According to the UN’s 2024 World Happiness Report Iceland is the third happiest country in the world. It has maintained that rank for three consecutive years. The score is calculated, according to the UN, based on “individuals’ own assessments of their lives.”
However, to some of us living here, this just doesn’t seem right. Maybe we are bad at self-assessing our happiness. I mean, in 2022 Iceland also had the highest consumption rate of antidepressants in Europe. Maybe we’re not happy, we’re just high.
This anecdotal evidence from everyday life begs to differ with the UN’s take. There are a couple of reasons this could be the case. Either Iceland is gradually heading into unhappier waters, with the statistics yet to catch up — or the rest of the world is just going to hell in a handbasket even faster than we are.
On Monday September 16, the Icelandic Police reported that a 10-year-old girl had been found dead in a lava field near Kleifarvatn, some 40 kilometres south of Reykjavík. Her father, an Icelander in his mid-forties was arrested on suspicion of murdering her.
If it’s confirmed to be a murder, this would be the sixth homicide case in Iceland this year, in which seven people died. In three of them, the victims were children. We’re only just exiting summer, and Iceland already has the highest numbers of murders recorded in a single year since records began — the previous record being five in 2000, 2020 and 2023.
Heimildin reports that between 1999 and 2019 the murder rate in Iceland was on average 1.9, climbing since 2020 to a staggering 4.6.
We’ve also seen an increase in the rate of stabbings in Iceland. The first anomaly was 2020, when 23 stabbings were reported — a 109% rise on the previous year. Statistics aren’t available after that, but numerous stabbings have occurred this year — one of which resulted in the death of a 17-year-old girl during Culture Night. The trend resulted in all parents of Reykjavík schoolchildren receiving an email from the city on August 29 asking them to help prevent children from bringing knives to school, which according to the email has become a problem in the past few months.
So what the fuck is going on here?
It depends who you listen to. According to the twats who hang out on Icelandic Twitter, and to absolutely nobody’s surprise, the answers are immigration, and the erosion of Christian morality. Very original, I know. Putting these racist tropes to one side, there is clearly something going wrong in Icelandic society. But what?
Dr. Viðar Halldórsson is a professor of sociology at the University of Iceland whose new book offers some thoughts on the subject. In an interview on Bylgjan radio on September 15, he suggested that Icelandic society’s negative trajectory is due to its social fabric being undermined. His evidence? Increased loneliness, anxiety, burnout, and polarisation.
With Margaret Thatcher rolling in her grave, Halldórsson explained that there is a thing called “society”, and that it’s being weakened by “special interests winning over collective interests”. This has resulted in a broadly individualistic outlook, he adds, that has weakened the social safety net for everyone and increased inequality.
It’s bleak stuff, for sure — but it’s also a much more nuanced explanation than the Twitter xenophobes had to offer.
Since the ‘90s almost all Western political parties have more or less operated on the assumption that Thatcher’s vision of capitalist non-society is the only way things can be. As a result, we have a narrow political spectrum where people debate whether the tax rate should be 37.5% (the “right”) or 38% (the “left”). I guess the centrists are aiming at 37.75%. When it comes to major issues like the housing market, healthcare, or education, all parties seem to agree that free market solutions are the only course of action, if they take any action at all, because laissez-faire.
And after three decades of applying free market solutions to complex social problems, we may finally be starting to see the tears in our social fabric, manifesting as increased violent crime.
While it’s a more complex explanation, it’s not exactly a surprise. The words of historian Will Durant (1885-1981) come to mind: “Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.”
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