Hi, I’m Loukas, and I write and think about stories, cultural change and the climate era. Here’s a newsletter making points about my adopted home country, based on a book idea I worked on for a while with Ylva Nilsson.
This post became so popular it spawned a miniseries of posts, one on each paradox. The first one is about mis/trustand; the second is about individualism; the third is about emotional vulnerability; the fourth one is about decision-making and the fifth is about the desire for the new but the need for the familiar.
I hope you’ll find them interesting. At the end I’ll add parts of a question and answer based on recent Twitter conversations
Sweden is the most normal ever
The overall point we wanted to make in our book was that the mild-mannered Sweden you see on the surface is the result of a series of fierce contradictions and conflicts within the Swedish soul and society. This is why Sweden can both be so normal it hurts and also display truly extreme characteristics. It’s all the same thing.
So the book aimed to lift the lid on the inner workings of Sweden. Pay us to finish it so you can get prepared and maybe you won’t be so surprised next time Sweden is in the news!
We chose to break down the contradictions into The Five Paradoxes that Make Sweden So Weird. Here they are:
1) Social trust versus social distrust. Swedes believe in each other at the same time as they don’t want anything to do with each other. ‘I’ll help you as long as you leave me alone’. And partly the high belief in other people stems from the fact that Swedes don’t indeed need to interact with each other.
This feeds into the next paradox 2) how the society can seem at the same time to be super individualistic and hyper-collective depending on how you look at it. In reality? They’re both true at the same time.
And these big general issues of trust and collectivism are rooted in the personal and psychological sphere 3) Because our third paradox is how Swedes are both cool and aloof and also utterly bloodily vulnerable with their (our) emotions. And in a very real way, the social distance is precisely because of just how open Swedes are when you do get close. We don’t ask each other how we’re doing – because we might find out far too much.
Turning to the political angle 4) policy decisions are certainly made with a huge degree of consensus and everyone should be on board the train but...once the train is loaded with as many people as can be, CHOO CHOO, there’s no stopping it and it will absolutely run you over if you dare stand in its path. This is why Sweden can seem to be both very democratic and very authoritarian at the same time.
And 5) finally there’s the historical dimensions. Swedes love everything that is modern, new and offers more efficiency – apart from when they don’t and when they cling on to watching exactly the same 1930s Disney cartoons every year at exactly the same time.
How this works in practise
I’ll turn now briefly to an example based on a recent event: The fact that the Swedish government planned in 2020 to bring in a temporary emergency pandemic law, but expected it to take until Summer 2021, underlined one of the paradoxes of authority in Sweden.
Citizens here obey the state very readily because they assume that the state will act in a considered way that has their best interests at heart. And going through all the long-winded motions of consultations etc. is how this social contract is maintained.
While at the same time this also means that the Swedish state can do things that would be hard to get away with in other countries, precisely because here citizens and the state see their interests as so closely aligned.
I'm not saying whether this is good or bad, just that it is a fascinating and fairly delicate interplay which constantly maintains this state of affairs – and that it defies the simple characterisations of Sweden's governance as either ‘liberal’ or ‘authoritarian’, that you see in a lot of foreign commentary.
In the current situation, however, the traditional Swedish consensus politics us being eaten away at by the current political crisis. We have an extremely small and weak minority government that can indeed get forced to do things by the opposition, such as speed up emergency pandemic laws, as happened. On the other hand (paradoxically maybe, eh?) this very weakness of the current government also emphasises the non-political nature of Swedish governance and policy decision-making. When the pandemic hit, the parliament threw the hot potato of corona restrictions to the government, which in turn quickly threw it to the Public Health Agency, which in turn allowed it to be taken over by this agency’s infectious diseases unit led by Anders Tegnell. This is why you have the seemingly strange situation of a consensus situation that is also figurehead-ed by one very outspoken and self-confident apolitical expert who seems to be telling everyone what to do. He sort of is, but only because he’s been allowed to.
Is it making sense?
To finish, here’s some questions I answered recently on twitter about Sweden. Feel free to ask more in the comments here.
Q: ‘Surströmming?’ [fermented herring]
A: ‘Ancient way to preserve the herring fish catch through the long winter.’
Q: ‘Why don’t you guys like badgers?’ [people in Sweden tell stories about badgers being dangerous, and how their jaws will only let go of you when they hear the bones crunch. Hence people literally put crispbread in their socks, to fool the badgers into letting go]
A: ‘Hey, we're not the ones slaughtering them and accusing them of spreading TB! :) I think it's more that Swedes have so many other big animals and even bears in the country, so aren't really so impressed by little bears.’
Q: First time someone told me the crackers in the socks story, I laughed but they were being serious. Since heard it again, from a different person. I love badgers – glad it’s just because they aren’t as (rightly) impressed as they are by the other majestic beasts also in Sweden.
A: ‘I mean, imagine how stoats and weasels are seen in England. For Swedes badgers are in that same category, just with mythical jaw strength :)’
Q: ‘A friend of mine once taught me this phrase "jävla bonde" -is that actually used in real life, also do people still do snus?’
A: ‘People absolutely do lots of snus, even people who moved to Sweden, so it's not dying out. The phrase you said is very rude but I can imagine a city dweller saying it and meaning someone was a redneck or country bumpkin.’
Thanks for bearing with me today. I hope you’re having a better day than I, and if you’re not, then that’s ok and hugs.
Loukas Christodoulou