There are more things, Horatio

Just had this memory fall over me, at 8 o' clock in the morning, that I thought I should write about.

The first time I realized there was more things in the world than I knew there was was when I was about eleven years old.

I don't remember when it was exactly, but I do remember I was on a trip with Stepdad. My stepdad took us - my stepbrother and me - on a couple of trips with relation to his work with the Social Democrats' youth. The Social Democratic Workers' Party, you must understand, has run Sweden for over a hundred years. It's an institution. When they don't get enough votes to form a government, either by themselves, or with the Green party and/or with the Left party, which has happened like five or six times in the last century, we suffer, as evidenced by the simple and immediate measure of the growth of national debt. We are a country that lives by socialist democracy, and we're only fooling ourselves to think any different. (I myself am a dues-paying member of the Left party, for the record.)

And the "youth" organization - every party that means business has a youth organization - it's a place for people to begin to engage themselves politically. Their offices, I remember quite clearly, had a foyer and a half-stairway up to a meeting area, and every inch of it was covered in feet-tall stacks of pamphlets. Stepdad was the chairman, which I guess meant he was the one who had to go on these trips, and so we went. It was the first time I went on an airplane. It was the first time I read The Adventures of Baron Münchausen. It was one of the first time I had a real fight with my stepbrother (dead in 2016, after at least 16 years of drug abuse, age 30). It was the first time I saw an auction, though it was an underwhelming affair of an auction where people put their bids in a hat, each paying the sum of his or her bid at every step.

I know we stayed for several days because I remember stashing the Münchhausen book away in the library when I had to leave for the day, but I don't remember a single thing about the sleeping arrangements.

But what I remember is this vivid, verdant moment in front of the sliding glass doors of the main building. Being eleven or twelve years old and having no idea how or when I'd ever get back home and being aware of the wild strange woods beyond the immaculate lawns beyond the winding asphalt paths through the immaculate green lawns between the school buildings and being aware I had no idea what most of the books in that tiny, two-shelf library I had found in a distant, depopulated building were about and being aware I didn't know what laid beyond those woods.

I only learned about the Dunning-Kruger effect some twenty years later, but I can say I've never been a victim of it. I always knew, before I knew it was something you should look out for and compensate for, that what you think you know about the way the world is put together is not everything there is to know.