The Swedish Mind
Why "socialist" Swedes are different from Anglo leftists
A surprising aspect of this tiresome virus freak out, is the emergence of Sweden as home of the sanest policy response.
Isn’t it interesting that Sweden, which we usually associate with monomaniacal pursuit of feminist goals, national death-wish levels of third world immigration, and super high taxes, is far to the “right” of Florida or Texas on SARS-2 response? This highlights the widely acknowledged inadequacy of a simple, single-factor left/right axis for summarizing values and political character.
Norway and Denmark, who speak languages/dialects mutually intelligible with Swedish, and are basically part of a common ‘Scandinavian nation’, nevertheless toed and EU and Anglo line and shut down aggressively, pushed masks, and undertook wholesale inoculations with untested gene therapies. Bear in mind, unlike Sweden, Denmark and Norway are in NATO, and thus have substantially vassalized governments under US patronage. Usually they’re allowed to run their own internal affairs, but SARS-2 policy has an international dimension; it’s not hard to imagine US pressure being decisive, early on.
It took nearly two years of discontent by the Danish public before the government, in September 2021, relented and adopted the Swedish model of treating the virus like a bad flu strain. Shortly after Norway relented and dropped her remaining virus policies, while non-scandinavian parts of the West continue with the absurd struggle.
The United States differs from Canada, Australia or Britain in that it has a large God-fearing, and culturally conservative minority, who put the breaks on the post-Puritan agenda which Massachusetts would no doubt love to impose on the country. You can critique these people, to be sure, but that’s not the point. I’m simply noting how Red Staters are a different species from Blue Staters, and there aren’t that many Red Staters in the Commonwealth.
Australia, Canada and the UK give us an idea of what the blue states would do if they weren’t chained to the Red States, a look into post-Christian Anglo leftist character. We see that they choose total Covid Tyranny. The commonwealth countries, especially Canada and Australia, are under a dictatorship of the longhouse, rule by a twisted and uncriticized version of the female Id. The men, disarmed, feminized, and fearful, do the bidding of their cruel matriarchs. When I look at Canada and Australia today, I see vast lands turned into open-air elementary schools, where the spinster has the whip hand, and every citizen is as a public school inmate-child, whose freedom of movement, of thought, of handwriting style, must be taken away. (yes, I am still bitter about 3rd grade handwriting instruction.) The idols of Safety, and Unfreedom must be worshiped by all, and these stifling gods demand human sacrifices, the infidels must be forcibly made to take their gene therapies, and ventilated to death if they resist. The teacher is talking, remain silent.
It’s no joke. Australians can’t really leave the country currently. They can’t organize protests, legally. They can’t decided what goes, or does not go, on their face, while they are outside, in the virus-killing Australian sun. Truly, 70s or 80s Yugoslavs had more freedom than today’s Australians, I’d argue post-Khrushchev Soviets had more freedom. So why have these fully post-Christian Anglo countries gone this way, while even more post-Christian Sweden hasn’t? They’re all “left wing” right? I find this question so fascinating. Who are these Swedes?
I propose that it is the more masculine nature of Scandinavian leftism which distinguishes it from it’s more fully feminized Anglo cousins. A paramount value in the North is Trygghet, or security. Sweden has a huge territory, the size of California, yet even after the 19th century industrialization, only has some seven million indigenous ethnic Swedes. This small endogenously generated population density, relative to the warmer continent, is of course due to the brutal Swedish winter, which drove immigration to America in the 19th century, and imposed a harsh, Malthusian caloric discipline in the centuries and millennia before that. This means that everyone, men and women, were selected to desire and seek security, more intensely than Britons or Germans. It’s also noteworthy that Sweden hasn’t really been invaded or had major civil wars since the Christian era began circa 1000 AD. Arguably Russians, with a similar winter, have had added selection pressures from their many, geographically driven wars. I digress.
Like all Europeans, Swedish character is much more complex than that of the American. Swedes feel that everyone should be empowered to self actualization. You shouldn’t have to take care of your elderly parents, or your children, because that gets in the way of developing your career, so the state covers those expenses through a high VAT. There’s a universal idea that women should be in prestigious roles, especially as CEOs and big-time academia. Swedes are strongly religious, only now they worship the climate and universal human migration. They are naive, selfless, and so emotionally moved by depictions of suffering in the bottomless third world, they invite an unsustainable flow of the lowest functioning people on earth, into their once pristine cities. While Swedish women are stunning, they are square-jawed, broad shouldered, dairy farmer stock. Their character is somewhat masculinized, and they are daring and emotionally robust compared to women on the continent, in Britain or most other countries.
Swedish leftism is motivated by more complex impulses, than the leftism of Germany or the Anglosphere. In America, leftism is enabled by a crude notion that “everyone should be nice” in the way a miserable public school teacher would insist the boys not wrestle. It’s also driven by a desire to punish and geld the Apollonian. Oddly, because Swedish men buy into the notion of security more than other nation’s men, on male terms, they have greater say over the direction of leftism in Sweden.
Like the Germans, Swedes are technically gifted and systematic. They seek to be logom (moderate), to find consensus. They express the peak of Western rationalist thinking, punching far above their weight in terms of science, engineering and high-end manufacturing. I think it is this systematic, ‘Germanic mind’, interfacing with a Security Mindset that’s informed by aspects of male character, that’s led to Sweden taking such a surprising and grounded approach to virus mitigation. To the cautious Swede, throwing out your pandemic mitigation plan (protect the old, let the young get infected) was seen as extreme. They should be praised for remaining sober in April, 2020, when most of the rest of us panicked. Plus, you can’t self actualize in a lock down.
Usually Finland will do whatever Sweden does, though they are also under strong influence by the Germans. My hope is that Finland will follow Denmark and Norway in chilling out, and going back to normal. This in turn will pressure Estonia, and then Latvia and Lithuania to chill. The Scandinavia countries are prestigious, perhaps, pound for pound, the most prestigious in Europe. Just maybe they can trigger a domino effect wherein the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria also chill. Then it will be all over as Germany will be surrounded by sanity and forced to capitulate to reason. Whatever Germany does, central/eastern Europe will copy. We can pray.