Much ado has been made about the comparatively luxurious and lenient treatment that Anders Behring Breivik, the mass murderer who killed over 70 people in Norway a few years ago. His sentence, and accommodations in prison, can be considered almost outrageously lenient and comfortable compared to what he’d be receiving in most other countries in the world.
If a mass murderer killed over 70 people in America, and received such treatment, you can be sure that there would be outrage and furor.
This, however, isn’t a thread about comparing the differences between the American and Norwegian justice system - that’s not what I’m getting at here. My question is, why does it seem that Norwegians do not get upset or angry at such treatment for someone like Breivik?
Doesn’t human nature - regardless of nationality or culture - tend to demand harsh treatment for heinous crimes? Doesn’t human emotion by its very nature want retribution? So, do the Norwegians simply feel much less negative emotion than other people (such as hate, anger, revenge, etc.), or have they successfully conditioned themselves out of feeling indignation?
I’m not being sarcastic or anything; this is a serious question. Is the Norwegian lack of negative emotion something that was caused by sociological conditioning, or is perhaps more ingrained?
Scandinavian countries in general have extremely high levels of alcohol, tobacco, and coffee consumption. That might have something to do with it.
But yes, the Scandinavian mindset does seem phlegmatic from my American perspective.
They’re not above drama.
They sent the berserkers off viking so the nice Norskies could live in peace?
It is social conditioning, obviously. If you grow up among people who frown on demonstrations of strong emotions, positive or negative, you won’t show them yourself. It’s just not done. That does not mean that you are less capable of feeling them, necessarily. Not at first, at least. But after a while you find that it takes more to set you off, and that feels nice, so the behavior is reinforced. It’s also a culture with less diversity than the US, so there are fewer odd behaviors that really piss you off. And it is a prosperous land these days, which reduces strife, but that wasn’t true 100-150 years ago, when my ancestors* and the ancestors of my friends of Norwegian stock came over to be blandly nice here.
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- Only an eighth, which explains my moments of being blandly nasty.
Norwegians have the same human nature as everyone else, but have as a society tried to advance humanitarian principles such as favoring peaceful resolution of international conflicts, banishment of corporal punishment, and providing an economic safety net for its citizenry. Also, I’ll hazard a guess that the Norwegian media provides much less of a media frenzy over this mass murderer’s post-verdict life than would occur here in the United States.
I’ve never heard that. I’ve heard that they tend to be lower, especially given how expensive alcohol is out in that direction. This chart has Sweden and Norway both below the US in alcohol consumption. Only Denmark is higher.
I would assume social conditioning. Norwegians don’t feel the need to treat their criminals harshly, we don’t feel the need to execute them, Americans don’t feel the neep to amputate them or whip them to death…
yes they are.
you body receives energy from food. all your functions result from energy contained in this food. when your body has to use a higher proportion of its energy to maintain core temperature it has less energy to devote to emotional display.
this is the reason that the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Norway and the other Nobel Prizes in neighboring Sweden. the people are calmer and can get through all the controversy of making such important decisions. could you imagine having the Nobel Prize decided in southern Europe; there would be fist fights of who to give the literature prize to.
I hope not, but I wouldn’t want to put it to a national referendum.
You mean they’re Vulcans?
I’m not sure that I agree with the logical soundness of the OP’s conclusion – just because a country’s legal system treats its prisoners in a different way than the OP is used to does not necessarily make its citizens “emotionally calmer and more placid.” I should note that even here in the US we do not sentence convicts to harsher prison conditions based on the severity of the crime (which is what the OP seems to suggest). I would say that a big factor in the difference between the prison conditions of the two countries is the fact Norway has a much less dense prisoner population: for each 100,000 members of the population, Norway has only 72 prisoners, whereas the US has a whopping 707.
But I agree there is some social component to Norway’s more humane treatment of prisoners. Besides the fact Norway (like many European countries) tends to be more liberal and progressive, particularly with respect to human rights, there probably are also things like lagom and other cultural factors that tend to make Norway’s society appear moderate to many Americans.
(thread hijack)
A Viking exhibit is opening this week at the Field Museum in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune ran a story about it:
Money quote:
A lot of people think of the Vikings as violent invaders. It’s more accurate to think of them as people who are out exploring the world, building relationships with people. Of course, when you’re encountering other cultures, sometimes they clash.
pulykamell has already linked to a chart showing that, in fact, Americans drink more alcohol than Norwegians do.
To that I will add this chart, showing that Americans also smoke far, far, far more tobacco than Norwegians do.
Did you possibly mix up Scandinavia with the Balkans or something? 
Map 14 on this page was the source I was thinking of. You’re right that it’s got Norway at the same level as the United States. The rest of Scandinavia is higher, though.
Map 18 on the same page proves that I was wrong about the smoking, too.
This map suggests that I was dead on about the coffee, though.
Here’s the .pdf the map was based on.
Alcohol consumption for the U.S.A., measured as “total alcohol per capita (15+) consumption, drinkers only (in litres of pure alcohol), 2010,” for both sexes: 13.3.
For Norway? 9.0.
So it’s settled: Americans drink a great deal more alcohol than Norwegians do.
Norwegians can be plenty upset and angry. A quick search for “forbanna” and “rasende” (the most usual Norwegian words for “furious”) gives lots of results from recent news stories (mostly related to sports, reality shows, and a recent political storm around some ridiculous claims about immigration and terrorism). And if you really want to see furious Norwegians, try to 1) be Swedish and 2) insult Norwegian sportsmanship or Torbjørn Egner (Norwegian children’s author).
But the knowledge that Breivik get’s a decent treatment in jail mostly gives us a feeling of smug superiority. Sure, he’s a shitty excuse for a human being, but we’re better than him. We’re so good that we give humane treatment even to the worst of the worst. And knowing that most of the planet would treat him worse only confirms that we’re better than you, too. 
Mind you, I’m not completely sure we’d be quite so relaxed about spending all that money on him if he had been a dark skinned Muslim terrorist, instead of a pale blond Christian terrorist. 
No, of course not. Did it ever occur to you that people are conditioned into such harsh punishments? I mean, it wasn’t more than a few hundred years ago that Western Europeans were burning people at the stake and hanging people by the hundreds for heresy and treason for bullshit offenses. Do you think that was bred out of our innate nature in a few hundred years? Did someone sit you down as a child and condition away your urge to burn heretics?
No, you never had an urge to burn heretics in the first place (I hope). Likewise, you never had an innate urge to execute murderers. At some point, someone either taught you that some people just needed killin’, and that executing murderers is right, just, and the American Way, or they taught you that capital punishment is wrong. Either way, you weren’t born with an opinion.
Well, the thing is, drunkenness is not just about how much you drink on average, it’s also how you go about it. Other countries (certainly Denmark) tend to spread out their alcohol consumption a bit over the course of the week. Norwegians and Swedes usually take it all in one big go, on a Friday or Saturday night. Havoc does tend to ensue. Then, the next day, everybody goes back to being placid again.
There doesn’t seem to be a concept of a “light buzz” in Norway or Sweden. The average person is stone cold sober and as calm as they come 99% of the time, and then humping lampposts, beating up police officers and passing out in the street for the remaining 1%.
Let’s just say that there are a couple of brief windows of time during the week, lasting a couple of hours each, when I prefer to not go outside.
You ever heard of “rule of law”?
If the people who executed March 11th (121 or 122 dead, depending on how you count) had been apprehended, I would have wanted them to be tried according to law. And imprisoned according to law.
Same as the people who murdered Carrero Blanco (Franco’s “VP”).
Or the people who planned Hipercor (22 dead). Or those who executed it.
All of them took place under different legal systems, but the point is, you have a legal system to use it, and you don’t go changing laws post-facto because someone did something so fucked up it hadn’t occurred to your lawmakers.
You’re telling me the people who decide the UPC have been having fistfights and not publishing them to youtube? How dare they!
Sorry, no fistfights. Some bloodless backstabbing, but what else can you expect from a bunch of academics.