State-Supported Extreme Individualism in Sweden

The following are excerpts from my forthcoming book (now in the final stages), Western Individualism and the Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future.

Extreme egalitarianism is especially apparent in northwest Europe. The “Jante Laws” of Scandinavia are paradigmatic: 1. Don’t think you are anything; 2. Don’t think you are as good as us. 3. Don’t think you are smarter than us. 4. Don’t fancy yourself better than us. 5. Don’t think you know more than us. 6. Don’t think you are greater than us. 7. Don’t think you are good for anything. 8. Don’t laugh at us. 9. Don’t think that anyone cares about you. 10. Don’t think you can teach us anything.[1] In short, no one must rise above the rest. Such egalitarianism is typical of h-g groups around the world,[2] and are antithetical to the aristocratic ideal of the I-Es.

Extreme egalitarianism results in high levels of conformism and social anxiety. Individuals fear social ostracism for violating egalitarian norms and standing out from the crowd—a phenomenon that has played a major role in creating a public consensus in favor of mass migration and multiculturalism. In Sweden especially there is no public debate on the costs and benefits of immigration; sceptics remain silent for fear of shunning and disapproval. Discussing the cancellation of a talk because it was sponsored by a politically incorrect newspaper, journalist Ingrid Carlqvist comments that “everyone with a different opinion in Sweden really is a Nazi! That’s the way it works in the New Sweden, the country I call Absurdistan. The country of silence.”[3]

Similarly, in his Fairness and Freedom, David Hackett Fischer describes the “Tall Poppy Syndrome” (envy and resentment of people who are “conspicuously successful, exceptionally gifted, or unusually creative”) that is characteristic of New Zealand.[4] “It sometimes became a more general attitude of outright hostility to any sort of excellence, distinction, or high achievement—especially achievement that requires mental effort, sustained industry, or applied intelligence. … The possession of extraordinary gifts is perceived as unfair by others who lack them.”[5]

The expression ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’ originated in Australia but seems more characteristic of New Zealand. Successful people are called ‘poppies.’ This tendency is perhaps not as strong as it used to be, but, although some successful New Zealanders are accepted, “other bright and creative New Zealanders have been treated with cruelty by compatriots who appear to feel that there is something fundamentally unfair about better brains or creative gifts, and still more about a determination to use them.”[6] Doubtless because of the same egalitarian tendencies, the New Zealand system encourages laziness and lack of achievement—workers insist that others slow down and not work hard. “Done by lunchtime” is the motto of a great many New Zealand workers.

Such egalitarian social practices are common in h-g groups around the world[7] and support the general view that this important strand of European culture, especially apparent after it came to power beginning in the seventeenth century (see Chapter 6), reflects the culture of northern h-gs.[8] Reflecting this pattern, Scandinavian society in general has a history of relatively small income and social class differences, including the absence of serfdom during the Middle Ages. A recent anthropological study of h-gs found that economic inequality approximated that of modern Denmark.[9] Chapter 4 discusses the individualism of Scandinavian family patterns, including relatively egalitarian relationships between spouses—extreme even within the Western European context.

The strength of extended kinship ties is thus central to this analysis. Patrick Heady divides European kinship patterns into three categories, strong (Croatia, Russia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Spain—here labeled “moderate collectivism”), weak (France, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Switzerland—“moderate individualism”), and very weak (Sweden, Denmark—“strong individualism”), running in a cline from southeast to northwest.[10]

Heady labels this pattern “parentally anchored and locally involved,” the extreme opposite being “origin free and locally detached.” Sweden is characterized by the weakest family system. Indeed, Maria Iacovu and Alexandra Skew provide a sharp contrast between the most extreme family forms in Europe, noting that in Scandinavia there is “almost a complete absence of the extended family.”[11]

The Scandinavian countries are characterized by small households (particularly single-adult and lone-parent households), early residential independence for young people and extended residential independence for elderly people; cohabitation as an alternative to marriage; and an almost complete absence of the extended family. At the other end, the Southern European countries are characterised by relatively low levels of non-marital cohabitation, by extended co-residence between parents and their adult children, and by elderly people with their adult offspring; this, together with a much lower incidence of lone-parent families, make for much larger household sizes.

Thus the fundamental cline in family patterns places the most extreme forms of individualism in the far northwest. This categorization system is essentially a more fine-grained version of the well-known Hajnal line which separates European family types into only two categories, east and west of a line between St. Petersburg and Trieste.[12]

The Simple Household as a Fundamental European Social Institution

One marker of individualism is the unique Western European “simple household” type discussed extensively in Chapter 4. The simple household type is based on a single married couple and their children. This household style has been typical of Scandinavia (excluding Finland), the British Isles, the Low Countries, German-speaking areas, and northern France—essentially Scandinavia plus the areas originally dominated by the Germanic tribes of the post-Roman world in Europe. The most extreme form of this household is in Scandinavia, where there is “almost a complete absence of the extended family.”[1] It contrasts with the joint family structure typical of the rest of Eurasia in which the household consists of two or more related couples, typically brothers and their wives.[2] Before the industrial revolution, the simple household system was characterized by late age of marriage as well as methods of keeping unmarried young people occupied as servants and circulating among the households of the wealthy. The joint household system was characterized by earlier age of marriage for both men and women, a higher birthrate, as well as means of splitting up to form two or more households when the need arises.

The simple household system is a fundamental feature of individualist culture. The individualist family was able to pursue its interests freed from the obligations and constraints of extended kinship relationships and of the suffocating collectivism of the social structures typical of the rest of the world. This establishment of the simple household free of the wider kinship community eventually gave birth to all the other markers of Western modernization: limited governments in which individuals have rights against the state, capitalist economic enterprise based on individual economic rights, and science as individual truth seeking. Individualist societies in the post-medieval West developed republican political institutions and scientific and scholarly associations which assume groups are permeable and highly subject to defection—that there is a marketplace of ideas in which individuals may defect from current scientific views when they believe that the data support alternate perspectives.

State-Supported Extreme Individualism in Scandinavia

As noted above, the Scandinavians have the most individualist family patterns in all of Europe.[13] Lars Trägårdh describes the extreme form of individualism in Swedish society. It may seem paradoxical in view of Sweden’s socialist economic policies and powerful tendencies toward egalitarianism, conformism, and law-abidingness. However, 

what is unique about Swedish social policy is neither the extent to which the state has intervened in society nor the generous insurance schemes, but the underlying moral logic. Though the path in no way has been straight, one can discern over the course of the twentieth century an overarching ambition to liberate the individual citizen from all forms of subordination and dependency in civil society: the poor from charity, the workers from their employers, wives from their husbands, children from parents (and vice versa when the parents have become elderly).

In practice, the primacy of individual autonomy has been institutionalized through a plethora of laws and practices … . Interdependency within the family has been minimized through individual taxation of spouses, family law reforms have revoked obligations to support elderly parents, more or less universal day care makes it possible for women to work, student loans which are blind in relation to the income of parents or spouse give young adults a large degree of autonomy in relation to their families, and children are given a more independent status through the abolition of corporal punishment and a strong emphasis on children’s rights. All in all, this legislation has made Sweden into the least family-dependent and the most individualized society on the face of the earth.[14]

In this regime, families become “voluntary associations”—despite continuing to exhibit high-investment parenting as indicated by high levels of time spent with children. Nordic families are relatively prone to “independence (of children), individualism, and (gender) equality.”[15] The “Swedish theory of love” is that partners should not be dependent on each other—that true love means not entering a relationship as dependent on any way (e.g., financially) on the other person.[16] Surveys of values confirm that Nordic societies cluster together in scoring high on “emancipatory self-expression.”[17] Nordic societies also cluster at the top of social trust, despite also being high on secular/rational values, despite trust typically being associated with religiosity.[18] Finally, the high standing on “generalized trust” provides economic advantages because it lowers “transaction costs”—less need for written contracts and legal protections, law suits, etc.[19]

These trends toward individual freedom and lack of dependency on superiors go back at least to the medieval period. Michael Roberts noted that the peasant in medieval Sweden “retained his social and political freedom to a greater degree, played a greater part in the politics of the country, and was altogether a more considerable person, than in any other western European country.”[20] Similarly, Lars Trägårdh:

The respect for law and a positive view of the state are historically linked to the relative freedom of the Swedish peasantry. The weakness, not to say absence of feudal institutions, corresponds with a history of self-reliance, self-rule, land ownership, representation as an estate in parliament, and the consequent willingness and ability to participate in the political affairs of the country. There is, of course, a strong mythological aspect to this oft-claimed lack of feudal traditions in Sweden. …

[Nevertheless,] the consequence of the relative inclusion and empowerment was that their status as subjects was balanced by their position as citizens. As an estate in parliament, they had a part in passing laws which in this way gained popular legitimacy. Furthermore, since the peasants and the King (at times joined by the Clergy) often were joined in a common struggle against their common adversary, the Nobility, many peasants came to view the State, in the figure of the King as in some sense being “on their side.” To be sure, in actuality political alliances shifted, some Kings were more powerful than others and the Nobility was at times close to achieving the kind of subjugation of the peasantry that was the norm in much of the rest of Europe. But all things told, the peasant struggle to retain their legal, political and property rights was remarkably successful, and by the time that democratic and liberal ideas made their way to Sweden from the Continent in the nineteenth century, they were effectively fused with these politically strong yeoman traditions.[21]

This passage is reflected in the writing of nineteenth-century historian Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783–1847). Geijer noted that feudalism (consisting of hereditary rights of the nobility and serfdom for peasants and which Geijer regarded as oppressive) developed in most Germanic societies beginning with the conquests of the Franks; however, “in Scandinavia itself, … the fiefs [i.e., land parcels granted to the nobility] never became hereditary, even less was serfdom introduced among the people.”[22] Moreover, traditional Swedish kingship was not oppressive: Geijer “was a firm believer in constitutional monarchy with a strong personal influence of a potent king—emphasizing the unique bond between the monarch and his people that Geijer regarded as an historical fact in Sweden.”[23]

The king did not act as the highest conciliator nor judge the free man in the absence of his equals, for all the judgments were given with the people or, what is the same thing, with an elected jury. In war the king was the commander, though the people did not follow him unconditionally in anything except what it had itself taken part in deciding or which the presence of the enemy in the land made necessary. All other warfare was not a national war but merely a feud, in which the king could also freely engage with his men, that is those who owed him particular allegiance (fideles) [i.e., the king’s “permanent war-band”[24] or “comitatus,”[25] i.e., a Männerbünd] or allied themselves temporarily with him. For no free man, even if subject to a king, was the king’s man, but his own. To be called the former required a specific relationship.[26]

The warrior nobility was a nobility of service and of the court and for a long time did not, and only with the expansion of royal power, gain any preferential rights with regard to the people. Nor were any of the advantages that accompanied it hereditary or even permanent in respect of a given person.[27]

Geijer claims that “in Scandinavia we know the original government to have been ruled by priests,” and he contrasts this priestly regime with “the first ‘Odinic’ rulers.”[28] As noted in Chapter 2, Odin was the “god of battle rage” and strongly associated with the Indo-European warrior culture.[29]  [30]

The rule of law rather than despotism by kings was the norm: “Rule of law was essential to the social contract that underpinned the emerging Swedish state, and adherence to the law by the king and his administration was essential to the legitimacy of the state.”[31] The values embedded in the law became internalized social norms.

Berggren and Trägårdh explain Swedes’ acceptance of strong state controls supporting egalitarianism as necessary precisely for achieving individual autonomy:

From the perspective of what might be termed the Swedish ideology, active interventionism on the part of the state to promote egalitarian conditions is not a threat to individual autonomy but rather the obverse: a necessary prerequisite to free the citizens from demeaning and humbling dependence on one another. As a culture and a political system Sweden cannot simply be described as communitarian, that is, as a society in which the citizens prize their voluntary association with one another above their empowerment as individuals. In fact, the official rhetoric about solidarity and social democracy notwithstanding, Sweden is not first and foremost a warm Gemeinschaft composed of altruists who are exceptionally caring or loving, but a rather hyper-modern Gesellschaft of self-realizing individuals who believe that a strong state and stable social norms will keep their neighbor out of both their lives and their backyards.[32]

At the level of the family, Berggren and Trägårdh agree with Patrick Heady[33] (see above) that Sweden “stands out” from the Western European family system. As noted above, a key aspect of the Swedish system is that young people had to assume individual responsibility for their marriages and for getting on in the world: “Young people were controlled by internalized systems of self-control, not least the tradition of ‘night bundling’ which, though in no way unique to Sweden, was very widespread and prominent.”[34]

Sweden is thus on the extreme end of individualism. “Sweden—and to a somewhat lesser extent the rest of Scandinavia—[became] the least family-oriented and most individualized society on the face of the earth, scoring at the extreme end of emancipatory self-expression values and secular-rational values.[35] The downside includes high levels of divorce, lack of filial piety, “alarming rates of stress and psychological ill-health,” and an individualist youth culture that in the contemporary world is able to be exploited by commercial interests and much given to sexual promiscuity and drugs.[36]

The moral communities of the West have deep historical roots as well. In Chapter 5 I noted that Christian Europe had become a moral community based on Christian religious beliefs rather than an ethnic or national identity. Moreover, the medieval moral community created by the Church, the Puritan and Quaker religious leaders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the liberal intellectuals of the nineteenth centuries discussed in later chapters carried on the primeval tendency to create moral communities as a source of identity. Moreover, as discussed below and in Chapter 9, such moral communities have come to define the contemporary culture of the West.

These moral communities are indigenous products of the culture of the West—products of Western culture in the same way that kinship-based clans, cousin marriage and harems of elite males are products of the people of the Middle East.

It is thus reasonable to attempt to find evolutionary predispositions toward creating moral communities. A theme of several chapters has been the uniqueness of northwestern European peoples—the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples. As noted in Chapter 7, despite roots in Proto-Indo-European, the English words ‘fair’ and ‘fairness’ appear only in the languages of northwest Europe where they originally referred only to behavior within the tribe, clearly a marker for the importance of moral reputation within the group.

The proposal here is that the moral communities observed at the origins of Western history and surfacing recurrently in later centuries tapped into a pre-existing tendency among individualists to create such communities as a force for cohesion that does not rely on kinship relations. Beginning after World War II and accelerating greatly in the 1960s and thereafter, these moral communities have been dominated by the intellectual left which is bent on dispossessing European-derived peoples from their homelands.

Moral communities are pervasive throughout the institutional structures of the West; however, because of their widespread influence, moral communities are particularly noteworthy in the media and the academic world. For example, whereas mainstream social science had been relatively free of morally based ingroup-outgroup thinking prior to World War II, such thinking has had dramatic effects on the social sciences and humanities in later decades, to the point that academic departments and scholarly associations in these areas can be accurately characterized as “tribal moral communities” in the sense of Jonathan Haidt.[1B] This is most obviously the case in areas such as social psychology, sociology, and ethnic and gender studies.

The result has been that academic research communities and the media rigorously police research and commentary that conflict with racial egalitarianism or promote the interests of European-derived peoples, and these attitudes have been internalized by a great many White people. Researchers such as Arthur Jensen, Richard Lynn, J. Philippe Rushton, and Ralph Scott who attempt to publish findings on race differences or on public policies related to race find themselves socially shunned, and they quickly learn that there are steep barriers to publication in mainstream academic journals and no mainstream grant support for their research.

For example, when scholarly articles contravening the sacred values of the tribe are submitted to academic journals, reviewers and editors suddenly become extremely “rigorous”— demanding more controls and other changes in methodology. Such “scientific skepticism” regarding research that one dislikes for deeper reasons was a major theme of The Culture of Critique in discussions of the work of Franz Boas, Richard C. Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, the Frankfurt School, to name a few.[2B]

One result of this reign of academic terror has been that conservatives often self-select to go into other areas that are not so compromised, such as the hard sciences or computing; there is also active discrimination against conservative job candidates and Ph.D. applicants.[3B] The system is therefore self-replicating.

The Extremism of Scandinavian Political Correctness

Although all Western European-derived societies are undergoing replacement-level, non-White migration, there can be little doubt that Scandinavia and especially Sweden, are extreme in welcoming replacement of their peoples and cultures. As elsewhere in the West, a major role in these transformations has been played by Jewish activists and Jewish media ownership,[1] but Scandinavians seem particularly favorable to these transformations.

In previous chapters it was argued that the Scandinavian countries are on the extreme end of the northwest-southeast genetic cline, with higher levels of Indo-European-derived and hunter gatherer-derived genes than most of southern Europe. I have also described individualists as creating societies based not on kinship, but on reputation and trust within a morally defined community—i.e., reputation based on honesty, trustworthiness, and upholding the moral values of the community. Effective groups require social glue to keep people unified. Kinship is one way of achieving commonality of interests. Participating in a moral community that actively polices its boundaries on the basis of whether individuals have the above-mentioned qualities is the social glue of individualist groups.

The reputation-based moral communities discussed here have also been strongly egalitarian—characterized by socially enforced egalitarianism as typified by the Jante Laws of Scandinavia (Chapter 3) and the Tall Poppy syndrome noted in societies of the Second British Empire—New Zealand and Australia (Chapter 8). Individuals who excel or “think they are better than others” are shunned and ostracized.

Reputation-based moral communities thus lead to groupthink as individuals trust one another to have honest opinions, and individuals who deviate from group norms are shunned. A Swedish attorney commenting on a legal case where an innocent person was convicted of a crime, noted that many people were involved in the decision and all agreed with what turned out to be an unjust verdict:

When the same people participated in all or most of [the decision], a groupthink developed. … Strong trust between people is often described as one of Sweden’s great assets [but] it cannot replace a critical approach to serious allegations, even when they are self-accusations [i.e., a confession by the accused].[2]

Strong social trust is indeed a great asset of Sweden and other countries with a significant Nordic population, leading to societies based on individual merit (a facet of reputation) and low levels of corruption. However, as in the above example, it can lead to groupthink as individuals who stand out or dissent from group norms in any way are ostracized—a facet of the Jante Laws and the Tall Poppy syndrome of Northwestern European culture: it’s not only excellence that is punished, but any deviation from group norms, including opinions shared by group members.

Egalitarian groups thus make decisions by consensus, not in a top-down, authoritarian manner. Once there is a decision-by-consensus, dissenters are seen as willfully ignorant or obstinate, and they lose status within the group.

Strong tendencies toward egalitarianism can thus easily lead to powerful social controls, either formal or informal, on behavior which are designed to ensure that individuals do not deviate from consensus attitudes, as noted in Puritan-derived cultures (Chapter 6) which became dominant in England and had a strong influence on the United States. Thus, even though Scandinavian cultures have been described as the most individualistic in terms of family functioning (Chapter 4), it is  not surprising that these cultures may exert strong controls on individual behavior to ensure conformity to the norms of a moral community.

Both egalitarianism and socially enforced norms (conceptualized in moral terms) thus typify these cultures. Sweden appears to be extreme in these tendencies. Whereas Chapter 3 discussed Sweden’s egalitarianism, here I describe the intense social controls that have virtually banned discussion of the negative aspects of immigration and multiculturalism, support for which has become a consensus among the Swedish elite.

Sweden has declared itself a “humanitarian superpower”— a superpower in which no sacrifice by the Swedes on behalf of Third World migrants is considered  too great.   The equivalent of a new Stockholm will have to be built within 11 years to house the migrants, and official policy is that Swedes should make sacrifices to ensure sufficient housing for the continuous flow of immigrants, including repurposing churches (while mosques are being built). The government buys virtually any standing structure to be turned into immigrant housing, and there are proposals to confiscate vacation homes “for the greater good.” Meanwhile, Swedes have a lower priority for housing than immigrants, and thousands can’t find an apartment, a situation that is particularly difficult for young people, especially those wishing to start a family. Leading politicians openly say that Sweden does not belong to the Swedes, and that Swedes and Swedish culture is bland or that Sweden does not have a culture. [3]

This phenomenon is a violation of the general finding that people are less willing to contribute to public goods (e.g., public housing, health care) to people who don’t look like themselves.[4] Thus, the European societies that inaugurated national health care programs did so when they were racially homogeneous.  A likely reason universal health care has been so slow in coming in the U.S. is its historically large Black population, as well as the post-1965 multicultural tsunami.[5]

A critical aspect of the success of Swedish multiculturalism is that Swedes are terrified to violate the moral consensus surrounding migration for fear of ostracism and loss of job. They are engaging in groupthink that demands allegiance to a moral community as defined by the media and the political culture. In effect, considering the genetic distances involved, this is an extreme form of what evolutionists term “altruistic punishment”—willingness to punish one’s own people and sacrifice them on the altar  of a moral ideal for fear of violating the norms of a moral community (Chapter 3, with further examples in Chapter 6).

A Swedish journalist, Ingrid Carlsqvist comments on the enforced silence on any criticism of multiculturalism, particularly in the above-ground media. Violating the silence is met with moral outrage intended to produce shunning and ostracism — in other words, there is a socially mandated groupthink where people are terrified at the thought of having dissenting opinions:

The situation in Sweden is far worse than in Denmark [which, as noted above is quite different from Sweden genetically]. In Sweden NOBODY talks about immigration problems, the death of the multiculti project or the islamisation/arabisation of Europe. If you do, you will immediately be called a racist, an Islamophobe or a Nazi. That is what I have been called since I founded the Free Press Society in Sweden. My name has been dragged through the dirt in big newspapers like Sydsvenskan, Svenska Dagbladet and even my own union paper, The Journalist.[6]

This phenomenon has nothing to do with Christianity. Sweden is the most secular country in the world. Its elites are hostile to Christianity and more than happy to donate Christian churches to the non-Christian newcomers or to destroy churches to make housing for them. Rather, it is a new secular religion of moral consensus. They are behaving like the Puritans and Quakers, as discussed in Chapters 6 and 7, but without the religious veneer. Of course, we see the same thing throughout the West, albeit to a lesser extent. Western societies have uniquely been high-trust, reputation-based societies, a basic corollary of the psychology of Western individualism.

There is now a morally framed consensus throughout the West that has taken advantage of this tendency toward groupthink by so many Westerners. The movements discussed in CofC were originated and dominated by tight-knit groups of Jewish intellectuals and were promulgated from elite universities and elite media. They were framed as having wide-ranging moral implications that essentially come down to toppling White, non-Jewish males (and ultimately females) from positions of power. These movements have achieved consensus among large percentages of non-Jews in the West — with disastrous results.

Ironically perhaps, one of the major findings on multiculturalism is that it erodes trust not only of ethnic outsiders, but also of people of one’s own race. We can thus look forward to Swedes and other Westerners being less trusting, but by the time this happens, Sweden will already have been transformed into a non-homogeneous society prone to intra-societal conflicts and lack of willingness to contribute to public goods. When trust evaporates, Swedes may become more willing to stand up to the suicidal consensus.

Groupthink implies failure to look at the facts of the situation rather than idealized versions that reinforce the consensus. Groupthink thus makes it difficult to question multicultural mantras like “diversity is our strength” by considering the research on the effects of importing ethnic and religious diversity. In the case of Sweden, research indicates that, as in the United States (Chapter 8), Swedes, especially highly educated, relatively affluent Swedes, are the first to flee diversity, typically while failing to question its value.

We’ve found a so-called “tipping point” at around 3-4%, says Emma Neuman, research economist at Linneuniversitet. When the non-European immigrants are that many in a residential area then the native Swedes start moving out. …

The effect doesn’t revolve around immigrants generally. Immigrants from European countries do not result in a moving effect, only non-European immigrants. It is reminiscent of the phenomenon of white flight in the USA where whites move away from neighbourhoods where many blacks move in.[7]

Despite such implicitly nativist behavior, these Swedes are unlikely to publicly dissent from the consensus opinion that forbids any discussion of the effects of importing non-European diversity. The question of whether Swedes benefit from an increasingly segregated, culturally and racially divided, conflict-ridden society is never raised in public.

[1] M. Eckehart, How Sweden Became Multicultural (Helsingborg, Sweden: Logik Förlag, 2017);

  1. Roger Devlin, “The Origins of Swedish Multiculturalism: A Review of M. Eckehart’s How Sweden Became Multicultural,” The Occidental Observer (September 9, 2017).

Kevin MacDonald, “The Jewish Origins of Multiculturalism in Sweden,” The Occidental Observer (January 14, 2013).

[2] “Lawyers Blame Groupthink in Sweden’s Worst​​ Miscarriage of Justice,” The Guardian (June 5, 2015).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/05/groupthink-sweden-miscarriage-of-justice-sture-bergwall

[3] See Kevin MacDonald, “Pathological Altruism on Steroids in Sweden,” The Occidental Observer (April 4, 2015).

[4] Frank K. Salter, Welfare, Ethnicity, and Altruism: New Data and Evolutionary Theory (London: Routledge, 2005).

[5] Kevin MacDonald, “Racial Conflict and the Health Care Bill, “The Occidental Observer (March 3, 2010).

[6] Ingrid Carlqvist, quoted in Kevin MacDonald, “Ingrid Carlqvist and the Morality of Ethnic Nationalism,” The Occidental Observer (August 8, 2012).

[7] Henrik Höjer, “Segregation Is Increasing in Sweden,” Forsting & Framsted (May, 29, 2015) (edited Google translation).

https://fof.se/artikel/segregationen-okar

[1B] Jonathan Haidt, “Post-partisan Social Psychology.” Presentation at the meetings of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, San Antonio, TX, January 27, 2011.

https://vimeo.com/19822295

http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.html

[2B] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998; 2nd edition: Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2002), especially Chapters 2 and 6.

[3B] Kevin MacDonald, “Why are Professors Liberals?,” The Occidental Quarterly 10, no. 2 (Summer, 2010): 57–79.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321716607_Why_Are_Professors_Liberals


[1] Aksel Sandemose (1899–1965) in his novel En Flyktning Krysser Sitt Spor (A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, 1933). Although originating in a work of fiction, the Jante Laws have been widely recognized by Scandinavians as accurately reflecting a mindset typical of their society.

[2] Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest.

[3] Ingrid Carlqvist, “I Want My Country Back,” speech given at the International Civil Liberties Alliance in the European Parliament, Brussels (July 9, 2012).

https://www.trykkefrihed.dk/i-want-my-country-back.htm

[4] David Hackett Fischer, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 386.

[5] Ibid., 486–487.

[6] Ibid., 487.

[7] Christopher H. Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge:

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

[8] Burton, et al., “Regions Based on Social Structure”; MacDonald, “What Makes Western Culture Unique?.”

[9] Eric A. Smith, Kim Hill, Frank Marlowe, D. Nolin, Polly Wiessner, P, M. Gurven, S. Bowles, Monique Borgerhoff-Mulder, T. Hertz, and A. Bell, “Wealth Transmission and Inequality Among H-gs,” Current Anthropology 51, no. 10 (2010):19–34.

[10] Patrick Heady, “A ‘Cognition and Practice’ Approach to an Aspect of European Kinship,” Cross-Cultural Research 51, no. 3 (2017): 285–310.

[11] Maria Iacovu and Alexandra Skew, “Household Structure in the EU,” in Anthony B. Atkinson and Eric Marlier (eds.), Income and Living Conditions in the EU (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2010): 79–100, 81.

[12] Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective.”

[13] Heady, “A ‘Cognition and Practice’ Approach to European Kinship.”

[14] Lars Trägårdh, “Statist Individualism: The Swedish Theory of Love and Its Lutheran Imprint,” in Between the State and the Eucharist: Free Church Theology in Conversation with William T. Kavanaugh, Joel Halldorf and Fredrik Wenell (eds.) (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2014): 13–38, 21–22.

https://books.google.com/books?id=nA-QBAAAQBAJ

[15] Ibid., 33.

[16] Ibid., 27.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid, 26.

[19] Ibid., 26–27.

[20] Michael Roberts, Essays in Swedish History (London: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1967), 4–5.

[21] Trägårdh, “Statist Individualism,” 32–33.

[22] Erik Gustaf Geijer, “Feudalism and Republicanism,” in Freedom in Sweden: Selected works of Erik Gustaf Geijer, Björn Hasselgrn (ed.), trans. Peter C. Hogg (Stockholm: Timbro Forlag, 2017): 125–306, 142.

[23] Lars Magnusson, “Erik Gustaf Geijer—An Introduction,” in Freedom in Sweden: Selected works of Erik Gustaf Geijer, Björn Hasselgrn (ed.)., trans. Peter C. Hogg (Stockholm: Timbro Forlag, 2017): 13–60, 26; emphasis in original.

[24] Erik Gustaf Geijer, “Feudalism and Republicanism,” 139; emphasis in original.

[25] Ibid., 138.

[26] Ibid.; emphasis in original.

[27] Ibid., 140.

[28] Geijer, “Feudalism and Republicanism,” 155.

[29] Hans-Peter Hasenfratz, Barbarian Rites, trans. Michael Moynihan (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2011; original German edition, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Verlag Herder, 1992), 49.

[30]

This contrast between the “Odinic rulers” and the previous priestly regimes is consistent with Marija Gimbutas’s controversial theory that the Indo-Europeans introduced a warlike, male-dominated culture, replacing previously existing, more female-centric cultures.

The following is speculative, but it’s interesting that a theme of Norse mythology was a primeval battle between the Aesir and the Vanir, the former seemingly referring to the Indo-European conquerors with their highly militarized culture (with gods such as Odin and Thor), while the latter possibly referring to the previously resident hunter-gatherer culture discussed in Chapter 3. The main god of the Vanik was Freya, associated with magic and compatible with the idea that priests were the original rulers in Scandinavia and that the culture was much more influenced by women than the highly patriarchal culture of the Indo-European conquerors. As noted in Chapter 3, this culture was quite sophisticated and supported a large population, so they may well have been able to put up a formidable defense against the invaders; after all, as noted in Chapter 3, the hunter-gathering cultures of Scandinavia held off the advance of agriculture by the farming culture of the Middle Eastern-derived farmers for 2000–3000 years. I suggest that the mythology ultimately refers to real battles that must have occurred but are lost to prehistory. According to the mythology, the Aesir used typical military tactics, while the Vanik used magic, and the two sides ultimately arrived at a modus vivendi. It’s therefore tempting to explain the relatively egalitarian thrust of Scandinavian cultures compared to other Germanic peoples as emanating from this cultural fusion.

Marija Gimbutas, Bronze Age Cultures in Eastern and Central Europe (The Hague: De Gruyter Noulton, 1965).

[31] Trägårdh, “Statist Individualism,” 132–133.

[32] Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh, “Pippi Longstocking: The Autonomous Child and the Moral Logic of the Swedish Welfare State,” in Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption, and the Welfare State, Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olav Wallenstein (eds.) (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010): 11–22, 14–16. One might note that Sweden’s extreme individualism is a disastrously poor match with Middle Eastern collectivism and the Muslim religion which Sweden is nevertheless energetically importing.

[33] Heady, “A ‘Cognition and Practice’ Approach to an Aspect of European Kinship.”

[34] Berggren and Trägårdh, “Pippi Longstocking,” 17.

[35]  Ibid., 19.

[36] Ibid., 20.

[37] Aksel Sandemose (1899–1965) in his novel En Flyktning Krysser Sitt Spor (A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, 1933). Although originating in a work of fiction, the Jante Laws have been widely recognized by Scandinavians as accurately reflecting a mindset typical of their society.

[38] Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest.

[39] Ingrid Carlqvist, “I Want My Country Back,” speech given at the International Civil Liberties Alliance in the European Parliament, Brussels (July 9, 2012).

https://www.trykkefrihed.dk/i-want-my-country-back.htm

[40] David Hackett Fischer, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 386.

[41] Ibid., 486–487.

[42] Ibid., 487.

34 replies
    • Olaf
      Olaf says:

      The article “How and why Sweden became multicultural” translated from Swedish is somewhat misleading as it does not mention the fact that the first law against “hate speech” there came already in 1948 as a result of pressure from the American Jewish Committee and World Jewish Congress against Swedish interests around the world and directly against the government. The immediate pretext was the publications of the national socialist Einar Åberg.

      “Initially, his agitation upsets only Jewish congregations in Sweden, but when he distributes his material on an international scale, both the American Jewish Committee and the World Jewish Congress start pressuring the Swedish government directly to do something about it. There are calls for a law for the specific purpose of outlawing Åberg’s activities, and the new law would sometimes be referred to as Lex Åberg – The Åberg law. The Madhouse: A Critical Study of Swedish Society, By Daniel Hammarberg.

      One can say the goodwill the Swedish government was trying to protect was a result of being the kind of “moral community” you are describing. But, clearly, the turn towards destruction of the Swedish nation by giving “minorities” – in reality much larger and more powerful groups than Swedes, Norwegians, Danes etc on the global level – special protection, started when it became necessary to protect that moral goodwill against Jewish organized interests. Sweden was of course also vulnerable as a small country that had been neutral during the war. When the 1960s came, free speech, even formally, already had been partially destroyed by the “Åberg law”.

  1. Rosa
    Rosa says:

    Thank you very much, Sir, for this article. I always learn a lot from you.
    Waiting eagerly for your book,
    Rosa Roccaforte, MD, MSc,
    Milan, Italy

    • Charles Frey
      Charles Frey says:

      Rosa, what you apparently are not ” learning a lot about “, [ again ] is your failure to understand, that paid people are scouring these pages in order to retaliate against persons who criticize them, by agreeing here.

      If you deem me unnecessarily alarmist, why don’t you list the rest of your personal information here. Some ninety-year-old will become your patient, if you have a practice, accompanied by their young nephew. A third new patient will call you at a pre-arranged time to speak to you in your reception area. The nephew will take an imprint of your medicine cabinet lock which will be robbed during the night; along with your prescription pad and drugs.

      The senior will give you misleading symptoms causing you to prescribe the wrong medicine. At Court there will be two of them against you alone. For Heaven’s sake, take on a pseudonym in lieu of a description of your front door.

      Then continue enjoying this site and commenting to your heart’s content.

  2. Rerevisionist
    Rerevisionist says:

    Professor MacDonald doesn’t seem to know that Swedish publications are run by Jews (the Bonnier family), and that Jews pursue what they think (they have a strange document, the ‘Talmud’) are their exclusive interests. Their money presumably is controlled by Jews as what’s called a ‘fiat currency’, meaning that it is printed or electronically duplicated as a completely monopolistic currency. People in Sweden who object are subjected to stringent controls, which perhaps MacDonald will discover in maybe 25 years time.
    .
    Meanwhile there is a vertical cline separating people willing to discuss the issue from those who will not.

    • Charles Frey
      Charles Frey says:

      You are a born Englishman but obviously have no knowledge of your mother tongue: or refuse to use it; for whatever reasons. None of us here is interested in KM’s regurgitation of commonplaces, especially those you alone, apparently, know of.

      No one here is expected to agree with everything written or commented upon. The Mod is most generous.

      Sixteen months ago you promised your final goodbye to us; yet broke it innumerable times already. Your two last sentences are beyond description: not only as to accuracy of analysis, but also with their utter impudence, that ” … PERHAPS MacDonald will discover MAYBE in 25 years time “. [ The Dunce ! ]

      For your last sentence, implying some ulterior motivation or fearful reticence, someone needs to stick your head in the toilet. Then flush – repeatedly !

    • Robert Dolan
      Robert Dolan says:

      Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
      KMAC doesn’t understand the JQ!
      He only spent most of his adult life working on it, and wrote three tomes
      about it.
      Are you the dumbest ass on the planet?
      Whew.

      • TJ
        TJ says:

        ass? toilet?

        Two adults throwing out crude ad hominems.

        This site wants to blame Whites rather than jews. I side with ReRevisionist.

        • Charles Frey
          Charles Frey says:

          And his unmistakable implication of ‘ Dunce ‘ is not a ” crude ad hominem ” ? Nor his first use of his newly-found word ” cline “, in a sentence implying cowardly reticence ?

          Over, and definitely out !

    • Richard B
      Richard B says:

      “I strongly feel that …the dismantling of whiteness is critical to both the eradication of racism and the survival of the Jewish people.”

      That says it all. Strong feelings, not reasoned evidence, justifies relentless attack from every possible angle on an entire race people so that jews can feel “safe.”

      Who are they fooling.

      They’re a power-hungry people filled with a savage, unjust and irrational hatred of anything that stands in the way of their acquisition of power.

      And what stands in the way of that power is the one group who believes in freedom in general and freedom of speech in particular.

      And freedom of speech is the one thing – the only thing – we have that allows us to uncover illusions and discover the truth.

      But when you do that unpleasant facts soon emerge.
      Theonly thing to do in that case is develop the capacity for self-criticism and a willingness to expose your ideas to a process analysis and correction.

      That’s the last thing an authoritarian, anti-democratic people can do.

      They’re also unoriginal and unqualified to build a civilization of their own. So they develop the ignoble qualities associated with all sneaky predators and insatiable parasites.

      But that’s where their much celebrated intelligence (largely a myth) is exhausted.

      Oh, they’re good at infiltration, subversion and destruction in their quest for power.

      But they’re not damned good at social management.

      That’s why everything they control falls apart and is falling apart now.

      In any event, the important thing is that this old song wheeze about them having to “absolish Whiteness” so they can feel safe, is properly translated into something simple and direct, ie;

      Freedom-loving Whites stand in our way of absolute power.

  3. The Mechanic
    The Mechanic says:

    “They are engaging in groupthink that demands allegiance to a moral community as defined by the media and the political culture. In effect, considering the genetic distances involved, this is an extreme form of what evolutionists term “altruistic punishment”—willingness to punish one’s own people and sacrifice them on the altar of a moral ideal for fear of violating violate the norms of a moral community…”
    In consideration of the above, I wonder if Michael Woodley’s model of the “spiteful mutant” might be applied usefully to those individuals who, because of their success, feel negatively objectified in a culture that’s evolved instincts see them as a problem. Instead of breeding to increase the mutational load in their favor, they spitefully import defective genes. This being encouraged, of course, by an even more mutationally loaded “hostile elite.”

  4. Curmudgeon
    Curmudgeon says:

    It seems to me that the “Jante Laws” must be understood in the context of Ingrid Carlqvist’s “I Want My Country Back”, and specifically Tage Erlander’s statement.
    In the nearly 3 years I spent in Scandinavia, in the early 70s, (admittedly very little in Sweden) I found Scandinavians to be quite reserved, until they got to know you. They are (or at least were) very polite. What is translated as “think” in this and other English language articles would be better expressed as “assume” and “say”. The context is simply this: in the rural areas of Scandinavia, most people are related to each other at some level. They see themselves, for the most part, as family. This is especially so in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Fifty years ago Scandinavian cities were not large. While the population may not have been related at the same level as rural areas, but understood that they were “one”. Being polite means no bragging. Stating, as fact, your personal and group achievements is fine, but gloating or belittling others is not.
    As for extended family, I suspect that varies greatly not only from country to country, but region to region. I am acquainted with Icelanders whose family began to hold a family reunion virtually every year, starting in the mid 1980s. While the last of the nine of the generation that started it died nearly 20 years ago, the tradition carries on. The attendees now number well over 100, and while they may only meet face to face at the reunion, they all know each other’s business throughout the year. I am told that their reunion might be unusual, but not the family contact.
    In my opinion, the Jante Laws are a corrupted version of Hávamál.

  5. Tom
    Tom says:

    My Danish ex-girlfriend regaled in teaching me about Jantelov. I knew immediately that she considered it the best thing since sliced bread. While I initially admired the sentiment, it soon became clear to me that beneath all the nice-sounding altruistic rhetoric there existed also an untested arrogance on the part of the believers. When I told her that Scandinavian socialism was simply another type of lunatic collectivism, doomed to collapse, she would literally go into a rage. It became clear to me that “not thinking you are anything special” was simply intended for others – not for the devotees since it was incomprehensible to them that their social philosophy might be in error.

    For my part, I’d delight in claiming that pre-New Deal America was the apotheosis of human social organization based on Natural Law. I’d scoff at how the so-called independence of Scandinavians was nothing more than a page taken out of Marx’s “The Origin of the Family, Private Property….etc”, wherein the fact of total nanny-state dependence rendered their independence a pathetic illusion. Let’s just say that Scandinavia is a perfect pilot plant for witnessing the dissolution of a people.

  6. CentralStar
    CentralStar says:

    Good God! That read like a nightmare. How can they live like that? The poor Swedes need some rescuing.

    • Cam OT
      Cam OT says:

      Their medieval ways were awesome. Maybe the “nanny state” is not surprising after a past like that, but in a sense, they just need a rollback. If we do survive the Jew yoke, not counting non-Whites into the moral community group will be a given everywhere, including the northwest. (Even assuming Jews will still be a thing, this post-WWII verbal deception card won’t work again in the internet era.)

  7. dolph9
    dolph9 says:

    It’s all about sex and reproduction, folks. That’s all it is. Are families forming and with multiple kids?

    If the answer for Sweden is no, they are doomed. If the answer is yes, they have a shot at fighting back.

    A beautiful woman by herself is nothing, less than nothing. Fodder for the cameras. Just one more millionth lingerie or swimsuit model or soon to be drugged out “celebrity”. The question is whether that beautiful woman gets impregnated, more than once, by a man of race. Everything other than that is nonessential.

  8. James Bowery
    James Bowery says:

    Important theoretic points I hope Kevin covers in his book that I didn’t see alluded to:

    “Eusociality” is defined in terms of reproductive specialization. The individual sexual organism, sporting reproductively specialized gametes with vast specialized armies of sterile worker cells, is the ultimate in eusociality. So the real mystery is not the evolution of individualism. Individualism is a given of sex. The more interesting mystery is the evolution of eusociality in which individuals, rather than cells, specialize to the point that we observe vast armies of erstwhile “individuals” who are, in effect, sterile workers supporting reproductive specialists. That is, indeed, the whole point of the controversial paper “The Evolution of Eusociality” by M. A. Nowak, C. E. Tarnita and E. O. Wilson. The bottom line of that paper: Sterile workers are parasitically castrated extended phenotypes of the reproductive castes in eusocial species, more than they are “altruists”.

    The relevance to northwestern European “simple household” becomes apparent in this passage:

    “Crossing the threshold to eusociality requires only that a female and her adult offspring do not disperse to start new, individual nests but instead remain at the old nest.”

    E. O. Wilson wrote an entire book based on this paper titled “The Social Conquest of Earth” in which he details the process by which homins starting with CHLCA have been evolving incipient eusociality. I won’t go into my usual criticism of such one-sided views of “evolutionary progress” in leading to incipient eusociality in humans except to point out that the really interesting thing about “the evolution of individualism” is not just that it had to go against 6 million years of hominin evolution, but that even among sub Saharan Africans, there is 600 million years evolutionary history of “individualism” that renders all humans subject to a deep reservoir of individualism that is of a piece with the meaning of sex.

    Just as the individual is built on eusociality, so morality is built on the individual. That is the reason the word “fair” has resonance not just with Swedes and not just with Europeans but with all humans. This is why so-called “individualistic” peoples are the natural moral superiors of humanity — but not if they’ve been parasitically castrated as extended phenotypes of their moral inferiors. After all, if humans truly are “the moral animal” what better way to parasitically castrate them than to subvert their individualism?

  9. Xavier Corday
    Xavier Corday says:

    Sweden is a jew-dominated Rapistan, where white women are raped and tortured every day.

  10. silviosilver
    silviosilver says:

    pre-New Deal America was the apotheosis of human social organization

    Libertarians, sighlol.

    Sweden is not really a “socialist” country. Nobody is actually prevented from becoming wealthy in Sweden.

    In contrast, pre-New Deal America made no attempt to prevent anybody from starving. I know which form of social organization I – and 90% of people – would prefer to live under.

    • Tom
      Tom says:

      I understand your point of view. However, there are varying degrees of socialism and it’s not necessary to abolish private property to have a “socialized” civil society. In fact, socialist Michael Harrington once maintained that it wasn’t necessary at all to abolish private property to achieve socialism. What was vital for socialism in his mind was the social control of property over and above the property rights of the individual owner. This unfettered and gratuitous governmental control of private property is happening before our eyes here in America and is further advanced in Europe. Civil society must be free of government interference beyond the universal constants of Life, Liberty, Property, and Happiness. In such a moral paradigm therefore, racial quotas and the growing number of protected classes in society would disappear. WE are in the sad state we are presently in precisely because private owners can’t tell the government, university, and OTHER corporate elites to pound tar when it comes to their left-wing social engineering schemes.

      Lastly, I am not an abstract libertarian but rather a conservative proponent of Liberty that believes that the traditional family unit and the market are capable of sustaining all.

    • Charles Frey
      Charles Frey says:

      Silvio, pre-New Deal America was working very well for the vast majority of all classes. The previous downturns were cyclical.
      The Fed was hatched on Dec. 23, 1913, in time to finance the War and to send millions to the Bolsheviks via the German 4 D banks: Deutsche; Dresdner; Dortmunder and Diskonto, through Sweden and Finland. We all know of brother Moritz of Hamburg, advisor to Wilhelm II, and his brother Paul Warburg of Jekyll Island and Fed fame, later joined by brother Felix who married a Kuhn [ & Loeb ] daughter. [ This versatile bankster coterie represented both Imperial Germany and the Allies at Versailles. ]

      It took until ca. 1925 before the Soviet Union was militarily and particularly financially settled. Thereafter, the American Bankers Association sent a letter [ facsimile on the net ] to all of its members to call all loans and to issue no new ones. The US had to contend with ca. $ 40 per person cash circulation, including the business sector. A calculated impossibility.

      Just in time to be saved by President Franklin Delano Campo di Rossi and his merry tribe merchandizing the New Deal. Later examined by much maligned McCarthy.

      Undoubtedly many good workmen, and others, were thrown out of work through absolutely no fault of their own. Bankers splattered on Wall Street and Broadway of their own volition, when shame still counted for something: preceding tax-payer bailouts and Goldman Sachs’s revolving door with the Treasury, the premiership of France – ad infinitum.

      Forgive me when I firmly believe, based on the above, that the New-Deal was an attempt to communize America, as that tribe had done with Russia: and is continuing to do with America and the remainder of the West. Ancient goals concocted of a rehash of old and new ideologies stewed in fragrant, inventive descriptions.

  11. bruno
    bruno says:

    I absolutely love KMac’s soul. The article above is another example of his contribution to our people. I can relate to the substance above from personal experiences.

    As a young man I was intimate with two beautiful Swedish gals. They had no family structure(s) to speak of and, although they “loved” me, what would happen when the newness wore off? Way back then I found the fact of close-net fatherhood to be, overall, missing. I’ve no time to write, however, it should be stressed that it’ll take a miracle or civil war for Sweden to survive. As always, Kevin did a great job with his brief. I hope he lives a 100 yrs.

  12. Richard B
    Richard B says:

    The situation in Scandanavia, and not just Scandanavia, reminds me of a pair of quotes from Book II of Nietzsche’s Daybreak.

    “To become moral is not in itself moral. – Subjection to morality can be slavish and vain or self-interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or an act of despair, like subjection to a prince: in itself it is nothing moral.”

    “Suspicious. – To admit a belief merely because it is a custom – that means to be dishonest, cowardly, lazy! – And so could dishonesty, cowardice and laziness be the preconditions of morality.”

  13. Thorgrun
    Thorgrun says:

    Thank you, Dr. Mac Donald, I am looking forward to purchasing this new book. My family is from Scandinavia and I find this very interesting and causes me to review my interactions with family and others. Joseph Campbell wrote something like, myth is not fact but it is true. The mythic beginnings of Scandinavia and the meeting of the Aesir and Vanir are in my opinion are as such, low on historic fact but true never the less. According to Snorri Sturluson the 12th century historian from Iceland, the meeting of the Aesir and Vanir was the, “first war in the world”. DNA research seems to be confirming the old myths, as the Aesir (Indo-Europeans) and the Vanir,(Old Europeans), are represented by different haplogroups, Ra and I1.

  14. Poupon Marx
    Poupon Marx says:

    Another expository work by the indispensable Professor McD. I had pondered how the particulars of Sweden and Scandinavian social values, norms, and traditions made it easy for Jews to subvert and redirect core values, either recognizably or not by the afflicted populace.

    I believe, however, that there is confusion regarding “individualism” as noted in this article in the Swedish context, and the use of the word in general. Here are the definitions from Dictionary.com:

    a social theory advocating the liberty, rights, or independent action of the individual.
    the principle or habit of or belief in independent thought or action.
    the pursuit of individual rather than common or collective interests; egoism.
    individual character; individuality.
    an individual peculiarity.

    Philosophy:
    the doctrine that only individual things are real.
    the doctrine or belief that all actions are determined by, or at least take place for, the benefit of the individual, not of society as a whole.

    My practical point is that, in this context, it would be more readily understandable, restrictive, and relevant to the thematic content, if there were a modifier in front of this word. For example, familial individualism, economic autonomous individualism, or defined and limited individualism. The two words, Swedish and Individualism, are contradictory and paradoxical, without further delineation.

    Scandinavians are, to me, herd people. The collective, as determined by consensus or delivered top-down, imposes a repression, mentally, from without. It is an external force, a limiting factor that causes compartmentalization, and-as noted-high anxiety and stress. This can explain the stupendously high alcoholism rate in Scandinavian peoples. And the cathartic effects of easy sex, promiscuity, and sexual perversion/pornography.

    Scandinavians have, to my perception, a rather “hollow personality”, a lack of individual expression of a personal uniqueness. They are downloaded all their values and personality determinants, to a larger degree than any people I know. This is not to be confused with the “outward” conformity of Northeast Asians. They, in my experience, have a richer inner life and depth of complexity and consecutiveness to the External World and an Inner World.

    I believe most characterize the meaning of individualism as a person that is able to totally cut themselves off, in whole or part, from all that has been taught and inculcated. Examples are the Drifters that wandered the American Plains, seaman of old, intellectual rebels, and those that have sought meaning and more connectivity outside of their cultures. A prime example would those Westerners who follow {not “become”} Buddhism, leaving aside family, culture, and other inherited and ingrained communal, nation ideas and ideals.

    The true individualist is that person who validates and views their uniqueness from the INSIDE, from his special existence much as a snowflake or fingerprint. Inclusive to understanding this uniqueness would be to comprehend C. G. Jung’s exposition of Individuation, connection to Archetypes, Ancestors, Common Consciousness, and the riddle of Meaning.

    While automatically there arises criticism of the above as unempirical, and theological, most of Western Philosophy after the Greeks is hopeless disconnected abstractions derived from abstractions, and of no general use to the cause of White, i.e., Indo-European survival which will be derived from clear and concise thinking. The failure to understand and reconcile irony and contradiction above the sensory world is the feature of a fatally flawed society or community. Without seeking an Inner Reality, people are bound to be dependent variables, meaning programable to unlimited extents.

    • Retired Now
      Retired Now says:

      I was just pondering similar thoughts when I got to your comments. The word individualism just didn’t fit with the collective social group think of HG descendants as they are not allowed to think individually. Its as if they/we have just swapped adherence to family demands with adherence to a more foggily defined group which they offend at the risk of their employment & social life – a different sort of honor killing, but still an honor demand leading to high anxiety, alcoholism & drug dependency. Growing up in New Zealand I had to laugh at the tall poppy syndrome & its similarity to the Jante laws. Less amusing is the issue of a grandchild suffering acute anxiety & the descriptors here are an indication of exactly what we are attempting to address though she is clinging to her beliefs like a drowning religious.

  15. Charles Frey
    Charles Frey says:

    All of us are thoroughly familiar with all of the self-appointed and self-anointed creative geniuses in simply all disciplines; irrespective of their mumbo-jumbo. Local administrative geniuses, regional politicians and national celebrities, led by ACADEMICS, dining and wining one another at self-laudatory, award-winning gala evenings.

    A German singer, succinctly put it this way: During the sunset of our civilization, even dwarfs throw a long shadow !

  16. Poupon Marx
    Poupon Marx says:

    Trouble In “Paradise”. This summary of Sweden by THE GUARDIAN-no less, a socialist Far Left Proto Rag-paints a dystopian picture of a society that collectively mentally disturbed:

    Sweden
    Anything I say about the Swedes will pale in comparison to their own excoriating self-image. A few years ago, the Swedish Institute of Public Opinion Research asked young Swedes to describe their compatriots. The top eight adjectives they chose were: envious, stiff, industrious, nature loving, quiet, honest, dishonest, xenophobic.

    I met with Åke Daun, Sweden’s most venerable ethnologist. “Swedes seem not to ‘feel as strongly’ as certain other people”, Daun writes in his excellent book, Swedish Mentality. “Swedish women try to moan as little as possible during childbirth and they often ask, when it is all over, whether they screamed very much. They are very pleased to be told they did not.” Apparently, crying at funerals is frowned upon and “remembered long afterwards”. The Swedes are, he says, “highly adept at insulating themselves from each other”. They will do anything to avoid sharing a lift with a stranger, as I found out during a day-long experiment behaving as un-Swedishly as possible in Stockholm.

    Effectively a one-party state – albeit supported by a couple of shadowy industrialist families – for much of the 20th century, “neutral” Sweden (one of the world largest arms exporters) continues to thrive economically thanks to its distinctive brand of totalitarian modernism, which curbs freedoms, suppresses dissent in the name of consensus, and seems hell-bent on severing the bonds between wife and husband, children and parents, and elderly on their children. Think of it as the China of the north.

    Youth unemployment is higher than the UK’s and higher than the EU average; integration is an ongoing challenge; and as with Norway and Denmark, the Swedish right is on the rise. A spokesman for the Sweden Democrats (currently at an all-time high of close to 10% in the polls) insisted to me that immigrants were “more prone to violence”. I pointed out that Sweden was one of the most bloodthirsty nations on earth for much of the last millennium. I was told we’d run out of time.

    Ask the Finns and they will tell you that Swedish ultra-feminism has emasculated their men, but they will struggle to drown their sorrows. Their state-run alcohol monopoly stores, the dreaded Systembolaget, were described by Susan Sontag as “part funeral parlour, part back-room abortionist”.

    The myriad successes of the Nordic countries are no miracle, they were born of a combination of Lutheran modesty, peasant parsimony, geographical determinism and ruthless pragmatism (“The Russians are attacking? Join the Nazis! The Nazis are losing? Join the Allies!”). These societies function well for those who conform to the collective median, but they aren’t much fun for tall poppies. Schools rein in higher achievers for the sake of the less gifted; “elite” is a dirty word; displays of success, ambition or wealth are frowned upon. If you can cope with this, and the cost, and the cold (both metaphorical and inter-personal), then by all means join me in my adopted hyggelige home. I’ve rustled up a sorrel salad and there’s some expensive, weak beer in the fridge. Pull up an Egg. I hear Taggart’s on again!

    The Almost Nearly Perfect People – The Truth About the Nordic Miracle (Jonathan Cape), by Michael Booth, is published on 6 February. It will be BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week from 10 February.

  17. ChilledBee
    ChilledBee says:

    I had never heard of the term “Systembolaget” so I looked into it and was interested to see that in January 2009, allegations were aimed against FONDBERG & CO, the second largest supplier of wine to Systembolaget with a market share of 8.5%, concerning large bribes made to the Gibraltar firm Bodegas, and are under investigation by the Swedish Tax Agency.

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