It's not an issue of maintaining a 'western European' standard of living - it's an issue of millions of people suffering because of lack of access to basic services, and a sky high crime rate that brutalises the population. The situation can be much better than it is without being comparable to western European standards.

According to worldbank data the murder rate in SA is around 10 times higher than in Egypt, and around 5 times as high as in Mongolia.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location...

If you like the correct framing is 'extreme suffering due to poverty', not 'high inequality'. The inequality is galling because there is a small percentage of people (myself included) who enjoy a good quality of life while millions of people live in poverty.

Purely in terms of 'inequality being bad', there are good reasons to believe that it undermines democracy (citation required I suppose).