How many people with vastly different opinions can you fit under one flag before the powder keg is lit? Can you make a positive and prosperous society when the society itself is cut in half on complicated social issues?

This is something I’ve had on my mind a lot lately and it has been amplified with the last election in Sweden, or rather the aftermath of it. I’ll give you the short version: there are 8 political parties with parliamentary seats and between those, there are two blocks in Swedish politics: the Right and the Left. The originality of this split is amazing, I know.

Swedish Democrats are the joker in this political deck of cards, they are frozen out by both blocks and are refused access to any meaningful influence in parliament. Here is the catch though: the Swedish Democrats gained enough votes in the last election to be the tip of the scale for anyone wanting to rule Sweden since the two blocks are in a deadlock (144 mandates in parliament versus 143).

Attempts to create an administration to rule the country has been trashed repeatedly since none on the left and the right want the other one to be in power and the Swedish Democrats vote down every try where they are not given a piece of the pie, which has been every time.

Let us have a break from the technical nonsense, take a step back, and evaluate the dynamics going on here for a second. I’ll pick up my brush and paint the scenario for how I view this thing:

Imagine you are out in town on a Friday night with your 9 buddies to celebrate your birthday. You have a discussion on where to go and grab a bite of food – 4 of you want to go to the steak house, 4 of the pals want to go to a sushi place and the last 2 wants to try out that new tapas place they read about. After half an hour of discussion, no progress is made and you realize nobody wants to compromise on their choice of food. You have to face the dire reality: You are holding each other hostage and nobody is going to enjoy the night to the fullest. One reasonable solution would be to eat at separate places and then meet up for drinks at a different rendezvous point (and have a half-an-hour discussion on which one, got to love those).

The political solution would be to try and lure people over to your side with bribes (“I’ll buy us a round of drinks if we eat at the sushi place, come on guys!”) or other incentives (“I’ll break up with my girlfriend on Snapchat if we go to the steak house!”).

Now this is just an isolated event I am presenting here and it lasts for only a night, but imagine if this were every day where you had to go through this process: everytime you do something you have to first call around and have a vote with your friends. Wouldn’t it drive you nuts after a while and you’d just find new friends that you knew you’d agree with more? If we want to go a layer down: in the democratic, parliamentary process it is not just your friends having a say on matters – people you don’t even know are giving input, someone with no stake in your life and well-being can slide in and prevent you from doing something by allowing a third party to micromanage your life.

This is the death of your freedom from a thousand cuts: small restrictions add up and form a pin in the societal machine over time. Tiny moral laws from the ’50s are still around today. It is still illegal to move rhythmically (dancing) in an organized fashion in Sweden because of morality laws from back in the day’s when anti-alcohol and “pro-public order” politicians realized that liquor bannings just made the situation worse. Instead, they opted to put restrictions on the situations where alcohol was present, in order to try and scale back consumption that way.

I can give you hundreds of examples of laws, rules, and regulations like the example above on all aspects of social life that are affecting us right now. The unseen consequences, to borrow a phrase from Bastiat, is immense. I don’t even know where to begin unwrapping those in any sane manner!

There is some merit in compromising and no society will have 100% unity, no matter how small the community/country/city is so there will always be a space where you need to draw the lines up and add some restrictions as bargaining chips to get the things you value the most, sacrificing something you don’t feel too attached to in comparison on what you are getting.

But when its quite clear that the divide is so deep and the nation consists of people with such radically different reflections on how things should be done, it might be time to consider splitting up? Test out ideas in new socio-economical zones within nations, just to see how something radically different would turn out?

If one side of the population wants a stronger public sector and the other wants stronger property rights, can you really say they are so alike they should be considered under the same umbrella together? In my opinion, no. Both sides would need to compromise too much for that society to ever be truly united, other than surface-deep.

– ALEX UTOPIUM Scandinavian anti-establishment blogger, editor for the Utopium Blog. Counter-economics, agorist-separatism, and free market advocate.