Someone is being paid for the right to claim ownership over a territory, a population, a future - without producing anything that might be called a human good. What service, precisely, does this payment purchase for the society that provides it? Not production, not security, not education, not health - only the perpetuation of a claim, backed by force and inherited privilege, that demands fealty in exchange for nothing but the continuation of its own existence.

The visit between Lukashenko and Kim Jong Un is not merely a diplomatic gesture; it is the visible surface of a deeper arrangement: the consolidation of acquisitive sovereignty. Each leader presides over a regime in which political authority has become indistinguishable from personal possession - where the state is not an instrument of common purpose but a vehicle for the preservation of a particular order, insulated from accountability by geography, secrecy, and mutual defiance. This is not governance; it is rentier politics, in which the rulers extract loyalty not through performance but through the threat of withdrawal - of food, of safety, of identity itself.

The Functionless Wealth Test, applied to political power, asks: what does this authority do? When a ruler’s legitimacy rests not on the quality of life he secures for his people, nor on their active consent, but on the claim that “it has always been thus” - then the authority has become parasitic. Its wealth is not the product of function but of monopoly: monopoly over movement, over speech, over the very possibility of alternative futures. The wealth here is not financial alone - it is the wealth of unchallenged control, the accumulation of power without corresponding responsibility.

This arrangement is not new. It is the modern expression of a pattern long familiar: the transformation of public office into private estate, of citizenship into tenancy. What distinguishes today’s alignment is its mutuality. Lukashenko and Kim do not merely share an ideology; they share a structure - each finds in the other’s isolation a confirmation of his own. Their solidarity is not built on shared production but on shared exclusion: exclusion of criticism, of competition, of the possibility that other ways of organising human life might seem plausible.

What does this mean for equality? It means equality of condition has been abandoned not just in practice but in principle. In such regimes, the claim that all persons are of equal worth is not merely ignored - it is rendered unintelligible. When a child’s life is determined by the accident of birth into a closed system, where opportunity is not open but allocated by loyalty, then formal equality becomes a cruel fiction. The society does not pretend to value its people; it pretends they have nothing to value except the order that keeps them in place.

The civilisational cost is not merely regional instability. It is the erosion of the idea that economic and political life should be for human flourishing - not the reverse. When power becomes a form of unearned possession, and when wealth is measured not by what it enables but by what it blocks, then the whole edifice of democratic socialism - of a society organised around function, not acquisition - appears not as a programme but as a memory. And memories, left unattended, fade.