Sweden is a very nice country with a long history and tremendous achievements from the Nobel Prize to Ikea to the zipper to Spotify and Skype. It is home to 10.5 million people who have a very high quality of life, as you know if you have visited.
It is especially nice now because this country is one of the few in the world that did not lock down for COVID and hence was not traumatized by the episode. They were pilloried the world over but performed better on age-adjusted excess mortality than most countries in Europe.
You might think that studying this case would be deeply interesting to people who write about the subject. On the contrary, I just read yet another book among many that nowhere discusses the country. It’s like the place simply does not exist.
These same books are the ones that say that the United States should have locked down earlier and more. They blame President Trump for delaying and then seeming to push the opening.
For the most part, the Swedish experience in COVID has been written out of the history books. And why? Because it doesn’t fit the story. You might think that people with one version of a story would be willing to confront their own version of events with contrary cases, just as a test regarding truth. But no: it’s shocking how little even famous scholars and writers do not do this.
It’s almost as if such writers believe that by not bringing something up, they can make it go away, all in the service of feeding their preferred narrative.
I get it. We all have a story about our lives, the world around us, people we know, institutions with which we associate, and policies we favor. More often than not, these are self-serving stories. We possess a remarkable capacity for curating what we decide to know for sure and what we ignore. Surrounded by countless trillions of information bits in the present and an infinite number in the past, we all experience the luxury of telling our own tale.
This is even easier in a digital age. We can manufacture any story we want about anything. I don’t know about you but I came into the digital age hoping that lies would be more difficult, not more prevalent. I’ve been disappointed.
The trouble is that the stories people tell themselves may or may not have anything to do with reality. Then with Artificial Intelligence, untruth becomes canonical, simply because it is a machine and instantly accessible. The problem is getting worse, not better.
It’s been fascinating to me to watch the deliberate scrambling of brains and the rewriting of the history of the last four years. I’ve spent four years absolutely obsessing about every detail of the COVID response, simply because it was such a catastrophe for civilization.
By now, I know much of the trajectory day-by-day, even hour-by-hour in some cases. I’m aware of the players, the connections, the names, and so on, together with all documents that are available.
And yet nearly daily I see people get it all wildly wrong and simply don’t care. Memories are so selective and easily spun out (made up) backwards in time. And once that happens, no facts seem to matter.
You can cite them all you want, but once a person has a story in his head, it can be impossible to dislodge.
Learning this and observing this has been deeply alarming to me. This cannot be the first time in world history where fiction has triumphed over reality. It really does make one wonder about how much of what we think we know about human history is simply wrong. How much is entirely made up in service of fantasy and political interest?
I don’t know the answer to this question.
In college, I would cycle through various historical obsessions. I would get interested in the Reformation and read everything I could. The same would happen with the U.S. Gilded Age, then Reconstruction, then the 1950s Red Scare, then the Nixon era, and then I went back to the Medicis and then the British Empire, and on it went.
Then I got crazy for philosophy and the lives and times of the great philosophers. Then I did the same with economists. And so on.
I’m not bragging here at all but warming up to the central point here. One thing I learned along the way is never to trust someone else’s version of events or ideas entirely. If available, always read the original text or document. This is true for everything: court cases, philosophers’ ideas, economic events, political controversies, wars, and so on.
The closer you can get to the actual source texts, the closer you can get to the truth.
That includes newspapers of the time, which are supposed to be the first draft of history. Yes, they lie too but if you compare enough accounts, and compare them against other books and things, you are guaranteed to find crucial information that historians do not report. This is because every historian too has a story to tell and they don’t want to include aspects of the real story that contradict their version.
Let’s get back to the last few years here. They were extremely disorienting for people all over the world. Every routine was disrupted. Everyone seemed to be going crazy. It was all the stranger that we kept hearing the same implausible lines from major media, government, and backed by big tech. They all said vast numbers of people of every age will die if we behave normally.
It was never true but everyone seemed to agree. If you thought rationally in this period or looked at the actual data, you could observe that it was all nonsense, scripted for clicks or power or money or something. It was essentially a racket. Adding to the dissembling about masking were the wild exaggerations about the shots, which are not even vaccines, as it turns out.
Ever since that time, we’ve been inundated with elites who say that pretty much everything went well, just as planned. It was all justified. People in the know also know for sure that this is not true. It was probably the worst and most damaging on a global scale government action in modern times, and that includes wars and other disasters. And yet here we sit still not getting the truth.
This is extremely disorienting. A disoriented people are evidently far more susceptible to believing tall tales that fit with their bias. We see it every day all around us. The mainstream story on this period is so implausible at this point that some people would rather not think about it at all rather than change their mind.
How do we get out of this trap? I cannot think of another way besides continuing to write and post true things so far as I am able. Eventually we have to hope the truth emerges on the other side.
This also involves serious research. We must examine as many original resources as possible and insist that government release all information they are keeping hidden, including that about vaccine injuries and the knowledge thereof. Still vast troves of documents concerning the real agenda behind the pandemic response are being kept under wraps.
Consider this, however. We are only talking about recent events of the last 3 and 4 years. And yet there are radically different versions extant about what exactly happened. If this is true in recent times, what does this say about the past? What really happened in the Progressive Era, the Civil War, the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions, the Black Death, the Fall of Rome, and so on? What do we really know?
These are scary questions, perhaps, but ones we have to ask in light of the experience of our times. This is the first huge crisis in history when vast swaths of humanity have had access to myriad information sources, including those that disagree with the establishment line of the day. This access has pulled back the curtain on the elites in ways that have never before been possible.
In the end, we have to depend on the integrity of our storytellers, and that’s not a very firm foundation on which to base what we believe. In the end, we have to muster the internal courage and integrity to work to find the truth for ourselves. There really is no substitute.
Plus, for now, we have the means to do so, unlike in the past.
If we have learned anything from our times, we have surely learned this. You can look up what Sweden did yourself and be amazed. You can do this with any and all subjects of the day. And, hey, and here’s the good news: finding out what is true is a glorious adventure. It awaits you and everyone.
