to be more like Texas use that language.

33. This also percolates to the Nordic not-right (the Nordic LARP community is very left-wing), viewing individualism as weird and foreign.

34. That paper comparing US vs. Nordic LARPers, re the LARP Mad About the Boy, treats the US rendition as inferior to the Nordic original.

35. The right-loading gets pretty clear if one looks at the attitudes of Swedes who complain about Jante's law re immigration.

36. They do not say, "openness is a good thing." No: they reproduce extreme right language treating immigrants as a social problem.

37. (And that's setting aside the fact that Janteloven isn't really different from how Sinclair Lewis portrays small-town America.)

38. The Nordic extreme right is furthermore homophobic and only likes gays as a cudgel against immigrants.

39. (This is similar to anti-Semitism on the extreme right, paired with statements that immigrants are the real anti-Semites.)

40. The result is that on both sides of the Pond, political hacks say "individualism" and mean "right-wing American attitudes."

41. By any normal definition of individualism, it exists in droves in the Nordic countries, generally more so than elsewhere in the world.

42. The rhetorical American device called "individualism," really meaning whatever is in the Republican platform, isn't so common.

43. But so what? Nordic racists who wish they had a US-style hostile environment invent a euphemism for racism, but they're still racist.

44. Moreover, understanding that the Nordic countries are highly individualist is useful for people who wish to replicate their successes.

45. High economic growth? Low GHG emissions? Good schools (in Finland)? Low-for-Europe corona rates (in not-Sweden)? Efficient government?

46. None of that is in a collectivist context. It's in a high-trust context, but trust is earned through good governance.

47. The Nordics build subways for around 40% our cost, and maybe 7% the cost in the US, because they have cleaner governments.

48. In the US, members of Congress engage in insider trading all the time. In Sweden, even jumping the rent control queue is a scandal.

49. Is that individualism vs. collectivism? No, it's different levels of toleration of political corruption.

50. So going beyond racist myths, the #1 reason Americans believe the Nordics are collectivist is as an excuse for US failure.

51. (We see similar excuse-making re corona: Westerners call Korea, where street protests overthrew a corrupt president, collectivist.)

52. Nothing about deep Nordic culture produces good socioeconomic outcomes. Their indigenous food culture, for example, sucks.

53. Good Nordic outcomes come from good governance. Whenever US (or French, or German) politicians don't imitate them, they fail. /end