>>84283955That has nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with the village community dynamics of envy.
This is a kind of behavior that stems from a very flat social hierarchy on the local level.
Similar behavior has been seen in rural China where people routinely hid their wealth when they did well in order to prevent retaliation against their fortune.
Around the turn of the 20th century it was not uncommon to see children undressed and wallowing in dirt one day, and the family moving to an upwards-mobile city neighborhood the next day.
This is pretty much the opposite of what you get in heavily stratified communities, such as pre-industrial Germany, where laws regulated what you had to wear to signify your precise status and function in society. This can lead to a mentality of fierce competition over status and representation, so long as there are ways in which to accumulate such resources.
One such result has been an arms race of fashion, in which the regulations on what you had to wear were pushed in any possible manner. The direct outcome of this has been a multitude of village-specific looks that were exaggerated to extremes of ornament right to the brink of impracticability.
Interestingly enough, these cultural differences have been carried right into the present day with Germany being far more defined by status and authority than Scandinavia. The mere composure and dress of a person heavily modifies the way in which they will be addressed, and uniforms by themselves provide far more authority in German culture.
For example, you can be punished for defamation under German law for not using the formal mode of speech when talking to a police officer. The fact that you are talking to an officer of the law as though they were your equal, or lesser, is questioning their authority in a way deemed criminal.
Such a mode of speech does not even exist in the Swedish language.
/rant
