In love with the state

Midsummer dance by Anders Zorn, 1897

There is a Swedish book I have ignored for a long time, called Är svensken människa? (2015) (Is the Swede a human being? in English) by Henrik Berggren and Lars Trädgårdh. Now that book is apparently being translated into English under the new, edgier title The Swedish Theory of Love. The new English translation is shamelessly being marketed as a kind of manual: How to trust your state bureaucracy as much as the Swedes trust theirs. So I finally borrowed the book in the local library to learn how we love in Sweden.

What is the Swedish theory of love? 

In short, the Swedish Theory of Love means that only people who are not financially dependent on each other can truly love each other. So Swedes are supposed to entertain an intense economic relationship with the state, where we pay a lot but also get a lot back as soon as we need it. Our marriage to an individual is not supposed to be a marriage in the traditional sense, but more of a concubinage: Swedish spouses are supposed to enjoy each other's company, while the material cooperation and economic security that is traditionally the basis of marriage are provided by someone else. 

But how about the children? Are they also supposed to be independent of their parents, siblings and grandparents? Should they also have a back-up relation with the state, so they can truly choose their families? Berggren and Trädgårdh don't write about that. But as a Swedish citizen, I know the answer: Yes, children are also supposed to be independent of their families. They are assigned an alternative relationship with the social services, to fall back on whenever their parents seem to fall short on any expectation. 

The state loves all the children 

Scandinavian child protection services are crazy. Not crazy in the sense "hold slightly different values than me", but bat-shit crazy. Crazy on the level that they lie to courts, fabricate evidence and hide teenagers away from the world so they won't reveal the lies. I don't know much about Denmark, but both Norway and Sweden have systems that are deeply corrupt. I only know one article in English about it, this one from BBC. They don't exaggerate. It really is this bad. 

In Sweden, social workers can do very much as they feel like with children and families, for one simple reason: They are highly trusted. Since people trust that social workers are competent and always act in good faith, social workers are free to do more or less as they please. No one checks what they are doing anyway. 

I think it is a bit like the many catholic priests who were accused of sexual abuse of children in the 2010s. How could such levels of child abuse go on for decades? Presumably because people trusted the priests. Catholic believers were so sure that priests were good people that they didn't bother to check if they really were. 

Currently, we have the same phenomenon with social workers in Scandinavia. Since we believe the government is good, we also believe government workers are good. After all, they have been educated by the government's higher education and need to follow the government's very well-intended laws. What can go wrong? Almost no one bothers to check. So if social workers for example find it more comfortable to feel and believe things than to gather real evidence, they are mostly free to do so. If they feel like splitting up a family because they really, really don't like to deal with those parents, they can often find an acceptable pretext for doing it. Of course social workers can also be real angels who always prioritize the children they make decisions for. Since no one really supervises them, they are free to be more or less what they like. 

Trust our experts! 

With enough trust, people will believe everything the government does is great, whatever it does. Sweden's handling of the coronavirus pandemic is another example of that. Different intellectuals have scratched their heads over why Sweden, which does not have a libertarian culture at all, met the pandemic with the most reckless non-response. 

It seems to have struck few foreigners that the Swedish strategy might have been a pure top-down decision. A very limited number of experts got an idea. And then everyone else had to follow, because in Sweden we "trust our experts". Our Experts were a few, maybe three or four people, who had been appointed leaders of the Public Health Agency. The chief epidemiologist at the time, Anders Tegnell, had never studied epidemics, but had studied adverse effects of societal responses to epidemics, especially school closures. It didn't matter how much other doctors and academics screamed that Our Experts simply had got the numbers wrong, because Our Experts had been appointed by our precious government. They couldn't possibly be wrong, whatever they said.

About half a year into the pandemic, the government seemed to realize that they were supposed to lead the country, in spite of having appointed three experts with colorful opinions. Slowly, and without comment, Sweden's response to the coronavirus pandemic converged with the rest of the world's. It took some time. In January 2021, schools were still banning face masks. In August the same year, health-care settings mandated face-masks. That is, exactly when most adults had got their two doses of vaccine, we finally got effective face-mask mandates. So I was in an ironic situation: When I used a face mask in shops in the spring of 2020, people stared so hard that I had to quip: "It's the latest fashion from New York." In the autumn of 2021, I was forced to wear a face mask although I thought it was a bit exaggerated.

The face mask mandates came just when death rates from coronavirus were seriously going down. But I heard no one commenting on it. No one asked "why do we wear face masks now that there actually is a vaccine when we did not wear them when we had no vaccine?" People just meekly put their face masks on. Because now the experts had said that was the thing to do. 

Yeoman socialists

The marriage between the state and the individual gives Scandinavia a certain double character. On the fundamental level, we are individualists. The very core function of the state is to defend individuals against other individuals. Sweden has taken this one step further. Individuals should never have to depend on fickle, unreliable other individuals. That idea ultimately makes us collectivist. Instead of depending on people we do know: friends and family; we depend on people we don’t know: the government.

When I scroll down the national news, I see the same story over and over again: A person believed in the welfare state. Then that person got sick/unemployed/had a child with special needs/whatever and needed help. Instinctively they turned to the state and the story made the news because the state’s representative did not think they needed help. This made the person involved think there is something deeply wrong with the state and hence with society. 

People assume that when they marry the state, they marry something impersonal. As long as they are only paying a lot of money to the government, it clearly seems so. But when they once in a while meet a state employee, they find out that they actually didn't marry a wise, fair and impersonal colossus, but a string of random civil servants. Some of them are smart, some are stupid. Some of them like you, some dislike you, some couldn't care less. But most people are lucky enough to never get into close contact with the state bureaucracy this way. They are free to go on with the circular reasoning that says that every important decision the government and its representatives make is optimal because the government is per definition optimal.

Why did Scandinavians end up loving their state bureaucracies more than most peoples? It could have something to do with our non-feudal past. The many independent farmers that made up the population in pre-modern times got used to dealing directly with the national government, without local intermediaries. But I also suspect it could have something to do with the unusually rapid industrialization process of Scandinavia. In the late 19th century, Scandinavian societies were still largely agricultural. Most people lived and worked in family units. Within a couple of generations, it was transformed into a full-fledged modern industrial society, where people had to move to the jobs. In places like France, the UK and the US, modern society came more gradually. Maybe civil society there was better at adapting to the social and economic transformation, because it had more time to do it.

Please, don't become like us, we're awful

It seems like American progressives are currently getting increasingly envious of Scandinavia. A research organization called the Evolution Institute has even appointed Norway a model society to study and copy. As a Scandinavian, I find such credulity worrisome. Yes, many things are good here, but unfortunately, our society is rotten to the core from excessive confidence in whoever holds the power. 

Dear non-Scandinavians, please don't become like us. Please don't fall in love with your state bureaucracy. If you love someone unconditionally you are at risk of being abused. Loving your state bureaucracy unconditionally is no different. You will be abused and you will be informed that you should love the abuse. Don’t go down that path.