A Different Approach...To Life and Society. It Might Be Hard to Achieve, But They Don't Call It "Civilization" for Nothing.

Or maybe it's not so hard to achieve.

The Denmark secret: how it became the world’s most trusting country – and why that matters | Denmark | The Guardian

It's certainly worth noting the contradictions among Denmark's eye-opening level of trust, but institutionalized racism, and more recent efforts to confront racism.

But there's an underlying feeling about Denmark and the idea of trust in other people.  Danes simply aren't suspicious of the motives of other people, including strangers.  And their society, and the ways it's constructed, and the ways it functions, don't give them reason to be suspicious.  At one very curious point in the linked article, when there's discussion of all the people who leave their infants in strollers in the street, one woman says that it's imaginable that someone might want to steal a "pram," but unimaginable that anyone would steal a baby, or a pram with a baby in it.  So she doesn't worry.

They do have violent crime, and it's unclear what it means to say the rate of it is 1/9th the rate of violent crime in the Bronx.  Is 1/9th the crime rate of the Bronx very low, or is the crime rate in the Bronx so high that 1/9th that rate is still high?  If the latter, the relaxed and trusting nature of Danes would be hard to explain.

This article puts me in mind of three movies.  One is a Michael Moore "Bowling for Columbine" documentary, which I've discussed before.  It's a documentary, so it's true.  Moore's investigations lead him to conclude that the rate of gun crime -- that's what this documentary is about -- is as high as it is in this country (which is very, very high) because Americans are a terrified people who don't trust each other.  They're afraid of each other.  Moore tests this, after talking to some Canadians just over the border, by "accidentally" opening the unlocked doors to people's homes, because he was told Canadians just aren't so worried, and tend not to lock their doors.  And in fact, on a personal note, I have to admit how not infrequent it is that I find out in the morning that I never locked my front door the night before (and no one came into my house).  So we Americans are terrified of each other, and we have a tendency to assault each other out of unnecessary and misplaced fear.  (Another Moore movie/documentary that comes to mind is "Sicko," which is about health care in real countries as contrasted with the US.  Real countries just feel that health care should be available to everyone, which is related to the Danes' view of social support and that no one should be dramatically more affluent than anyone else.  In fact, one of Moore's passing references in "Sicko" is that universal health care in real countries is supported by the presumably unresisted payment of taxes, which again contributes to, and may be driven by, a sense of trust in, and feeling of responsibility for, other people in those countries.)

Another movie is a dramatization of a true story, and it's "Take the Lead."  It's the story of Pierre Dulaine (Peter Gordon Heney), who is played by Antonio Banderas, and says he grew up in Spain (Pierre Dulaine/Heney was actually born in Palestine to an Irish father and Palestinian mother in 1944, but his family fled in 1948 -- hmm -- and lived in a few places in Europe before moving to Amman, Jordan, then fleeing again to England in 1956 due to the Suez Crisis -- hmm.  Dulaine (it's not explained in Wikipedia why he gave himself a French name) later moved to NYC, where (you have to watch the movie to find out how this happened) he started giving free ballroom dance lessons to misbehaving inner city high school students, as well as running his own more conventional and upper crust studio.  But the point is that at one point in the movie, Dulaine is explaining to the school's PTA, which wanted to cancel this program, how teaching ghetto teenagers to dance ballroom, which includes touching each other in civilized ways, and trusting each other to lead and to follow, would instill in them confidence and respect for themselves and for people of the other gender.  It's a somewhat different take on the idea of developing trust, as the Danes have.

Finally, there's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," which is set in Sweden.  One of the protagonists loses a court case involving what amounts to a white collar crime (he was set up, and he wasn't really guilty), and his sentence is three months in a relatively comfortable room with a door he can open.  He's a convict, but the system trusts him.  And the sentence doesn't even start until six months after the conviction.

So there's a lot to be said for the idea of trusting other people, including people you don't know, and for not assuming they're a threat to you.  Of course, if you constantly give them reasons to be afraid, and then arm them, you probably make them more threatening and harder to trust.  But depending on what stories you tell them, you might give them the impression that you, too, are more threatening and harder to trust.