109: Dennis Nørmark | Are We Really Free? Pseudo-Work & Unfreedom: How Work & Society Keep Us Trapped

So today we are together with a fellow Dane, Dennis Nermark. First of all, Dennis, it's good to see you and welcome. Thank you so much. Yes, so I almost don't know where to start because there's so many questions I want to ask you. You have written two of my favorite books, one of them with a co-author called SodaWork, and the new one here you've written by yourself. And you have written other books also which I have yet to read and look forward to. This one I would love to go into depth with today is called in Danish Ufrihedens Pris, and it would be translated to the price of unfreedom, and that's a funny word freedom. So can we start there? Talk about what do you mean by unfreedom and that's a funny word freedom. So can we start there? Talk about what do you mean by unfreedom?

well, unfreedom means to be prohibited into, into doing what you would like to do. It means that you somehow, but that you are what you would call it when it's not possible for you to do or think or be the person you'd like to be. It means that you are, you have aspirations to do something else, or the will to do something else, but sometimes the structures and the people around you make it impossible for you to do that. I think that for me, you know, freedom is about self being self-propelled by being able to do like you aspire to do, uh and yeah. So unfreedom would be the the negative of that yeah, and as I read, um soda work first.

maybe we briefly should touch on that before I go into further questions. What is SodaWork?

Then we have the two framings for our talk SodaWork- was a concept I developed with Anders Fogh Jensen, a philosopher, that covered the types of work that we sometimes do that really does not serve any real purpose, when there is no real value-added work, that could be easily ignored without having any sort of consequences in the real world. So it would be the type of, you could say, work as a sort of theater right, where you do stuff that is unnecessary but you've somehow been told by your surroundings that it's very important that you do it or that it has some sort of purpose, which is just very difficult to really detect and find. So you could say it's a kind of yes, as I said, a theater of of types of job that that has no real effect, but but, but you can get a lot of prestige from and and and that you can. You can have a very fancy title and sometimes it sounds very important, although it isn't.

Would you like to give an example, just for those who can't imagine, yeah, by that.

It's always easier to use one of the examples in the book because we, of course, we interviewed a lot of a year on writing and putting pages together, forming a 70, 80 pages product that she finds out nobody really reads in the organization, Nobody really cares. And she actually starts interrupting a lot of other people in their work so they can make some contribution to this annual report and take pictures and give some quotes, et cetera. But she finds out that even the board of directors only get a 15-pages executive summary of it. So all in all, it's basically a waste of her time and everybody else's time. But when she confronts her boss with this fact, he just says well, everybody makes an annual report, Everybody knows nobody reads them, but all organizations do this, so we do the same right?

So you basically copy it and what I realized, what we realized, is that a lot of pseudo work is stuff you do because all the organizations do them as well. They make strategies, they make reports, they have workshops or you know they have a lot of stuff that they feel is important and they would feel they were not a real company if they didn't do it. But all in all, a lot of it isn't used by anybody or basically, you know, kills their way because it has no real impact. It's just a waste of time.

But then that is where my life story got difficult. Our story briefly told we started to homeschool our kids. My wife was at home with the kids, I went to work and some things happen when you choose to not school. If you look at it, then you can ask yourself what is that? That actually happens when you choose a school. I made the calculations because we have a grown up daughter who is now 25, and our next one is 19, etc. Down to one who is 13.

And we had chosen a school because we really like their learning style based on Celestine Frenet, and it was really interesting to look at how long time would we be connected to that school with the age gap we had between our kids, and it ended up close to 20. That meant then that I would choose a house that was in biking distance of the school to make our kids life easier. I would prefer to bike to work, so I would also find a work in that distance, and we wanted a house and a place and a 30-year mortgage and it was just like you can see how life is panned on a school and because we have four kids, it's just like panned out. This is the direction. This is where it goes. And then one what happened was my my wife is luckily still here, but she got cancer and survived, and we needed to revalue, relate everything and we ended up with choosing homeschooling later on unschooling of different reasons and what happened was I still went to work, we still had the house, the same place, and our oldest was still in the school. She wanted that.

But at some point I was just looking out of the window, the sun was shining, I knew my wife and kids were having fun and I just felt trapped. We didn't have to stay in one place because our kids were homeschooled and the only thing that kept us in that one place was that I went to work every day. So we went on, changed my income over to being online, a digital nomad, and then the last seven years we have been traveling. It's a wonderful thing to have created, but it was very clear when I read your book, I was just looking back at all those hours and hours and hours in an office where you are spending the time. So the whole thing about freedom I find very interesting, as we are still hunting freedom, almost hungrily, want to have the most out of life because of this life-changing experience.

It's so funny how this you know, quest for work has become so absorbing for everybody, right? You know, in the book we also look at, you know I'm an anthropologist and when you look at hunter-gatherer societies or tribal societies, work doesn't really fill that much of a place in their lives. You know, most people do other stuff they play, they tell stories, they sometimes just hunt for fun, all right. So, you know, originally human beings with it and spent more and more time on work until we actually, you know, probably reached the sort of the pinnacle of work in the 1800s and then it slowly started to be reduced. But we found it so fascinating that about 100 years ago everybody thought we would be working 15 hours a week, that about 100 years ago everybody thought we would be working 15 hours a week, that you know, leading economists and politicians and unions, everybody thought that work hours in 2020 or 2030 would be around 15, 20 hours. But that doesn't seem to have happened. We still work a lot. So we're just fascinated by the fact.

Maybe the work in itself has become a type of religion, you know where, maybe you know doing work, and even though we've had a lot of machinery, a lot of computers, a lot of things that should actually make it possible for us to do less work. We don't know what to do with our lives, so our point is that we start to invent work instead. So our point is that we start to invent work instead. We just pile more work and then we think it's very, very important to do another strategy seminar, or make sure that our logo is transformed and changed every fifth year, or something like that, even though that's not really necessary. So we end up inventing tasks for ourselves, because human beings have developed the incapacity to actually live without the work.

And you know, that's something that originally inspired us for writing the book is what happened to the dream of leisure, what happened to the dream of actually avoiding work? And it somehow stopped, like 30 years ago, because we haven't really seen a reduction in work hours per week for the last 30 years. And it's not like work automatically takes 37 hours of your life every week. That's an insane idea. So for some reason, we just ended up with this concept of work taking so and so much time, and our point in the book is that work seems to expand with the hours available for its completion. So if you decide that you have 37 hours each week you spend on work, you will find a way to make the work you have fill 37 hours and that's sort of the strategy of modern work life.

Do you think it has to do with the concept of work itself?

Yeah, you could say well, every people on the planet work in some way. That means they produce something, they create something, they do something with something so that it adds some sort of value, and every human being is sent to do this. But we used to do this type of work because we felt it was necessary. And sometimes we also do play, or we invent or we do something else.

What's interesting about work is that human beings, at least the Western human being, does not really play anymore. You know, just go 100 years back and a lot of people spent a lot of time playing when grownups were together. They played, they did a lot of other stuff also, you know, in the Western world, but somehow all things that has to do with play and fun just went out the window. And then work suddenly became a place where we should find our identity. If you look back 200 years ago, nobody really found much identity in their work. If you go to a hunter-gatherer society in the Kalahari Desert of Africa, nobody would claim that their work is their identity. So this sort of came later. So work became a predominant way of looking at yourself and who you are, which, of course, is also necessary for it to consume so much of your time.

I was just thinking, the distinction between working and not working. Yeah, Of course there is, as you say, Living.

you could say yeah.

The necessity of things and there is a gray zone between what's urgently clearly necessary and what's peaceful, calm, hanging out, playing, and all the in-betweens. And I say that as a homemaker. We've had a lot of conversations about me drinking coffee, but I'm the mother in an unschooling family. It's my responsibility to share the responsibility of the education of the children with the children themselves, but I'm not unparenting them. I'm not not there giving them, allowing them their freedom, that I believe they have the right that they own their time. They have the right that they own their time, but there's a lot of drinking coffee in that equation. There's a lot of. This morning I had a one hour conversation with our 19 year old son on literature and psychology, and it was, you know, we were both wearing our workout clothes, we were on our way out to go for a run and this obviously meant that my work day, where I could sit with my computer and look smart, was pushed an hour.

Yeah.

But the question is, when did I add more value? When I had that conversation with our son about literature and psychology? Or when I wrote that blog post that I wrote a bit later for maybe no one, maybe a lot of people to read, I don't know? I know that in the context of of this young man who has never been to school in his life, it's a very important institution. You might say that he can have a conversation with someone in his proximity, someone he trusts, someone he's he knows about the things he's passionate about. So what is that? Does that work? When we have the negative version of the conversation, it's not work it's me being lazy in the sofa.

Yes, and when we're I think it is.

It is work, you know life.

What some of the things that we try to argue for in the book is that we have limited our idea of work to to work with an economic payment, with some sort of economic reward. But that's never been what work is. It's been what work is for a limited amount of time in history. But historically, all the things you're mentioning there are work. You know, spending time with your kids is work. Feeding your kid is work. Talking with your kid about something that's important to that person is work, because it creates some sort of value. That's why you know women for a long, long period. You know, for hundreds of years their type of work was never recognized because it was done in the home Cleaning, washing the sheets, doing all of that stuff. That wasn't that was that was home, it was chores. You know, that's stuff you do in your home. But in reality it was work and because women were not paid for it, it wasn't considered work.

There's been this very narrow idea that work is only something where you get some sort of economic compensation for, and our book is trying to. We were trying to say there's a lot of work that you get economically compensated for that really isn't work, because it doesn't do anything. On the other hand, there's a ton of stuff that you do. All that adds some sort of value to something that wouldn't have been added automatically. Right, you do something, you refine something. When you talk to your kid, you engage with that person, you give that person new insights, you promote something, you create some sort of value to.

When you're sitting down having a a cup of coffee, coffee, thinking sitting. You know I'm a writer. Most of my time is looking out the window with a cup of coffee. You know that's what I do. You know, in a work in an office environment that wouldn't look like work, somebody would come up to you and say to me so, dennis, what are you doing? I'm working, it doesn't look like it. No, dennis, what are you doing? I'm working? It doesn't look like it. No, but if I've been running around to meetings, sitting and hammering my fingers down in a keyboard or talking about strategies, it would qualify as work in the setting of work that we've created. But it just isn't.

So do we have also some sort of moral thing going on where we're trying to prove to our surroundings that we are good people because we work hard?

yeah, it's, there's absolutely a moral obligation in it and a sort of moral value we take from work. It also that's probably also due to our protestant ethic, you know it's, it's probably more. You'll find more of that in christian societies with a heavy protestant ethic and in other societies, and you know, the clear proof of that is that you can go to some countries, you know. You can go to places like in, you know, in Africa or somewhere else, where people deliberately, very openly, do nothing and I'm not ashamed of it because it doesn't fill them with any type of shame, because that's just how it is. You work when there's something to do, otherwise you don't do anything.

But we come from a culture where especially me and you too, I guess where being busy is a badge of honor. Being able to show that you're constantly engaged in something that means that you don't have time to do, play and life is a rewarding exercise. And people will reward you for that because it will be seen as a way of having self-control or a way of avoiding your own pleasures. And again, you could sell that as a commodity and in this way it easily becomes something that society wants you to exhibit. So busyness becomes yeah, as I said, a badge of honor.

Yeah, and what I personally find difficult is, for example, with our children, whom we give enormous freedom. Example with our children, whom we give enormous freedom. I can look at them and be like there's still this in the back of my mind sometimes oh, will they ever get a career? And then it is arguing with the other side that is saying imagine they were just happy people, that they were satisfied and in balance with themselves, that they, as we say, worked when they needed food and money. They could do live wherever they wanted, but not having this constant something in the back of the mind just telling you to keep on. And on the other side I will go back to myself again.

I have always had a drive to produce something. When I was younger it was movies. I've written children's literature. Now we're doing a podcast and I work and part of me loves to create.

There's something in the art of creation I really like, but at the other hand, I do not like creating without getting economic compensation for it somehow, because then I don't give it the same value. And then I can argue with myself that money is just a language we have created to talk about value, because people don't come if they listen to the podcast and enjoy that time I've spent making that they don't go home to us and do the dishes as an exchange. So money is an exchange for value in some sort, and I have all these internal dialogues. But at the same time I'm like can I figure out, just to relax, when does it come from this push? Is it the Protestant Christian background and the whole culture in Denmark? And then I'm just going like, ah, now I will just. And now when I relax, now I whittle spoons, which is still a production of something. But on one hand, humans like to produce, and that is also my problem.

Humans are creative. You can't find a place in the world where people don't just look at the sky the whole day and watching this day and watching the clouds float by, Everybody's doing something. You can always go to anywhere in the world and people are busy making a flute out of some branch or creativity is just part of human life, and we try to improve. We like to improve. We are intelligent beings who'd like to challenge ourselves. Why do we do crossword puzzles? Crossword puzzles are idiotic. Nobody's paying you for that.

You're doing it because you want to somehow challenge yourself, and human beings have the drive to create, to want to create, to do something. But at the end of the day, you also have to survive, right? So if too much of your time is spent on something that will not give you any benefits at all, then most people start to think maybe I can make some money out of this podcast, or maybe I could make some money out of bending spoons and become a magician or whatever, right? So we end up, because we have these needs to to somehow convert what we like to do into some sort of a job, and I think that's what most people have done in the world so far, the strategy of modern life is that we are now converting. We're now being told to do a lot of things that we don't really enjoy doing but that we think we have to, even though it makes no sense for us, because we're caught up with these. You know, strange ideas of what work should be and, in some corporations, the strange ideas of what is necessary and efficient, etc. Etc. So I think we are all creative. Everybody will be that at some point and want to do it, and some of us are lucky to convert that into something that can actually benefit us economically as well lucky to convert that into something that can actually benefit us economically as well.

When I talk with a lot of unschooling, homeschooling parents on the start of their road down their journey, then I actually recommend your books because I'm like this is what someone has figured out about work and work ethics and etc. But why aren't we looking at the schools at the same way? Because there's a lot of sort of work going on in school. There's a lot of unfreedom, so have you in your work, looked at some of this?

yeah, basically a lot of the schools too. You know, uh, you know because you know what. What made me make a transition from pseudo work to the to to the price of unfreedom, was exactly the my interest in how much of work out there. That is pseudo work has to do with the fact that we don't. That is pseudo work has to do with the fact that we don't trust that people will actually do their work. We think it's so tiresome and terrible for them to do their work that we have to control them, that we have to make sure that they do their work, because we end up with a crazy idea that human beings are basically lazy and they are disengaged and not interested, that originally, human beings would try to avoid any type of creativity and work, etc. Etc. And this is, as I said before, simply not true. But because this myth of human beings have been so prevalent, we have started to make so many control systems and so many rules and basically tightening the strings every time human beings are out there working to, you know, control what they do or frame it in such a way that we have some sort of control over it. So for me, that was, you know, a transition from pseudo work to the price of unfreedom, which I saw in a lot of organizations, especially the schools you know in.

In the schools in the 1917s and 80s, school teachers had a tremendous amount of freedom to do almost entirely what they wanted. Um, and that happened for a very long time until we started to really again narrow it, it down, making it harder and harder to just be guided by your personal calling as a teacher and more and more framed by strict strategies and plans and goals and, you know, a performance indicator type of work. And that has again basically taken out a lot of the joy in work as well, because one thing that can certainly take the joy out of work is loss of meaning, loss of control and, interestingly enough, also when we pay them. So if you do pay work you don't get paid for, you usually enjoy more than the work you do get paid for. So all of these things added up to making especially teaching, especially in schoolwork, a job that more and more people found unfulfilling to do.

But if we flip it in those schools where the teachers now are suffering basically in Denmark it's called fiddles model the shared goal which is a set of rules of how school should be done in the public school, which is. I read it. Obviously, as I'm home educating, I needed to see what am I up against here.

So the says that I have to do something on the same level as that. So I had to know what it was and I think it was very, very specific. Yeah, Borderlining OCD. You have to learn about this in that month of that year in this way and make sure they know exactly A through Z. It was pretty, yeah. Anyways, the teachers are suffering because they have no freedom. They are little robots or they are not, of course, but they kind of have to act like a little robot. But what about all the kids? They're at the receiving end of this. They are trapped here, and they are one of the most impactful books we've read. We actually only had to read the title. It was called Children the last slaves.

Yeah because, when you think about it, how much freedom does a child have?

Not a lot.

It's trapped there in school and they have to do what the parents are told. They will not be fed if they don't behave. They can't. If I have a job and I hate it I might feel trapped by the economics of giving up having a job, but in a way I'm an adult. I can quit my job, find another job. I can leave A child can't leave the school. They are told wrongly in Denmark that they have to be there. Actually they don't by law, but everybody tells them they have to be there. Actually they don't by law, but they everybody tells them they have to be there. And they have to be in this system where they are doing things that make no sense, that are not interesting, and even the the, the deliverer of it, the teacher, doesn't find it meaningful. When we were in school at least the teachers were free and inspired yeah, and inspired, but now they are doing this mechanic work yeah, and what drops off?

of course it drops off at the kids. I'm sure it does um and it and it creates a very narrow learning environment. You know, the more, the more you are supposed to. I think it it's about 5,000 different learning goals that we have in the Danish public schools. They're trying to get rid of them now, thankfully, but that has been the regime in the public schools of Denmark and that means there is, as you said, there is a very in the price of unfreedom.

I call it managerialism. You know the idea that you can sort of manage everything, that you could square things in and tell people exactly what to do. It's the old Frederick Winslow Tayloran idea of the conveyor belt. You know, instruct people in how to do their work and let them do it and check if they've done it. And this type of managerialist idea has been running organizations public sector, private sector for many, many, many years, have been running organizations public sector, private sector for many, many, many years.

And when that tailor and idea of managerialism meets the public school, it means a very narrow idea of how to teach kids, and the kids also learn over time that their response is very narrow too, that they can't really do anything crazy or wild. Even our grading system in Denmark has become this way that basically what you're looking for, if you want to get a top grade in a field, you have to make no mistakes. That's what we do today. When I was a kid, you could get a 13, which was top grade for an extraordinary achievement that was doing something other than expected. But children today learn not to do anything than what is is expected from them. So if you make no mistakes, it's fine.

So you create the whole idea that it's about. It's about, um, finding errors. It's about making sure that you have you have checked all the your boxes. It becomes a very narrow idea of teaching and expanding people's knowledge, and I think, especially if you are kids who are maybe a little bit weird or special or have some sort of diagnosis or whatever, and then the more restricted stuff gets, the less room there is for you to really perform in. So I think it has some devastating effects on innovation, how kids learn, how much they enjoy learning. It also has an effect on how much difference can we actually allow for in the classroom. So I think this has a lot of other effects than, just as you mentioned, the teachers and their teachers' well-being. Of course it rubs off on the kids.

Then is what is the price of unfreedom?

Because it's a whole book it's very good to narrow things in and have controls and have management and have unfreedom, because otherwise things will get too unhinged, it will go out of control, it'll be dangerous, it'll be costly, it'll be inefficient, et cetera, et cetera. What I try to show with the book is that it's actually the reverse phenomenon. That freedom actually is a quite smart way of solving problems. Giving people freedom and the ability to self-organize is much more cheap than having a ton of managers checking and instructing and writing very complex manuals about what to do and how to do it. That we have somehow managed to convince ourselves that freedom is not the clever way of solving things, that more management, more control, more leadership, more rules, more organization, more framework is efficient and clever and safe. But I try to show in my book that it really isn't. It is a misunderstanding. There is a lot to be gained from freedom, much more than we think.

But, dennis, sometimes when I've recommended both your books of these two we're talking today, I've said to people try not to cry when you read it, because when you see it, for some people it would be like removing the blinds, like, oh fuck the things I've when I go to work I can be annoyed with stuff. And now this guy is even saying I'm not wrong, I'm right, it's stupid. And again, with the, the price of unfreedom, you can be like, oh, that is why I hate all these rules. But when I say to try not to cry is, have you created a life where you're stuck in this? Then you will be like, oh no, what to do now? So what do you suggest people do after they have read your books?

Well, that they take matters into their own hand. You know I, you know I, I, one of I, I. One of the things I really try to combat in the Price of Unfreedom is what I call self-inflicted helplessness. You know that we end up believing that we can do nothing. We, we sort of we sort of mirror this image of ourselves that has been created over over, over time and and it becomes who we are and we start to believing in it. You know, sudowork has sold more than 100,000 copies around the world and it's as far away as South Korea and it's just been translated into Japanese. This is because this rings a bell with a lot of people's lives. They realize that. As you said, jesper, you know the little feeling you have inside that maybe it's not me who's wrong here, maybe it's something else that's wrong. That really did strike a chord with a lot of people. So people are.

I've got so many mails from people who quit their job because of my books and I think that is a good thing. It's not entirely the sole purpose of the book to make people quit their jobs, but if they feel that I showed them and me and Anders Fogh Jensen showed them that their life is miserable with this type of work, then it's fantastic to lose the grip and just say well, now I'm in the driver's seat, now I take the decision, now I'm leaving, and I think a lot of us. The problem of modern Western persons is they're looking for a lot of other people to help them when actually they should be helping themselves. They're thinking why should the state should help me with this, or society should help me with this, or society should help me with this, or my boss should help with this, or consultant or psychologist? But in reality you should help yourself with this. You should start doing something else. You should quit your job, right. You should realize that there's much more to gain from freedom. You should sort of just get the shackles off, and most people can actually do this.

But for a very long time we have been told that we really can't, that we need managers, we need people to guide us in every aspect of our life. Then we become self-inflictedly helpless and so and when I say this, a lot of people still look at me with a desperate gaze, thinking I still don't understand it. And it's hard sometimes I've met some of the most depressing people sometimes when I go out and talk about this and they just sit there and think, oh, it's great to be more self-organized and inner directed, et cetera, et cetera. But I can't. I live in, I work in an organization where it's impossible or that would be very difficult. I might lose my job, you know. So people are sadly to say not necessarily, they don't. A lot of people don't have that drive anymore and I wish they did. And that's the only thing I can say I really wish they did.

I think some of it actually stems from that school system.

Yeah, that we are taught from very early on that that we are not allowed our own freedom should be an inborn right to decide what to do with your own hours on this planet, in this life, and and young children are taught what you want to do is irrelevant and a waste of time.

What you are interested in is not what you're supposed to be interested in. Here we are the adults in in some way here. Here it is the state telling you what to learn, how to learn it, when to learn it, how to behave, and the things you want to do you can do in the allocated free time that we give you, that you can have if you get good grades in school, if you do your chores, if you're a nice older brother, whatever. So we teach children early on that if they don't comply to the school system and learn the things in the right way and now they changed you know the grading system, as you said to the good student is the one who doesn't make mistakes, which means you don't take any chances, you don't risk anything, you don't go wild in your brain and compare two incomparable things a tree to a I don't know a play by shakespeare and you go down that rabbit hole and it didn't work.

But you tried and and maybe get that 13 for that, just for the creative idea. Um, that doesn't happen any longer. And you're taught all the time that you have to go through with this. And in the country you and I come from you go through it for about 20, 25 years until you have your university degree because otherwise you won't get a good job and then you won't get a good life. And I met a lot of children older children, I kind of see when they're younger how the light turns off in their eyes after a few years of schooling, this enthusiasm, joy, wonder. And when they become young teenagers they believe that narrative, it's internalized. And now you're telling me about the workforce, how you know they kind of see your point because they're smart enough to understand it, but they don't. They've given up in a way.

you know they're in the trap and that's because a lot of the teachers or consultants and managers and politicians, et cetera, has framed the taking away of freedom as a type of care. You know they have. They presented this as a way of taking care of you, a way of organizing your life for you, because otherwise life would be hard and dangerous, et cetera, et cetera. So, and it's very, very difficult to rebel against somebody who says they love you, you know, and framing it like like some sort of care. And that's why, you know, in my book I framed it, I call it the administrative upper class, which means that if people are not willing to take control over their own lives, somebody is willing, homeless a very long time, so say I don't want power. Somebody else will say, well, I'll grab it for you then and I'll decide what you do and I'll make a whole career out of telling you what to do, because then the productivity I convey in this world is telling you what to do and instructing you in your life and making rules for you life and making rules for you. And again, so that's why, you know, we get more teachers and consultants and HR departments and managers, etc. With a larger and larger managerial class of people whose basic jobs it is to tell you what to do, and that's their contribution to the world.

And again, if they frame this with if we weren't here, everything would go wrong, then we're a bit scared and then we say, well, okay, then you better be here. It might be I'm probably not fit to take up, you know, decisions on my own. It would probably be dangerous for me if I did this, you know, just because I think that would be the right thing to do, if I let my sort of inner drives guide me, if I let my sort of inner drives guide me. So I think that's the reason why this has happened is that that it has been sort of the, the freedom has been taken away from us with a, with a lot of love in a way, or what I would say is looking like love, but really isn't it basically control.

So, knowing these things, thinking about them and dissecting the system, understanding what's up and down, what is care and what is freedom, we might have to keep living in the same sort of society for a while. I'm not going to personally start a revolution not not an armed one, um but knowing it at least can set us free emotionally and, it's like, with our thoughts yeah, yeah, exactly yeah so we understand you're taking away my freedom now, yeah, because you're saying that and you're trying to manipulate you.

You repeating the narrative of care, I don't, I don't buy that. I'll do what you tell me to do because I have to, otherwise you're not paying me. I remember my mom.

She was a high school. Sorry, my mom was a high school teacher.

It's not just pay, it's also punishment, right? Yes, it's carrots and sticks. Yeah.

Yeah, my mom was a high school teacher and she got pretty disillusionized over her years of teaching in high school in Denmark and in the end she said I don't care, they can give me a broom and I'll broom the floor instead of teaching French literature. I don't care any longer. They pay me and I do what they tell me to do, and that's not the kind of life you want. That's not the kind of worker you want either.

No, no dissolution At least she kept her free thinking, she didn't obey to the idea that she had to do the things because they were necessary, because she found them increasingly BS over the years of working. And I think, of course, it's not good to have a job and a life, an everyday life, where you think what most of you, most of what you do, is bullshit, but at least you can call it yeah, and then you don't have to live with that fear, because fear is the ruler of this right. If they tell you it's necessary, otherwise it's dangerous, well then you're ruled by fear, fear of something that isn't doesn't exist and that's the first step.

it's calling bullshit, uh or or didn't, or just refusing to do some of the stuff. That's the first step and I think, again, more of us could be doing that. The last phrase in the pseudo work is you have more space than you think, because we are trying to tell people that you probably have more wiggle room or whatever you want to call it. As we call it in Danish, you are able to maybe move yourself around more than you think you are. Just try it out, see what happens. And again, this means that you somehow have to defy some of these authorities or maybe find the best, better authorities.

You know I'm not against authority, as I write in my book. You know natural authorities are a great thing. I'm guessing you're natural authorities for your kids. I mean, you're somebody they look up to, hopefully, and you think that you can inspire them, etc. From people to get, you know, good ideas. To be inspired by people is fantastic.

What is wrong and what tends to be problematic are hierarchies. You know where people are. You know entitled to tell you what to do and can force you or punish you if you don't do as they tell you to. And again, my problem is just that increasingly, our work life and public life, et cetera, has been full of authorities that can push you around, that can actually punish you, that don't inspire you anymore, that you don't want to follow just because you think they're amazing or interesting. But you follow them because otherwise you'll be fined or punished or put to jail or people will take away your money on something like that, and that's what I find problematic yeah, and even these people usually, I think have this installed in their deep psychology, internalized the idea of control as as the good path.

So they think they're doing a good job, a necessary job. It's not malice necessarily happening from the side of your boss and you don't have to rebel against the school teacher. It's questioning the underlying structure of that system. That becomes interesting. You know, why are we? Why are we doing this?

exactly, and that's why I spent just so much of the president. Freedom is about. How did we end up with a image of human beings as so helpless, you know? How did we end up with an image of human beings as so helpless, you know? How did we end up with an idea that human beings couldn't do this? You know. So for me it's about there's no, of course, all the people in the administrative upper class are not doing this, because they've started to adapt the idea that human beings are so helpless that they're inherently evil, that they are misguided morally if there's not a superior figure that can tell them what to do, and that they're lazy at their work, that there are all these types of things.

And for me, it's about the image of human beings. If that has been created and been reproduced by a class of powerful managers and people who have an interest in this image of human beings as helpless, then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That becomes how it is. That becomes how we view each other. How it is that becomes how we view each other. So that's why a lot of the Prize for Unfreedom is about backtracking on that image of human beings and actually constitute an image of human beings as much more inner directed, as much more ethical and moral creatures, as much more responsible, self-organized, social responsible individuals, which most of us actually are, social responsible individuals, which we, most of us, actually are.

But we've just been told, we've been told by, by the people who hold power over us that you're not yeah, is it even the case that in the brief moments, or maybe sometimes longer phases of our lives where we are a little helpless, where we we lose control or we're trapped or we're I had cancer once I couldn't do much other than take chemotherapy and try?

to survive and and that was pretty helpless situation but I mean, I grew a lot from that. I learned a lot from that and being helpless for a while. I remember my grandmother. She fell once and she couldn't get up. She was maybe 72 and she couldn't get up and she had to wait until someone showed up in her house because she couldn't reach her phone. It was pretty devastating because she felt like awkwardly it wasn't that she was that weak, but that put so, realizing she was helpless, made her work out a lot the following years. She bought little things. She was an elderly woman. She wasn't like a fitness queen or anything, but that experience of helplessness and how that was not a good feeling made her realize I better do something about this. So if we really are helpless, if we are not governed by anyone there's no instruction book, no one's coming to save you. There's no. You know you are actually. Can I say the f word? You are actually a little fucked you know, that might spark some power.

It's not. It's not the end of the world to be a little bit helpless for a while in your life no, but how will you get stronger if everyone all the time is lifting the stuff for you?

yeah, that's it. You. You have to. You have to recognize that sometimes we do need help, because this again, as I said, sometimes we do need somebody who are cleverer than us. Sometimes we do need help Because this again, as I said, sometimes we do need somebody who are cleverer than us. Sometimes we do need that. We are in situations where we do this. We just shouldn't be too clingy afterwards right, we shouldn't. This shouldn't be how we see or start to see ourselves.

The human beings are in great need of other people's social support all the time. We are extremely social beings. We die when we're alone. The most terrible thing you can do to another person is put that person in isolation. Why do people do that all over the world? Because we know it's the most horrible situation to be in. So human beings want to be with other people and we want to know that the help is out there if we need it. And in the most dire circumstances in our life, people will be there for us. We have just somehow come to learn that these circumstances are almost constant. That help follows you even when you don't need it, because people have interests in helping you, sometimes even when actually distancing you from that help, or even just basically avoiding it would actually be better for you.

I think it's about reclaiming the responsibility for our own lives, and that can be difficult when we hand over the power to someone else. I wanted to end on a positive note.

I think this is pretty epic.

It is super epic and positive. No, but what I what I wanted to say was that maybe it is the bubbles we move in, that I think there is something growing. I think there's a slow movement going on your books, the interest for the books you have written, even though that I mean you are out there being a consultant for companies, because there's an interest in listening to what you have to say. Yeah, it is growing, and I believe that this period of time where we went down the let's over control everything, we can now see the results, which is it doesn't work. So is it just my bubbles or do you think there is something?

It is there. And one of the things is, even though we live in a very polarizing world, what a good thing is that we? I think we're starting to depoliticize freedom, because for many years it has been sort of the right-wing agenda to talk about freedom and the left wing has sort of forgotten to talk about freedom. And the left wing has sort of forgotten to talk about freedom. A lot of other things became much more relevant security, equality, et cetera, et cetera. So the left wing sort of had forgotten freedom. Go back to the hippies in the 60s and 70s. They loved freedom, they talked about it all the time, but then a lot of other things became important to them and then the right wing sort of took a monopoly on freedom. And I think we're back to trying to get rid of the political element in freedom and say everybody wants it, it's a good thing, and no political wing should have any sort of monopoly on it. Everybody are interested.

In Denmark we talk a lot about setting people free of the workplace. That has become a new paradigm, especially in the public sector, and it is everywhere. We're talking about debossing organizations, getting rid of managers and maybe giving more people the freedom to take control of themselves, pushing down the pyramids, making them flatter and flatter and giving more people empowerment in their work. And we talk about deregulating society. We talk about that in Denmark, in the US, in England, everywhere. So I think we are actually at a turning point where freedom has become, has had.

You know that there's a hope there in freedom and there's a limit to. We've understood there's a limit to how much managerialist and regulatory ideas can actually bring you. We talked about how the whole European Union, how we in Europe, are losing competitive edge because we have created so much bureaucracy, so many rules that we are taking away initiative from everybody, right? So I think we are realizing that we have put too much power in some institutions and some people and that it would be better to give it back to the people who probably knows better, which are everybody. So I see that happening right now in Denmark and, you know, again with the popularity of what I've been writing. And also, you know people are interested in having me come out to organizations and talk about this because they can see that this can actually help them. So, yeah, maybe it's just me who want to see what's positive. You know we all have that bias, but I do think that there is a, there is a change happening perfect, dennis.

If people want to read more of your work and find you, can you, for the people just listening, share the name of your website and how they can get hold of your books and stuff?

sure you know they can always find me on LinkedIn. They could also go to denisnormarkcom, which is my name, with an O instead of an Ö, which it is in Danish, com, and there you can read more about me, and I usually, you know, write there. If there's anything new happening, especially for English viewers or people who are not fluent in Danish, that would be the place to look. But LinkedIn is always a good place to find me, perfect.

All right.

It was wonderful this has been a very interesting conversation, thank you.

Thank you so much.