It looks like more and more Danes are sharing my posts.
The number has been growing steadily these past years, and something tells me it will just continue. I rarely manage to read what people write when they share - time simply doesn't allow it - but in a few cases I've discovered that to some, I'm perceived as - right-wing.
And maybe that's correct?
It's not something I walk around thinking much about, in any case. Politics has never really interested me that way.
I've written before about my movement from left to right over the course of my life, so naturally this doesn't come as a shock. But still I wonder, and I've been wondering for nearly ten years now, about those two words. Right. Left. And about how they've quietly slipped away from what they meant in the old days, without anyone really noticing, and without us getting new words instead.
So instead of discussing a label I no longer know what contains, I'd rather lay out what I believe in, and where I stand. All of it. Or as much as I can see right now. Maybe that makes me right-wing. I honestly don't know anymore.
Maybe you can help me? Maybe it can help you as well, to find out where you stand - and what you believe in?
Strap in.
Here we go.
I believe that EVERY HUMAN BEING HAS INFINITE WORTH. Not because of skin colour, sex, faith or passport, but because the Human is created in God's image, and that worth cannot be taken away by any state, any ideology or any mob. That includes those I deeply disagree with.
I believe in FREEDOM. In the fact that the Human is created free, with will and conscience, to seek out for itself what is true and good, and that this freedom is not an error to be managed away, but the very way a human being can come into being at all.
I believe in FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Also for those who are wrong. Or. Especially for those who are wrong, because it is only in the open space that errors can be met and corrected - and a society that punishes words has already given up on seeking the Truth.
I believe that WOMEN AND MEN ARE OF EQUAL WORTH, and that women's freedom is one of the most precious things our Western civilisation has produced. I believe that homosexuals should be able to live freely and without persecution. I believe that children should be protected, also against adults' ideologies, that there are two sexes, and that compassion for the individual human being never requires us to lie about reality.
I believe that EQUAL WORTH IS NOT THE SAME AS SAMENESS. That man and woman are created different, and are therefore not a problem to be solved, regulated or levelled out, but a polarity that creates life, home and direction, and that much of our time's confusion comes from the fact that we've made difference into an enemy instead of receiving it as a gift.
I believe that THE FUTURE can become better than the past. Not because I suffer from some form of naive optimism, but because it always has, every time the Human has understood reality more deeply instead of fleeing from it. Therefore I believe in science as the path into the outer, measurable world, and in the wisdom traditions as the path into the inner - and I believe that a civilisation which cultivates one and mocks the other becomes either soulless or detached from reality. Did you catch that?
I believe in NATURE. In clean air, clean seas, rich forests, and in the fact that we have a responsibility for Creation. I don't believe that responsibility is better carried if we are filled with anxiety by state and media, that we should be burdened with guilt we can only escape by paying indulgences or that someone speaks to us daily with doomsday language.
I believe in ENERGY. Abundant, clean and stable energy, nuclear power and the technology that comes after it, because the future's needs don't grow linearly but exponentially, and because no society has ever become either greener or freer by making electricity a luxury.
I believe in WORK, RESPONSIBILITY AND CREATION. In the fact that a society is not the same as a state, but consists of people, families, relationships and duties, and that the state is a tool, not a foundation. I am just as sceptical of concentrated power in corporations as in ministries.
I believe in CAPITALISM. Not as a casino, but as the order that best harmonises with the Human's actual nature and inner structure - our urge to own, build, trade, improve and reap the fruit of our own work - and which for precisely this reason has lifted more people out of poverty than all idealistic systems combined. At the same time I also believe in REDISTRIBUTION, the healthy kind. The kind that ensures no one falls below dignity, that the sick child is treated and the old person is not abandoned, not because the state owns us, but because we owe each other that. Redistribution as floor, not as ceiling. As a lift, not as punishment of those who create.
I believe in LOCAL DEMOCRACY. In the fact that decisions should be made as close as possible to the people who must live with them, in the family before the municipality, in the municipality before the state, in the state before the union - because distance from power always ends as power without a face, and because no human being takes responsibility for something it has no influence over.
I believe in CHARITY. In the fact that everyone's dignity is secured through a common lift, an upward pull, not through coercion, but through the recognition that we are part of a whole that obligates us to each other, and that there are many ways to carry that responsibility. The family carries it. The friend carries it. The association, the congregation, the neighbour carries it. The state can carry some of it. But it can never carry all of it, and it must never make us believe we are exempt because it takes care of it.
I believe in THE RULE OF LAW. And I believe that forgiveness and justice are two different things, which must not be confused - forgiveness is the inner person's liberation, it frees the victim from hatred, but it does not abolish judgement. Justice is civilisation's function, and punishment is not revenge but order, society's way of saying to both victim and perpetrator that what happened mattered.
I believe that A HUMAN BEING DEVELOPS FROM THE INSIDE OUT. Through recognition, not through endless external rules, laws, frameworks, schedules and controls it must submit to, because the human being that is only shaped from the outside may become obedient, but never whole.
I believe that the Human has the possibility of living a life in accordance with its nature, and that this life is the best there is for it. It leads, almost without exception, to higher health, deeper joy, stronger belonging and a calmer acceptance of reality as it is. That life always looks like duties and discipline on the surface. It looks like sacrifice. And that is precisely the secret - it is through the offering of oneself that the good life can even have a chance of meeting one, because we are not created for comfort. We are created for radical adventure.
I believe in THE BODY. In the fact that it is mine, and that responsibility for it is mine, and that it never lies. It reveals what I have built, and what I have neglected, and precisely therefore it is not vanity but honesty, the first place where a Human can measure whether it lives in accordance with reality or against it.
I believe in THE FAMILY. Not as nostalgia, but as the construction that binds the Human to reality in both directions - backwards to those we come from, forwards to those who come after us, and which is the first and last place where a human being learns what it means to belong.
I believe in ASSOCIATIONAL LIFE AND IN HUMAN ENCOUNTER. In song, music, dance, art, craft, sport, theatre and play, all those places where the Human's gifts are practised and refined face to face, because a people is not held together by screens and systems, but by what we do together with body and voice.
I believe in CULTIVATION. In the fact that a civilisation is not something you inherit in the blood, but something that must be passed on, told, learned and loved anew in every single generation, and that a people which stops giving its children its own history doesn't lose it in a hundred years. It loses it in one generation.
I believe that the Human needs to BELIEVE IN SOMETHING GREATER THAN ITSELF. Not as decoration, but as defence, because without something above it the ego has no boundary, and desire, hedonism and nihilism take over - and I am convinced that precisely that loss of meaning is one of the deepest roots beneath the wave of anxiety, depression and emptiness washing through the Western world these decades.
I believe that none of this exists by itself. Freedom, peace, trust, everything we take for granted, exists only because someone before us was willing to pay for it, and it persists only if someone after us is the same. I've had the story of Budapest 1956 told at my own dinner table, by people who carry it in the family, and I therefore know that the distance between a free life and an unfree one is not measured in centuries. It is measured in one decision not to defend oneself.
I believe that A COUNTRY HAS THE RIGHT TO BORDERS, AND THAT A PEOPLE HAS THE RIGHT TO EXIST. I believe that integration in Europe has failed on a large scale, and that Islam, as a civilisational order, stands in direct opposition to the kind of freedom I've just described above - the woman's, the homosexual's, the apostate's, the word's. The individual Muslim is not my enemy. It's the system and the architecture. And I believe that even the most spacious freedom must know its own boundary - it cannot make room for what will take the space and the freedom from everyone else.
I believe that the West's freedoms didn't fall from heaven, but grew out of a specific inheritance, Athens, Rome and Jerusalem - or Greek Philosophy, Roman Law and Christianity - and that a house which forgets its foundation cannot explain its own walls.
I believe in BEAUTY. In the fact that it is not decoration or taste, but a sign, a way reality tells us that something is in accordance with its purpose - and that ugliness is rarely accidental. A culture can be read in what it builds, and a soul in what it surrounds itself with.
I believe in LOVE. Not as one feeling among other feelings, not as mood or sentimentality, but as the very fundamental note Reality itself is cast in, the deepest layer beneath everything, which physics measures the edge of and mystics have touched for centuries - and which every Human recognises immediately when it meets it, because it is itself made of it.
And I believe that words should mean something. That Truth is not mine or yours, but something we both together seek out and must align ourselves with - even when it costs.
Maybe I've forgotten something.
But that's all I can see right now.
And now here I stand with my list and my question.
Is this right-wing?
It may well be.
But then I must ask further - when did it become that? When did women's freedom, free speech, nature, the family, associational life and care for the one who falls, become something that belongs to one wing?
I seem to remember a time when most of this was just called Denmark.
So please help me. Read the list again, and tell me where you yourself stand. Because my quiet guess is that you could nod to most of it. And if that's correct, then we stand in the same place, you and I, whatever that place is called. Or what?
And maybe that's the discovery itself - that there are far more of us standing here than the map tells us?
And that the disagreement filling up space for the Man on Television is about something entirely different than Right / Left?
❤️🔥🪽
Have a good rest of your week.
We're hoping for more sun here at the summer house ☀️
