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  The Swede’s explicit faith in their version of rationality has become wedded to an implicit faith in their regulatory structures. Ever since the reign of Gustav Vasa in the sixteenth century, Swedes have had a strong centralized government; and since the regime of Gustavus Adolphus and his chancellor and administrative genius, Axel Oxenstierna, in the seventeenth, they have tended to regard bureaucracy as reason and, therefore, justice incarnate. The country’s present-day bureaucracy is still viewed as a more supreme embodiment of justice than the mortals who govern and are governed. As Michael Maccoby observes in The Leader, ”Today Swedes distrust leaders and have rejected the old patriarchal model, but the rules have become the rulers; technique is authority.”⁴ Rules are also more concurrence with the Swede’s distrust of human passions. A rule cannot in itself be capricious, greedy, or evil, and is therefore to be preferred to the unpredictable human factory. A rule is closest to the ideal of pure reason; man’s function is to carry it out to the letter
  In the not too distant past, Sweden was primarily a nation of farmers. In contrast to the Danish peasantry, however, Swedish farmers were ”free” and not the subjects of feudal lords. They had a good deal of say in the estate riksdag and did not have to assume the adversary position toward governmental powers that the Dances and the farmers of the Continent did. The Swedes were inclined to believe that the government, its legislative decrees, and its functionary extensions generally acted in the best interests of the people. This legacy has carried over into modern times. Swedish speech habits tend to make little or no distinction between ”the state” and ”society,” a blurring that was evident in Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson’s 1929 vision of the ”People’s Home,” and that persist in the notion that societal reforms are essentially reforms enacted by the state.
  Compliance with laws and regulations may be viewed not so much as an act of obedience as an act of self-interest, but one that is also in the interest of all concerned. There are, of course, those who attempt to manipulate the system to obtain extra subsidies or cheat on their income tax, for example but the majority of Swedes comply with their system. In 1983 close to 80 percent of a sample of Swedes interviewed by the Swedish Institute for Opinion Research said that they considered reporting too low an income tax statements as constituting a rather serious or very serious crime.

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