Film: The Swedish Theory of Love

Film

The Swedish Theory of Love

By Kajsa Norman

Sweden is the loneliest country in the world. About half the population live alone – in Stockholm it is 60 percent – and one in four die alone. The Swedish Theory of Love examines the emotional cost of independence.

In the documentary The Swedish Theory of Love, film director Erik Gandini accompanies Swedish government officials as they deal with the deaths of people whose passing has gone unnoticed. Sometimes, the corpses have been rotting for years before they are discovered. A neighbor phones the landlord complaining about the smell coming from the deceased’s apartment, or the automatic rent payment eventually fails as the funds of the deceased have run dry. Officials then begin the process of tracking down next-of-kin whom nobody has heard from in years. If they are unsuccessful, the state simply lays claim to anything of value and arranges for the rest to be transported to the nearest dump. It’s not unusual and, according to the officials interviewed, the number of cases is growing by the year.

In Sweden, since the early 1970s, the focus of state policy has been to free the individual from dependency on family members. An individual’s social contract is with the state, nobody else. You pay your taxes and in return the state agrees to look after you when you became old or fall ill. You can rest safe in the knowledge that you will not be a burden to anyone. However, in the wake of this development towards ever-increasing autonomy and independence comes increasing isolation and loneliness.

The Swedish Theory of Love portrays this solitude as the ultimate outcome of the kind of state individualism that characterizes Sweden. While the film is from 2015, the topic of isolation feels more relevant than ever since the onset of the pandemic.

The documentary was inspired by the book Is the Swede Human? by Swedish historians Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh. To be Swedish, they argue, is to strive for independence, freedom, and individual self-realization, at the expense of community, intimacy, and traditional duties. However, when they talk of individualism, Berggren and Trägårdh don’t mean it in the positive sense of independent thought, or the courage to forge one’s own path. Rather, they mean individualism as French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville first defined it: the atomic culture that results from elimination of the undemocratic ties or duties of family, religion, and community that used to unite human beings.

In the early 1800s, Tocqueville expressed his belief that radical individualism could mean the end of humanity, as it would inevitably lead to atomism: the destruction of all that binds human beings together and all that distinguishes them from one another. An atomistic world is one populated by many equally insignificant, identical, isolated selves, each of whom is free from all external duties and restraints that might determine the purpose and direction of their existence. Tocqueville argued that such individuals were anxious, melancholic, restless, and dissatisfied even in the midst of abundance. This was, he argued, because the individual knew that they could not truly satisfy their own deepest longings, yet individualism remained the only option.

The state policy has been to free the individual from dependency on family members.

How to watch: The documentary The Swedish Theory of Love is available on YouTube.