Focus on Iceland: The fanatic self-image
Yesterday I gave a speech at an Iceland conference in Helsinki. Amongst other speakers were Friðrik Andersen, bank manager at the Nordic Investment Bank, and Pekka Mäkinen, regional director for Icelandair in Finland. I gave the speech in swedish, but for easier writing I composed it in english and then translated it. The text is here below – but there are some changes, and the swedish one is a bit longer.
Dear listeners.
First – a word of advice: never believe an Icelander speaking of his country or nationality. More or less every word we say about ourselves is a gross exaggeration in one way or another. Not many nations in the world are as fanatically interested in their self image as my own. We love to feel that we are fantastic, to make ourselves out to be the best. The government forms committees to find out what it should mean to be Icelandic, in commercial terms, rather than trying to find out what it actually means – the committees end up spouting the same nonsense as has been repeated for more than a thousand years – something about poetic, sensitive vikings shaped by rigorous nature, the strongest men in the world and the most beautiful women – and they´re all just a little strange, aren´t they?
This fanaticism about what others think of us (and how we can control it) has certainly got something to do with us getting our independence rather recently, in 1944 – we´re still in the throes of that particular nationalist struggle. And it has also got something to do with us being so few – so little in the world. 300 thousand people are hardly even noticable as data in a world of over 6 billion people, and this causes an inferiority complex of such a scale that breeds a kind of hysterical need for believing in our own accomplishments. A few months back Icelandic businessmen were the best in the world, this winter we’ve had the best revolutionaries – and we are, of course, going through the deepest crisis mankind has ever seen. Or so you might think, listening to us – myself included. In a few days we’ll vote and it’ll no doubt be the most amazing example of democracy in action ever seen.
But how can an Icelander such as myself divulge anything about Iceland to foreigners that is not somehow just another fairytale – that doesn’t in some way get apropriated by this incessant need to be acknowledged by foreigners – how is this story told without falling into all the numerous traps, the delusions of grandeur or banal clichés about elves, mountains and poetic vikings – these fairytales are already a thousand year old! Can I tell you that there´s a thriving arts scene, without succumbing to this insanity? Can I at all say something positive, without making myself an accomplice to this great unstoppable exaggeration? Ísafjordur
Anyone that wants to find out anything about Iceland will probably be exposed to a lot of exaggeration and nonsense – and that might very well happen here as well. You’re likely to get offered some euphimistic landscapes and language explaining how we are in fact special – because that´s what most Icelandic people, or the complicit foreign Iceland-fetishists, will lead you to believe. Sigur Rós will show you how we’re close to nature – a simple countryfolk with a tendency for mysticism, a people that sticks together. But they won’t mention that we also have a deep love affair with big cars, and that the simple countryfolk would like nothing more than to get an aluminium smelter or oil refinery in their backyard, whereas most of the city-dwelling nature lovers don´t want the fjords of their summer-huts destroyed – and you will probably not be told that we are among the most materialistic nations in the world, and almost assuredly noone will say we´re the most corrupt or collectively deceitful.
It’s hard to guess exactly what today’s speakers will tell you – I´m not even 100% sure about what I myself am saying – but it might be proper to bear in mind that the first speaker is an Icelandic bank manager – which, with due respect to mr. Andersen, is a job title which has lost a bit of it´s impartiality-shine in the last half a year or so, though of course the NIB does not, to my knowledge, have much to do with the current crisis. The second speaker is a regional director of an airline company, Icelandair, that incidentally, and probably through no fault of mr. Mäkinen, tried a few years ago to cash in on the idea that Icelandic women were promiscuous, selling so-called “dirty weekends” in Reykjavík to horny foreigners. Which of course is another very descriptive facet of our so-called self-image: a lot of what we masquerade as information or explanation is just plain old-fashioned capitalism, that has turned both the country and the people into merchandise that should be sold for a profit.
Naturally not much of what we´ll tell you about Iceland has anything to do with what you will actually find if you ever go to Iceland. What you’re most likely to find is lousy weather and a common-place western nation that’s more interested in American Idol than the Icelandic Sagas – with some dissenters of an independent nature, like everywhere else. You’ll find a nation that indeed has it’s peculiarities, but no more so than any other nation. It’s strange that I feel I need to say this, here in Helsinki, two hours flight from Reykjavík, but we´re mostly like everybody else. Yet it should be mentioned that the propaganda about Iceland and Icelanders does also affect Icelanders – we are very good at playing our parts in this incessant circus we’ve helped to create, and most of us believe our own mythology: that we read more than other nations, that we’re all poets and artists, that we have a daring pioneer spirit that’s helped us do great in business, that we’re carefree and liberal and promiscuous and we party hard and work even harder.
Right now, of course, you find us at a peculiar junction: for several years the prime example of our success, of our specialness, was the Icelandic business-life. Our president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, went around the world explaining to people how come we were so successful, how our spirit of innovation and hard work made a perfect blend for achieving greatness. This was the final and absolute proof – we live in a world of money, and the proof for the worth of anything is how much money you have at the end of the day. (Bill Gates isn’t just the richest person in the world, he’s the smartest person and the best person). And for awhile we thought that all the mumbo-jumbo we´d invented about our specialness was finally being proven true – probably to our own amazement. Icelanders bought up half of Copenhagen and London – diamonds and toys and banks – we even came to Finland, and settled for nothing less than the Sampo itself, the money-making tool of the Kalevala. Right now we don´t have any money – in fact we are deep in debt, and therefore, by the standards which we ourselves set, completely and utterly worthless.
But of course there’s no lie in the world as great as the lie of money and what happened is simply that all the lying caught up with us. The castles we built on air crumbled – loans. Icelanders were struck with a uniting disbelief, and have spent this last winter desperately trying to acquire new truths. Some have found them and others haven´t – mostly it seems that society will now settle back into it’s familiar rut, and having been perhaps a little spectacular for a few months – critical, thoughtful, daring, sceptical and even a little spiritual – we will once again become commonplace, boring, materialistic, commercial and cowardly.
But why am I saying all of this? Having never actually attended one of these conferences, I have a strange feeling it´s purpose is mostly commercial – not a big surprise in a world that much prefers commerciality to social critique or academic study. I have a feeling you´re gonna be listening to another round of Icelandic mythology meant to make you love us – stories of majestic nature, poetic vikings, daring instincts – while the truth is that Iceland is mostly just hot water, cold rock and normal people that neither believe in elves nor ghosts.
In short – what I´m trying to say here, in the best of spirits, is that we are mostly not trustworthy when speaking of ourselves, and especially not when the one speaking is a government institution or a commercial firm. The firms because in capitalism they are habitually dishonest: they may not lie directly, at least if the law can stop them, but they´ll always give you a skewered picture of the reality of their product. And the government because of a profound tradition of nationalism, which of course differs from country to country – and let me assure you, as far as I’ll allow you to trust even me, that Iceland does not suffer from it lightly, but greatly.
But maybe it´s hard to start a conversation by telling the critical truth, maybe I´m starting on the wrong foot, maybe we should all just start off by describing ourselves in mostly positive terms.
In which case I have done everyone a great disservice.
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