Want to be Scandinavians? Learn to insult the meat

"There’s this ritual, for example, among the !Kung in the Kalahari Desert, of insulting the meat, where imagine you’re a hunter, and you just had a great catch. And you come back with a big piece of meat. And then what you do is you sit at the fire, and you don’t say anything. And then people come along, and they say, did you catch anything today? And you say, no, no, no, not much. And then they would know, O.K., tonight is going to be a big feast. And if they would actually see what you brought and see it’s super big, then they would start insulting it. It’s like, oh, it’s pathetic. It’s nothing, et cetera.

Well, it often reminds me of Scandinavian and Dutch culture. It’s, I think, the secret of social democracy. It’s not about Gini indexes or taxation or whatever. It’s about forced humbleness."