Those Swedes!

A few months ago I was watching a travel show on the Travel Channel and they were exploring the food of Sweden. During the course one dinner the host and his guests had a conversation exploring a particular Swedish word: Lagom.

Lagom is a Swedish word with no direct English equivalent, meaning "just the right amount".
The Lexin Swedish-English dictionary defines lagom as "enough, sufficient, adequate, just right". Lagom is also widely translated as "in moderation", "in balance", "optimal", "suitable", and "average".

Of course to most English speaking Americans we really have no way to grasp a concept such as ‘Lagom”. How could anything, that is enough, sufficient, or adequate, be also in balance, suitable, average, or lord forbid, optimal?

To Americans, the concept of “adequate,” ‘sufficient,” or such signifies abstinence, scarcity, or failure. We are a society that is for BIGNESS, DOMINANCE, OVER THE TOP, and WINNER TAKE ALL.

Where we value “more is better” the Swedes obviously value “just enough”: Which probably explains, in a very paradoxical way, why the Swedes and most of the other Nordic countries score so much higher on the various happiness indexes and prosperity indexes.

We get pumped up when someone says, “Drill, Baby Drill” while Lagom would favor a more sustainable alternative. How many cars, televisions, phones, and all the other consumer items would one really need if one appreciated the concept of Lagom?

It isn’t that we have no intellectual history of a concept of balance: Aristotle and his concept of the “golden mean”; where the most desirable path is the one between two extremes because the reality of extremes is that one is of excess and the other is of deficiency.

While we view beauty as an extreme the Greeks believed there to be three 'ingredients' to beauty: symmetry, proportion, and harmony. This triad of principles infused their life. They were very much attuned to beauty as an object of love and something that was to be imitated and reproduced in their lives, architecture, and politics. They judged life by this mentality.

Plastic surgery, drugs, cosmetics, and coaching represent our concept of beauty, just watch the Miss America contest; nothing natural there!

In Chinese philosophy, a similar concept, Doctrine of the Mean, was propounded by Confucius.
We do not want to just exist, or prosper, or be successful but rather as Americans we want to dominate! Secretly we actually glorify that some of us do without because it gives us a sense of superiority.

We have no problem with the fact that our CEO’s pay is hundreds of times more than the lowest paid employee of the same firm. We see nothing wrong with the fact some companies are “Too big to fail” while others are failing on a daily basis. We glorify in the accomplishments of our healthcare system yet we do not find it odd that we have never figured out how to equalize access to these accomplishments.

We suffered more and incurred greater long term damage to our economic system due to the financial meltdown than any other country and we did because our society exhibits the greatest amount of imbalances in just about everything.

On one hand we want to bemoan the growth of government and yet the same people who protest government dominance over their lives are also the ones promoting dominance in every other area of our society: especially in regards to economic and military affairs.
If you find yourself losing your personal freedoms in one area of your life you can pretty much bet that you have lost it in others areas also.

We love our banks big, our Wal-Mart Super Centers, our sports heroes on steroids, our beauty queens with implants, and our aircraft carriers…why not our government?

I also can’t fail to wonder if this is the reason this country is so dependent on anti-depression drugs….because obviously we are lacking balance in everything.