g-Think | Issue 19 | What We Can Learn From Iceland

I landed in Reykjavik on a cheap flight shortly after the fall of Iceland. It looked normal, but then, prices were equal to the dollar instead of nine times it. What was once Europe’s most expensive city was now looking positively affordable.

Reykjavik is tiny, consisting of maybe 500,000 people, and centers around a main drag you can walk in about 20 minutes (during which time you run a 60% chance of encountering Björk at any given moment). England had seized Iceland’s banks shortly before I arrived; consequently the top fashion that week were t-shirts featuring Elizabeth II with her heart slashed over with a red X. (Another design, aimed at Gordon Brown and reading “Brown is the Color of Poo” was equally in style but not nearly as funny in English as the Icelanders probably thought.) Iceland comes across close to the drab, socialized bleakness of Northern Europe… except that it’s missing the bleak part, even in this most crucial of moments.

Though it may have been the first country to get it when the economic axe fell, Iceland may be one of the best off in the long run. And that’s for a series of reasons that we could do very well to study.

Discussing the crisis with a friend and the janitors at the Blue Lagoon hot springs, I heard a solid, unwavering position: “We’ve done it before. We’ll be fine.” Iceland (like America) is rich in natural resources. They have more than enough fish and sheep to feed everybody indefinitely (fish and fish derivatives are practically all they eat anyway—if you think British supermarkets are monotonous, try Reykjavik). Even more importantly, they have easy access to fresh water (Iceland may be better off than just about everybody in this regard by mid-century). And even if there is more than a fair share of resentment at the economic situation, and Great Britain, there is also a sense that things haven’t changed fundamentally.

At 100% literacy rate, Iceland is one of the most educated in the world. It’s also one of the most insular—its inhabitants have been interbreeding for over 1,000 years, producing some of the most beautiful women and surliest-looking men in Europe. Iceland has what may be one of the best protection policies in these times—a resilient, tight-knit, unbreakable culture. One gets the sense that the island is one gigantic interconnected family (traditional families don’t quite play here—no value judgments are placed on sexuality, leading to a free society without much recourse to the nuclear family).

Although it may be insular, Iceland has maintained a high culture, and sense of self, that many of us traded away long ago for material wealth.

As the economy fails, the first world will in most cases not be facing riots in the streets and the prospect of starvation (at least in its richer areas)—these will be reserved for the third world economies dependent on ours. However, as our quality of life declines, we will indeed be forced to cope with lessened standards, lessened opportunity lessened everything. We will still have the chair kicked out from under us, and the predominant challenge will be psychological. We will have new circumstances to adapt to, and new identities, and much, much less insulation from reality.

When one’s sense of identity collapses, psychological problems can follow close behind for the unprepared. This is when community becomes most important, when the most valuable insurance policy you may be able to have is a sense of self not tied to a job or material possessions, but more deeply in touch with the real rhythms of interacting with other human beings and with nature. This is a true model of resilience. To paraphrase the economist Charles Hugh Smith, “Safety doesn’t lie in how many guns you have—it lies in how many people you know.”

In the coming hard times, those who look out for only themselves will be in for trouble—but those who look around at each other will see the answers to their problems. In that regard, we can look to Iceland not only to understand how the recession began, but also to understand how to get through to the other side, as well.