Switzerland, a Prison?
A few days ago, I came across a short video from Switzerland. Perhaps fifty seconds long. The first time I watched it, I was convinced the whole thing had to be staged. It was almost too perfect, like a little satire about Switzerland in which the screenwriter had decided to squeeze every national cliché into less than a minute.
I watched it again. And again.
A 37-year-old man from Singapore, travelling through Europe on his motorcycle under the name Sukas, had ended up on a road in Giswil, in the Swiss canton of Obwalden, where motor vehicles are prohibited. Apparently, he had missed the sign. In any case, he wasn't supposed to be there with his motorcycle. There's no need to argue about that.
At some point, he stopped on a patch of grass. The ground was soft, the kickstand sank into it, and the motorcycle toppled over. The kind of mishap that can happen to any motorcyclist.
An elderly Swiss man approached. The tourist asked him to help lift the motorcycle.
The man didn't help.
Instead, he demanded to know what the tourist was doing there. Motorcycles were forbidden. He took photographs and made it clear that the rider had no business being there.
The tourist explained that he hadn't seen the sign and apologised in English.
"I'm sorry."
That should have been the end of the story.
But it wasn't.
The older man replied:
"Not sorry. It's forbidden."
I burst out laughing.
Not because the man was particularly funny. Quite the opposite. It was because those two words suddenly seemed to contain an astonishing amount of Switzerland.
"Not sorry."
It sounds English, but there is something unmistakably Swiss about it. In Swiss German, you might say exactly that: "Nöd sorry." Not as an additional apology, but as a blunt rejection of one. It sounds as though the man had simply translated a Swiss German expression directly into English. Whether that is what he actually did, I have no idea. But that is certainly how it sounds.
The tourist had made a mistake. He understood that. He apologised. The violation was over. There was really nothing left to settle.
But that wasn't enough.
The older man then said something I could hardly believe the first time I heard it.
"I hope it's damaged."
He was talking about the motorcycle.
Here was a man standing in front of a complete stranger whose motorcycle had just fallen over, expressing the hope that it had suffered some serious damage.
Not in the heat of a physical confrontation. Not after being gravely insulted. Not because the tourist had done anything to him personally.
But because he had ridden along a road where he wasn't supposed to ride.
When the tourist asked once more for help lifting the motorcycle, the man refused and walked away.
I watched the scene several times. And every time, I found myself returning to that one sentence.
"I hope it's damaged."
What exactly has to be going on inside a person for him to wish material damage on a complete stranger who has just suffered a minor mishap?
On a bad day, that is Switzerland to me in fifty seconds.
Of course, I don't mean that eight or nine million people wake up every morning wondering whose motorcycle they can refuse to lift today. I know plenty of generous, relaxed and helpful people. But I also know this other type well enough that the man in the video immediately seemed familiar.
Not the man himself. The attitude.
This goes beyond what the Swiss call Bünzlitum, a particular kind of petty, rule-obsessed respectability. A typical Bünzli might have pointed out that motorcycles were prohibited, perhaps shown the tourist the relevant sign, and then walked away feeling satisfied. Order would have been restored.
But something different happened here.
Restoring order wasn't enough. The offender had to suffer a little.
His apology wasn't accepted as a way of repairing the social situation. His motorcycle was already lying on the ground, but apparently even that wasn't sufficient. Ideally, it should be broken.
This is no longer simply a love of order. There is something extra in it. Something punitive. Almost a sense of pleasure in being right.
And that is what interests me.
As far as I can judge from a short video, the older man doesn't look like someone struggling to survive on a miserable pension. He appears neatly dressed, confident, perhaps seventy or seventy-five years old. Anything beyond that would be speculation.
But he does live in Switzerland.
One of the safest, wealthiest and most stable countries in the world. Surrounded by scenery that people from other parts of the world pay thousands of francs and spend twelve hours on an aeroplane to experience. Everything is clean, peaceful and orderly.
And in the middle of this paradise stands a man hoping that a stranger's motorcycle is broken.
Where does this bitterness come from?
Or perhaps it isn't bitterness at all. Perhaps the man is perfectly happy with his life. Perhaps no personal unhappiness is required to behave like this. Perhaps all it takes is the opportunity to reprimand someone and enjoy a brief moment of moral superiority.
Perhaps it begins with one of Switzerland's greatest strengths: its sense of order.
An astonishing number of things work in Switzerland. Roads are maintained. Public administration functions. Contracts are honoured. Rubbish is collected. Trains usually arrive when the timetable claims they will. Property boundaries are respected. Rules actually mean something.
None of this happens by magic.
One reason such a society functions is that people keep an eye on one another.
And perhaps that is precisely where the problem begins.
Spend enough time making sure everything is as it should be, and you develop a remarkably sharp eye for everything that isn't. The car is parked incorrectly. The rubbish has been disposed of improperly. The neighbour is too loud. The tourist is riding on the wrong road.
Someone is always doing something wrong.
The thousand things that work disappear from view. They have become normal, taken for granted. What remains visible is the deviation.
Perhaps Swiss dissatisfaction is sometimes the very shadow cast by Swiss success.
The more perfect the order, the more conspicuous the mistake.
The Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt once described Switzerland as a prison. In his famous speech Switzerland — A Prison, he suggested that the Swiss were both prisoners and guards in their own prison.
I think he was onto something.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this prison is that it doesn't need walls, guards or watchtowers. The prisoners take care of all that themselves.
Everything has its place. Everything has its purpose. Everything must be in order. Cars belong in parking spaces, rubbish belongs in the correct containers, and people are expected to behave according to the rules. Nobody needs to stand over you with a whip. Everyone knows what is expected, and everyone knows that someone else is watching.
And perhaps that is what makes the prison so effective. Its inhabitants are not merely prisoners. They are also the guards. They monitor one another, correct one another and make sure that nobody steps too far outside the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. The prison doesn't need to be imposed from above. It reproduces itself through the people who live in it.
And the remarkable thing is that most of them probably wouldn't recognise it as a prison. They would call it a well-functioning society.
Which, of course, it is.
That is the paradox.
There is another irony in this story that I find particularly interesting. The tourist comes from Singapore, a country famous for its strict laws and sometimes draconian punishments. Singapore has become almost a symbol of what happens when a society takes rules and regulations very seriously.
But perhaps Switzerland has developed something even more remarkable.
In Singapore, the law is strongly associated with the authority of the state. In Switzerland, the law seems to have moved into the minds of the people themselves.
You don't necessarily need a policeman to tell someone what is permitted. People already know. More importantly, they feel personally responsible for making sure that everyone else knows too.
And I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing. Quite the opposite. I rather like living in a society where people have internalised its rules. Where you don't need a policeman standing beside every rubbish bin, where people respect other people's property, and where most things work because individuals take responsibility without constantly being told what to do.
There is something genuinely civilised about that.
The alternative is hardly attractive. Nobody takes care of anything because nothing is their problem. Rubbish lies around, rules exist only on paper, and when someone asks who is responsible, five people point at one another.
I'm not sure I would prefer that.
But there must be a limit.
Because internalising the law is one thing. Turning yourself into its permanent enforcer is quite another.
At some point, a rule stops being a useful agreement between people and becomes part of their moral identity. They no longer simply believe that certain things should be done in a particular way. They begin to believe that anyone who does them differently deserves punishment.
And that, perhaps, is where Dürrenmatt's prison becomes particularly interesting.
Its walls are not made of concrete. They are made of expectations. Everything must have its place. Everyone must behave as expected. Every deviation demands an explanation, every mistake a correction. The guards don't wear uniforms because they don't need to. They are ordinary citizens who have taken the prison's rules so deeply into themselves that they no longer recognise the difference between maintaining order and policing their fellow human beings.
The prison works because its inhabitants believe in it.
And I can live with that, up to a point.
But when an elderly man sees a foreigner standing beside a fallen motorcycle, refuses to help him, and actually hopes the machine is damaged simply because he has taken the wrong road, something has gone badly wrong.
The man hasn't merely internalised the rule.
He has internalised the punishment.
Nobody appointed him a policeman. Nobody asked him to enforce the law. He simply assumed the responsibility. And when the tourist apologised, he refused to let the matter end.
"Not sorry."
For a brief moment, he was the prison guard. And the tourist, whose only offence was taking the wrong road, was his prisoner.
What fascinates me is how quickly the original problem becomes irrelevant. The tourist isn't continuing down the prohibited road. He isn't arguing about the rule. His motorcycle is lying on the ground. The practical situation is almost absurdly simple. Two men could lift the motorcycle, exchange a few words, and go their separate ways.
But then the older man would lose his moment of authority.
Perhaps that is why the apology is so inconvenient. An apology closes the matter. It acknowledges the mistake and removes the need for further confrontation. In ordinary human interaction, this is precisely what an apology is supposed to do.
But if your pleasure comes from the confrontation itself, an apology is almost an annoyance.
"Not sorry."
Two words that refuse to let the matter end.
Perhaps this is one of the most underrated human pleasures: being right.
Being right costs nothing and grants you a few seconds of moral elevation. You don't have to be rich, handsome, successful or particularly intelligent. You merely have to stand next to someone who has just made a mistake.
And suddenly the world becomes wonderfully clear.
I am right here. You are wrong there.
Perhaps this also explains something about the bitterness that disturbed me so much in the video. After all, prosperity doesn't eliminate the human need for irritation. When the big problems disappear, our brains don't declare themselves unemployed and announce: Wonderful. Now we can enjoy the next thirty years.
They find smaller problems.
And when almost everything works, very small things can become astonishingly large.
Perhaps that is the ultimate luxury of an affluent society: you can afford to get seriously upset about a tourist who rode down the wrong road.
There is one aspect of the video I haven't discussed yet. At one point, the older man raises both hands towards his eyes, pulls at the corners, makes a grimace and sticks out his tongue. Some people have interpreted this as a racist gesture directed at the tourist's Asian appearance.
And maybe it was.
But I'm not entirely sure. The gesture could also be interpreted as a rather crude way of saying, "Watch where you're going, you idiot!"
I'm not interested in defending the man. His behaviour was unpleasant enough without the gesture. But I also don't want to pretend to know what was going on inside his head.
And perhaps we should turn the situation around.
I'm Swiss. I also ride a motorcycle. Suppose I had taken that same prohibited road and ended up standing beside my fallen bike. Would the older man have behaved any differently?
I seriously doubt it.
In fact, I have little doubt that he would have approached me with exactly the same indignation. He would have pointed out the prohibition, taken his photographs and probably refused to help me lift the motorcycle. And I wouldn't be surprised if he had expressed the same hope that my bike was damaged.
Being Swiss would hardly have earned me special treatment.
Quite possibly the opposite.
He might have told me that, as a Swiss citizen, I should know better. A foreign tourist can at least claim that he didn't understand the sign or wasn't familiar with local regulations. What excuse would I have?
So I suspect that being Asian wasn't a necessary condition for attracting this kind hostility. Breaking the rule was enough.
And that brings me back to Dürrenmatt's prison.
The prison guard doesn't necessarily need to dislike you because of your nationality, your appearance or where you come from. He only needs to see you doing something you aren't supposed to do.
And suddenly he knows his duty.
Interestingly, the tourist himself reacted to the incident with considerably more composure. He was later interviewed by a Singaporean news outlet. He explained that the gesture had hardly bothered him. He had found the man rather comical. And when Swiss people apologised to him for their fellow countryman's behaviour, he told them they had no reason to feel responsible. He had met plenty of friendly people in Switzerland too.
I found that remarkable.
Here is a man from Singapore, a country not exactly famous for its anarchic interpretation of traffic regulations, who rides down a prohibited road in Switzerland, drops his motorcycle, gets insulted and is told that hopefully his bike is damaged.
And of all the people involved, he is the one who takes it in his stride.
He had every reason to be upset. Instead, he refused to turn an unpleasant experience into a judgement about an entire country.
Perhaps that is the real irony of this story.
The foreigner displays precisely the generosity that the local man has completely lost in that moment.
I would expect that kind of composure particularly from someone who has reached old age. You've spent seventy or eighty years on this planet. You've watched people come and go. You've probably experienced illness, death, love, disappointment, success and failure. By now, you know that most things that upset you on a Tuesday morning will be utterly meaningless by Wednesday.
And then along comes a tourist on a motorcycle.
He rides where he isn't supposed to. His motorcycle falls over. He says, "I'm sorry."
And instead of helping him, you hope the machine is broken.
There is something profoundly strange about that. A man can spend an entire lifetime learning how society works without necessarily learning how to deal with another human being.
Perhaps that is the distinction we sometimes forget. A functioning society is not necessarily a generous society. It can have excellent roads, reliable institutions, impeccable public transport and an impressive respect for the law, while still producing people who seem incapable of showing a stranger the smallest kindness.
And perhaps that is why the scene stayed with me. Not because someone broke a rule, or because someone else insisted that the rule be respected. Both are perfectly ordinary events.
It was the moment when being right became more important than being decent.
Perhaps that would have been the moment for a functioning society to demonstrate that it possesses not only rules, but generosity as well.
The older man could have said, "Yes, you're really not allowed to ride here."
And then helped him lift his motorcycle.
The rule would still be the same. Switzerland wouldn't collapse. The mountains would remain where they were. The trains would continue running.
And the tourist might even have left with a pleasant memory of an elderly Swiss man who gave him a lecture before helping him out of trouble.
But perhaps that is more difficult than creating a perfectly ordered society.
Knowing when enough is enough.
Because a society in which everyone knows the rules is a remarkable achievement.
A society in which nobody knows when to stop enforcing them is a prison.
"I'm sorry."
"Not sorry."
