A community enforces the expectation that no member should consider themselves special, better or more knowledgeable than the group.
The rules appear in Sandemose's 1933 novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, set in the fictional Danish town of Jante, modelled on his own Nykobing Mors. All ten are variations on one instruction, addressed by the town to anyone thinking of standing apart. The satire outlived its target and became the standard Nordic term for a genuine preference for collective modesty, credited both with unusually egalitarian workplaces and with a ceiling on visible excellence.
In practice
- A Nordic executive describing a success in the first person plural is not being coy about who did it.
- A newcomer who states their qualifications at an introduction has told the room something other than their qualifications.
- Standing
- Sandemose wrote the ten rules as satire of small-town conformity; they were taken up across the Nordic countries as a name for a real norm. Distinct from tall poppy syndrome, which is hostility toward the successful, and from the Japanese proverb about the protruding stake: Jante describes a modesty people apply to themselves as readily as to others.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- Proverbs that recur across cultures