The phenomenon of class is expressed in subtle ways. I have an acquaintance who comes from the educated bourgeoisie, having grown up with humanist values of a liberal nature. Class makes him uncomfortable because he finds structural unfairness morally offensive. This doesn’t prevent him from having a Filipino cleaning woman that he pays under the table and gives the family’s cast-off designer clothing to without seeing anything derogatory in the gesture. He makes an odd point of saying that the cleaning woman doesn’t understand what fine, expensive clothing she’s been given. This acquaintance criticises me for not being “nice enough to service employees.” I think he pampers service employees.

For me, being a service employee is a normal occupation. That’s what people around me were when I was growing up and what was expected of them after school. But because my acquaintance clearly looks down on service employees, he has to be really nice to them to show that he doesn’t look down on them. From this, there also follows a vigilance about other people’s behaviour toward service employees. It becomes a litmus test of being a good person – but only for someone who doesn’t notice that it’s actually a sign of class condescension.

My father, who was the son of a maid, a woman who spent her entire life serving others, used to go up to service employees and complain when something was wrong. As a child, I was ashamed and wanted to spare them, but he explained that they represented the establishment to the outside world so they had to hear complaints, in order to pass them on to whoever was in charge. It would never have occurred to him that they were under him in rank and that he therefore needed to treat them carefully and with extra kindness.

My acquaintance is also dismayed when I say that I think it’s nice to be in places where people wear well-cut clothes, are freshly scrubbed and smell good. If I didn’t know you, he says, I would think you were the “worst upper-class snob.” Once again, he mixes up the concepts. Saying that a class society and the expressions it takes exist is not the same thing as accepting it. Thinking that a jacket that costs 5,000 kronor is better looking than one that costs 129 kronor is not saying that someone who has a 5,000 kronor jacket is better than a person with a 129 kronor jacket. It’s not even thinking that those people deserve their jackets. It’s simply noting that capital – cultural, social, economic – provides opportunities for a more beautiful and impeccable quality of life.

But my acquaintance doesn’t believe that people should mention that they see a difference on the outside. If everyone is supposed to have the same opportunities to improve their lives, an ethically-minded liberal person winds up in a dilemma when the outcomes are so different. Because if you admit what class is and what it does to people, the next step is to realise that social changes are needed if you can continue to be ethical. Perhaps people need to give up their privileges, which is disturbing.

Saying that rich people have clothes that are more beautiful than poor people’s is just as undramatic as saying that well-read people know more about books than people who never read. Elegance requires a certain eye that may be innate, but it doesn’t follow class boundaries. Some have it and others don’t, but it must nonetheless be acquired and nurtured. People can only keep their elegance up if they know they will continue to live well and in luxury; otherwise they are too worried about their finances to be able to maintain it. Anyone born into the lower social layers is always worried about their finances and about ending up in the gutter; it’s innate. But then my acquaintance, who doesn’t understand the mental mechanisms of belonging to the lower layers and seeing society from below, says, “But everyone can afford two nice shirts. You can buy two nice shirts and wash them a lot.” By saying that, he wants to deny that it’s a matter of money, because unfairness in the unequal distribution of wealth makes him feel guilty. It’s better to have it be a question of a person’s innate propensity for good taste, which cannot be remedied through political decisions.

It doesn’t work that way, I reply. Class is constituted by people’s perception of themselves, much more than by sociological categories like occupation, income or type of housing. People who come from a world of limited means simply don’t imagine that those nice shirts are for their bodies. They don’t go into the shops where they’re sold, and if they do go in, they feel like a fish out of water as soon as they see a sales clerk. They head off to the down-market department store, where they feel at home and find shirts that confirm their identity. The same thing is true in other areas. That’s why the class society regulates itself. People know their place and stay there. A large part of the basis of class consists in feeling that it’s not for me to take a place in that society.

Class resides in a person’s soul, in their psyche. It constitutes a mental horizon. It’s conveyed to them through their environment and it’s their duty to expand this horizon, but they need help with that. Possessing inner wealth, an education, an ability to understand the world and themselves is deeply enriching, regardless of the kind of job a person has. That’s what the early labour movement and advocates of the comprehensive school understood, which had an enormous impact on the self-perception and social mobility of the Swedish working class in the 20th century. One of the greatest achievements of Social Democracy in the last century is that it gave an opportunity to so many people to move up the class ladder not just externally but internally – intellectually and existentially. But this move up the social ladder requires a lot of effort.

People who do so leave their parents and their history behind, and there is pain and existential loneliness in such a move. They make attempts to conceal the traces of this class move, to avoid embarrassment and feelings of inferiority. People who adopt an American attitude and think that a class society is a free and democratic society where everyone in theory has the same opportunities reflect a just distribution based on intellectual potential and talent, ignoring the fact that class lies in the psyche, interwoven with a thousand sturdy threads. A person of average talent from the upper class wriggles her way in and out of law school despite little aptitude for the job. It takes a little while longer, but she finishes. She then does well in life, lives well, has a rewarding social life. For a person of average talent from the lower levels, it would never cross her mind to go to law school. She’s never met anyone who’s a lawyer and doesn’t know anyone who’s gone to university. The university is a frightening place that’s for other people. She’s not encouraged to apply but is in fact discouraged by the obvious argument, explicit or implicit, that it’s difficult. These inaccessible mental threads affect a person her entire life so that almost no political measure aimed at levelling the classes can be too large, as long as it doesn’t infringe too much on a person’s freedom.

When I was young, I devoted all my ambition to sport. When it came to a career and education, I had no goals or intentions, couldn’t discern the way up or forward, but with sport everything was clear and discernible as early as the age of ten. I saw the way and the goal and knew how to get there, and that I could do it, because it didn’t depend on anyone else or on any obscure structure. Sport is less complicated than society and the working world. People move faster or slower, jump higher or lower – the results are irrefutable and no one is discriminated against arbitrarily; the position people have is equal to their capacity.

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My father devoted a large part of his life to sport. He saw it as the only way to make the most of his talents and do something with his life. He saw no other path in society, but he knew and understood sport. And everyone admired great athletes, even kings and presidents. He wanted for me and my brother to, if not to get ahead, at least not be prevented from getting ahead if we had the right gifts. We should get a chance to make an effort and develop, train hard and compete a lot. My father gave me rides, watched me, took the time, planned, cheered and encouraged. He put all of his free time and money into it. Sport was our life, and there was never any doubt what the goal was. It wasn’t to win the local championship but the Swedish championship, and later not the Swedish championship but the world championship and the Olympics. I was supposed to be the best in the world. Nothing else was of interest; tenth place didn’t interest me. The fact that I could aim high was because I understood how to do it and didn’t think I had less access to first place than anyone else.

I didn’t waste time by being unaware of the opportunities and how I should behave. A person can’t get anywhere that they don’t know exists, to a place they don’t think is for them. That’s also the relationship that classes have to the social order. The middle class never thinks, no matter what happens, that they will become postmen, rubbish collectors, carpenters, welfare recipients or hospital orderlies. The working class thinks that it’s other people who become writers, doctors, lawyers, diplomats and professors.

But it wasn’t other people who became world champions. That world was clear and understandable. The only scissors that can slice through the tightly woven threads of class are education and improvement. This constitutes liberation, regardless of whether people then make their living that way. It was by taking part in other people’s knowledge in the form of texts, ideas and images that I managed to shatter my mental framework and begin to understand that I had access to the world’s collective mental activity. During my entire childhood my grandmother said “I just don’t understand;” in the end I thought, that can’t be the point, that people shouldn’t understand – nothing should be unknown to me. But it isn’t enough for a person to get away from how they are defined by using their own power. What’s needed are good, functioning social institutions that don’t restrain and restrict but instead work as a bridge between the family and the individual a person could be.