Mindanao Advice

I am Norwegian, and as a child, my father told me about a law said to originate in Jante, a fictional small town in Denmark with its own moral code, the Law of Jante.

The Danish-Norwegian author Axel Sandemose formulated it to expose the mechanisms of small-town social control, in which individuals are kept in check through collective norms, envy, and fear of deviation. Being different becomes a threat to the established order, a mentality Sandemose captured in his famous line, “You shall not think that you are anything,” from the novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (1933).

But exposing destructive behavior does little to eliminate it. The patterns Sandemose named are still very much alive across the world today. Their forms may change, but their function remains the same. New thoughts and enlightenment often appear threatening to the collective, an old reality that remains unchanged, and one that demagogues seem to grasp instinctively.

While such behavior suppresses those who stand out, it also rewards populists who make themselves accessible by simplifying reality. They appeal to the comforting sense of being wiser than those entrusted with truth, knowledge, and the slow work of building societies.

This is where it becomes natural to turn to one of Sandemose’s contemporaries, Karl Kraus, the Austrian satirist and critic of language, who devoted his life to exposing how language can be corrupted into a tool of power. For Kraus, the lie was not primarily a moral failure, but a linguistic one. When language deteriorates, so does thought.

His famous remark about demagogues, that their secret is to make themselves as stupid as their audience so the audience can believe they are as clever as he is, was not an expression of contempt for the masses, but contempt for the method.

Kraus understood that demagoguery works not by persuading, but by affirming. It offers insight without effort, participation without responsibility. This is why lies become effective, not because they are credible, but because they are comfortable.

What we are witnessing in the world today is therefore nothing new. The mechanisms are ancient. Herd mentality, simplification, scapegoating, suspicion toward knowledge, and contempt for complexity recur throughout history. Democracies rarely collapse with a bang. They erode slowly, through habits, language, and silent acceptance.

Sandemose described how the collective can crush the individual. Kraus showed how language can crush reality. In different ways, both warned of the same danger, a society that stops demanding precision, responsibility, and courage of itself.

When we now see leaders succeed through simplification, through aggression disguised as honesty, through lies disguised as authenticity, it is not because warnings were absent. It is because they were ignored, again and again.

For this reason, I propose a new and updated law, the Law of Power. It consists of ten principles for those who wish to rise in today’s society using dirty tricks distilled from centuries of human manipulation:

1. You shall not believe that knowledge is necessary when emotions will suffice.
2. You shall not think that complexity can be true. Simplicity is enough.
3. You shall make yourself smaller than your audience so that they may feel larger than you.
4. You shall never show doubt. Doubt is weakness. Certainty is strength.
5. You shall cast suspicion on those who know more than you.
6. You shall call criticism hatred.
7. You shall always present yourself as the victim, regardless of power.
8. You shall repeat the same message until it becomes familiar, and call it truth.
9. You shall make the outrageous ordinary, until no one reacts anymore.
10. You shall not believe that responsibility follows position. Blame always belongs to others.

What is happening now has happened before. These mechanisms are old, and they will reappear in the societies that survive future wars and environmental collapse, not because humans are evil, but because we are drawn to comfort, affirmation, and silence when action carries a cost.

We have been warned, in literature, in philosophy, in history.

Yet each time, we seem to believe that this time is different.

And perhaps that belief itself is the oldest law of all.

Featured image © Eldar Einarson