An over-educated, under-employed man struggles to complete his novel and get his life together over the course of one scorching hot Swedish summer in this clever, provocative, and hilarious novel that is already an acclaimed sensation abroad.
Convinced of his own moral and intellectual superiority, the nameless protagonist of this debut novel is also paralyzed by self-consciousness. Yet, inspired by Stephen King’s On Writing, he decides to dedicate four hours a day to work on his own novel over the course of one summer. Only, he must also balance his creative goals with a part-time government job and looking after his girlfriend’s possibly brain-damaged Pomeranian dog.
Too bad he’s uninspired by his job, almost kills the dog, and realizes his novel is slowly morphing into misguided fan fiction about French writer and enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq.
Even when he’s alone, he can’t help but pontificate before an imagined audience, making over-the-top cases for and against all manner of culture war battles, referencing everyone from Spike Lee to Grumpy Cat. He obsesses over identity politics, and veers into dangerous territory as he and his androgynous girlfriend engage in sexual role-play. He’s an emblem of all the follies of our age—happily unaware that in his refusal to be ordinary, he’s become a walking cliché of misguided manhood.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a portrait of a person belatedly coming of age, a blistering takedown of a privileged man who believes he’s a revolutionary, and “a crackling firework display of comic brilliance” (Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden).
Release date:
June 11, 2024
Publisher:
Atria Books
Print pages:
256
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Chapter 1: Frodo’s Disappearance 1 FRODO’S DISAPPEARANCE It was only in late March 2018, as fate would have it just weeks after the publication of Carl Cederström’s peculiar article in Svenska Dagbladet about Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,I that I seriously came to understand what a truly incendiary, if not scandalous, figure the Canadian psychologist cut, among not only ordinary folk but also people in my own social circle.
My girlfriend, Maria, who was by this point fairly instrumental in managing my social life, and at whose place I was increasingly spending the night, had decided to invite her friend Agnes, a PhD student in art history, and Agnes’s partner, Otto, a historian of ideas, over for dinner one Friday evening at her apartment on Linnégatan in Gothenburg.
Otto was a few years past thirty, as was I, and Agnes a few below, like Maria. Maria was a pretty good cook (we were both big fans of Anthony BourdainII) and had prepared a lamb casserole that had had to spend most of the afternoon on the stove.
She had warned me, though.
It would be a good idea to tread softly, so to speak, with Agnes and Otto (and be a little extra nice to them), since just a few weeks earlier their cat, Frodo—so named after the hero in The Lord of the Rings—had fallen from their third-floor window and subsequently vanished without a trace. One of them, either Agnes or Otto, had forgotten to shut the kitchen window. They had found claw marks on the window ledge, Maria told us. Poor Frodo, a rather diminutive cat, must have been—or at least so I imagined as Maria recounted the story—nonchalantly sniffing around by the window, surveying the street outside, when all of a sudden he lost his balance; in full-blown panic he would have scrabbled at the window ledge, only to slowly but surely—and possibly to the screech of splayed claws on metal (like in a Tom & Jerry cartoon)—lose his grip completely, at which time he must have plunged headlong in the darkness and cold and down onto the pavement, where he, Frodo, this patently indoor cat, hella terrified by the wider world, would presumably have perished. Agnes and Otto hadn’t given up hope, mind; they had plastered half of Kungsladugård and Majorna with posters of little Frodo. Beneath a photo of the timid cat, the whole sorry tale was described. The infuriatingly unshut window. The claw marks on the window ledge. Frodo’s putative nosedive onto the hard tarmac below.
So, Frodo had already been gone a few weeks, and, according to Maria, who knew Agnes well, it was clear that they had started to lose hope just a tad. Maria told me she had heard it in Agnes’s voice when they had last chatted. Notwithstanding all that, I’d venture to say that spirits at dinner were high. Maria and Agnes mostly reminisced about their student days in Lund, and there was only the odd mention of Frodo. Like when Agnes talked about how much she missed the little cat, while Otto caressed her back with a very serious and strained expression, torn between the urge to comfort Agnes and to scrutinize our reactions; as though Otto, model boyfriend that he was, nevertheless to some extent presumed that I, mainly—at whom he cast a suspicious glance when Agnes was perilously close to tears—actually found the whole story, and, indeed, this whole pet fixation, pretty ridiculous, which was basically true. It was awkward. Agnes valiantly squeezed her boyfriend’s hand. They would get through this together. “Yes, yes, we will, Agnes. We will get through this.”
It seemed obvious to me that Frodo—about whom my thoughts were already in the past tense, as ex-Frodo, say—had been something of a “transitional object” for the couple, even if they themselves were naturally incapable of regarding him as such. If Agnes and Otto managed to look after a little cat and were both capable of showing him the requisite tenderness and consideration, thus proving to each other their “adult responsibility” as well as warm feelings for the cute little furball, they could then “level up,” as it were, and perhaps eventually allow themselves to make a real little baby, an undertaking that would reasonably demand both responsibility and maturity.
That Frodo had fallen from the window had, I assumed, not only come as a shock to them both; it was, conceivably, a genuine disaster. They probably wouldn’t say as much openly to each other, but I imagined the issue hovering over them all the same: What if that had happened to a real little baby? The fact of the matter was that such terrible tragedies did occur at times. Every now and then kids did fall from windows, much to society’s horror—and that was certainly no laughing matter.
Truth be told, I myself shuddered slightly at the thought of something like that happening to Maria and me, even though we didn’t yet have kids of our own (and perhaps never would). Admittedly, we did have—or, rather, Maria had—Molly. But the thought of that little white Pomeranian having the audacity to fall from a window felt far too outlandish for me to take seriously.
Agnes also revealed that they had just put up another set of fliers on their block, Poster 2.0, with the headline: Frodo is still missing! So eager was she for us to see it that she whipped out her smartphone and started scrolling through her photos. In the photo on the (ambitiously) laminated, and thereby waterproof, poster, there was an additional picture of Frodo, this time in color, which made the little cat’s unique coat patterns clearer, all to facilitate a correct identification. As I gazed at the image, I strangely enough felt a keen impulse to pretend I’d seen Frodo near my flat in Majorna, but I bit my tongue, tried to rustle up a look of sincere concern, and hoped that it would seem like my heart was bleeding for them, so to speak.
Agnes was, I noted, very keen to emphasize that Frodo was their cat. Agnes’s and Otto’s. They were in this together. On the poster they had given both of their phone numbers. Just in case, I guess. So two numbers. And two email addresses. Yes, I could unequivocally state that they were both indeed traumatized—and at the same time strangely bound—by the tragedy of Frodo’s disappearance.
After dinner we retired to the living room, where Maria and Agnes went on drinking white, while I took another Urquel and Otto a bottle of Stigbergets pilsner from a local brewery. It was only then that the generally breezy atmosphere would take an abrupt turn. It had all started with a pretty uncontroversial conversation about Sweden’s “consensus culture,” and the conformism that could be deemed characteristic of Scandinavian countries. We unanimously agreed to leave unsaid for the moment whether said conformism and consensus culture were for better or for worse. In this respect we were still pretty much of one mind, as we had been about most of what was discussed at dinner. Donald Trump was dumb. Putin was dumb. Margaret Thatcher had, admittedly, been Europe’s (and maybe even the world’s) first female prime minister, and as such perhaps deserved just a smidgen of feminist admiration—not to mention the fact that she’d spoken out against climate change at a relatively early stage—but in the grand scheme of things she, too, had been dumb. A great many people were generally dumb—on that we were all agreed—perhaps especially so in those days.
Thus, with no great friction, we could all agree on the existence of what might be termed a Swedish consensus culture (without ipso facto outing ourselves as exponents of that social norm). Otto soon got onto the 1938 Saltsjöbaden Agreement between the trade unions and employer associations, and the Swedish labor movement’s long and well-documented collaboration with industry, which had largely, he believed, been a boon for Sweden. A statement that was music to my ears, and perhaps lulled me into a false sense of security, for it was then that I thought—since Otto seemed like a “sensible” chap with a certain understanding of social democracy’s reformist strategy—that the time was ripe for me to recount a Jordan B. Peterson anecdote that my friend Johannes had told me during a session at Plankan, our local watering hole.
The anecdote was about an elderly Canadian man who stops at a pedestrian crossing to wait for the light to turn green. It’s early in the morning and freezing cold; maybe minus 4. No car as far as the eye can see. The city is empty, deserted. Still, the man stands there waiting for ages—a long, long time—for the light to go from red to green. For this Canadian pedestrian, to cross on red would be simply unthinkable. It makes no difference that the traffic is pretty much nonexistent, or that he, this lone pedestrian, is in actual fact the only traffic there is! He abides by the law and the rules, he does, for that’s what he has always done. Now, if one were to apply the terms of personality psychology to this man, one would say that he has a strong measure of agreeableness and is also, I assumed, a relatively conscientious person; in this case extreme in his exactitude and complete symbiosis with Canadian society’s wholly rational (and potentially universally applicable) traffic rules. Which I supposed was perhaps why Peterson had used the man as an example of something that to me seemed equally characteristic of many of us Nordic peoples: an almost idiotic readiness to comply with law and order.
“Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that, generally speaking,” I said. “But then again it might not be wholly positive. The man undeniably stands there freezing like a poor animal, without needing to!”
Otto replied with grim resolve that there may be some degree of truth to that, certainly, but then he added, surprisingly harshly, and so out of the blue that I almost recoiled, that he actually thought Peterson was “a joke,” and that he couldn’t understand how anyone could take the man seriously. It was as though he hadn’t even listened to my (or, rather, Peterson’s) example of our interesting Nordic psychology. For my part, while recounting the anecdote, I hadn’t quite picked up on his apparent transformation into a completely different—all but crackling—person.
For a second I thought Otto was on the brink of tears. I also got the unpleasant feeling that he could easily throw a punch or something. The thing is, even though I’d bumped into Agnes and Otto a few times in town, I didn’t really know Otto; to me he was a blank page. Maria and Agnes said nothing, but Maria shot me a glance that I interpreted as an expression of surprise and perhaps an appeal for caution. To my knowledge she wasn’t really up on who Peterson was, and in a way neither was I. Agnes, for her part, looked altogether unfussed.
Though I soon suspected that Otto had some sort of beef with Peterson, under the circumstances it didn’t feel right to completely capitulate, so to say. As such, it seemed a not-entirely-inappropriate moment to bring up Carl Cederström’s bizarre Svenska Dagbladet article, in which Cederström, an associate professor in organization studies, described the psychologist as someone who looked up to or even praised bullies and scorned the weak. The article was illustrated with an image of Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons; a classic problem child in the cartoon who, as Peterson would have it, serves as a corrective for keeping weak and pathetic behaviors in check.
“Personally, I have a hard time—a really hard time, frankly…” I said, “believing that Peterson actually looks up to bullies and scorns the weak.” I went on: “Though I haven’t read 12 Rules for Life myself.”
“Yes, but why would anyone read it!” Otto bristled. Something I chose to ignore.
“But wasn’t Cederström’s article extremely black-and-white and weird? Was he not guilty of guilt by association? A clear-cut case of bias, surely? I mean, he went on to mention Breivik, the alt-right, the far right, Trump, and the like. Only ‘lost boys’ admire Peterson, yada yada yada. The only one missing was Hitler!”
“Apparently young men call him and cry down the line,” Otto said jeeringly.
“Even Peterson cries sometimes—on his own YouTube channel!” Agnes jumped in merrily; she didn’t seem at all as outraged by the Canadian psychologist as her partner, for whom the man was clearly an extreme trigger.
“Well, I for one have no intention of reading him,” Otto declared sourly. “He has no substance!” he went on. “There are loads of contemporary conservative thinkers who are better. Way more worth reading. If I had to read conservative thinkers today I’d prefer… well, maybe Mark Steyn or Peter Hitchens. Peterson pretends he’s some kind of expert on myths and folktales, but he takes examples from works that he clearly doesn’t realize were originally written by Hans Christian Andersen…. You know, it actually upsets me to talk about him. I mean, he isn’t good! What sort of people like that person? Well, actually I do know… what they are.”
Otto, the historian of ideas, had more or less hissed that last sentence, and it had also sounded more or less insinuating, as though there was an underlying accusation there. But I couldn’t quite make out if it was directed at me, or he’d simply disappeared into some sort of private sphere of festering conflicts and traumas. Perhaps he had a junkie brother who loved Peterson, somehow, and perhaps this (in Otto’s eyes) loathsome adoration simply constituted yet another alienating element in their relationship. But it would be extraordinary, if not completely absurd, for him to think I belonged to some Swedish alt-right faction or the like. For my political leaning was definitely no secret. I had always been left wing. Much like Otto himself, I assumed, even if he was perhaps to the left of the left on the political spectrum.
In any case, it was clear to me—and I assume the others, too—that Otto’s entire bearing had changed. He looked almost emasculated. Sat there with his shoulders hunched, as though preparing to fend off an attack. His gaze had darkened, his eyes anxious and glassy. For a second I pictured Frodo the missing cat and the Canadian psychologist both materializing in the middle of the room, and the latter—the, in Otto’s view, would-be deranged and fascistoid right-winger—screaming and blustering at the little cat and transitional object: You are small and weak, Frodo! You don’t even deserve to live! But the little cat (and baby substitute) didn’t deserve Peterson’s unreserved taunts. Of course not! Otto’s fists may well have been clenched beneath the low coffee table where they were hidden, and his knuckles may well have been turning white, but still he didn’t straighten his back. The damage was done. He would not recover.
A man (like Peterson), that intellectual scum, I imagined Otto thinking, a man who was clearly willing to rape and pillage his way through the entire Shire—the hobbit Arcadia—was no better than Saruman himself! In that moment it didn’t seem at all inconceivable that that was exactly how Otto saw things. He had lost it, in short, and in almost exactly the same way that associate professor Cederström had lost it in his bizarre article in Svenskan. Both had seemed in thrall to passions; pathos had occupied the place that had once housed their identities; their personalities had completely dissolved; their autonomy dissipated. They had allowed themselves to be hurled into chaos—and ressentiment.
“I just don’t get how anyone can take him seriously,” Otto grumbled, appearing all of a sudden both highly hot and bothered and pathetic all at once, to the point of deep despondency. It was a very strange scene to behold—and from what I could tell the man wasn’t even all that drunk!
“I just don’t get why people take Peterson seriously,” he repeated. “How can anyone take such a character seriously?”
“Still, it seems like a whole lot of people in the world do take him seriously. And he clearly provokes a lot of people, too. In any case, Camille Paglia has called him the greatest Canadian thinker since Marshall McLuhan.”
“But isn’t Paglia mainly just a provocateur?” Agnes wondered.
“Possibly,” I said, “but she’s also a pretty brilliant person.”
Nope, when it came to Paglia I had no plans of backing down an inch. I liked her keenly.
“I would even go so far as to say that she has certain… well, wholly genius aspects…” I went on. “Which for that matter I don’t think Peterson has.”
I’d thrown in that last part mainly to please or even appease Otto, who for at least a second lit up with what I assumed were gratitude and relief; but no, I didn’t think Professor Peterson was a genius, absolutely not. Professor Paglia, on the other hand, had been an idol of mine for years, even if lately—that is, in the late 2010s—I’d been increasingly disappointed by the author of the monumental Sexual Personae.
One of her more recent books, Glittering Images, which discussed Western art—from Nefertiti’s grave to George Lucas’s volcano-planet duel in Revenge of the Sith—hadn’t lived up to my expectations. Besides which, she’d clearly gotten ever more stuck in the role of someone who both wrote and spoke in what she herself termed “sound bites.”
She doesn’t really get to the heart of it, I thought and took a swig of my Urquel, supposing it would be a faux pas to air some of her more famous quotes, such as: “There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.” Personally, I assumed Paglia was right on that one—since there was de facto no female counterpart to the musical genius of Mozart or Beethoven or Bach (which was kind of sad in a way), and there was de facto no female counterpart to serial killers like Jack the Ripper or Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer (and a good thing, too!)—but it could take all night to explain why. And it definitely wouldn’t be worth it.
Maria and Agnes had gradually—and perhaps more or less demonstratively—started to turn to each other to discuss other things entirely, as though signaling that it was time for us men to amuse ourselves for a while. It didn’t seem unlikely that they were mildly embarrassed by Otto’s exaggeratedly emotional reaction. But then again they might not have been all that interested in the topic, either. It wasn’t like they were Peterson’s target market, exactly. Or at least not in the same way that Otto and I were.
Neither he nor I, it has to be said, were actually confused or lost young men—or at least not in our own eyes, I guess—but men we were, and we were also at least to some degree involved—Otto more so than myself—in the fields of academia that Peterson considered his targets.
As I would only later come to understand, Peterson saw Marxist, postmodern, and above all feminist-oriented academics—and institutions—as his enemies. In essence, he wanted to close down all the humanities and rebuild them from the ground up, since the world of academia was corrupt beyond redemption. For decades, professors had increasingly become the activist defenders of political correctness and identity politics. But the revolution ate its own children; with time the ideology that they had championed would consume itself. The universities had, in addition, been feminized, according to Peterson; the prestige of having an academic (humanities) background was constantly being devalued. The Canadian psychologist regarded political correctness as an umbrella term for everything that had been de rigueur in academia of late: gender studies, women’s studies, postcolonial studies, intersectionality; so-called whiteness studies.
Now, if Otto identified with Marxism, postmodernism, and feminism—if these were an integral aspect of his academic persona and identity (and, perhaps, his strategy for winning over his peers)—then it possibly wasn’t so strange that he would react as strongly as he did. But the fact that Peterson could seem so monstrous in Otto’s eyes was, at the time, simply astonishing to me, even if I should, admittedly, have suspected that Cederström’s article would be symptomatic—a sort of morphological paradigm—of how many people nevertheless viewed the Canadian psychologist.
Anyhow, I tried to coax Otto into small talk about other things, and after a while the reluctant guest started to tell me about an essay he was working on—I seem to recall it was on the concept of the deep state—but in the wake of the Peterson Debate, any good-mannered banter was well and truly off the table. The atmosphere was irreparably damaged. Peterson had exposed something. A wound? A sore point? Otto’s contention that Peterson was “a joke” was hardly a real argument in my view. On the one hand, that there were contemporary conservative thinkers who were more worth reading seemed plausible enough—that much I could buy (clueless as I was when it came to conservative thinkers); on the other hand, Otto hadn’t really put his finger on what was so conservative about Peterson’s thinking in the first place.
As for me, I still didn’t get what this thinking was, and I certainly didn’t get what about it more or less whipped people like Otto and Cederström up into hysterics when confronted with it. Be that as it may, that I would sooner or later have to read Peterson’s book and make the effort to familiarize myself with his thinking was now seeming increasingly unavoidable.
Once Agnes and Otto had finally left—much earlier than expected (we never got round to playing Trivial Pursuit, which I’d kind of been looking forward to)—both Maria and I breathed a sigh of relief. As I got down to the dishes I had a certain trepidation that Maria would blame me for sabotaging the agreeable vibe, but thankfully she, too, expressed shock at how “weird” Otto had gotten at the mere mention of Peterson’s name. Something that she linked to the “trauma” of Frodo’s disappearance. But it wasn’t like I’d been particularly offensive or unruly in any way. I had led the conversation, as I myself and Maria also saw it, with a demonstratively reasoned, formal tone, which I suppose may in and of itself have provoked the historian of ideas. Nor had I defended Peterson to any great degree. I was also grateful that Agnes hadn’t assumed an overly loyal and uncompromising defensive position vis-à-vis her partner. It would have been sad if Agnes had started to think badly of me, especially seeing as she often dropped in at Maria’s or popped by to join us when we were out in cafés, and so on.
As such, I would be seeing Agnes more than Otto going forward—provided, of course, that my relationship with Maria was to last, which, given that we’d already been together a year and a half, felt extremely feasible.
Fact was, we were very happy together. We had what one would call a “serious” relationship. We also had a number of shared interests. Maria had initially studied art history, but she had changed tack and was now reading librarianship over in Borås, where she had one year left of her training. She was cute, pretty smart, and exciting in erotic respects. Sometimes she would surprise even me by going along with things that I think are difficult or possibly compromising to consciously articulate, even if just to yourself. So long as we were singing from the same song sheet, as it were, and she got what I would term “the concept”—which she seemed to do intuitively, in fact—she was never disgusted or in any way alarmed by the “acts,” “scenarios,” or even “episodes” that occasionally popped up in and of themselves. I’m not sure even I knew where some of them came from.
Now, admittedly we were just two people, but even so I would sometimes find myself thinking of our lovemaking—in group-dynamic terms—as a sort of erotic play community whose diffuse rules emerged—there and then—from an exclusive, chaotic, and unique play sphere. In such a way one could draw parallels between the mystical rules of said play sphere and the so-called willing suspension of disbelief in the reading of literary works. Only if disbelief surfaced—if the fiction didn’t work—would love’s spell, or what one could perhaps also call that of the sexual manuscript, be broken. It would backfire, just as art backfired when said suspension was not achieved.
Sometimes I would even find myself contemplating the German-American psychologist Kurt Lewin’s behavior equation, as described in his 1936 work Principles of Topological Psychology. The equation, B = ƒ(P, E), describes behavior (B) as a function (f) of the person (P) and his or her environment (E). This equation was usually paired with Lewin’s field theory, which posits that an individual’s “life space” comprises a psychological field that includes both the individual and their immediate environment. As such, an individual’s actions can’t be explained—or at all understood—by internal or external factors alone but are rather the product of a complex interplay of internal and external motivations.
A group—or perhaps even just a couple (like Maria and myself)—thus always consisted of more than the sum of its individual contracting parties. When the group—or in this case the couple, or participants in the binary play sphere—was formed, it constituted a unified system with supervening qualities that would be impossible to understand through an individual evaluation of its parts alone.
Apparently it was my turn to take Molly out that night. I don’t know how Maria came to that conclusion, but it didn’t really matter anyway. Besides, I could see that her greatest wish was simply to curl up in bed with Grace Coddington’s Grace: A Memoir and get swept up in its glamorous world. She had gone all in with that book lately. Whenever Maria was reading she was impossible to reach. The strange thing was, she read so slowly that I almost got the feeling she was pretending. It wasn’t that she was bad at English. She just read extremely slowly. Yes, even in Swedish. Ah well.
I stopped dead in my tracks in the hallway, Molly’s lead dangling from my hand, caught by my own reflection in the full-length mirror. I didn’t have any particularly big mirrors at my place, so I found it a little disconcerting to see myself in my own magnificent totality, as it were. No, to be honest it was more that I was genuinely taken aback by how enormously critical I was about my own appearance. Or, more precisely: on that particular night I was surprised by how extremely alien I looked to myself. Namely, I was struck by the fact that my once-so-slender build was starting to exhibit a meatiness that I had never really noticed in myself before. I pinched the layer of subcutaneous fat on my belly and noted that it was still no thicker than one (1) inch (2.54 cm). “Pinch an inch,” as an American woman had said to me once in Berlin. Yeah, I’d fancied her all right. According to her, one inch of subcutaneous fat was a sign of good health.
It struck me now that I not only was, but was increasingly starting to look like, a grown man. My waist wasn’t as slim as before, and if I didn’t consciously suck in my belly and stand up straight it was there; not so big, perhaps, but still. Suddenly I recalled the impression that actor Harvey Keitel had made on me wh
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