The Last Adult in the Room

During this Pandemic that Ate a Planet, Sweden and Sweden alone has refused to be sucked into the vortex of self-interested media fearmongering, progressive globalist propaganda, and totalitarian social experimentation. She has refused to succumb to the abject, life-annihilating terror of death; refused to play the immature game of prolonging the inevitable by hiding under the bed hoping that somehow an unpleasant reality will disappear if one hides long enough; refused to act as though the threat of physical illness were the single overriding concern of life; refused to forcibly shut down her own economic and social life indefinitely, causing massive and long-term damage to her national health and psyche, for the sake of a twisted experts’ fantasy that somehow dragging a bad flu season out for years, rather than facing its worst immediately, will lead to less pain rather than more; and refusing, in the end, to give herself over to the hysterical society’s weakest and most irrational dream, namely that somehow we can all live forever and prevent all bad outcomes if only we give the State all the power and resources it needs to force everyone to do as its all-knowing masterminds decree.

For keeping her head when all about her have lost theirs; for accepting the inevitability of a harsh year once in a while; for refusing to pretend that older, weaker citizens can only die of this virus, and would otherwise never die; for rejecting the totalitarian alarmists’ manipulative appeals to the petty selfishishness of childish fear, and the self-righteousness of societal suicide masked behind rhetoric of “compassion”; for adopting the courageous, philosophical, realistic, long-term, sensible, genuinely public-spirited position of the rational adult — for all this, Sweden is being mocked, despised, and ridiculed. 

For all this — for being the only adult left in the room — she will be punished by the frightened, resentful, irrational children and their cynical controllers and indoctrinators in the progressive globalist hierarchy. The only adult in a room full of terrorized, screaming children stands no chance. She will either surrender at last to their will in an exhausted plea for mercy, or she will continue to resist and be slowly beaten to death. In the former case, she will lose her immortal soul in a self-defeating attempt to save her mortal body; in the latter, she will resign herself to the practical hopelessness of rationality in the midst of unmitigated insanity all around her, but simply choose to die with her honor intact.

Sweden is us.

There have been very few times in my life — I am trying to express myself moderately here — when humans, collectively, have sickened me more than they do at this moment. Childishness in its “purest” sense — that is, childishness without the innocence and open-minded curiosity that make childhood lovely and full of promise — is barely tolerable even in children. (That, after all, is why we educate them.) In a healthy adult, such “pure” childishness is revolting. In a civilization, it is more deadly and intractable than any mere virus. It is the plague, but far worse: it is a vile, hideous death, but one mired in the further ignominy of eternal shame.

Fortunately, at moments like this, one is all the more acutely aware and appreciative of instances of rationality, moderation, integrity, and adult willpower where one finds them. That is, the saving grace of civilizational conflagrations such as we are witnessing today is that they serve as the perfect background to reveal the rare, brilliant points of intelligence and decency in our midst. Those exceptions, which might otherwise be overlooked or taken for granted, suddenly appear in their truest form, namely as stars that enliven our dark skies, or guiding lights which remind us that we are not utterly lost. True friends find each other in the night.


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