......The Jante Law mentality has helped Scandinavians to coexist in a remarkably peaceful way. It has also, in the past, led to educational policies that actually punished promising kids for doing too much better than their classmates – the lesson conveyed to those kids, loud and clear, being: you mustn’t show off, you mustn’t stand out. What matters is not developing your potential to its fullest but maintaining cohesion, consistency, harmony, equality of results.
To reward excellence of the kind that cafeteria lady Annica Eriksson represents, and thereby encourage others to emulate her, thus potentially bringing the whole society up to a somewhat higher level of accomplishment, is verboten. No, the idea, instead, is to drag excellence down to ordinary levels in order to avoid conspicuous inequality – to keep, in short, from spreading unease and insecurity on the part of the less intelligent, less talented, and less driven – those who stand no chance in hell of ever being world-class in anything.
As bad as being excellent is being innovative, doing something differently, going that extra mile – the proper socialist reaction to which is: why rock the boat? Why upset the other passengers? As Eriksson told her local paper, from which The Local picked up the story, “It’s supposed to be standardized throughout the municipality. We’re supposed to follow what they say….so I’m not allowed to do as I did before, but must follow orders.” To Read the Whole Article……
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