#inb4: I'm saying this as someone who earns below median salary where I live

[iamthetruenhaz]

In my country there's this attitude of "can't get rich if you don't do something shady". Especially in the last 30 years when we had a rampant mafia/state corruption combo. For real, if I hear ads of some business that I remember hearing as a kid (so the 90s/00s), I immediately assume they buddied up with someone in the state-mafia conglomerate in order to make it big and stay big, and that often (not always but often) gets proven right. Large businesses here don't survive otherwise.

Back during soc (for the non-Eastern Europeans, those were the years of the communist regime, so 1944-1989) that was actually the official doctrine - anyone slightly more rich than dirt poor is filthy bouwoeuergoieoriesie and must be sent to a death camp or just straight into a mass grave. A person owning a mom and pop shop or even a poor peasant owning one cow could be a rich person for the regime to eat, especially if they wanted an excuse to remove that person. Hell, every CV started out with "I was born in a poor working class family" if you wanted to get hired anywhere. And if someone found out you had "people affected by the People's Government's initiatives" (i. e. your father's mom and pop shop was confiscated at gunpoint and declared property of the state), you would get yeeted out of your job, pronto.

Of course, it was blatant hypocrisy - anyone with a standard of living close to western instead of a tiny, cramped concrete box, was at the very least a party member or worse, an undercover intelligence agent of our local KGB clone. Or if you made it a habit to steal on the job. There was no legal way to not be poor.

It goes further back - "chorbaji" is shorthand for any person during Ottoman times who was not dirt poor - say, a merchant who at most had the means to send his kids to study abroad. It's absolutely loaded with connotations of "evil tycoon", no matter that many of those evil tycoons funded the liberation movement that slandered them. It's just that the "even slightly richer than me = evil" stereotype has always been there.

After the "fall" of soc, the very first people to get "western" standard of living (being able o afford going abroad, sending their kids to western universities, having a nice apartment, western goods and yes, a dishwasher, especially before the 00s) were looked at with suspicion - they must have played dirty, either with the former commies or with the newly hatched mafia. (Doesn't help that it was at least part true - the party regime did soften its own fall by making a bunch of people rich and giving them state-owned assets as their own so they would stay in their circles.) But the sentiment is so prevalent that these days, especially when there are actual ways to make a decent living without playing dirty - it has become a harmful stereotype.

I don't think you guys realize but as a latinoamerican I have never met a person with a dishwasher who wasn't rich so every time you talk about the dishwasher I'm like holy shit my mutual is fucking loaded