I think it is a pretty universal problem. As Carl Sagan said in his book the “Demon Haunted World” :

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

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Ha ha that is funny dialogue. Obliviousness can be a blessing, a source of a calm and innocent mind, but I guess it is annoying when the oblivious try to lecture others, which dogs and cats never do. Well then we have obliviousness in dangerous situations, like traffic, which is an issue for dogs and cats, but we owners have to be non-oblivious for them.

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Yes, when I was a teenager I read a lot of classic science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, as well as some of Tolkien’s books and they were all translated into Swedish. Later in life I learned to read English books and I read the originals. For example, my favorite Arthur C. Clarke short story was the “The Wall of darkness” or “Mörkrets mur” in Swedish. However, I loved it even more in English because the somewhat poetic aspect of the story telling came though better in English. The first line in The Wall of Darkness is “Many and strange are the universes that drift like bubbles in the foam upon the River of Time.”, which sounds better in English than in Swedish. When it is a bit poetic it tends to sound better in the original language.

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Hi Thomas, it is true that many people don’t travel and don’t take much interest in people and places outside of their immediate circle of reference. I was teasing you. Thank you for this interesting information. I have been to Helsinki, and it was very interesting. Everything was translated into Finish and the book shops were full of books by well know authors translated into Finnish. I found that very interesting. On the plane to Oslo, I sat next to a Norwegian man who was reading The Silmarillion by Tolkien in English. He said he’d previous read it in Norwegian and now he was reading the original.

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A bit political but I understand that. Thank you Denise.

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I assume you are referring to my last paragraph “…we are all more or less unaware of other cultures, places,…..” You are right, generalizing is being oblivious. However, in regard to “more or less” I know you are definitely very much less. I know you know a lot about cultures, art, nature, literature, the world, economics, and much more and you have amazing experiences, and yet you approach everything with humility. So yes “being unaware” is much less in your case. It is very interesting that South Africa has 11 official languages with their own cultures and 13 for Kenya.

The official language of Sweden is Swedish but there are five official minority languages including Sami, Meänkieli (ancient Swedish form of Finnish), Finnish, Romany and Yiddish. I should say Sami, Meänkieli and Finnish are both very different from Swedish, like you say, not even related to European languages. A linguist told me that the north Swedish dialect I speak, Norrlandish, is really its own language, but not officially though. Norrland has the Swedish culture, but it is very countryside, and therefore a bit different from city thinking and attitudes.

A funny thing happened once when I visited my hometown. A woman at the cash register told me “it is so nice to hear someone speaking the old way” referring to my old-style Norrlandish. It is disappearing because of the TV etc. She continued “where do you live?”, maybe expecting me to live far out in the forest without a TV. When I said Dallas, Texas, in the USA, she looked surprised, and it seemed like she didn’t believe me.

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