ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses why it is crucial for the outcome of a country’s response in pandemic emergency to learn from failure, and it investigates the lack of admitting failures in Sweden’s experiment. The author tries out tools from cultural analysis, including shame studies, to uncover clues to the mystery of why a majority of the population for almost a year followed its national leadership into a kind of “politosomatic pandemonium”. Has this conceivably to do with shame within conformism? What role does a high level of trust play when confidence is shaken? What does it mean for the conditions of restoring trust when responsible leaders time and time again deny that they have failed? Can one restore the legal system so that civil servants and politicians can be held accountable for violations of the law?
The chapter develops a hypothesis that Sweden is distinguished from others in a unique asymmetry of a) a high level of trust in politics, b) no trust from politics in science and c) an ambiguous high-and-low level of trust from politics (Government and Authorities) in the people (trust in individual responsibility and distrust of citizens’ acceptance of tough measures). Finally the chapter suggests a model of the triad of science, politics and trust for analysing pandemic management, and emphasises the need for a transdisciplinary approach for studying both the virus and the social processes accelerated by its spread.
