Janteloven — don't think you're anyone special

Janteloven — the Law of Jante — is a set of ten unwritten social rules formulated by the Danish-Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandemose in 1933 as a satire of small-town conformism. Norway adopted them as a description of itself, and the reading has stuck for almost a century.

A Danish-Norwegian novelist, a fictional town

Aksel Sandemose was born in 1899 in Nykøbing on the Danish island of Mors — a small port town of about seven thousand people, the kind of place where everyone watches everyone — and he hated it. He went to sea as a teenager, jumped ship in Newfoundland, worked the lumber camps, came back to Denmark with stories shaped by Jack London and Joseph Conrad, and around 1930 moved to Norway, where he wrote in Norwegian for the rest of his life and died in 1965. Most of what he wrote was, one way or another, a long argument with the town he grew up in.

The argument peaked in 1933 with the novel En flyktning krysser sitt spor — A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. The narrator returns in memory to a fictional Danish town called Jante, which is Nykøbing with the names changed, and tries to understand how a person becomes capable of violence. Most of the book is psychology and recollection. But ten pages of it formulate the unwritten social code Sandemose says governed his childhood — ten rules he sets out like commandments. He calls them the Janteloven. He meant them as an indictment of one small town. The country next door took them as a mirror.

The ten rules

Each begins Du skal ikke tro — You shall not believe. The biblical phrasing is doing work; these are the negative ten commandments of a town that does not pray.

1. Du skal ikke tro at du er noe. — You shall not believe that you are someone.
2. Du skal ikke tro at du er like meget som oss. — You shall not believe that you are as good as we are.
3. Du skal ikke tro at du er klokere enn oss. — You shall not believe that you are wiser than we are.
4. Du skal ikke innbille deg at du er bedre enn oss. — You shall not imagine that you are better than we are.
5. Du skal ikke tro at du vet mere enn oss. — You shall not believe that you know more than we do.
6. Du skal ikke tro at du er mere enn oss. — You shall not believe that you are more than we are.
7. Du skal ikke tro at du duger til noe. — You shall not believe that you are good for anything.
8. Du skal ikke le av oss. — You shall not laugh at us.
9. Du skal ikke tro at noen bryr seg om deg. — You shall not believe that anyone cares about you.
10. Du skal ikke tro at du kan lære oss noe. — You shall not believe that you can teach us anything.

Sandemose adds an unspoken eleventh, sometimes called the jantelovens straffelov — the penal code: Tror du ikke at vi vet noe om deg? — Don’t you think we know something about you? The small town watches.

From novel to national mirror

The novel sold, but the rules took their time. Through the 1940s and 1950s Janteloven lived mostly inside the book. It was the post-war generation — sociologists, journalists, writers reaching for a name for something they recognized — who pulled the phrase out of the novel and into general use. By the 1960s it was being invoked in newspaper columns; by the 1970s it had entered the standard dictionaries; by the 1980s a Norwegian could say that’s just Janteloven about a colleague and be understood without a footnote. The satire became a description, and then the description became a kind of confession.

What Norwegians were confessing to was real. Sociological work since has confirmed what every Norwegian already knew: in Norwegian workplaces, status is muted, salary differentials are narrower than almost anywhere else in the developed world, and the person who self-promotes pays a social cost the American hire often does not see coming. The Hofstede measurements of Norway pick this up under the labels low power distance and high femininity. What they are measuring is largely Janteloven still doing its work.

Pushback

For most of the last twenty years some part of Norway has been trying to push the rules back into the book. The shove comes mostly from business and politics. Hotelier Petter Stordalen, one of the country’s richest people and probably its loudest, has said for years that Janteloven should have been buried long ago — that his entire advice for success is dare to be different. Successive prime ministers have made the same complaint in milder language: that Norway cannot build a post-oil economy on entrepreneurs who have been told from age six not to think they are anything. A movement called Ja til Mer — Yes to More — argued through the 2010s for replacing the ten negatives with ten positives. A widely shared “Janteloven 2.0” floated around the same time, keeping the modesty but adding permission for ambition. Public opinion polls in the same decade found a majority of Norwegians under thirty-five saying that Janteloven was bad for the country.

And yet. The prime minister still takes the tram. The executive still wears the same wool sweater as the postman, and would be embarrassed to do otherwise. The tall poppies who insist Janteloven is dead still tend to live in Oslo neighborhoods carefully calibrated to look unflashy. The rules are softer than they were and still operate; what has changed is that Norwegians now argue with them out loud.

The good and the bad

The bad is easier to see: pressure against ambition, a chill on the person who wants to try something the town has not done, a habit of cutting down the visible. Norwegians who leave for London or San Francisco often say they did not realize how much of the ceiling was internal until they were out from under it.

The good is harder to see because it is the water. Janteloven is the cultural engine of Norwegian egalitarianism — the reason the cleaner and the executive look each other in the eye, the reason wealth is not flaunted because flaunting it would be embarrassing, the reason a politician caught arranging a private upgrade is finished. The same rule that flattens the ambitious also flattens the powerful.

Behind both is a Lutheran-pietist instinct that no one is to claim more than their portion — that the equal soul sits in the equal pew. Janteloven is that instinct stripped of the church and left to run on social pressure alone.