Why There's Not Enough For (Some of) You

It is no secret that the last decade saw a concerted effort by the Global Far Right and its Russian ringleaders to reverse the economic gains of communities of color and nations that are not part of the Global North.  This was the motivation for the ethno-nationalism fostered in many parts of Europe by far-Right politicians, as well as the motivation behind Russian attempts to pressure the European Union into restricting immigration into EU countries by barring nonwhite people.  If you want proof of this pressure, please read "The Writing Is On The Wall For The European Union" from the blog titled "Vineyard of the Saker."  The pretentious doofus who calls himself the "Saker" is a pro-Putin Russian transplant who lives in Florida, and it was this piece of his (and the picture which accompanies it) which in 2016 finally convinced me that the Russian government is run by some truly disordered people.

Two asides here.  First, since the Saker himself is an immigrant to the U.S., shouldn't we now treat him the same way he was wanting the U.S. to treat immigrants from certain select countries during the Presidency of Mr. Let's-Build-A-Wall?  Second, note that the "Vineyard of the Saker" is by no means the only pro-Putin sewage pipe dumping itself into the Internet.  There is also the "Unz Review" as well as many others.

Funny, the connection between the Russian government and white supremacy, isn't it?  And funny is the need which far-right groups and their leaders have to create both an in-group and an out-group - the creation of which is so typical of personality-disordered people.  A world in which people look different and have differing skin color/hair color/eye color/language of origin/place of birth provides an easy means to make this differentiation.  But I was thinking this past week of what life must be like in those places where, either through historical accident or design, everybody looks the same - especially those places where everyone is white.  How do the clique-creators behave in such settings?  The answer is bound up in the phrase, "the narcissism of small differences," and in the concept from calculus of the limit of the value of a function as the difference between the function's independent variable and a certain set value of that variable approaches zero.

The concept of race as applied to humans who look different from each other has been abundantly proven false, so hating people based on race is an example of a narcissism of a small difference.  But when everyone looks more or less the same, a personality-disordered person must look for even smaller differences on which to construct his in-group and his out-groups.  There have been a number of examples of this narcissism of smaller differences over the years, from the office cliques and cubicle politics that make so many workplaces hellish to the grander European narcissism of small differences that triggered World Wars 1 and 2.

And there is a much more significant example.  I am thinking just now of those European or Eastern European nations which have leaders who have been installed or helped to power by the government of Vladimir Putin.  A measure of the division within these societies is the level of wealth inequality within these societies.  This has been documented in the 2021 Global Wealth Report published by the Credit Suisse Research Institute.   On page 24 of that report we discover that the economic top 1 percent of the Russian population have owned around 60 percent of the total wealth of Russia over the last decade, and that Russia has a Gini coefficient of 87.8 percent at present.  Now a high Gini coefficient is like a high golf score - a sign that you're playing the game badly, especially if you're the leader of a country and the object of the game is to provide a healthy outcome for all your citizens.  

Looking at another Credit Suisse document, the Global Wealth Databook, provides another picture of the evolution of wealth inequality in European and Eastern European countries over the last ten years.  On page 115 of the Databook, we see the Gini index for the following countries in 2020:

• Armenia - 73.0
• Belarus - 66.7
• Bulgaria - 70.1
• Georgia - 81.3
• Hungary - 66.5
• Italy - 66.5
• Moldova - 69.4
• Poland - 70.7

I have listed these countries because of the association of their leaders with the Global Far Right and/or their association with Russia.  Note that although Poland is not ostensibly associated with Russia, the Polish government can be said to be aligned with the Global Far Right, according to some measures.  Concerning Italy, please also see "Inequalities in Italy" by the Inequalities Forum.  Note also that Italy has been turning increasingly fascist over the last five years.  (See also, "The Growing Concentration of Wealth In Italy: Evidence from A New Source of Data".)  A similar story can be told for Hungary, which means that Viktor Orban has not exactly turned that place into Paradise.  Similar stories can be told regarding the rest of the countries I have listed, but I'm running out of time tonight.  Concerning Orban again, note that high levels of inequality in a nation are almost always tied to corruption practiced by the ruling elites, as was pointed out in a lecture delivered by Margaret Heffernan to a class at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.  We had our own case of this with Donald John Trump.  Note also that like Trump, Orban has tried to dodge the issue of inequality in Hungary by scapegoating the few nonwhite people he can actually get his hands on, who in this case are the Roma (Gypsies) who live in Hungary.  One last note about the countries listed in the table above: their Gini indices are calculated based on the best available data.  But not all of these countries are open, honest, and transparent in the publishing of their economic data, as documented in the Inequality Transparency Index of the World Inequality Database.  So actual inequality may be worse than noted.

Britain, of course, is a long-standing historical example of the narcissism of ever-smaller differences, whose second-class citizens have at times included the Irish, the Welsh, the Scottish, the peoples of the de-industrialized North Britain, the Cockneys, the Scousers, etc, etc.  And note - these people all look like each other and like the royal "Cool Kids"!  Note also that many of the people who were meant to be excluded from Britain by the Brexit look almost identical to the native Britons.  Note lastly that the Brexit has led to massive shortages in Britain - just in time for the Christmas shopping season.  The joining of Britain to the orbit of the Global Far Right has been a natural fit.  And the Gini index of Britain has been climbing upward over the last decade.  Boris Johnson has not helped.

How are many members of the dominant cultures of the world responding to the sudden appearance of their own disenfranchisement?  How are they responding to the surprise announcement that, " Sure, everyone whom we feel to be deserving got some, but, er, well, there's not enough for you"?  I don't know how the answer to this looks in other countries, but during the Trump years I used to drive by a homeless encampment which had a little American flag flying over one of the tents.  What badge did the dwellers in that tent wear that got them excluded from the big party?

P.S. To learn more about the spread of inequality through Russian society in 2020 and 2021, check out "The Middle Class Went Into Self-Destruct Mode" ("Средний класс вошел в режим самоуничтожения") from the Ведомости website.  Oh, the horror of losing one's middle place in an unsympathetic pecking order...!