contexploration

“Somebody has to take responsibility when a person takes his own life.”

This cry symbolises a notion that is common in Scandinavian social democracies: “If something has gone wrong, there must be a department or state unit somewhere who’s not doing their job.” The State is seen as something for the people, by the people, but sometimes this trust is way out of proportion.

A period in my life a few years back reminds me of this rhetoric of state compassion, and the reality of life on the street for the few genuine outcasts of our Nordic, bureaucratic paradise. Together with a friend I spent half a year working on a project to start an XML-based Semantic Web venture, releasing public information to the citizens through the Internet. “Broadcasting for the twenty first century”. We were in need of an office, and we were offered space at an organisation working for the homeless in Oslo. This organisation was a project initiated by squatters. They had managed to get funding from Oslo municipality - including one waged position. Their goal was to smooth the entrance into the housing market for the “ressurssvake” – people that because of their powerlessness or general convictions were living outside of “the system”. My friend and I could use a room in their offices in exchange for assisting them when setting up their organisation structure and giving counsel on other dealings with the civic bureaucracy.

The squatters had occupied their own building not far from the offices where most of them lived. This was an old building by Akerselva owned by the city. It was considered useless. The Municipality had planned to demolish it. The squatters had broken into the building and established their own codes of behaviour there. Most of them were anarchists, sleeping on mattresses, going to flee markets and bringing back old furniture, climbing the roof and flying a huge black flag for everyone to see. The use of drugs was prohibited. Junkies were chased away. Many of the squatters dropped by our offices daily.

After a few weeks we got to know them better, and we learned a few things about their life. It was outside of every ordinary understanding of life in Oslo. They had real enemies (neo-Nazis and foreign mafia), they used violence if necessary, also in demonstrations. They didn’t trust the police, whom they considered fascists. Their distrust was not out of place. Most of them called themselves “activists”. Activism was a political lifestyle. When I asked some of them why they weren’t interested in trying to get a job (because they were certainly in constant need of money) they tried to explain to me that working for the capitalist system was a “disease”, or that they were too busy planning the next demonstration or showdown with some teen Nazis they had discovered at a shopping mall outside town.

According to Norwegian state regulations each “disadvantaged” person is entitled to a minimum of $ 670 a month (€ 520) in social welfare. If you’re a registered citizen you get this - without regard to your personal situation – as long as you bother to apply and accept it. But a lot of the squatters weren’t receiving social security. They had their own reasons for not applying in the first place. Some were youngsters and had run away from their foster families – fake Christians “brothers and sisters” that they despised wholeheartedly. Others were ideologically against the welfare system and refused to “submit” to any type of bureaucracy imaginable. Then there were some that had gone underground from other reasons; some had taken the law into their own hands; others were threatened because of clashes with foreign mobsters, which they owed money or had somehow deceived.

The days of the squatter were long. It was impossible for them to plan far ahead. Hardly any of them had cell phones, there was no access to the Internet in the squat house, and only one Internet-connected computer at the offices we shared. (I mention this because today so many practical things are dependent on these necessities: How do you apply for work? Pay your bills? How do others get in contact with you?) But the squatters knew life on the street. They were up-to-date on all activity in the city, they knew what office buildings were left unattended, and they could always tell the good junkies from the evil ones, they knew where the gangs of immigrant thugs hung out. (One week when we were there, three of them were stabbed, in three unrelated incidents. Two were hospitalised, one came back the next day, proclaiming his leather jacket “holy” because the stabber wasn’t able to pierce through it.)

When talking to the squatters you always had the feeling that they might not be telling the truth… that they were half paranoid half hunted… that they weren’t giving you their real name… that life was precious. A couple of them were Muslims or Straight Edgers, but most of them were drinkers, they hung out at the local bar. They stayed up late and got up late.

My friend and I found a few things that could make life easier for them. Many of them were without cash, which meant that they simply didn’t eat meals on a regular basis. We set up a deal with a chain of bakeries (Åpent Bakeri) to pick up leftover bread and pastries in the afternoon after closing time. We borrowed a car and drove by two shops, twice a week, bringing huge plastic bags of food back to the squatters and others hanging around at the office. We managed to get a hold of an old electrical stove so that they could make some sandwiches, and finally we organised free breakfasts twice a week. (In an inspired moment my friend concluded that the root of all the squatters’ problems was to be found in the fact that they never got up early in the morning. We soon discarded that theory.)

Our own XML-project was going down the drain. We had a series of meetings with people in business, the universities and the media, but somehow we weren’t able to build support for our majestic technological revolution. Maybe it was because our project was too “ahead of our time”, we speculated. Maybe our credibility was hampered by the fact that we didn’t have anything substantial to present - only ideas and hand-drawn sketches? We didn’t even have our own computers at the time! Only Kristen Nygaard and Dag Wiese Schartum showed somewhat form of interest. Nygaard had a heart attack and died.

More and more of our time was invested in the practical challenges at the office. Bringing food, cleaning up, writing new clauses for the squatter organisation. Occasionally, a business company or some health institution would call the organisation and “offer” the squatters their excess furniture. We would jump with joy, gather a group of people, rent a van and spend the whole day moving cupboards and old slimy bathtubs back to the squat house. I remember we once moved fifty pairs of antique slalom skies from the basement of an old sports legend. We brought the skies down to the squat house. I pondered the odds (and political implications) of anarchists going downhill skiing.

After half a year we had to evaluate our situation. We were both broke. We had somehow become absorbed by the logistics of “fighting poverty”. There is nothing especially heroic in this labour: You carry things, you spend a lot of time waiting for other people, and you clean up after others. Finally, we had to abandon our project and concluded that if we were going to fight poverty we might as well get a job. That way at least two people “fought their way out of poverty". A week later we were doing carpentry in homes around Oslo.

I have often thought of how different people treated us when we were with the squatters. Some were completely cool and friendly, like the young employees at Åpent Bakeri, gladly lending a hand, and without ever projecting an air of tragedy around us. But others took the “empathetic” stance, like the Christian charity workers we met. They placed themselves above the poor. (Sometimes I suspected that seeing suffering might make them feel good.) When I watched the movie “The Motorcycle Diaries” I could easily identify with the hypocrisy of religious charity in the scenes from the leper island. “You want help? Sure, but then you’re obliged to submit to our ethical indoctrination.” This is extortion, not empathy.

My experience made me speculate that charity is not just another strategy to achieve a just society, like the Pope claims, but that there is a real opposition between the two. Does having more of one mean less of the other? When George W. Bush won the presidential election in 2004, some studies showed that “moral values” were among the most important reasons for the president gaining eight million new voters since the 2000 election. A Norwegian politician at the time commented the US Election Day studies with these words: “Americans like to talk about moral values. We prefer to pay for them.”

In this quote, there is in fact quite a lot of disillusionment, which usually creates a good environment for sane political judgements. The State, through its bureaucracy, cannot make people happy or make them kind, but it can abolish poverty. Even compared to highly religious societies, social democracies tend to give more economic support to disadvantaged societies as well: Foreign Policy put the Commitment to Development Index 2005 together with the World Values Study and found a correlation between a country's level of foreign aid (including aid from private benefactors) and its level of secularisation. In industrial countries with high levels of religiosity, the level of foreign aid was lower.

The Pope writes:

“Hope is practised through the virtue of patience, which continues to do good even in the face of apparent failure, and through the virtue of humility, which accepts God's mystery and trusts him even at times of darkness.”

Socialist and social democrats can’t accept injustice as God’s mystery. A social democratic society is one where all receive their share of the goods of the society. Justice needs to be done in this life, with the help of the State, not in an imagined afterlife, with the help of God. This said, I wish that the indifferent and just approach of the State in Scandinavian countries could be combined with a renewed confidence in individual accomplishment. Ultimately one has to take responsibility of ones own life.

FURTHER READING: Four writers on Iran. Stop the love hype.