False morality…

By Ylli Manjani

There is a kind of public morality that has become fashionable in Albania. Finger morality. It always points at someone else’s house, but never talks about its own yard.

Look at the Census statistics and compare them with official data on constructions with and without permits, and a paradox emerges that deserves serious discussion: a very large share of Albanian families own more than one home. On average, about two homes per family. There are families with one, families with three or four, but the overall picture is this.

It is not hard to believe. Just travel through Albania. Informal zones are filled with multi-storey constructions. Many of those who built there did not abandon their village or town house when they left. They simply added a second one. Then came the wave of constructions, apartments sold wholesale, until the market was saturated.

And here the question arises.

How is it possible that we have so many families with two homes and, at the same time, thousands of social assistance beneficiaries?

Can you be officially considered poor while owning two houses, one of them even two or three storeys? By what standard is it justified that taxpayers’ money funds social assistance for someone who owns such wealth?

These are not cynical questions. They are questions of social justice.

Because when the state fails to distinguish poverty from wealth, it does not produce solidarity. It produces farce.

And the farce becomes even heavier when false morality enters the scene.

“The poor” with two houses each begin playing the role of moral prosecutor. They ask others: “Why do you have two houses?”, “Why do you have a villa?”, “Where did you get the money for the villa?”

Legitimate questions. But they apply to everyone.

Then another, equally legitimate question arises: And you, what did you build your two houses with? What did you raise your multi-storey villa with while you are registered as a social assistance beneficiary?

Don’t tell me you bought a house with a salary you haven’t received for months because the media owner has no money to pay you! I cannot accept the logic that you opened a portal and got rich from the filth you write there, or even from the truths or half-truths with which you strike at the world.

Don’t tell me your wealth as a non-government politician is somehow more righteous than that of the other guy, who under the same conditions as you has a villa or a more modest house.

Please no!

If you demand transparency about someone else’s wealth, transparency starts with your own wealth.

This standard must apply to everyone. To the politician, the businessman, the journalist, the public commentator and the ordinary citizen. No one gains moral immunity simply because they shout the loudest.

You cannot build an ethics where someone’s villa is proof of corruption, while your villa is a “social case”. There cannot be two moral codes, one for those we point our finger at and another for those who keep their finger raised.

The people have said it much more simply: When you eat someone else’s chicken, tie yours in the stable.

Either the rule applies to everyone, or it applies to no one.

If owning a villa is reason to demand explanations, then explanations must be given by anyone who owns a villa. If it is not reason, then let the hypocrisy that uses property only as a weapon against the opponent cease.

Morality is not measured by the volume of the accusation, but by the equality of the standard.

Undoubtedly, the morality of laws and of politics that stems from this social falseness is also wrong. Because the same questions apply to the prosecutor or judge who decides based on this false collective morality.

The falseness that comes from collective informality cannot deliver justice. Falseness only produces foam against the targeted victim and revenge from the foam of collective slobber.

A society where one part figures as poor on paper, lives in villas in reality and simultaneously lectures others on morality, is not simply unjust. It is a society that has begun to confuse solidarity with privilege and hypocrisy with virtue.

This is, perhaps, the most disgusting falseness of all.