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 sp.