I know we are meant to gad about projecting sunbeams and streaming positivity from every orifice, but quite frankly, I don’t feel like it. That’s the sort of thing you do when you are in a serious state of denial, or just plain delusional – or when you’ve popped one too many happy pills and are floating pleasantly on Cloud Nine where everything is pink and muffled. With sensible people who’ve got their head screwed on right, it’s more a case of hoping for the best but expecting the worst.

It’s easy to blame the government for the way things are heading, but the government is not the cause. It is the symptom. It is we who are the cause of what is happening. We are the government’s enablers, and the government is a manifestation of ourselves and of our wishes. I say ‘we’ in terms of the dominant view and the predominant social culture and attitudes, but even those who don’t share these views, culture and attitudes are to blame. It’s pointless objecting or feeling upset if you don’t actually do something about it. If you stand by and watch, and only whisper your anger and dismay because you are afraid of vengeful retribution, then you are part of the problem and equally to blame when the slide down to corruption, abuse and frighteningly low standards continues.

Do you remember how we ended up in 1986? Lots of you do. Not all my readers are a generation my junior, so the rest will know what I’m talking about here – yes, even those who, despite acknowledging what a hell-hole Malta had become, continued to vote Labour all the same (hoping for what – a miracle?) and thereby validating that hell and that corruption. My point here is that we didn’t end up that way overnight. There were some key decisions which make rampant and wholesale abuse and corruption possible, but on the 16-year-long road to complete economic disaster, murder and terrifying corruption, the real changes were incremental. Bits of normal life were chopped off day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until one day we woke up and realised we were living in Enver Hoxha’s Albania and asked ourselves “My God, how did this happen?”

Getting people accustomed to abnormality is done in exactly the same way, though on a different scale, by all kinds of abusers, captors and authoritarian figures, from those who groom children for sex, to men who ill-treat their wives, to abusive bosses, to petty despots. Every day brings a little bit more abuse until the incremental changes turn what was previously abnormal into the new normality, and the victims accept it however much discomfort and unhappiness they might feel. They even begin to feel that they might be the ones who are in the wrong, and that they are over-reacting or being unduly fussy, because they are angry and upset. The message they are receiving, constantly, is that they should be grateful, they are lucky to be ill-treated and insulted, they should be radiating those sunbeams of happiness and positivity.

These incremental changes are allowed to happen, to mount up, because too many people do not notice or understand their significance. Devoid of analytical skills, they accept each new piece of information in a vacuum, cut off from its context. And not only are they afraid of voicing their criticism because of retribution, but now they are even worried of feeling critical in the first place, in the privacy of their own heads. Everybody who criticises what is happening is torn down by the army of Happy Pills Poppers as “negative”. Everybody else is floating around like Happy Pills Poppers, smiling for the money, smiling even harder for the contracts.

And one day soon we will wake up and find out that normal has gone, and the new normal is here to stay. The new normal becomes so normal that people will even vote for it again, convinced that a corrupt hell is actually a money-making heaven.

This piece crystallised in my mind as I watched Sandro Chetcuti, president of the Malta Developers Association, making his presence felt in a Valletta coffee shop today, blaspheming into his phone and shouting down the bar for his coffee. And I suddenly realised just how bad Maltese society is, how perverted and twisted, how accepting of everything just to survive. The leader of Malta’s most powerful lobby – building contractors – is given a one-month jail term for assaulting a union leader in his office, and everything just carries on as ‘normal’. Television show hosts invite him on air to discuss his views, members of the government are delighted to be seen with him in public and have countless meetings with him in private, at least one magistrate goes to parties with him and invites him to hers, people with their eye on the main chance suck up to him socially hoping he can get them networked into the government for contracts, consultancies and leads for business.

And what is the message we are giving people here? That it is perfectly all right for the leader of an industry lobby to assault a union leader and be sentenced to a month in prison for doing so – because everything will just carry on as before. Have you even bothered to stop and reflect on just how freakish this is, how unacceptable it would be anywhere else in the civilised world? How corrupt and unprincipled the Maltese look to those standing on the outside and looking in? But it was ever thus – for decades this island’s main export was all kinds of criminals, smugglers, slavers and prostitution racketeers.

Now it looks like the sort of Maltese men who would have gone into white slavery in London in the 1950s are now going into politics and ‘business’ in Malta instead. The future looks bright only if you’ve popped too many of Joseph’s Happy Pills.

www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com