When I first came to Berkeley six weeks ago, I felt accepted at once. Not because of something I did or said, but simply by being ME. Nobody cares how you dress, how you act, Americans here are all crazy anyway! The diversity of people, I love it. As Professor Petersen said when I first met him: “You’re not here to learn, you’re here to develop yourself!” And as a Norwegian, I actually find it challenging to be and develop myself. In the culture I grew up in, I learned that “You shall not believe that you are somebody, you shall not believe you’re more worthy than us, you shall not believe that you are better than us”. These are some of the sentences in the so-called Law of Jante (“janteloven”) that pervade every part of the Norwegian society. In contrast, Emerson writes “ …the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude” and “I must be myself”.
Hence, I need to think less about “the others” and more about myself, and Berkeley is a good place to do this. But I don´t think I will ever be able to be as individualistic as Americans are. Nor do I want to. Fischer claimed in the lecture that individualism is not selfishness. But I can´t help thinking, isn´t the difference between self-interest and selfishness a small one? Can´t self-interest easily become selfishness? Maybe the different American grassroots organizations that Fischer talked about are keeping Americans loyal to others in addition to themselves, and hence decreasing the degree of selfishness in the American society. I´ve always been surprised about how patriotic Americans are: the talk in media about how good the US is, the amount of American flags hanging on peoples´ houses. It seems like people of all colors and different ethnicities share a feeling of being “American.”
Norwegians should take more risks to go against the mainstream and not be so afraid of social sanctions. People are unique individuals with different qualities that ought to be explored. Meanwhile Americans could benefit from being a little more humble.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
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