Tegnell was aided by another worthy candidate to share the Nobel, Johan Giesecke, who had formerly held Tegnell’s job and served during the pandemic as an advisor to the Swedish public health agency. Decades earlier, he had recruited Tegnell to the agency because he admired the young doctor’s willingness to speak his mind regardless of political consequences. In early March 2020, as leaders across Europe were closing schools, Giesecke sent his protégé an email with a sentence in Latin. It was a famous piece of fatherly advice sent in 1648 by the Swedish statesman Axel Oxenstierna to reassure a son worried about holding his own in negotiations with foreign leaders. An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur: “Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?”
The quote is from an article (h/t instapundit) that starts
The frontrunner for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize … is the World Health Organization. It’s hard to imagine a worse choice. (Okay, Vladimir Putin.)
Most of the world ignored Tegnell and Giesecke, but they had equivalents in Florida. Those Floridans may have known Count Oxenstierna’s remark. But it’s more probable they knew what John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson on July 9th, 1813.
“While all other sciences have advanced, that of Government is at a stand … little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.”
Clearly they also knew that science bureaucrats are a lot more like bureaucrats than like scientists – not advancing science but at a stand as to how to apply it for anyone’s benefit but their own.
If Boris Johnson had listened to the Swedes instead of Professor Neil Ferguson and suchlike, he would still be prime minister. Boris (and Dominic Cummings too!) should have remembered what Dominic saw during the Brexit campaign.
Most people in politics are, whether they know it or not, much more comfortable with failing conventionally than risking the social stigma of behaving unconventionally.
It made a strange end to his career that, after getting his dream job by winning unconventionally, Boris then lost it as a delayed side-effect of failing conventionally. Fate offered him his longed-for Churchill moment – whereupon Boris let the Swedes, not the Brits save themselves by their exertions, and give the world their example: not something I would have predicted before I first saw it.
The frontrunner for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize … is the World Health Organization. It’s hard to imagine a worse choice.
I don’t agree at all. If you look at the list of recent Nobel Peace Prize winners, the feckless, dishonest and corrupt WHO fits in perfectly.
“While all other sciences have advanced, that of Government is at a stand … little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.”
I’m afraid I disagree again. The purpose of those in government is to get re-elected and grow their budgets. At this they have proven spectacularly successful. BoJo may have lost his gig, but one can surely not question the spectacular successes in the latter goal with regards to Covid. I suspect that Jefferson was focused on the pretend goal of government — to improve the lot of people — but this is really the delusion of government rather than the reality.
You Brits have a perfect example of this — the overwhelming favorite for your new PM among those that elected them was Kemi. But she didn’t stand a chance against a party machine focused far more on their own business than the business of the people. (FWIW, I think Mrs. T. was the best PM in recent history, but I think that Kemi could well have been even better than her, and could well have surpassed the Thatcherism that saved 1970s Britain, by a new 20 year long reign of Kemi-ism. You Brits missed an amazing opportunity.)
Not us Brit’s, we never had the opportunity.
It was approximately 300 untrustworthy, unimaginative, unrepresentative and untalented grey (or gay) men in grey suits and their female equivalents who put their own petty interests before those of the country.
These political rent seekers are an important reason why successive conservative governments have failed to implement the 2010 boundaries commission recommendations. The leeches would rather continue to gift labour a 20-30 seat head start in the next general election than risk a handful of their number losing their sinecures as a result of long-overdue redistricting.
This may be the way the political world is run. It is certainly the case in American corporate life, and American life in general.
Excellent post.
Very true.
Nothing for me to add.