Argh… damn it, I had decided to let it go.
But I can't.
I apologize. 😅🤷🏼♂️
You can have a fitness picture to both soften the text - and remind you - that life is NOW.
It doesn't wait. And that pills - no matter how well-meaning those selling them are - don't help in the long run either, with what you're actually seeking and longing for.
AND to stem the tide, so the post doesn't get too many reshares 😁😁
Right. Read.
I think you'll like it.
….
Anders Samuelsen has in the past week posted two quite excellent posts about the joy of Denmark and the homogeneity we experience in 2026.
I've thought a lot about these two posts and also about the reactions to them.
I refrained from commenting and chose instead to reflect and analyze it all a bit. Because quite a bit of what he writes is true. Completely objectively.
So what is it that gets under people's skin when they read it - and why is there such a violent reaction to admitting the parts that are true, and debating what isn't. Or just addressing where the argument slides?
Regardless. Because I believe it's important - because words are important - because words create meaning and reality - because precision matters when we use words to describe reality, I've decided to comment on this, instead of in a comment that just drowns.
It might be a good idea to read the two posts before you continue, to understand the context. I'll link to them below.
I don't know him and have never had the pleasure of meeting him - but Anders and I agree on more than many would probably think if they read my texts daily. But we do. We agree that Denmark is worth defending. We agree that trust, equality, freedom of speech and rule of law are real goods, not self-evident things. We especially agree that you can't build a future on an idealized past. And we agree that modern Denmark, with all its imperfection, is something quite unusual. A small miracle. Both in itself. And internationally speaking.
That's precisely why it's worth going a layer deeper into the two posts he's written in the past week about Danish homogeneity. Because there's something right in them, and there's a blind spot, which of all places ought to be our common concern, because it blocks the analysis we need if we're to be able to defend what we both care about.
First, what's right.
Anders is correct that there's a real value consensus in today's Denmark. People agree on a long list of things that would have seemed unthinkable a hundred years ago. That agreement is not nothing. He's right that the past wasn't an idyll. Poverty, class division, oppression of women, institutions for the "feeble-minded," you mustn't forget those when talking about what Denmark once was. And he's right that sentimental national conservatism, which confuses social status quo with cultural backbone, leads directly into a dead end.
So far so good.
The problem lies in the very concept his argument builds on. He uses the word 'homogeneity' without defining it, and the meaning shifts imperceptibly in the middle of his own text. Or between the two posts.
In the first post, homogeneity means that people agree on a long list of contemporary values and taste preferences. In the second post, when he has to defend the claim against all the upset comments, the definition slides somewhere else, and now it's about who has voice and rights in the community. So keep your tongue straight in your mouth here.
Those are two different concepts. The first is cultural-value-based. The second is institutional-juridical. And when they're exchanged along the way WITHOUT being kept separate, and WITHOUT being clear about the definition - then you can more or less prove almost anything.
It is what it is - I assume it's either unconscious or political cunning slipping a bit, because that game is about winning, rather than finding out what's true. And it's only the latter that interests me.
What I actually want to address is the matter that lies a layer beneath it. Because that 'value consensus' he enthusiastically celebrates and points to didn't arise from nothing. It's the result of a multi-century civilizational formation consisting of Christian language of conscience, reformatory understanding of freedom, Grundtvig and the folk high school, the cooperative movement, a Lutheran undertone that made it possible to build a welfare state on trust and low corruption levels. Trust between people doesn't fall from heaven. And an associational life like Denmark's doesn't come out of the blue. It's the product of a common substrate, and that common substrate is PRECISELY the deep homogeneity that doesn't come up anywhere in Anders' text.
And I know it's just a Facebook post and not a doctoral dissertation - he doesn't need to be held to any standard for hobby scribbling. I'm writing solely to clarify and create clarity, not to go after him.
But the text turns the relationship on its head. Because it pretends that the expansion of demos that has taken place over 150 years is what has created the homogeneity… But it's exactly the reverse.
The common cultural-religious foundation made it POSSIBLE to expand demos.
Women's rights, gay equality, legal abortion and so on are not proofs of a stronger homogeneity. They're expressions of the moral and conscientious capital that already lay in the Christianly-shaped Denmark, and which was gradually converted into law.
And that's exactly where it gets interesting for both him - and me and for you. Because when the substrate weakens, when the common language, the common story, the common religiously-shaped conscience loses its grip, then the very capital that made the consensus possible also weakens. This isn't something we discover day by day. It's something we - as many have begun to sense - discover a couple of decades too late. And that explains parts of the comments that accompanied the post.
His 1864-reference is therefore also worth stopping at. In 1864 we lost territory and learned we are small. That lesson was about EXTERNAL borders. But what's at stake today is NOT an external loss. It's an INTERNAL transformation, demographic, linguistic, religious, institutional, cultural that has NOT come out of war, that NO ONE has voted on, and that you CANNOT speak openly about without being suspected of romanticizing something. Sometimes something very humanly disgusting. So the lesson from 1864 doesn't help us here. We're facing something qualitatively completely different.
And he mentions it himself. The challenges with parts of Muslim environments, parallel societies, social control, integration problems. He mentions it in a single paragraph, and then he quickly moves on. And this is where I'd like to ask him - and anyone - to stop longer. Stay standing. A day. A week. A month. Think. Feel. Explore. Even if what you find is unpleasant. Because if his own analysis of a strong Danish value consensus were adequate, WHY do these phenomena exist at all?
If homogeneity REALLY were growing, the parallel societies he mentions couldn't be sustained. They simply wouldn't have room. That they exist, and that they're growing, and that this is happening everywhere in Europe at a pace no one can grasp, is not a marginal note. It's the WHOLE EVIDENCE against his own thesis - and it deserves to be taken seriously by both him - and by all of us.
Hierarchy and homogeneity aren't opposites either. That's his - perhaps - hidden premise, and it doesn't hold. A society can very well be deeply hierarchical while simultaneously sharing a common religious-cultural basic structure. Pre-modern Denmark was both. The inequality was real and in many cases deeply unjust. But the homogeneity was also real. Pointing out that those at the bottom had less voice doesn't disprove the homogeneity. It says something about who was inscribed in the public space, not something about the substrate beneath it.
And therein lies what I'd like to add to his analysis - not as contradiction, but as the next step.
He speaks of consensus without asking where the consensus comes from. He speaks of trust without asking what has historically made trust possible. He speaks of a broad value-based agreement, as if it were a natural feature of modern democracies. Let me say it clearly. It is not. Most democracies don't have it. What made it so that we - that Denmark - had it? That's the question his text doesn't ask. And that's the question that determines whether we see clearly or unclearly in the situation we're in now.
Because the risk with his position, and I say this with respect for his contribution, is that it projects a stability that isn't necessarily stable - or true.
It confuses the current value consensus with a basic state, when in reality it's the result of something that can lose ground. Quickly or slowly. Visibly or invisibly. But it can lose ground. And if problems with parallel societies, parallel culture, parallel legislation and this happens at the expense of and displacement or dissolution of the existing order we live in. Then we have the strongest indication of which direction we're heading in.
Toward less real homogeneity. Toward dissolution of The Common.
The DENMARK he describes exists. Right now. In this decade.
How strongly it stands in twenty years doesn't depend on whether we can agree on Vingegaard and padel. It depends on whether we can see the common substrate beneath us clearly enough to protect it.
That's the conversation we need to have, if the Denmark he describes is to have a reasonable probability of becoming.
It's not a conversation to be taken against him - but one we all need to take fearlessly and oriented toward what is most true.
Not what we might wish were true.
❤️🔥🪽
Shouldn't we get started.
If there are others who think, that is, that the small, safe, green and completely special and unique country in the North - Denmark - with its beautiful and warm-hearted free population - that we grew up with at the end of the last millennium - is worth defending and preserving in a recognizable form for our children, grandchildren and future generations and heirs. 🇩🇰
Happy weekend again, friends 🙂
(And if you're reading this Anders. You don't need to respond. The post should lead to depth. Not to 'who's right' - have a really good weekend. And thank you for your effort for us and for Denmark. It will never be forgotten.)
