Scandinavians have managed to attain high standards of living while maintaining a low differential between rich and poor. And if that isn’t enough to make you want to throw up your smoked sheep’s head and give the blue-eyed blond kid a wedgie, then consider that they are the only humans in history who have been cool enough to divorce nudity from sex. Young and old of every gender and proclivity can nakedly sauna, roll in the snow, and skinny-dip with seals without the faintest leer or vain concern for subzero shriveling.

But at least we can console ourselves with the thought that a great many of them will commit suicide. Though the Scandinavians dispute this, saying they’re just more diligent at collating their mortality statistics, the North does have its dark side. The long winter nights, the months where the sun skims like a pale pebble across the horizon. Scandinavians may charitably love the Third World, but they loathe and despise one another. The nations share a pugnacious history of occupation, famine, murder. The watchword of all Nordic people, their mantra, is “conformity.” The worst social sin is to stand out, to appear even obliquely boastful or pleased with yourself. It is one thing to succeed, but you mustn’t ever be seen to be succeeding. You can’t tell how rich or powerful anyone is by looking at how they are dressed or the watch they are wearing or the handbag they are toting. Scandinavians drive sensible, unremarkable cars, pedal old, beat-up bikes. The streets of Copenhagen and Stockholm are a uniform monochrome of black parkas and wool hats. Not belittling others with your success is a serious and constant obligation.

You can split Europe between the herring people and the sardine people. Herring Europe, in the North, is Protestant, liberal, conformist, and honest. The sardine South is Catholic, corrupt, vain, and mendacious. But ask 100 Europeans—or anyone, for that matter—if they’d rather live in deranged, derailed Italy or decent and efficient Denmark and 99 of them will say, “Give me Tuscany.” Including the Danes.

Of course we’d rather live with the flattery, the flirtation, and the sybaritism, putting off till tomorrow what we should have done yesterday. But we also know, in our fear, that what we should do is live more like them. And when the economic weather is cold, it’s better to be a herring. The attraction of Scandinavia’s renaissance is in its having managed to survive a humane and collectively responsible recession. This is not a time for thoughtless laughter and lies, for long lunches and siestas. It’s a time for hunkering round the fire, caring for each other, diligent toil, and eating mushrooms. The appetite for murder and terse detectives always grows in popularity during depressions. The grim darkness of crime fiction reflects hard times. These tales aren’t an escape to a nice world—they are about facing up to a grimly Gothic life where stuff happens and you need to man up to make it right.

Out of Scandinavia comes the cold, cleansing gust of fiscal and social cohesion, of redemption, with a bit of heavy drinking and woolly, fit sex on the side. The Nordics have a trick, a useful mind game. They keep two sets of ethical accounts, like the New Testament and the Old. One set of books they show to the world; the other they keep to themselves. Publicly they are liberal and inclusive. They clear shelf space for pornography and they politely listen to nihilism. They prefer rehabilitation to punishment and they open the doors to refugees. They are never judgmental about social stumbles, abortion, or illegitimacy. They throw confetti over gay and inter-racial marriages. You could probably set up home with a willing reindeer. But privately, behind the shutters, they are moral sticklers, silently unyielding and stern about impropriety and licentiousness. They are formal and easily shocked. They are welcoming but not particularly friendly to strangers. They manage to live with this dichotomy, without suffering its contradictions, because it is practical. Society must work, and it works best if it’s fair and compassionate. Families work best when there are rules and stout boundaries.

The Scream may seem to be very us, very now, but you need to look at it through Scandinavian eyes, without our self-reverential solipsism. We assume that the scream is coming from the figure. We identify with its terror. But Munch described this moment, and the cry is coming from the outside. It is the vibrating call of the wild. The figure is covering its ears, and not screaming but gasping. It’s not all about you. You’re not the victim. It’s out there, all around us. That’s very Scandi, very herring. And if you make your own bed, it’s much easier to lie on it.