How Sweden Got It Right

To what extent does sound decision making depend on indifference to what others think of you? It may have meant the world to Swedish children.

When country after country closed schools and sent children home to be locked up in isolation Swedish public health authorities decided instead to let public health considerations, and not panic, guide their response.

According to Swedish author Johan Anderberg in a new article in UnHerd, the famous, and to some infamous Swedish chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, was hired by his predecessor, Johan Giesecke mainly because of his “complete indifference to what other people thought of him”.

It seems both Tegnell and Giesecke understood from the outset how the reaction to the pandemic was to a large part guided, not by facts, but by panic; not only panic about the disease itself, but also to a large extent panic about what others would think. As Ben Irvine explains in his new book, The Truth about the Wuhan Lockdown: And How the World Became Wuhan it was this kind of panic that drove Boris Johnson to reverse course in March 2020 and close the schools.

Anderberg quotes an email from Giesecke to Tegnell when they prepared to defend the decision: “An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur.” (Don’t you know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?) The quote is attributed to Swedish 17th century statesman Count Axel Oxenstierna, a key player in laying the groundwork for the Swedish state and a constitution which provides an unusually strong protection of human rights.

While good knowledge of history and the classics may certainly be an asset when faced with mass panic, this is not enough. There is little doubt Boris Johnson knows his classics, but that didn’t save him from freaking out when his Twitter account started to fill up with angry messages and threats in March 2020. He was too concerned with what others thought of him. In the end, doing the right thing when a storm hits has little to do with education, but everything to do with the ability to think critically and clearly and the moral integrity that characterizes those who can stick with what they know to be right, no matter what others may think of them.