Mythmaking is a national and international pastime at the moment.
Mythmakers-in-chief abound, from Trump in the US to Johnson in the UK to Putin in Russia, to the vast array of conspiracy theorists who inhabit the landscape of COVID-19. In our own small ways, we are all mythmakers in one way or another involving family, relationships, community and, of course, country.
A great many of our myths do little or no harm but some can cause great pain and even life-long suffering for self and for others. Coming from Ireland, I am well-aware of the damage and suffering mythmaking can do – we have specialised in it for many decades if not centuries.
Myths are a ‘natural’ form of self-protection, a way of cocooning the self and helping us, for example, feel safe or virtuous, deserving or entitled. All too often though the myths we create involve others and our relationships with them. Myths routinely portray others more as sinners and ourselves more as sinned against.
The damage that myths can do is viciously apparent at present in the context of COVID-19; in the reprehensible behaviour of Trump on race; in the use of toxic nationalism in many countries and locally and regionally in debates around migration.
Myths play a central role in our sense of ourselves and our multiple identities; our role and place in the world and our responsibilities as well as culpabilities. They allow us to construct frameworks and interpretations that justify our attitudes and actions allowing us to ignore or even approve self-serving and damaging behaviour.
In recent weeks I have been once again intrigued at the prevalence of one dominant myth now deeply ingrained in the public consciousness and one which facilitates an entirely false and delusional view of the world.
It revolves around the mantra-like insistence that our overall relationship with the poorest and most marginalised peoples of the world is essentially benevolent and supportive. In the pages of this paper and elsewhere, this view represented in the insistence that we continue to 'give‘ millions, billions (and recently even trillions) while apparently taking little or nothing in return. We are ‘givers’, they are ‘takers’, so the myth goes.
This myth is one cornerstone of the stories that we tell ourselves about migration and much else.
The reality is, of course entirely different as has been detailed by Tony Daly and this author in a recent report on financial justice. According to data from the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD, for every US$1 that is transferred to the developing world, US$5 is transferred out.
In 2017, while official aid flows to poorer countries amounted to US$146 billion, total financial outflows amounted to US$770 billion.
In the five years from 2014 to 2018, net legal financial outflows (after deducting all inflows) from developing countries to developed countries amounted to a total of US$1,005 billion. This reflects the pattern of the past twenty years and before, one that is not predicted to change any time soon.
In addition to these legal transfers, officially estimated illegal financial transfers (notoriously difficult to measure) from developing countries for the period 2005 to 2014 amount to some US$3.5 trillion and if extended to 2017 could reach a staggering US$8.7 trillion. Some 45% of these funds are estimated as destined for international tax havens and the other 55% directly to developed countries.
The division between what is legal and illegal is becoming more opaque yearly and has become a major concern to regulators internationally. Malta and the Maltese are no strangers to this reality.
In 2015, in Africa alone more wealth was leaving the continent than was entering it - US$203 billion as against US$162 billion. This amounted to a net drain from Africa of some US$41billion, wealth that should be expended locally but is not.
And yet we persist with the delusional myth that we ‘give’, they ‘take’ because it suits the stories we tell ourselves.
The various outflows of wealth from those countries facilitated by the dominant economic, political and financial system undermines the well-being of the world’s poorest. Such transfers contribute to increasing poverty and inequality with obvious economic, political and environmental consequences including that of migration.
Most of us like to believe that this has nothing to do with us, that it is solely about big business and transnational corporations. Yet each time we choose the products or services of companies such as Amazon, Google, Citigroup, Facebook, Ikea, Vodafone or Walt Disney or any of another 350 transnational companies we become involved.
Sustaining the myth that we are not implicated in any way in the negative consequences of globalisation is delusional but most importantly of all it hurts entirely innocent people.