The Nordic Secret: A European Story of Beauty and Freedom

By Lene Rachel Andersen

Surveys show that the Nordic countries have strong democracies, are among the best for business and startups, score high on human capital, have the most liveable cities, happiest peoples, strong economies, and much more...

How did the Nordics get there?

And what is Rosa Parks doing on the cover?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nordic Bildung
• Release date: Jan 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9788793791206

Lene Rachel Andersen

Lene Rachel Andersen is a full member of the Club of Rome, President of the Copenhagen based think tank Nordic Bildung, and co-founder of the Global Bildung Network.She is an economist, author, futurist, philosopher and bildung activist. After studying business economy for three years, she worked as a substitute teacher before she studied theology and wrote entertainment for Danish television until becoming a fulltime writer with a focus on technological development, big history, and the future of humanity.Since 2005, Lene Rachel Andersen has written 20 books and received two Danish democracy awards: Ebbe Kløvedal-Reich Democracy Baton (2007) and Døssing Prisen, the Danish librarians' democracy prize (2012).

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THE NORDIC SECRET

This book is a must read for anybody who wants peace, well-being for all, and a meaningful future.

Jan Eliasson,

Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations 2012–2016

Contents

Preface

Introduction and overview

Part I – Setting the Scene

Chapter 1: Are the Nordic countries really that remarkable?

Chapter 2: Personal freedom and responsibility – psychology

Part II – Personal Freedom and Responsibility – Bildung Philosophy

Chapter 3: A very different kind of Europe

Chapter 4: The Bildung prelude

Chapter 5: The German Spring

Chapter 6: Bildung and ego-development

Part III – The Scandinavian Spring – Implementing Bildung

Chapter 7: The Danish Spring

Chapter 8: The Norwegian Spring

Chapter 9: The Swedish Spring

Chapter 10: Summing up the Scandinavian spring – Nordic bildung 1.0

Chapter 11: The Modern Spring – Nordic bildung 2.0

Part IV – Exploring What We have Found

Chapter 12: What happened elsewhere? – Control cases

Chapter 13: Does this kind of thinking hold up?

Chapter 14: Scandinavia today – self-destruction in the making

Chapter 15a: Discoveries while writing this book

Chapter 15b: Discoveries since publishing The Nordic Secret 1st Edition

Part V – Looking Forward

Chapter 16: Can the Nordic experience benefit the rest of the world?

Chapter 17: Societal transitions

Chapter 18: Where are we now? – Challenges, obstacles, and choices

Chapter 19: What could bildung and Nordic bildung 3.0 look like?

Chapter 20: Looking forward to our conversations

Appendix

Sources

Index

Preface 2023

What is it about the Nordics? Are they a utopia? An achievable utopia? Are Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden just good at PR? Or are they really that successful, and is there a secret behind their success?

Maybe you are reading the World Happiness Report and see that, year after year, the people in the Nordic countries are somehow always the happiest. Or you are watching the TV-series Borgen, and as you follow the plot, your attention is caught by the interior design, and the Danish society fascinates you. Or you went on a vacation in a Nordic country, and you felt a vibe that you could not quite define: Pleasant, laidback, and energetic, progressive and rooted, cool and warm, welcoming and yet with a distance, but overall: Yay! Clean, vibrant, and no poverty! What’s their secret?

The Nordic secret is that we have lifted society from the bottom. With a particular kind of education. For more than 150 years. This book is about that.

The book is also about something else:

We humans generally do not solve the problems we have; we solve the problems we understand. If we have a sense that they are our problems to solve. What sometimes happens, though, is that we face a new problem and see it as our problem to solve, but we do not understand the complexity of it and rather than solving one problem, we create a new one.

Short of a meteorite hitting Earth, the problems we face as a species are problems we have created ourselves. Climate change, overpopulation, poverty, pollution, mass extinction of species, wars, terrorism; you name it, we created it. Ironically, what created many of these problems was once the solution to something else.

The good news is that the knowledge to solve our problems is available; the bad news is that we need to understand more and act differently to do something about it. We also need a sense of responsibility. We need consciousness and conscience.

The Nordic Secret is about how Nordic education allowed Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden to pull themselves out of deep, deep poverty in the 1800s and become industrialized, modern, affluent, stable, democratic societies, and to do it without any revolutions, major riots, or violence. Instead, everybody got the skills they needed to thrive. The education was inspired by a German concept called Bildung, and as we shall see through this book, local teachers, pastors, farmers, academics, peasants, business owners, and young farmhands and farm girls self-organized around it and turned it into a special kind of Nordic bildung. This started in the 1850s and 1860s; later, Nordic workers self-organized around it too, and from 1850 to 1920, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden went from being among the poorest in Europe to being among the very richest. From 1918 to 1950, Finland went through a similar development.

Since The Nordic Secret first came out in November 2017, humanity’s problems have not only increased, the pace with which our species is facing complex, wicked problems is also accelerating. We are creating exponential technologies and do not have the democratic institutions and legislation to contain them; we are also facing exponentially faster and more serious reactions in nature around us. 2020 started with Australia burning, then came COVID-19; this was followed by natural disasters in California, Afghanistan, Syria, Ethiopia, Central America, Germany, Pakistan, and other places, until we faced global heat records in 2023. It seems that Earth has never seen temperatures this high the past 125,000 years. Meanwhile, the very richest have become exponentially richer. If we are to solve these problems, we need bildung, we need it fast, around the globe, and in all strata of our societies.

The Nordic Secret was not written to brag about the Nordics, but because there is a lesson to be learned: People hold immense potential; it just needs a way to unfold and flourish. When people have access to meaningful education, to unfold their talents and creativity, and to build their character, they take responsibility, and we can solve our problems. This is bildung, and the method we created for it in the Nordics should not be a secret anymore. We also need to update both the content and the method here in the Nordics.

As a species, whether we like it or not, we humans are currently in a new transition from industrialized nation states to a digital global economy—some parts of the world are even making this transition from a pre-modern, non-industrialized starting point. Not only do we need new institutions again, but the transition also needs to be meaningful to people and give them hope. If not, they will wage wars. Fighting over dwindling natural resources simultaneously is not going to be helpful.

When Tomas Björkman and I started out talking about the idea for this book, and I started researching and writing it back in 2015, we thought we had a good idea, that we had found something important, and that we could initiate a different kind of political debate. As I kept researching, we realized that there was a Nordic, European, and American story about how and why our democracies and freedoms evolved that had never been told. I also found more historical evidence for our hypothesis than we had ever imagined. It is a fascinating story, and it helps us understand how prosperity and good societies are created. Understanding the sources of our societal and political development of the past 250 years in the Nordics causes a cultural fabric to stand out that explains why some countries work so well. The sources are not entirely Nordic, though; they are also British, French, German, and Swiss with some important input from Greece, Italy, Moravia (in today’s Czech Republic), and the United States. Not only did this shape Europe, it shaped the United States too. This is a tale of transatlantic beauty and freedom.

It took me from 2015 to 2017 to research and write this book and in the process, it changed its character. What started out as a short debate book turned into a solid piece of academic research with deep inquiries into more than 300 years of European philosophy and with visits to research libraries in Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, and Stuttgart. Yet, since the content is about how stories and aesthetics changed the course of the Nordic countries, I chose not to write the typical academic non-fiction book, but to tell a story about beauty and freedom and how they unfolded.

From the beginning, the goal was to reach four main groups of readers who usually do not read the same books—which is exactly one of the problems we are facing today: echo chambers of insufficient knowledge. The four groups were:

People in fields related to politics and economics.

People in fields related to human development.

People in fields related to literature and the arts.

Citizens who engage in their society, be it as politicians, volunteers, party members, or voters looking for new perspectives.

Rewriting this introduction in 2023, I now see that teachers and educators are not mentioned explicitly—maybe because teachers are included among those working with human development, or because the assumption was that teachers and educators are already familiar with pedagogy, education, and bildung. My apologies. This book is very much for you too! The world needs you more than ever, and I hope that The Nordic Secret can provide you with some of the good arguments that need to reach policymakers: Education and bildung are not an expense; they are the best and most fruitful investment any society can make, and without good teachers there can be no functioning society. Period.

Given this diverse target group of readers, some will probably wonder about parts of this book: Why do I need to know this about Rousseau and Herder? Why must I look at GDP per capita? Why so many quotes from Schiller? Is this Danish king really that relevant; I’m not Danish! How can this old stuff be relevant in the 21st century? And so forth…

Others may read with a different kind of wondering: How come I never knew this connection before? Why were history lessons in school not about this? Is my country’s economy dependent on philosophy? What would a similar development or institution look like today? Where could my knowledge make a difference? Who would be the best people with whom to discuss this?

Given the diverse target group of readers, a good reading experience has been prioritized over academic documentation and footnotes in the book itself. Instead, main sources are mentioned in the text, there is a literature list at the end of the book, and all sources including useful links are online at:

http://www.nordicsecret.org/sources-alphabetically/

For feedback and input for the first edition, I would like to thank: Michel Al-hadeff-Jones, Dan H Andersen, Bo Andersson, Lars Andreassen, Richard Bell, Sturla Bjerkaker, Lars Thorkild Bjørn, Mette Hvid Brockmann, Jos van den Broek, Arthur Brühlmeier, Anders Burman, Michael Bøss, Paul Cobben, Lars Dencik, Peter Duetoft, Kristina Elfhag, Tobias Etzold, Merel van Geel, Rasmus Glenthøj, Dick Holmgren, Thomas Jordan, Bent Raymond Jørgensen, Flemming Jørgensen, Arthur Kok, Teddy Hebo Larsen, Jeroen Lutters, Kyra Mensink, Marijn Moerman, Jo Moran-Ellis, Jonathan Reams, Beate Richter, Myrte Rischen, Jonathan Rowson, Ginie Servant, Heinz Sünker, Eugene Sutorius, Michiel Tolman, Ad Verbrugge, Ole Vind, Jan Visser, Christian Welzel, Koen Wessels, Matilda Westerman, Gunnar Wetterberg, Michael Winkler, Oliver Zöllner, and Jens Østergaard.

For feedback and input for the second edition, I would like to thank: Paul Beverley, Michael Yueping Jiang, Jill Nephew, and Christian Stifter.

Why a New Edition?

In January 2018, inspired by The Nordic Secret, Mette Hvid Brockmann and I, together with a group of educators, businesspeople, activists, and futurists, started the thinktank Nordic Bildung in Copenhagen. The goal of the organization is to combine futurism and the knowledge we need to grasp the 21st century with the Nordic method for bildung, what we now call Nordic bildung. (Capital N and B for the thinktank Nordic Bildung; capital N and lowercase b for the Nordic bildung method.)

In February 2020, David Brooks wrote about The Nordic Secret in The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/opinion/scandinavia-education.html, and people started reaching out to me from the US wanting to know more about Nordic bildung and Nordic Bildung. People started reaching out from other parts of the world as well and as a result, in 2021, we created the Global Bildung Network.

When I wrote the first edition of The Nordic Secret, I translated the Swedish name for the Nordic bildung method literally and called it folk-Bildung. The Swedish word is: folk-bildning. But now, people in our network have started referring to the bildung method we developed historically in the Nordics as Nordic bildung. This change in wording is one of the reasons that we at Nordic Bildung are now re-launching The Nordic Secret: it has come naturally to people around the globe to talk about Nordic bildung as a thing; folk-Bildung, not so much. In this book, I am still going to refer to folk-bildung throughout the text as we explore Nordic history, but as we approach our own time, I am going to make an explicit distinction between education, bildung, folk-bildung, and Nordic bildung, because they are not the same and we need all of them.

I am also going to write bildung, not Bildung (i.e. non-italic, non-capitalized rather than in italics and capitalized as was done in the first edition), unless I am specifically referring to German writers using the word Bildung in German.

Another reason for this new edition is that there were some mistakes in the first edition, including moving around some text in the graphic editing, which ended up getting Ludvig van Beethoven born in Brabant, He was born in Bonn. I hope I have managed to catch all mistakes; if not, please let me know.

A third reason is that Robert Kegan’s model regarding psychological development plays a big role in this book. Unfortunately, due to the way I wrote about it in the first edition, perhaps too big a role. Psychological lingo in some places dominated too much, and many have come to think that bildung and developmental psychology are the same thing. They are not. But the overlap between the German understanding of human development 250 years ago and Kegan’s understanding of it today shows how advanced the understanding of human development was among the Bildung thinkers more than 200 years ago, and that contemporary psychology can learn a lot from the past. I have made the distinction between bildung and developmental psychology clearer in this edition.

Since the first edition, I have come across new information about the historical development of folk-bildung and Nordic bildung in Denmark where it all started, not least some statistics, which is yet another reason for this update.

Finally, there were two names on the cover of the first edition of The Nordic Secret, both Tomas Björkman’s and mine. This was an agreement between two friends who collaborated for two years, though our contributions to the book were very different: I came up with the idea and the title and I researched and wrote the book; Tomas was the editor. For some reason, and though my name was listed first, The Nordic Secret has frequently been credited by journalists, bloggers, and YouTube-hosts as "The Nordic Secret by Tomas Björkman and Lene Andersen," if I am mentioned at all. It is unusual to put the editor’s name on the cover, I know, but I honestly thought we would at least get equal credit. So, for this edition, the cover has been changed and I take full credit for writing The Nordic Secret: A European Story of Beauty and Freedom.

I would therefore like to conclude by thanking Tomas for introducing me to the work of Robert Kegan, which allowed me to discover the similarities between the old German Bildung and modern developmental psychology, which was what got this whole project started. Thank you also for inspiring and fruitful discussions, disagreements, work sessions, and hour-long phone calls. Our collaboration was a lot of fun, and you were an amazing editor when I wrote the first draft, the second draft, the third draft, turned it into a major opus and the fourth draft, then the fifth draft, some more rewriting, and finally after I don’t know how many discussions back and forth the final text and the first edition. I could not have written it without you.

Lene Rachel Andersen

Copenhagen, 2023

Introduction and Overview

We are going to go on quite a journey, historically, culturally, academically, intellectually, and—perhaps—emotionally. So, before we start, let us look at what we are about to do.

This book is going to make the case that the success of the Nordic countries—not least the successful transition from poor agricultural to rich industrialized countries—was due to a very specific and targeted cultural and political project: key cultural and political figures in the 1800s saw the need for education, enculturation, and personal emancipation of the rural population. Visionary pastors, intellectuals, authors, politicians, and some aristocrats and royals saw that the feudal structure was about to collapse, that there was a mass-migration to the cities, and that the sharecroppers, peasants, farmers, and later the workers too, needed more than reading and writing skills if they were to become responsible citizens. And once the right ideas, the teachers, and the pedagogical methods were there, people took them and ran with them. They self-organized it.

As early as the 1780s, members of the Danish elite saw that the general population, including farmhands, unskilled workers, and women outside the city bourgeoisie, needed good education and they needed to be more than a workforce; they had to be responsible persons who cared about their country and could engage in their society. They needed to identify with their nation, and they needed a sense of collective identity as a people; at the time, the majority of the population would mainly have identified with their family and local village. Their pastor, their local bailiff, and their landowner would have been their local authorities, and people would have viewed the king as some strict father figure far away, but they would not have had much of an idea about other people like themselves living in other parts of their own country.

For all these people to develop that kind of identification and national loyalty and cohesion, they needed education, and they needed a richer and more complex inner world. They needed to develop a sense of responsibility towards self and society; they needed moral, emotional, and cognitive development. They needed what is called self-development or ego-development in modern psychological terms.

When expressed like that, it sounds like a very strange claim, especially given that this was a political project more than 200 years ago, and that people eventually figured out how to organize it themselves. Nevertheless, this is what happened: there was an understanding of the human mind around 1800 that was surprisingly modern but has been overlooked and lost, and this understanding was behind deliberate political efforts that actually worked. The key is that rather than psychological development, self-development, or ego-development, people back then used a much broader and deeper concept and called it something else.

In the top layers of the Nordic societies, there were people who saw the lack of mental complexity, discussed it, and wrote about it; there was an awareness that the common people were not ready for the changes their society was going through and that something had to be done about it. Some of the intellectuals were quite explicit about the people not having the necessary knowledge, self-confidence, and mental complexity to match the challenges of the 1800s. They used a very different—and in some cases not very politically correct—vocabulary about the lower classes, but that was what they meant. They wanted the people to think, feel, and act in different ways.

And here is the interesting and significant part: though they wanted to promote feelings of responsibility and peoplehood, they did not want to dictate what the people should think, what they should feel, or how they should act. Rather, they wanted to educate and wake them up so they could figure it out for themselves. They wanted a population that could author their own lives and take part in the authoring of a new society together with others. What they wanted was a general population that could think for themselves and disagree at a higher level.

The inspiration came from the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, France, and Switzerland. The philosopher Shaftesbury inspired continental philosophers throughout the 1700s, Goethe sparked Sturm und Drang in 1774, and the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 raised hopes of emancipation in Europe as well. The French Revolution in 1789 inspired intellectuals across Europe to hope for political freedom like in the United States, but the following bloodbath appalled everybody, and the disappointment was tangible.

With the hopes of political freedom thus in a shambles, the German thinkers developed Romanticism in the 1790s, the Napoleonic wars sparked nationalism around 1810, and that all gave birth to Romantic Nationalism, which became a major cultural factor as of the 1810s. Contrary to the Germans, the Swiss pedagogue Pestalozzi wrote openly about societal changes, and his focus was pedagogy and how to empower the poor through education.

What emerged was the understanding that people must be able to control their emotions, internalize the norms of society, and take individual moral responsibility. In German, this kind of personal development went under the name Bildung.

The reading and writing classes in the Nordics were inspired by this Bildung philosophy, Idealism, and Romantic nationalism, and Bildung became the new black. But the German thinking was much too lofty to capture peasants who lacked what would today be called cultural capital. These were God-fearing, pragmatic, rural people who only read their Bible, the hymnbook, and Luther’s Catechism. To reach these peasants, several efforts had to come together. First, the Danish school system was transformed by progressive legislation, then poets ignited nationalism, and eventually a clever pastor added some English pragmatism to the cocktail in order to bring the lofty German ideals down to earth and into practice.

Strange as it may sound, the hopes of the American and French Revolutions, the Romantic nationalism of the German Idealists, and the industrious pragmatism from the UK all came together in a farmhouse on the small Danish island of Funen in 1851. The aforementioned clever pastor was one of the financial as well as intellectual sponsors, and the people who made the big breakthrough were a stubborn teacher and some 18-year-old farmhands. What they had just invented was deliberate ego-development and transfer of social capital, and it came to be known as folk-bildung; folkeoplysning in Danish and Norwegian, folkbildning in Swedish. A path had been invented towards unfolding everybody’s potential and forming their personal character.

As a result, over the next 100 years, the Nordics were transformed peacefully from dirt-poor farming countries to some of the richest industrialized countries in the world. The main actors were the rural youth and the so-called schoolmen; teachers who wanted to make a difference not just to the individual students, but to their local community and society as a whole. It is an amazing story, and it is a great joy telling it.

Hypotheses and Questions

Two things in particular sparked the creation of this book: First, a suspicion that there was an overlap between ego-development as it is described by current developmental psychology and the old concept of Bildung. Second, a rather strong assumption, yet only vague knowledge, regarding the impact of education and folk-bildung in the Nordic countries and what we may now call Nordic bildung. Researching and exploring the development of the original German and Swiss concept of Bildung and the Nordic folk-bildung, five hypotheses and nine questions emerged back in 2015:

1. The modern concept of ego-development is more or less the same as the old concept of Bildung;

If this is true, how close are they in fact to one another?

2. Folk-bildung is different from mere adult education;

How much of a difference is there?

3. Folk-bildung has played a significant part in the development of the Nordic societies as of the mid-1800s;

How much of a part did it play?

How much of an understanding of the original meaning of Bildung and thus ego-development did the teachers, pastors, politicians, and other initiators of folk-bildung in the Nordic countries have 150—200 years ago?

If the folk-bildung initiators did in fact understand developmental psychology, how big a part did psychological development play in the development of the modern Nordic countries?

4. The Nordic countries became successful due to a deliberate cultural, intellectual, moral, and emotional cultivation of the least educated part of the population;

How deliberate was it?

How many people were affected and how?

5. There is a universal lesson about creating democracy and stable societies to be learned from the Nordic countries;

How can the Nordic experience benefit the rest of the world?

Can this historical experience regarding the transition from feudal absolute monarchies to industrialized democratic nation states help us in any way as we are going through a transition from the industrialized nation states to a digitized, globalized economy that must somehow become a global community?

Now, in 2023, I would like to change the second hypothesis:

Education, ego-development, bildung, folk-bildung, and Nordic bildung overlap and are all crucial, but they are not the same.

The Content of this Book

This book was not written to brag about the Nordics but to share some lessons about how to build prosperous and well-organized societies where happy people can live meaningful lives.

For practical reasons, focus will be on the three Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. First, because of the language barrier: Icelandic and Finnish are not Scandinavian languages, and I do not read them. Second, to keep the book as short as possible (and it ended up being rather long nevertheless). Instead, Finland is used as a control case towards the end, and hopefully the Icelanders and Finns will forgive me.

The book comprises five parts and twenty chapters, and they are somewhat different from one another in content as well as in length and style:

Part I – Setting the Scene

Chapter 1: Are the Nordic countries really that remarkable?

Facts and statistics about the Nordic countries today.

Chapter 2: Personal freedom and responsibility – psychology

Contemporary models of human development and meaning-making; what is ego-development?

Part II – Personal Freedom and Responsibility – Bildung Philosophy

Chapter 3: A very different kind of Europe

We go back 350 years to find out how Europeans understood the world before they invented Bildung.

Chapter 4: The Bildung Prelude

A handful of philosophers explored our emotions and how our mind works.

Chapter 5: The German Spring

Concepts of freedom and human development in the late 1700s and the 1800s; what is Bildung?

Chapter 6: Bildung and Ego-development

To what extent are they the same? There is quite an overlap but they are not the same; bildung is more complex.

Part III – The Scandinavian Spring – Implementing Bildung

Chapter 7: The Danish Spring

How Bildung was turned into folk-bildung and transformed a country.

Chapter 8: The Norwegian Spring

How the Danish invention made it to Norway and got an extra layer.

Chapter 9: The Swedish Spring

How German, French, and Danish input inspired the Swedes.

Chapter 10: Summing up the Scandinavian Spring – Nordic Bildung 1.0

What were the similarities and differences between Denmark, Norway, and Sweden as they developed Nordic bildung?

Chapter 11: The Modern Spring – Nordic bildung 2.0

Transforming all of Scandinavia after 1880.

Part IV – Exploring the Findings

Chapter 12: What happened elsewhere? – Control cases

How can we test the significance and results of Nordic bildung when we cannot re-run history?

We look at Finland, Switzerland, how badly things went in Germany during the Nazi era, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Nordic immigrants in the United States, and cooperatives’ contribution to the economy in 19 countries.

Chapter 13: Does this kind of thinking hold up?

Conclusions regarding hypotheses 2, 3 and 4.

Chapter 14: Scandinavia today – self-destruction in the making

How Denmark and Sweden are dismantling their heritage and success.

Chapter 15a: Discoveries from writing this book 2017

Some bonus insights emerged that came as a surprise. Among other things, this may not just be about the Nordic secret, but also the secret of the Freemasons—read on…

Chapter 15b: Discoveries since publishing The Nordic Secret 1st Edition

Some 2023 insights into the aftermath of publishing the book in 2017.

Part V – Looking Forward

Chapter 16: Can the Nordic experience benefit the rest of the world?

Some concrete lessons and concluding regarding the fifth hypothesis.

Chapter 17: Societal transitions

How do societies generally transform and become more complex due to technological development?

Chapter 18: Where are we now? – Challenges and choices

What is happening in the world right now due to new technologies and other wicked problems?

Chapter 19: What could bildung and Nordic bildung 3.0 look like?

Some suggestions for the road ahead.

Chapter 20: Conclusions

Keeping the conversation going.

Nordic Bildung to The Rescue; Conclusion

To sum up the Nordic secret, this was the conclusion in 2017:

Bildung is the way that the individual matures and takes upon him- or herself ever bigger personal responsibility towards family, friends, fellow citizens, society, humanity, our globe, and the global heritage of our species, while enjoying ever bigger personal, moral, and existential freedoms. It is the enculturation and life-long learning that forces us to grow and change, it is existential and emotional depth, it is life-long interaction and struggles with new knowledge, culture, art, science, new perspectives, new people, and new truths, and it is being an active citizen in adulthood. Bildung is a constant process that never ends.

Beginning around 1800, visionary pastors, intellectuals, educators, authors, and politicians in the Nordic countries saw that the world was changing. Around 1850 and particularly as of the 1860s, this was turned into a deliberate agenda: large-scale development of the inner self, the ego. The people needed bildung, a phenomenon that had been thoroughly explored and described by a number of European thinkers. Particularly the peasants needed to grow and change if they were to handle the societal transition, and an educated elite developed the institutions for it. Because it was deeply meaningful and it empowered people, they loved it, and they co-created it and took responsibility for it. Whoever participated had fun and got to develop their potential at their own pace.

In the Nordics, we have implemented developmental psychology aimed at changing our ways of carrying ourselves through life. It emancipated our great-great-(great)-grandparents and until around the turn of the millennium, it raised our expectations of ourselves and of our political leaders. It allowed our immediate ancestors to handle the increasing complexity and to develop healthy institutions and thriving societies. It also allowed them to develop a healthy nationalism that did not turn into national chauvinism but allowed for high levels of responsibility and trust. And that is the Nordic secret: folk-bildung.

I would have phrased a few things differently today, but this conclusion still stands: In the Nordics, we lifted our societies from the bottom. We did this through a unique pedagogical approach that allowed everybody to unfold their potential, to find their own voice, and to form their personal character. What might be counterintuitive is that by promoting this kind of diversity among the citizens, during a time of revamping the societal structures, the Nordics created strong inner cohesion, social peace, lots of beauty, and previously unknown degrees of freedom.

Chapter 1

Are the Nordic Countries Really that Remarkable?

Facts and statistics about the Nordic countries today; why are the Nordics worth exploring in the first place?

How remarkable are the Nordic countries? Really? Is this just Nordic self-indulgence, or is there something important about Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden that is worth exploring?

Let us begin with a story from real life, as I was on my way to give a lecture in Sweden back in 2016:

It is a freezing cold November morning and it has only just become light as I cycle to the train station. As I wait for the train on the platform, jumping in place to stay warm, I ponder the fact that three dark months are ahead of us. Between mid-November and mid-February, the general working population will go to work in darkness in the morning, spend the few hours of daylight in the office and then return home in pitch darkness. I am in Copenhagen, Denmark, but up in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland it is even darker; blink and you missed the sun that day.

Nevertheless, according to the World Happiness Report, year after year, we are among the happiest peoples in the world:

Table 1: Happiest people

The World Happiness Report is a survey that ranks 155 countries according to six indicators: freedom, generosity, health, social support, income, and trustworthy government.

http://worldhappiness.report/

https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2023/

https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2023/world-happiness-trust-and-social-connections-in-times-of-crisis/#ranking-of-happiness-2020-2022

Canada, Switzerland, The Netherlands, New Zealand, and Australia are members of the happy club too, and Israel and Luxembourg join from time to time as well. Overall, 10—15 countries compete in the top ten year after year, but all five Nordic countries are always up there. Why?

As I enter the train, the rush hour is over and I get a stall to myself, so does a man across the aisle and we briefly nod and smile vaguely to recognize each other’s existence. Another man sits alone up ahead, but I cannot see him due to the high backrests. As we cross the bridge to Sweden, his phone rings and some important business deal unfolds.

I have three hours on the train ahead of me, and I take out a book and plug in my earphones.

As the train stops at the first station in Sweden, two customs officers want to see my ID and I take out my earphones and show them my driver’s license.

As of the refugee crisis in 2015, we now must be able to identify ourselves traveling from Denmark to Sweden. This is unusual. We have had a passport union since the mid-1960s allowing Danes, Finns, Icelanders, Norwegians, and Swedes to travel freely within the Nordics, but the thousands of refugees who walked up through Europe put a stop to that. I feel offended that my politicians have not solved this and that I must identify myself as I go to Sweden, but I am treated with the utmost friendliness and good spirit by the two officers. Even two Syrian women, who were on the train the last time I traveled, were met with nothing but kindness and respect; they had to get off the train, but they were informed about their rights to seek asylum in the friendliest way possible. This is border control authority showing human capital at its peak. It is also two of the richest countries in the world struggling to balance human rights with national security and social welfare; idealism with realism.

According to The World Economic Forum 2016, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, were in the top 10 regarding human capital, Iceland was number 20.

Table 2: Human capital index 2016

The Human Capital Index by the World Economic Forum quantifies how 130 countries are developing and deploying their human capital and it tracks progress over time.

http://reports.weforum.org/human-capital-report-2016/rankings/

Then the WEF stopped making the ranking. Instead, The World Bank now makes a Human Capital Index, and they are using a different method. Here, in 2020, the Nordics are ranking lower: Finland 6, Sweden 8, Norway 15, Denmark 22, Iceland 27 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Capital_Index, October 2023); still not bad, though. Unless the Nordics are resting on their laurels…

The Nordics also have some of the most competitive economies:

Table 3: Competitiveness Rankings 2016 and 2019

The Global Competitiveness Report by the World Economic Forum

ranks countries according to productivity.

http://reports.weforum.org/

global-competitiveness-report-2015-2016/competitiveness-rankings/

https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_TheGlobalCompetitivenessReport2019.pdf

Since 2019, the Global Competitiveness Report was redefined, which means that there is no later comparable data from the World Economic Forum.

The Nordic countries are even good for the rest of the world too. According to the Good Country Index, three out of five countries were in the top ten in both 2017 and 2023, Norway was number 13 in 2017 and number 11 in 2023. Iceland is not part of that survey, which covers only 163 countries:

Table 4: Good Country Index

The Good Country Index measures what each country

contributes to the common good of humanity and to the planet.

https://goodcountry.org/index/overall-rankings

As I look out the window, I see no asylum seekers on the platform this time. Realism won over idealism, Denmark implemented border control at the Danish—German border, and the Nordic politicians are still fighting among themselves to find a lasting solution. None is in sight as the train starts moving again; we’ll just have to put up with the border control between Denmark and Sweden.

Outside, the Swedish landscape is frosty and white; inside, it is nice and warm, and over the loudspeakers, they inform us about where to buy coffee and tea. The cell phone belonging to the man I cannot see starts ringing again but he does not pick it up.

Jeez!

Were the Nordic countries always this fortunate and rich? No. We did not come from money. In fact, according to economic historian Paul Bairoch as well as the Maddison Historical GDP project, in 1830, the Nordics were among the poorest in Europe; nobody would have been under the slightest suspicion of fleeing here for the money—and definitely not in this climate!

What is remarkable, though, is that from 1850 to 1950, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden consecutively climbed to the very top among the European economies; for each country it took just about 50 years. No other country did anything similar, except Finland, which started the same economic journey around 1920 and made it in just 30 years.

The two graphs below show GNP (PPP) (Purchasing-Power Parity) and GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita in Europe from 1800 onwards according to two different studies: Paul Bairoch in 1976 and The Maddison Project, which began in 2010.

Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, and United Kingdom follow very similar paths, so they are clustered as the Rich Countries, and

Austria-Hungary, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain are clustered as the Poor Countries; these countries did not start out poor, though: in the early 1800s, they were comparably rich (for more details, please go to Appendix 1).

Switzerland is remarkably rich so it gets a graph of its own.

What is interesting in this context are the individual economic journeys of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland (Iceland was a part of Denmark until 1944 and thus does not show):

Figure 1: Paul Bairoch: GNP (PPP) per capita in 1960 US dollars, next page.

Figure 2: Maddison GDP per capita 1800—1950 in 1990 US dollars, the page after

The data for both figures can be found in the Appendix.

What we are looking at is obviously some kind of Nordic secret unfolding—and a Swiss miracle. Can the bildung upgrade really be the reason?

As we pull into the train station in Malmö, the first major train hub on the Swedish side, a woman in her 50s enters our compartment and disappears in a seat behind one of the backrests.

The train starts moving again. The gentleman’s cell phone starts ringing again. She picks it up—oh, no! The guy must have gotten off the train at the first Swedish station and forgotten his cell phone!

The woman is obviously Swedish, the man at the other end Danish; the conversation has caught the attention of the man to my left as well: there is no doubt the cell phone must get back to its owner, but how?

We’ll arrive at Lund in 12 minutes and we’ll stay there for a couple of minutes, the man next to me says. The woman tells the man on the phone; he must be in a car somewhere going in the same direction, because after a bit of back and forth, she says she will be ready in the door of the train if he can make it to the platform of Lund, the next station, in time. They agree, she hangs up.

Many things happened in the Nordics in the 1800s that could explain our economic progress. Railways, better communication technologies, scientific breakthroughs, education of more engineers, industrialization, liberalization of the economies (i.e. abolition of guilds and old feudal structures), new technologies in agriculture, public schools, and general access to primary education. But these changes happened in other parts of Europe as well. In Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, and United Kingdom, these improvements kept increasing GDP per capita, but these countries started out rich and geographically they were in the middle of everything. In Austria-Hungary, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, such improvements either were not implemented or did not make much of an economic difference.

As we pull into Lund station, the woman goes to the corridor with the phone, and as the train stops, no man in sight.

Max Weber, the sociologist, would probably explain the differences in economic development between the Nordics and Southern Europe as the difference between Protestant and Catholic or Orthodox Christian countries. The theological value of work is different in Protestantism compared to Catholicism due to both Luther’s and Calvin’s teachings about the relationship between work and salvation. Likewise, Protestantism generally meant a comparatively higher literacy-rate than among Catholics because Lutherans were supposed to be able to read the Bible and Luther’s Catechism, and literacy usually influences economic development as does a hardworking population. But Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden had been Protestant since the 1530s, and the four countries, particularly Sweden, had some of Europe’s highest literacy rates during the 1700s, and still the countries entered the 1800s poor, particularly Sweden. France in the 19th century was overwhelmingly Catholic, as were many Swiss cantons; France had been Catholic since Charlemagne 1,000 years earlier, the Swiss cantons at least as long. Yet France entered the century rich and the Swiss worked themselves up to be top economic performers. In other words: Weber’s Protestant explanation only makes limited sense.

And then, as the clock on the platform approaches our departure time, the owner of the phone comes running. He sees the woman waving, they both let out a sigh of relief, he gets his phone, they laugh and share a few pleasantries about the horror of losing one’s phone, the train signals that the doors are about to close, they wish each other a pleasant day, the doors close, and the train starts moving.

As she reenters our compartment, we nod, recognizing each other and that had she not picked up the phone and arranged for the man to get it back, any one of us would have done the same. That is what you do. Had the owner not been there to pick up his phone at the station, he would have called again, and they probably would have figured out that she would hand over the phone to the train personnel.

One of the things that keep baffling researchers about the Nordics is our high level of trust. The global trust survey from Our World in Data puts all five Nordic countries above everybody else in Europe:

Figure 3: Interpersonal trust

The strange thing is that there is such a strong focus on trust, but not the underlying sense of responsibility that allows us to trust. University and thinktank researchers have entire programs surveying and exploring trust, our Nordic trust makes headlines in international media, and barely anybody cares about the sense of responsibility.

Did the man leave his cell phone because he trusted that somebody would find it and give it back to him? Definitely not! Did he get it back because a complete stranger had a sense of responsibility?

Yes, indeed.

The Nordics are not just unique regarding happiness, trust, and economic development, we also have rather unique values.

If we look at the World Values Survey and the values that characterize societies across the globe today, the Nordics are outliers in the far, top right corner.

The model shows the cross variation between two scales of cultural values: Survival values versus Self-expression values and Traditional values versus Secular-rational values. The horizontal axis is thus about individuality and the vertical about emancipation from religious constraints in society; the Scandinavian countries are extremely individualistic/self-exploring and secular/modern.

The earliest survey dates back to 1981 and the Nordics were always towards the top right corner. During the 40+ years the surveys have been carried out there has been a global journey towards more self-expression and secular values; as a species, overall, we are moving towards more liberal values. Relative to one another, though, the different culture zones and most of the countries have remained in the same part of the full picture.

There is a strong correlation between the countries that have high self-expression and secular-rational values (top right corner), and the countries ranking high in the other surveys and statistics quoted above. The correlation is interesting, but is there a cause and effect? How did the Nordics get to where they are today? One set of values may not be objectively better than another, but most would probably prefer a high GDP per capita and happiness among responsible people, to a low GDP and unhappiness among opportunists. What changed first: values or wealth?

Figure 4: World Values Survey

The Nordic countries are characterized by high self-expression and secular-rational values; this is the 2023 map. Source: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp

It is not very likely that the Nordics would have been among the poorest countries in Europe in 1830 and at the same time have values radically more modern than the rest of Europe. In fact, state-sponsored religious fundamentalism was so severe in Sweden in the 1850s that the United States and several European countries protested officially to the Swedish government against the persecution of the Swedes; poverty was one big reason for Swedish emigration in the 1800s, religious freedom was the other.

What we see in the World Values Survey regarding the Nordic countries is the result of, literally, a popular movement towards emancipation and modernity.

As I get a cup of coffee and the train continues its journey through freezing cold southern Sweden, I continue my research for this book: What was it we invented, where did we find the inspiration, and what actually happened that allowed us to make a peaceful transition from dirt-poor feudal monarchy to prosperous industrialized democracy?—And how do you develop modern societies where forgetful people get their cell phone back?

Looking at the surveys and statistics, it is hard not to conclude that there is something remarkable about the Nordics. The Nordics are not alone, though. One other country keeps beating us or nipping at our heels: Switzerland. A handful of countries are fierce competitors—or maybe we should call them peers—particularly the Netherlands. These countries have obviously figured something out that is worth knowing about; it is a secret worth exploring.

As we reach Växjö and I get off the train, I check one extra time that I have my cell phone. I tend to show responsibility, but would I trust complete strangers with my phone? Even in the Nordics? Heck, no!

Chapter 2

Personal Freedom and Responsibility – Psychology

This chapter explores some of the models of human development and meaning-making that have been developed in modern psychology. First, we’ll look at how the self discovers itself; how the ego discovers the ego. Then there is an introduction to the moral psychology of Lawrence Kohlberg and to Robert Kegan’s model of ego-development in five stages. I then change the wording to a less academic one. Finally, these different models are brought together into a fuller picture of human freedom and responsibility, and the chapter concludes by looking at how our sense of solidarity and responsibility may grow as we mature.

When Tomas and I first met, our big, shared interest was how to create the foundations for the development of the best possible societies for the 21st century. How can we make societal development and make sure that everybody contributes and feels included and appreciated? How can we provide the societal structures for fulfilling lives, and how can everybody find meaning and purpose? How can we take our societies through the current technological changes and develop an economy that does not exclude anybody?

Tomas’ answer was ego-development, mine was bildung. To me, ego-development meant New Age mumbo-jumbo and purple unicorns, and there was no way I could see this solving any major societal issues. To Tomas, bildung meant 19th century bourgeois table manners and reading Proust or Shakespeare, and there was no way he could see this solving any major societal issues of the 21st century. For two years, we each thought the other was a tiny bit stupid, but we also really enjoyed each other’s company and the many other discussions we had, so the friendship did not suffer as such. It was not until Tomas told me to read the books of Robert Kegan, psychologist and Harvard professor of Adult Learning and Professional Developmental, that the pieces started falling into place. The big breakthrough came when I found a Swedish bildung text from 1840 describing bildung in terms almost identical to Kegan’s descriptions of ego-development. Could we have been talking about the same thing all along?

As we kept on reading, Tomas reading more about bildung, and I reading more ego-development psychology, we realized that we might have stumbled upon a connection between bildung and ego-development theory that nobody in academia had explored before. As I went to the German sources, I found more and stronger similarities between Bildung (as described by the German philosophers) and ego-development (as described by some of the