Nordic Dialogues I: “What is healthy funding in a changing world?”— My Nordic Journey 1998-2025
A reflection on Norse Metal, cultural capital of Bildung, and Finnish chairs
I have a strong sentiment for the Nordics. In my formative years of teenage angst in the latter 1990s I was a devoted fan of some of the darkest metal acts from Norway, Sweden and Finland. A culture of extreme sonic and visual aesthetics fascinated me as a kid born into a Roman-Catholic Polish family—the hymns of iconoclastic irreverence met my need for youthful mutiny against the false dogma of incompetent authority. In 1998, at sixteen, a primary school friend and I formed our first musical act, Nebula Gates. It was a two-piece where he would compose music and sequence drums and bass on his Amiga while handling guitar and vocals. I would play the lead guitar and write lyrics. We were heavily inspired by our Scandinavian influences. Our debut demo material was released on a local underground record label, 7Gates—inspired by the classic track by the 1980s’ English legends, Venom. These were the bohemian days of total intoxication with the music and the underground scene.
Nebula Gates at Wacken Open Air, Northern Germany, 2003
My first lyric was titled Within the Structures of Creation. We even published an issue of our fanzine, featuring interviews with some of the bands we were swapping cassettes with, as well as with some of those whose music inspired us from the beginning. Those were the ancient days of snail mail, floppy disks, and photocopied booklets of demo tapes - something unheard of in today’s digital age of instant gratification. Why am I talking about this?—Because when I think of the Nordics today, all of these memories come back to life. It was a time that was equally magical as it was dangerous, both ideologically and with respect to our self-destructive lifestyle at the time. All that said, one could not accuse us of not being authentic—we walked the talk: what was in the lyrics, was also in our young lives. We used to spend long nights—sometimes several in a row—on discussing metaphysics, the music and our mission in it all. Somehow this period of wild abandon, with all of the dark symbolism of metal aesthetics, was also a heterodox educational experience of a special kind to us. To use the terms from Nietzsche’s debut The Birth of Tragedy, the chaos of Dionysian excess paradoxically concealed within itself the Apollonian dimension of reason and order. Only now can I see with it clarity—after over two decades of professional experience as an educator I increasingly recognise my metal days as a vital stage of learning, emerging from the vague haze of a reckless paroxysm. I will therefore consider it below in terms of cultural capital.
Cultural Capital
The term cultural capital was coined by a 20th century French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. He observed that amongst all the non-monetary forms of capital there are cultural assets such as education, social skills, style of speech, and of dress etc., which affect how well the individual or population does independently of monetary wealth. During those years of metal debautchery and travels to gigs and festivals, we were simultaneously soaking up with high culture. Back then I used to read tons of music magazines. I remember reading Jan Axel, drummer of the Norwegian Mayhem, Arcturus and The Kovenant, refer to James Joyce’s prose in an interview. On another occasion, the frontman of the Finnish Beherit talked about the civilisational crisis humanity is in in terms of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West—one of the works I have been reading ever since, which helped me understand the inner dynamics of the current world-KRISIS. These were not isolated instances where Scandinavian artists shew off their cultural literacy. Similarly, I first heard of Nietzsche’s philosophising with a hammer from my music fanzines. It always impressed me how articulate and erudite my role-models were, given the otherwise counter-cultural identity of the extreme underground metal movement. The musicians could not be discredited as uneducated even if their work and attitudes casually violated societal taboos. In essence, being part of this scene as a fan and creator was my early cultural priming. I was gaining in cultural capital while having fun, head-banging to the glory of the metal gods—my own private panacea to the Nietzschean death of God which only now, twenty years later, has gone maintstream.
It wouldn’t be until years later that I learned of the source of this cultural capital coming from the Nordic states. Knowing now it was the same Nordic Bildung that Lene Rachel Andersen talks about in her book The Nordic Secret: A European Story of Beauty and Freedom, which educated my teenage role models, who in turn provoked my curiosity through the fanzine interviews. The story has turned a full circle! Out of my passion for music grew my commitment to philosophy and mysticism that the metal culture was soaked in. This yearning for big ideas and profound thinking would stay with me for good; this hunger for cultural literacy would define the way in which I would interact with the world writ large, and in my adult life as well: first as a musician, lyricist and philosophy undergrad, then as a liberal arts scholar, and finally as a philosophising linguist and educator. The latter has become a vocation that ended up inspiring me to go alone and become self-employed in an age where even some of the most renowned educational organisations are struggling to uphold the ethos they were originally designed to fulfil. They often bend to ideologies of the day, losing credibility and forcing authentic educators seek liberty in self-exile. The currency of sincere learning, one could argue, is currently in trouble but the cultural capital of true education must survive if humanity is to. Education, which is to say learning in the broadest sense, is a form of cultural capital. And in a world where educational resources are easily scaleable through global information networks, I feel it’s important for us to recognise the opportunities the global communication networks offer. In some ways we have never had a more convenient time to see education as capital. But we need courage and resilience to build up its currency in a world of exponential ignorance.
A Nordic Call
Back to my story: My first real-life encounter with the Nordics after years was in December 2023. I got invited on a teaching tour in and around Stockholm for a large Swedish multinational educational organisation. Winter days were short and I got sick in the first week so there was not much to reminisce, other than managing to find time for dinner out with a friend. My experience of Stockholm was somehow lost in the day-to-day of my teaching routine. Sometime between then and now I also joined The Global Bildung Network online community set up by the same Lene Andersen from Denmark who beside her book keeps promoting the story of how Bildung education made the Nordic states so successful as in her new online course.
In addition to these two encounters with the Nordics—one in flesh in Sweden, the other virtual one, with Denmark—were an interlude to an even greater Nordic opportunity, all within a single year! In November 2024, I received an invitation to join the first edition of the brainstorming event called the Nordic Dialogues. The masterminding was had at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland to discuss regenerative funding. This sounded exciting. I had never been to Finland before, though, needless to say, I already had warm feelings towards it through the music of my youth.
Economics of Beauty
What I discovered in Helsinki was, above all, the sublime minimalist aesthetics of the famous Finnish design. I was in constant awe of the functional beauty of the daily objects surrounding me. Could this heightened sense of aesthetics be also the result of the 175 years of the Nordic Bildung, which puts so much emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of life? The low-key functional beauty of the curves of utility objects and interiors that I encountered in Helsinki was remarkable. How much warm capital is lost in mis-designing things so that they are merely functional and not also beautiful? Whatever happened during my short stay at Aalto University was obscured by the impression this ergonomic elegance made on me.
Elevator at the Helsinki Airport: steel, glass and concrete transcended by legato string music, reverberating around the cold hard-surface structure with sonorous warmth
What did this aesthetic sensibility tell me about the Finnish as a people? Surely, that they care about beauty… What a wonderful sensibility for a society to embody—caring for the beauty of items we use all the time. How could this affect economics in general? What disposition could a people who intrinsically care about beauty foster with regards to the matters of finance? During my couple of days stay in Helsinki I was spellbound, in contemplative awe of chairs, tables, appliances, radiators, woodwork, and architecture. I even made friends with a chair designer at the airport as I walked into him unaware while taking a photo of a chair! This constant focus on the aesthetic dimension of utility items seemed to have put me in a quasi-meditative mood. It seemed to have regulated my nervous system as my attention was hooked on admiring the style of things for most of the time…
By the way, was it not precisely one of Joyce’s signatures to lean over the sensory aspects of otherwise mundane experiences and elevate their inner magic from daily life through the power of description, rendering in language what the Finnish chairs offer to our sight and touch? Is this not precisely a daily dose of the infinite that is cast within the finite—the Hegelian dimension of the Absolute which “shines forth through the veil of sense” as he divined it in his Phenomenology? I’m not sure if Finns ask themselves such questions—possibly not. It probably takes an outsider to notice the cultural soup in which they luckily swim in on a daily basis, but to be honest—I don’t know. This aesthetic experience of the Nordic design revealed to me yet another aspect of cultural capital—that of aesthetics. Of course, this is no accident. Søren Kierkegaard, the 19th century Danish father of the philosophy of existence famously championed an aesthetic life as a counter-measure to the fundamentally anxious reality of the human condition. He would insist, though, that an aesthetic experience cannot be sustained, it must always ultimately lose to despair of the human predicament—that of being suspended between anxiety and pleasure…
A Finnish chair.
Towards a Sustainable Consciousness
In any case, the matter of regenerative economics has to do with designing a ecosystem of energy exchange, such that could last, i.e., be sustainable. All of what I was meditating on above has to do with my understanding of a sustainable way of being: being educated, intrinsically committed, and responsive to the beautiful—not in the sense of “sustainability” as in catch phrases of power-grabbing scams of billionaire green deals, but in its true intrinsic sense of the word. What I was trying to point to in my reflection on the cultural capital of education and aesthetics is that the revolution we should seek is not outer but inner. As the saying goes, it will not be televised… For me the shift from unsustainable to sustainable is a shift in consciousness, and not in politics; in the mind, and not in thought. Even though a shift in perspective is difficult to communicate as it escapes the habits of thought and language which had created the predicament we are aching to address, the most real transmutation is silent and imperceptible—as are the weapons which exacerbate the dysfunctional inertia of expired paradigms that stand in the way of fundamental change.
I have no answers, nor do I believe in pretending to have any amid escalating uncertainty. What we can do at best, if you ask me, is to harness the wisdom of millennia by the best tools the modern world can offer; to attend mindfully to the balance between the daring courage and adaptive humility as we co-create new ways of seeing, being and connecting in the cracks of the rupturing world. As the KRISIS exacerbates anxieties by mobilising our most basic instincts, the balance of our moral economy must stay in the black. The way to foster it is the way of learning together as we go along—trusting the process… This doesn’t mean we will always succeed. All that matters is that we keep an eye on the prize—i.e. staying human, whatever that will turn out to mean—carrying the flame that flickers on the horizon of our hard-won hardships and joys, the earning currency of a consciousness that can sustain itself resiliently with little support from the outside. The more functional our inner compass, the more anti-fragile systems will we be able to evoke from the ruins of the universal collapse. It has to do with what the religious call God, or what Gregory Bateson called Systemic Wisdom—our ecological destiny along the path of life overcoming itself where after millennia of chasing unintegrated shadows through the corridors of history, as in our personal journeys, our collective suffering can at last make us all just a bit more human—all too human. It’s already here.