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I am Norwegian, so I thought I'd add a few points, which I think greatly influence the difference. 1) Prison guard education is just a few weeks in the US to m

I am Norwegian, so I thought I'd add a few points, which I think greatly influence the difference. 1) Prison guard education is just a few weeks in the US to my knowledge. In Norway it is a 3 year college education, where you learn about mental illness, why people become criminals, how to rehabilitate people etc. The prison guard job in Norway, is by American standards more like a social worker. Guards spend a lot of time doing activities with inmates. They are not simply there hit misbehaving inmates. 2) The criminal justice system is largely under professional control. We don't elect sheriffs, judges etc like in the US. So there is less opportunity for populist "though on crime" politics to win through. Policies are mainly driven by professionals in the field. 3) Norwegian culture isn't as hung up on good and evil as American culture. I guess that is partly because religion has little importance in Norway. Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that. There was no evil devil. The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil. The world "evil" almost never surface in any discussion. It isn't just the justice system, but Norwegians themselves aren't very interested in revenge. E.g. I've never heard a single survivor from the Utøya massacre express a desire for revenge. I don't know why it is like that, but perhaps a reason is that Viking culture was very revenge and honor based. But this mentality was destroying society so authorities worked hard for hundreds of years to change this mentality.

Toenex 9y ago
> The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil. What an interesting point.
- metaphorm 9y ago
  incredibly common theme in many pre-Christian myth systems. the good/evil dualism in Christianity is the real aberration, despite its prominence. one of the more credible hypotheses I've encountered about this phenomenon is that early Christianity adopted many of the positions of Gnostic Manichaeism [0] in order to absorb rival cults. 0- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism
  - theoh 9y ago
    Norbert Wiener (of cybernetics fame) made a distinction between Manichaean devils and Augustinian devils-- essentially between evil as a force opposed to good vs evil as merely a lack of goodness. Essentially the distinction is between mischief and error. Edit: see e.g. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/najafi2.php http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/najafi2.php
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    Christianity is far from alone in its belief in good and evil. The idea that there's a battle between good and evil goes back to Zoroastrianism, which predates Christianity by hundreds of years. The other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, also have conceptions of good and evil, though they might not be viewed as being involved in a battle.
- sho 9y ago
  If you are at all interested in this topic, I cannot recommend this lecture series highly enough. I found it absolutely mind-blowing and a stunning revelation. Just give the first episode a shot. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAT-0aSPq-OKOpQlHyR4k5h https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAT-0aSPq-O...
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Don't sit with your first revelation, though. Jordan Peterson is a great lecturer but he leverages that to promote a particular worldview of his own. There's a reason for the Buddhist saying 'if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.' Please note that this is a metaphor for continually reworking your own ideas, not an exhortation to kill anyone who displays Buddha nature.
    - sho 9y ago
      Fully aware of that and I fully agree. I am not putting him up as some sort of cult figure - he definitely has an agenda, and pushes it masterfully. That said it is probably the best argued agenda I have ever heard. As a full-blown atheist I had never heard such a good defence - explanation, really - of religion, and it's no exaggeration to say the fellow has radically changed my thinking on the matter. I think it is OK to not agree with someone one hundred percent but still urge any intelligent person to listen to what they have to say, if it has merit.
      - jolux 9y ago
        He's also a transphobic asshole who thinks the existence of "transgender ideology" is a crime against humanity comparable to Stalinism.
        sho 9y ago
        I don't know about the "crime against humanity" but it's pretty hard to disagree with him on that topic. Most opponents fall back to crude insults, as you have. I suspect that a majority of reasonable people would agree that new genders do not spring into existence simply because you imagine them, and that it is completely obvious that all humans are either male or female. Labelling this simple acknowledgement of reality "transphobia" is very dishonest.
- wesleytodd 9y ago
  If you are interested in a series of fantasy novels with a similar order/chaos mythology, I recommend the Saga of Recluce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saga_of_Recluce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saga_of_Recluce
- hacker_9 9y ago
  Makes me wonder how much we miss out on in the rest of the world because of the language barrier.
- mmirate 9y ago
  From a modern viewpoint, I fail to comprehend how Order/Chaos is not merely a special case of Good/Evil. Biological life/intelligence, and the Earth it inhabits, is Order, an unusual low-entropy arrangement of matter; whereas the ultimate Chaos is the cosmological Heat Death.
  - tkxxx7 9y ago
    A funny consequence is that Order vs. Chaos is almost entirely dependent on the scale you consider.
  - canadaduane 9y ago
    Perhaps it's the psychological effect that's salient--the honor/shame spectrum, rather than the good-explanation/bad-explanation spectrum.
  - nl 9y ago
    While there is some overlap of Good/Evil and Order/Chaos it's pretty easy to show how "Order" can be "Evil". Totalitarian regimes have that name because they demand total control and react strongly to any disorder. They are generally regarded as towards the "Evil" end of the Good/Evil spectrum. In reality the OP is right - they are different things.
  - krapp 9y ago
    One does not have to assume that order is good, and chaos is evil. Within a universe of absolute order, there can be no change, and no life can emerge. Within a universe of absolute chaos, there can be no structure, and no life can emerge. Neither is good, or evil, since those are human cultural constructs, and not fundamental physical laws or universal constants. Even life itself isn't necessarily good or evil, any more than a star or dust cloud is good or evil, it's just one of the many possible states that matter and energy can take as the universe inevitably exhausts itself.
- kamaal 9y ago
  Order and chaos are just abstractions. They moment you get down to root cause analysis- There is generally some definition of good and evil you have to settle to understand why things like order and chaos exist.
vivekd 9y ago
>Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that. Norse mythology was never like that. There was no evil devil. The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil. What? Why do people say stuff like this? The Norse myths were from a millennium ago, no one has believed in them for almost a thousand years. Maybe Norway is largely atheistic now but for the majority of its recent history it was a Lutheran nation and before that the nation had a Catholic tradition dating back to 900 A.D. Even today Christianity is Norway`s biggest religion, enjoys regular church attendance of a quarter of its population, and has half of the population declaring they believe in a Christian, not Norse, conception of God. Clearly Christianity has some influence on Norwegian thinking.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Not many Norwegians are believers in Norse myth, I think parent was referring to the fact that today's Norway is just less religious in general. Yesterday's Norway is less relevant.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  It's also bad understanding of Christian theology. > Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. No, it's mostly focused on the contrast between being a follower of Christ or not. To that end, the character of God and Jesus are elaborated on at length. So subjects like "good" and "evil" come up as a part of that. Yes, Christ is described as being intrinsically good, but the end goal isn't to: * do good things * be a good person * avoid evil things * punish bad people ...that's not to say all those things are irrelevant, but they're certainly based on trusting Christ and His teachings. To be fair, the usual cast of Flanders clones (televangelists, Westboro Baptist) get this all really wrong, but just because they're wrong doesn't mean we should get it wrong, too.
  - jaggi1 9y ago
    One has to differentiate between Christian influence and general thinking. "Do good things" is common sense but Christian theology has opinion on what is good and bad and it matters at a subtle level. For example as a Hindu when my kid went to a missionary school they would try to portray polytheism as bad and temporary tattoos as evil.
planteen 9y ago
> Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that. It's interesting you say that. My only exposure to sagas was from reading Beowulf in school, which is a canonical example for the theme of "good vs. evil".
- BjoernKW 9y ago
  First of all, Beowulf - at least the written records we have of the poem - is decidedly Christian. It was supposedly written by a literate monk several centuries after Norway had been christianised. It also isn't necessarily about good vs evil but indeed about order vs. chaos. Grendel's misdeed is not that he attacks and slaughters good and righteous men ,it is that while doing so he violates the sacred law of hospitality by attacking the king's great hall. In doing so Grendel flouts the 'natural' order and therefore can be seen as an embodiment of chaos rather than pure evil.
callmeed 9y ago
> Prison guard education is just a few weeks in the US to my knowledge First off, this varies by state. Second, a few weeks might be an exaggeration for most states. In California at least the academy is 12 weeks long and that comes after application screening, written & physical exams, background/psych checks, and interviews.
- arcticbull 9y ago
  Far from a 3 year college degree though huh.
timwaagh 9y ago
yet the norwegian prison system also has its problems. especially with regards to its 'hotel prisons' being antisocial and isolating compared to other kinds of prisons. this article is on solitary confinement. norwegians have something to learn here as well.
wolfhumble 9y ago
> I don't know why it is like that, but perhaps a reason is that Viking culture was very revenge and honor based. But this mentality was destroying society so authorities worked hard for hundreds of years to change this mentality. Or maybe it really sprung out of the Christian influence that came after the Viking culture, with teachings like: "Love your enemies" [Matthew 5:44 - https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5%3A44&version=NKJV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5%3A44&...]?
- delazeur 9y ago
  If that was true, we would expect the American Bible Belt to have some of the cushiest prisons in the developed world.

Toenex 9y ago

> The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil. What an interesting point.

metaphorm 9y ago
incredibly common theme in many pre-Christian myth systems. the good/evil dualism in Christianity is the real aberration, despite its prominence. one of the more credible hypotheses I've encountered about this phenomenon is that early Christianity adopted many of the positions of Gnostic Manichaeism [0] in order to absorb rival cults. 0- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism
- theoh 9y ago
  Norbert Wiener (of cybernetics fame) made a distinction between Manichaean devils and Augustinian devils-- essentially between evil as a force opposed to good vs evil as merely a lack of goodness. Essentially the distinction is between mischief and error. Edit: see e.g. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/najafi2.php http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/najafi2.php
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  Christianity is far from alone in its belief in good and evil. The idea that there's a battle between good and evil goes back to Zoroastrianism, which predates Christianity by hundreds of years. The other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, also have conceptions of good and evil, though they might not be viewed as being involved in a battle.
sho 9y ago
If you are at all interested in this topic, I cannot recommend this lecture series highly enough. I found it absolutely mind-blowing and a stunning revelation. Just give the first episode a shot. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAT-0aSPq-OKOpQlHyR4k5h https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAT-0aSPq-O...
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Don't sit with your first revelation, though. Jordan Peterson is a great lecturer but he leverages that to promote a particular worldview of his own. There's a reason for the Buddhist saying 'if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.' Please note that this is a metaphor for continually reworking your own ideas, not an exhortation to kill anyone who displays Buddha nature.
  - sho 9y ago
    Fully aware of that and I fully agree. I am not putting him up as some sort of cult figure - he definitely has an agenda, and pushes it masterfully. That said it is probably the best argued agenda I have ever heard. As a full-blown atheist I had never heard such a good defence - explanation, really - of religion, and it's no exaggeration to say the fellow has radically changed my thinking on the matter. I think it is OK to not agree with someone one hundred percent but still urge any intelligent person to listen to what they have to say, if it has merit.
    - jolux 9y ago
      He's also a transphobic asshole who thinks the existence of "transgender ideology" is a crime against humanity comparable to Stalinism.
      - sho 9y ago
        I don't know about the "crime against humanity" but it's pretty hard to disagree with him on that topic. Most opponents fall back to crude insults, as you have. I suspect that a majority of reasonable people would agree that new genders do not spring into existence simply because you imagine them, and that it is completely obvious that all humans are either male or female. Labelling this simple acknowledgement of reality "transphobia" is very dishonest.
wesleytodd 9y ago
If you are interested in a series of fantasy novels with a similar order/chaos mythology, I recommend the Saga of Recluce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saga_of_Recluce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saga_of_Recluce
hacker_9 9y ago
Makes me wonder how much we miss out on in the rest of the world because of the language barrier.
mmirate 9y ago
From a modern viewpoint, I fail to comprehend how Order/Chaos is not merely a special case of Good/Evil. Biological life/intelligence, and the Earth it inhabits, is Order, an unusual low-entropy arrangement of matter; whereas the ultimate Chaos is the cosmological Heat Death.
- tkxxx7 9y ago
  A funny consequence is that Order vs. Chaos is almost entirely dependent on the scale you consider.
- canadaduane 9y ago
  Perhaps it's the psychological effect that's salient--the honor/shame spectrum, rather than the good-explanation/bad-explanation spectrum.
- nl 9y ago
  While there is some overlap of Good/Evil and Order/Chaos it's pretty easy to show how "Order" can be "Evil". Totalitarian regimes have that name because they demand total control and react strongly to any disorder. They are generally regarded as towards the "Evil" end of the Good/Evil spectrum. In reality the OP is right - they are different things.
- krapp 9y ago
  One does not have to assume that order is good, and chaos is evil. Within a universe of absolute order, there can be no change, and no life can emerge. Within a universe of absolute chaos, there can be no structure, and no life can emerge. Neither is good, or evil, since those are human cultural constructs, and not fundamental physical laws or universal constants. Even life itself isn't necessarily good or evil, any more than a star or dust cloud is good or evil, it's just one of the many possible states that matter and energy can take as the universe inevitably exhausts itself.
kamaal 9y ago
Order and chaos are just abstractions. They moment you get down to root cause analysis- There is generally some definition of good and evil you have to settle to understand why things like order and chaos exist.

vivekd 9y ago

>Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that. Norse mythology was never like that. There was no evil devil. The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil. What? Why do people say stuff like this? The Norse myths were from a millennium ago, no one has believed in them for almost a thousand years. Maybe Norway is largely atheistic now but for the majority of its recent history it was a Lutheran nation and before that the nation had a Catholic tradition dating back to 900 A.D. Even today Christianity is Norway`s biggest religion, enjoys regular church attendance of a quarter of its population, and has half of the population declaring they believe in a Christian, not Norse, conception of God. Clearly Christianity has some influence on Norwegian thinking.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Not many Norwegians are believers in Norse myth, I think parent was referring to the fact that today's Norway is just less religious in general. Yesterday's Norway is less relevant.
humanrebar 9y ago
It's also bad understanding of Christian theology. > Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. No, it's mostly focused on the contrast between being a follower of Christ or not. To that end, the character of God and Jesus are elaborated on at length. So subjects like "good" and "evil" come up as a part of that. Yes, Christ is described as being intrinsically good, but the end goal isn't to: * do good things * be a good person * avoid evil things * punish bad people ...that's not to say all those things are irrelevant, but they're certainly based on trusting Christ and His teachings. To be fair, the usual cast of Flanders clones (televangelists, Westboro Baptist) get this all really wrong, but just because they're wrong doesn't mean we should get it wrong, too.
- jaggi1 9y ago
  One has to differentiate between Christian influence and general thinking. "Do good things" is common sense but Christian theology has opinion on what is good and bad and it matters at a subtle level. For example as a Hindu when my kid went to a missionary school they would try to portray polytheism as bad and temporary tattoos as evil.

planteen 9y ago

> Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that. It's interesting you say that. My only exposure to sagas was from reading Beowulf in school, which is a canonical example for the theme of "good vs. evil".

BjoernKW 9y ago
First of all, Beowulf - at least the written records we have of the poem - is decidedly Christian. It was supposedly written by a literate monk several centuries after Norway had been christianised. It also isn't necessarily about good vs evil but indeed about order vs. chaos. Grendel's misdeed is not that he attacks and slaughters good and righteous men ,it is that while doing so he violates the sacred law of hospitality by attacking the king's great hall. In doing so Grendel flouts the 'natural' order and therefore can be seen as an embodiment of chaos rather than pure evil.

callmeed 9y ago

> Prison guard education is just a few weeks in the US to my knowledge First off, this varies by state. Second, a few weeks might be an exaggeration for most states. In California at least the academy is 12 weeks long and that comes after application screening, written & physical exams, background/psych checks, and interviews.

arcticbull 9y ago
Far from a 3 year college degree though huh.

timwaagh 9y ago

yet the norwegian prison system also has its problems. especially with regards to its 'hotel prisons' being antisocial and isolating compared to other kinds of prisons. this article is on solitary confinement. norwegians have something to learn here as well.

wolfhumble 9y ago

> I don't know why it is like that, but perhaps a reason is that Viking culture was very revenge and honor based. But this mentality was destroying society so authorities worked hard for hundreds of years to change this mentality. Or maybe it really sprung out of the Christian influence that came after the Viking culture, with teachings like: "Love your enemies" [Matthew 5:44 - https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5%3A44&version=NKJV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5%3A44&...]?

delazeur 9y ago
If that was true, we would expect the American Bible Belt to have some of the cushiest prisons in the developed world.