boomers and old­er-mil­len­ni­als often love to call upon the ‘zuvaa­nun’ as if they’re some kind of hive-mind mono­lith that can be mobilised at will. this is stu­pid.

almost all of us active­ly online can be clas­si­fied into the cul­tur­al elites (includ­ing myself): not only are most of us malé cit­i­zens who have had broad­er access to resources and sys­tems of wealth, but many of us are also labour aris­to­crats and pet­ty bour­geoisies. if you’re active­ly online (or able to be active­ly online even if you choose not to), you are most like­ly in this cat­e­go­ry in the mal­dives.

i’m not talk­ing about resort own­ers, high-pro­file politi­cians, large-scale ren­tiers, birthright ‘bey­ful­hun’, etc. — that’s a whole dif­fer­ent class on its own.

many peo­ple have close prox­im­i­ties to politi­cians via rela­tion or friend­ship; are chil­dren or rel­a­tives of busi­ness own­ers, store own­ers, small-time politi­cians, media fig­ures, etc.; own places that they rent or have fam­i­ly mem­bers with rental income; work in pol­i­tics, law, and non-gov­ern­men­tal organ­i­sa­tions by the bless­ing of rel­a­tives and fam­i­ly mem­bers in the indus­try; and so on. hey, you can’t help it, huh? fate decides birth, and this city is just so small.

at least one of these things would apply to you if you’re read­ing this online via insta­gram, twit­ter, or what­ev­er else. if not, you are in a very small minor­i­ty.

this strat­i­fi­ca­tion is not some­thing I just arbi­trar­i­ly decid­ed, it was doc­u­ment­ed in the past by eliz­a­beth colton (1995) and xavier romero-frias (1999), and even recent­ly in 2022 by the world bank: our dynam­ics of income strat­i­fi­ca­tion a vast­ly dif­fer­ent com­pared to oth­er upper mid­dle-income cap­i­tal­ist economies. unless you were born, raised, edu­cat­ed, and employed in a non-malé city or, con­verse­ly, you are among the top 10% (high-lev­el, non-sme busi­ness­es, resorts, promi­nent polit­i­cal fam­i­lies, and so on), whether you are more or less priv­i­leged than me, we are in the same domes­tic eng­lish-speak­ing polit­i­cal class.

feel­ing uncom­fort­able already? is priv­i­lege clock­ing to you yet? let me help you pic­ture that. in mal­dives, by 2022 cen­sus data:

• nation­al 1% means 3,828 peo­ple. can you pic­ture 3,828 peo­ple in a sin­gle room? try it.

• nation­al 10% means 38,275 peo­ple. that’s 27% more than our entire civ­il ser­vice employ­ees in 2023, and almost 15% more than our State-owned enter­prise employ­ees.

now you tell me who’s who.

even among civ­il ser­vants, there is such high vari­ance in take home pay, where a good 15% Make a dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly large amount com­pared to the rest of the civ­il ser­vants.

fun, isn’t it?

accord­ing to the world bank study, non-malé cit­i­zens are (obvi­ous­ly) more impov­er­ished. accord­ing to 2022 cen­sus data, malé city’s pop­u­la­tion was 161,108 (the 2022 nation­al ten-per­cent is, by jux­ta­po­si­tion, 23.76% of malé city’s pop­u­la­tion). that means about 68% of the pop­u­la­tion are non-malé pop­u­la­tions. if you’re read­ing this, even if you were from anoth­er island, the chances are that you were born and raised in malé, and like­ly edu­cat­ed abroad in india, sri lan­ka, or malaysia at least once in your life. excep­tions will be rare.

but what about rel­a­tive pover­ty? again, look at that pover­ty and inequal­i­ty study in the mal­dives:

• in atolls, the num­ber of peo­ple below the nation­al rel­a­tive (not absolute) pover­ty line is ten times high­er than in malé (p.20–21) — 93% of the coun­try’s poor live in atolls.

• accord­ing to the world inequal­i­ty data­base, in 2022, the top 10% (38,275 peo­ple) held a whop­ping, mind-screw­ing 58% of our wealth, while the bot­tom 50% (191,376 peo­ple) shared only a measly 4.8% of that wealth. the top 1% (3,828 peo­ple) held 23.4% of our nation­al wealth. by deduc­tion, then, the top 40% (strat­i­fied by world bank into two dis­tinct groups) — 153,100 peo­ple — shared the remain­ing 37.2%. bear in mind that we rake in bil­lions of dol­lars every year in for­eign rev­enue.

• fur­ther, accord­ing to the world bank, the upper 10% (anoth­er 3,828 peo­ple) of the top 40% make a dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly high­er rate than those in the low­er tiers of that brack­et (see p.46).

• the mul­ti-dimen­sion­al pover­ty rate in atolls is 40.3% in atolls and only 9.6% in malé (p.36). more than half of our pop­u­la­tion, again, resides in the atolls. i want you to think about that. that is ridicu­lous.

• gen­er­al­ly, peo­ple employed in the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary sec­tor — and peo­ple that are self-employed in this sec­tor, i.e., like fish­ing or farm­ing, not run­ning busi­ness­es — are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly poor­er than those in the ter­tiary indus­try. most peo­ple in the atolls are self-employed in the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary sec­tor.

what does all this mean?

i’m not say­ing your strug­gles aren’t real, that you don’t suf­fer under cap­i­tal­ism, or that your suf­fer­ing is invalid if you don’t fall into the bot­tom 50% brack­et. what i’m try­ing to show you is that Mal­dives’ wealth dis­tri­b­u­tion dynam­ics is dif­fer­ent from oth­er upper-mid­dle income coun­tries.

this is a priv­i­lege check: if you live in malé (and aren’t crammed into a small house­hold); if you have famil­ial prox­im­i­ty to peo­ple in malé pol­i­tics and busi­ness­es (small or large); if you own your home (or have prop­er­ties you can rent out) in malé; if you were able to afford a ter­tiary edu­ca­tion with­out a loan; if you have a suc­cess­ful busi­ness (inher­it­ed or ground-up); if you work in career pol­i­tics espe­cial­ly with the aid of famil­ial ties to high-pro­file politi­cians — if any of these things apply to you — you are in the social elite of the mal­dives.

that espe­cial­ly applies if you have the time and resources to be con­stant­ly online.

Be care­ful what you wish for — you might get it

of course no one wants to hear this kind of thing. it’s so much eas­i­er to ignore your priv­i­leges, point at oth­ers (often with­in the same brack­ets as you) with slight­ly high­er priv­i­lege and scream hypocrisy, and see your­self as part of a black-and-white ‘good guys’ fight­ing the ‘bad guys’. it absolves you of the uncom­fort­able real­i­ty of see­ing past your strug­gles, no mat­ter how big, and peer­ing across class lines.

we look at the resort elites and we tend to think, “well, at least I’m not them” — but what about our own priv­i­leges? do we ever think about where we stand?

again, this is why i nev­er per­son­al­ly hide my priv­i­leges or shy away from con­ver­sa­tions of priv­i­lege. this is also why you will nev­er hear me wax lyri­cal­ly about how i’ve strug­gled to get to where i am (indeed i did work hard, but then again, all of you must have too, right?) or mas­quer­ade with a stu­pid rags-to-rich­es sto­ry, no mat­ter how organ­i­cal­ly and hon­est­ly my par­ents ran their busi­ness either. cap­i­tal­ism is still cap­i­tal­ism.

con­ver­sa­tions about priv­i­lege is hard. con­ver­sa­tions about pow­er is hard­er. it feels shame­ful, it feels uneasy, an it feels like a humil­i­a­tion rit­u­al. but if you ignore dis­cus­sions about priv­i­lege, if you try to frame your­self as ‘one of the poor peo­ple’ when you clear­ly aren’t in our con­text, if you can­not val­i­date your strug­gles with­out mask­ing your priv­i­leges, then you are mired in hypocrisy and moral cow­ardice.

but of course, that does­n’t real­ly stop any­one, does it?

espe­cial­ly when you’re cam­paign­ing for pol­i­tics, you need your par­ties to be relat­able. if you are a can­di­date, you espe­cial­ly would want to prove you’re just like the peo­ple you want to vote for you. equal­is­ing your priv­i­leges helps your con­science rest, does­n’t it? so, rather than con­fronting sys­tems of priv­i­lege head-on, most peo­ple in this wealth brack­et are too busy point­ing fin­gers and play­ing pover­ty cha­rades — espe­cial­ly online.

and don’t even get me start­ed on ‘com­mu­ni­ty’.

what com­mu­ni­ty? you all hate each oth­er. you can’t stand each oth­er. almost every friend group is vehe­ment­ly hos­tile and antag­o­nis­tic towards oth­ers. of course there are excep­tions to the rule like ser­i­al abusers and offend­ers who every friend group (even ones at odds with each oth­er) have an abuse or assault sto­ry of and has an iden­ti­fi­able pat­tern of bad behav­iour in their his­to­ry, but those peo­ple are an excep­tion­al minor­i­ty.

the pres­ence of the extremes does­n’t absolve you. most of you behave like you’ve nev­er grown a day out of sixth grade. you lie, spread rumours, dog­pile, bul­ly, and some­times even phys­i­cal­ly harm peo­ple just because you don’t like them or they dis­agree with you. a few of you excep­tion­al ones are run­ning out here seri­al­ly, open­ly, and proud­ly hurt­ing peo­ple. in your delu­sion­al minds, you and your friends/parties are ‘work­ing class’ and/or ‘good’, and every­one else is ‘bad’.

and while you’re busy play­ing these imma­ture games, the polit­i­cal 1% and their for­eign colo­nial allies are rob­bing you blind and strip­ping this coun­try naked. your inabil­i­ty to con­front sys­tems of priv­i­lege and pow­er — your apa­thy towards fight­ing for the work­ing class­es and non-aris­to­crat labour­ers below you — will lead to this nation’s undo­ing.

per­haps these divi­sions, too, are an engi­neered out­come of cap­i­tal­ism and the eco­nom­ic cen­tral­i­sa­tion we have in malé. too many god-damn peo­ple are crammed too close to each oth­er with no way to get away from the ones that hurt us or com­mu­ni­ties we don’t like.

the eco­nom­ic col­lapse is nigh. it’s almost here. and when it comes, des­tiny will give you what you wished for — true eco­nom­ic pover­ty and suf­fer­ing — and you’ll wish you’d nev­er did. but don’t wor­ry, those of us prepar­ing to help us all sur­vive such a strug­gle are doing so with even peo­ple like you in mind. we want to make sure all of us sur­vive, and that all of us live to see a future where pow­er games, cor­rup­tion, and wealth inequal­i­ty are a thing of the past.

why do i care about any of that? because if i want to live a qui­et life away from most of you nutjobs, i need to first con­tribute to mak­ing sure this whole place isn’t on fire any­more, that restora­tive-pre­ven­ta­tive jus­tice is final­ly estab­lished, and that we get to a soci­ety where i can actu­al­ly feel con­tent writ­ing fic­tion instead of this stu­pid $#!t lol