The collapse of the Danish Empire of narrative

When Danish business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos call the global situation over Greenland "surreal," they are admitting that their version of the world is collapsing.

We often use the word "surreal" when things stop following the rules we were taught to believe in. For decades, the Nordic region has relied on a comfortable "normal" based on predictable diplomacy and logic. We were told this was the only "rational" way for the world to work, but it may have simply been a set of rules that served those who were already winning.

The shock these leaders feel is not a sign that the world has gone crazy; it is the panic of a power structure realizing its old manual no longer works. When a CEO calls a situation "irrational," they are often observing a reality they can no longer control.

We love to use words like "common sense" to describe our way of life because it makes it seem like our values are just "the way things are," rather than just one perspective among many. But the Greenland crisis is stripping that mask away. It shows us that what we called "normal" was actually a very specific cage we built to keep the world predictable. Now that the door has been kicked in by forces that don't follow our script, we call it a nightmare because we don't know how to exist in a world where we aren't the ones defining what is sane.

We should stop viewing the world as "absurd" and start questioning why we trusted this one version of reality for so long. If the world suddenly feels surreal to a leader, it is likely because they have lived in a bubble where their logic was the only one that mattered. They convinced themselves that their own interests were the same thing as "reason". The world is not losing its mind; it is simply moving in a direction they cannot manage. The "order" being mourned was never a law of nature, but a structure of power that is now coming apart.

The most important question to ask is why we were so sure our version of "rational" was the only correct one. If the current situation feels like a dream, it is because we are realizing that our "normal" was just a story we used to feel in charge. The real surrealism is not the events in Greenland, but the fact that we spent so long pretending our rules were the only rules.

If you are unsettled by a world that does not make sense to you, it is because you have lost the power to tell everyone else how to think. Instead of trying to fix the old box, it may be time to admit that the box was always a limit—and it is finally breaking.