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by 4gotunameagain 395 days ago
Having lived in Denmark for quite a while, I will say that it is the societal coherence, and an attitude of working together for all which must have been influenced with the difficulty of surviving in that landscape in the past.

Societal coherence has been aided by the isolation, and here is the hot take: this cannot exist in "diverse" societies. Not because of bullshit genetic superiority justifications, but because no diverse society has so far demonstrated the capacity to have a shared purpose, coherence and high degrees of trust.

And yes, I do find monoculture societies (including denmark) very boring, and I believe diversity has other great benefits. But societal stability and long term prosperity in that sense? Doesn't look like it.

Before someone mentions the US as a counterexample, do not forget that all the prosperity of the US came from basically seizing an underutilised (in the industrial sense) resource rich continent, and now it is falling apart by internal divide.
2 comments
halfmatthalfcat 395 days ago
The divide is a feature, not a bug. There’s a reason the US is called an experiment, with all the trials, tribulations, failures and successes that come with that. “We do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
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4gotunameagain 395 days ago
Portraying the largest conquest and ethnic cleansing of the Americas as a deliberate experiment to figure out multiculturalism leaves a bitter taste, I'm not gonna lie.

And if you gave me a choice between a world divided in small Denmarks or between the contemporary re-armament of the west due to the election of a populist buffoon combined with decades of mismanagement of a unipolar world, I wouldn't think twice.

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halfmatthalfcat 395 days ago
Every culture has sins and skeletons. That’s not to absolve them but if we’re comparing contemporary national cultures, their stability and demographic makeup, it’s obviously a spectrum of stability, progress, etc.
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4gotunameagain 394 days ago
Every empire has sins and skeletons.
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LunaSea 394 days ago
> and an attitude of working together for all

I don't know much about Denmark but somehow I doubt that this attitude extends to taxing rich pensioners more (since they didn't contribute enough).

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4gotunameagain 394 days ago
In a coherent, collaborative society, one is willing to endure some personal hardship for the collective benefit or out of necessity.
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