The expression “I’m alright Jack!” encapsulates an aspect of the basis of our country’s moral and ethical malaise. Neoliberal capitalism – with all its obnoxious greed – has succeeded to uproot our moral conscience. We have reached the point strongly denounced by Pope Francis as the “globalisation of indifference”.
Unwittingly or not, several seem bent to prove that Karl Marx was right when he wrote that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness”. Isn’t the contemporary neoliberal capitalist social structure – our social being – strongly conditioning both the consciousness and the conscience of many of us? Hasn’t this brought about our amoral attitude? Our morality has become just another superstructure produced by the unbridled capitalist structure we are living in. Political correctness has thrashed our moral correctness.
This capitalism, which has won our country’s soul, is being banded around 24/7 by all means of communication, ranging from broadcasts to podcasts, and Twitter to TikTok; but most of all by the supremacy of money. Money talks! Mammon controls our media. In 1864, the US Congress allowed the phrase ‘In God We Trust’ to appear on US currency. But its materialist version, which is the ‘religion’ of many believers, has inverted this maxim to “in money we trust”, or as the Maltese saying goes “l-ewwel il-pappa, mbagħad l-umpappa”.
During my student days “at Tal-Qroqq”, there were those who prided themselves carrying Marx’s books under their arms, ranging from Capital and Grundrisse, to other leftist literature. This identified them as “intellectuals” and leftist philosophers. Then they started prophesying socialism and the joining the Maltese Communist Party.
Then, as if struck by lightning on the road to Damascus, they were converted to the self-benefits of the capitalist temples in the land: banks, corporations and big business. Could we be more cynical? Perhaps what they kept from their socialist/communist years is their fall from Christian faith and morals.
Christians are called to change this false egoistic yardstick. Pope Paul VI said “for the Church, the first means of evangelisation is the witness of an authentically Christian life, given over to God in a communion that nothing should destroy and at the same time given to one’s neighbour with limitless zeal... modern man listens more to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” (Paul VI, October 2, 1974). There can be virtual teachers but not virtual witnesses!
Christians are called to change this false egoistic yardstick
It saddens the faithful that even the Church is passing through a moral shock. Paul VI indicated to us the real light to conversion: “It is therefore primarily by her conduct and by her life that the Church will evangelise the world, in other words, by her living witness of fidelity to the Lord Jesus – the witness of poverty and detachment, of freedom in the face of the powers of this world, in short, the witness of sanctity”. (Evangelii Nuntiandi, 41).
It is this “I’m alright Jack!” philosophy that has turned many of us into grumblers rather than into men/women of action.