I have nothing to do with all this. Or do I? Doesn’t it feel kind of numb, looking around us, seeing chaos and thinking that it was not us who caused it? There are a bunch of morally corrupt people who are causing chaos, but not us.

You see, we are all innocent bystanders, hooked on the next update on media’s front page. Isn’t it strange that, for us, these bunch of morally corrupt people may be the ones who caused the situation, or the ones who are demonstrating on the street, depending on our political lens?

As we look at all that’s happening around us on this tiny rock, some of us take the holier than the Pope approach and say, “I would never do that”.

Others may be saying “this is running so deep and is so widespread that I may have a finger in the pie too. Better keep quiet”, while others are saying that “nothing is happening here at all”.

As a country, we are trying to rationalise what is happening, we are trying to understand and perhaps normalise the situation, because that is what we are wired to do. We are wired to either change the way we operate or find an excuse that what is happening is all normal (for the bookworms out there, I am talking about Leon Festinger’s’ cognitive dissonance theory). Finding an excuse is so much easier than changing! Isn’t it?

Here, I am neither talking politics nor religion. I am talking ethics. I am saying ‘this can happen to anyone’.

When we mute our conscience by saying irrational things like ‘the others did worse’ or ‘it’s the media’s fault’, we are doing nothing but deviating from having serious ethical discussions. We are deliberately excluding ‘us’ (personally, our circle of family and friends, our business, our political party…) from the equation, in order to hang on tight to the blissful illusion that ‘we have nothing to do with this’.

We need to start employing our ethical filter more.

We need to understand that our decisions as citizens, as employees, as businesses, as politicians have ripple effects. We need to understand that making a lot of money without giving weight to the effect on other people, on our environment and on our country cannot be justified, no matter how much money we make.

We are all in it and we all have our finger in the pie

‘Malta is the centre of the universe’. That’s how we tend to think and act. Yet, this island, which is a truly precious gem but also just a dot in the middle of the Mediterranean, is becoming too unsustainable for all of us, no matter our political stand.

We have serious environmental, health and ethical issues and yet we keep our minds engaged on blaming the other, because it is the easy position.

I urge everyone to understand that this is not ‘business as usual’, to understand that we all make mistakes, but we all have the power to make Malta a better place.

Let us focus on getting our priorities right. If we do not have enough imagination on what our priorities should be, I urge everyone to have a look at United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Because we cannot relax, sit on a couch and blame the others for everything that’s happening.

We are all in it and we all have our finger in the pie. This is not The Wizard of Oz movie, where we can click our heels together and say, “There’s No Place Like Home” and just like that we vanish to our comfort zone. Because if we really want Malta to be a better place, right now it should feel nothing like our comfort zone, but it is home.

Corinne Fenech is the lead consultant and trainer at TinkTings.com, and a PhD researcher in ethical decision making in business at the University of Glasgow.