Fürchtet Gott! Ehret den König!

The Biblical words of the first Pope. And a lesson to us all today, as Andrew Brown writes:

When I was travelling in Sweden last week, people talked about two rumbling scandals. They don't seem to have much in common, since one is Social Democratic and the other results from the privatisation of parts of the health service. But in fact both point towards the same kind of moral vacuum against which the Occupy movement takes aim.

The entertaining scandal is supplied by Håkan Juholt, the new leader of the Social Democrats. He was supposed to represent a return to the party's core values, and its core voters, after the disastrous election result last year under the modernising Stockholmer Mona Sahlin, when the party did worse than at any time since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1921. Burly, moustachioed, provincial and looking as if he would be comfortable in overalls, Juholt's appeal was that he talked like an ordinary worker. This is important at a time when the conservative parties are trying to position themselves as the party of honest workers, and the Social Democrats as the party for state-employed drones. There's just enough truth in that for it to sting.

No sooner had Juholt been elected in March than the papers discovered that his partner – whom he met on a dating site – had been given a suspended sentence for embezzling from her employers as their relationship was beginning in 2005. Juholt knew of this, but had neglected to tell the party officials who had asked if he had any skeletons in his past. Then, in September, he was discovered to have claimed about £15,000 too much on his parliamentary expenses for the costs of staying at her house in Stockholm.

His defence has been a mixture of bluster and denial, which essentially comes down to the idea that everyone fiddles little things like that.

No one knows whether he will survive – and he certainly seems to have done nothing to make the party more electable – but the more urgent point is that in the old days, anyone caught behaving like that would have been out on his ear. You cannot run a welfare state in which it is alright to fiddle.

Neither can you run one in which welfare isn't delivered. The rather bigger scandal, or series of scandals, concerned old people's homes run by Carema, a private company in Stockholm. Relatives and former workers have come forward with stories of dead old ladies left in front of the television; demented patients left to smear themselves with excrement and a management demand that incontinence pads be weighed to make sure they had not been changed until absolutely full.

This is what happens when the health service is part privatised, say critics. I'm not sure that things were idyllic under the old, wholly nationalised system. My then wife worked in an old people's home north of Gothenburg and said it was run with brutal efficiency but so emotionally cold that she would rather be in hospital in England. Indeed, the big selling point when competition was introduced to some services in the 1990s was that the care homes would remain small, local businesses, with less bureaucracy than the old centralised model, often family run. But that's not how a market works.

Taken together, these scandals show that both left and right are in trouble. The old Social Democratic model is completely broken, but the new, competitive model doesn't work very well, either. In both cases, people don't believe in society partly because they no longer have any reason to fear it.

The conformism of Sweden is something almost every visitor notices and complains about. But many foreigners suppose that it is imposed from above, on a duped or unwilling population. I don't think that was ever true. The way it really worked was written in gothic script outside the German church in the old town of Stockholm: "Fürchtet Gott! Ehret den König!" – "Fear God and honour the king!"

Of course, very few people fear God in Sweden today. At some stage in the 20th century, God was replaced by the future. The future, which everyone was confident could be trusted, appeared to have the attributes of God, an inscrutable wisdom that could nonetheless be trusted, and was, in any case, authoritative. In the end, the future could talk to you with the crushing authority of God talking to Job.

Social control worked because everyone – including the governors – was seen to submit to the same authority. The Social Democrats established that this didn't have to be God. The future would do just as well, if everyone believed in it. This submission to a common authority was what Swedes generally meant by "democracy". It wasn't an ideal of a system of voting, and it wasn't even a commitment to a tyranny of the majority, though it could feel like that. It was a commitment to the belief that no one is above the law, and no one can escape the future, which blurred on one side into the traditional, vicious egalitarianism of small communities, and on the other side into a confidence that the future must be more democratic.

Social democracy spent decades smashing up the old authority structures, among them God and the traditional family, in order to take over their authority. From the 1980s onwards the neoliberals spent decades smashing up Social Democratic beliefs. And at the end of this process, the future has let both sides down. The idea of society as a place of mutual service has disappeared or at least attenuated to an ideal.

Both the socialist and the anti-socialist ideals have been traded in for individual fulfilment through magically enlightened self-interest. The Carema scandal shows where that leaves people when they are useless: lying in a bed full of their own shit, waiting until it's profitable to the shareholders for someone to come and clean them up. The trouble is that it's much easier to destroy structures of mutual obligation than it is to build them up again. This isn't a uniquely Swedish problem.