Pure water and small scale democracy

My dear friends,

I returned from Iceland, but my soul still lingers on the rims of embering craters and murmuring geysers. In one way or another, Iceland’s other worldly landscape has a kind of purity that I found nowhere else. The best witness to this purity is the water. Open a tap in Iceland and fluid crystal pours out of it.

I may have been studying water in a more serious way than most people. It was the first thing I learned during my training as a tea sommelier: the quality of tea is dependent on the quality of the water used. I am talking here about Chinese full leaf tea – tea with a soul. Grown with as much love and dedication as the grapes of the Romanée Conti.

Such tea leaves reveal the true nature of water. Each hidden shortcoming in the water will surface in the tea flavor as a wisp of bitterness. I have tried all kinds of water and I can confidently say: what comes out of any ordinary tap in Iceland, belongs to the best I have ever tasted.

When I just arrived in Iceland, I asked the divinely comic doctor Karl Snaebjornsson – Kalli among friends – whether I should buy bottles of water or rather just have it from the tap. His answer: if you want to pay for the microplastics, buy it in bottles.

Kalli was brought to court during the coronacrisis. His crime: he prescribed alternative medicines to people with corona. A six-year sentence was demanded. He kept his back straight, went to court, and was exonerated. Sometimes our judicial system does what it has to do.

And sometimes it doesn’t. I met some of the leaders of the Canadian Truckers a few weeks ago in Holland. Some of them actually spent some time in jail (or are at risk of jail sentences up to 15 years). I noticed that many of these criminals have something in common: I see a candle of love burning in the cathedrals of their eyes and in their voices I hear a song about a future worthy of a human being.

Back to Iceland. There are no more than 380.000 Icelanders, about half of them living in or around Reykjavik. There are certain advantages to this pocket size democracy. I remember an ancient Greek saying that a democracy cannot work if the democratic leader doesn’t know most of the citizens personally. I guess it would be quite challenging to switch to a few million mini democracies in these globalist times, but nevertheless, there is something to be said for the idea that the essence of a democracy is situated in the quality of the relationships between citizens and leaders. The lower the quality of the human bonds, the more bureaucratic rules will be needed to organize daily life, and the more society will be open for the introduction of technocratic surveillance systems.

Few people realize the dangers of bureaucratic systems: ‘In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant’ (Hannah Arendt, On violence).

On Wednesday, Sigmundur David (see picture), former prime minister of Iceland, showed me around in the parliament in Reykjavik. During lunch, he patiently answered all my questions about the history and structure of the Icelandic democratic system. Iceland doesn’t have an army (it never had one) and it needs only a small police force (which is barely visible in the streets).

And the undervaluing of real labor (jobs of which we all know that they are necessary, think about what nurses and garbage men and farmers do), and overvaluing of ‘bullshit jobs’ didn’ root well in Iceland’s volcanic soil. The best paid job in Iceland is cod fisher. It earns 13.500 euro’s a month (two weeks of paid leave included every month).

Since its origins in the ninth century, Icelandic society has been isolated on an Island and it is so limited in extent that people rather trust their own lived experience than social statistics. The introduction of the internet and social media, migration and immigration, the increasing impact of European and globalist institutions – the impact of all sorts of social evolutions are silhouetting here more clearly and more tangibly than elsewhere. Or at least: Iceland offers an excellent opportunity to study how these factors reshape society and impact on daily life.

My conversation with Sigmundur left me with a warm feeling – there are politicians who truly care for a humane society. And I had the same impression when I went hiking with presidential candidate Arnar Jonsson. In general, political discourse might have lapsed into hollow rhetoric and mere propaganda. Yet also in the political world, some people have preserved the virtue of sincerity. I think we should always be careful with anti-elite sentiments. Good and evil fight their perennial battle at all levels of society.

And I met so many other lovely people in Iceland. To mention a few: Marta Ernstsdottir, former Olympic athlete who led me to warm water springs high in Iceland’s mountains, Frosti Loganson, one of Iceland’s most celebrated journalists who got cancelled for speaking out during the coronacrisis, and, of course, my dear friend Sigurour Sigurbjornsson – Siggi, you felt like a brother from the first time I met you.

That being said: I am ready to leave for Slovenia in a few days – giving lectures, meeting new people. I will keep you posted.

Mattias