This year, the 5Cs podcast went down a few dark alleys and I promised I’d find someone who could help us work through what we’re feeling. I found a fabulous clinical psychologist who does exactly that. And before she comes on, I need to set the stage so to speak this week.
I want to make a distinction for you to ponder. Because, if you are like me, it will change how you view the many dumpster fires we see burning out of control in our world right now.
Moral injustice versus moral injury. The former is what happens to you. The latter is what it does to you.
The injustice part is the event. Think of it as the moment you discover that the institution you trusted, the values you were told the organisation held, the rules of the game you built your whole career around were NOT what they claimed to be.
We can all point fingers to businesses, governments, banks, stores, suppliers, customers, friends, spouses, neighbours, can’t we? The day we realised something we trusted was actually a lie, we did a double take. That was the injustice part we felt.
The injury is what that discovery leaves behind. The fracture in our ability to trust our own judgement. The exhaustion we can’t quite explain. The self-doubt that shows up in rooms where we have every right to be certain. The anxiety, the burnout, the frustration, the anger, the rage and every one of those other negative emotions that flood our system
Like many, I spent decades inside corporate structures. Chemicals, plastics, lubricants. Industries built on extraction, in every sense of the word. I was good at it. I was trained to be good at it by very smart people, trained by the generation before them.
Five years ago, I started asking different questions. And after hundreds of conversations with scientists, policymakers, sustainability practitioners, and executives going through their own slow awakenings what I found is a bit surprising.
Most of us don’t have a knowledge problem. We know enough. As a matter of fact, we’ve known enough for a while. We’ve turned our backs on it, or maybe a blind eye. But we’ve known, deep down. Something is very wrong.
What we have is a wound we haven’t named yet.
After the Vietnam War, psychiatrist Jonathan Shay started working with veterans who came home carrying something that didn’t fit the existing diagnosis of PTSD. It wasn’t just the combat. It was the betrayal. They had been told they were going to do something honourable. They arrived to find something else entirely.
Shay’s research, and the work that followed it, showed something striking. The severity of the moral injury was often the most accurate predictor of how badly veterans struggled afterward. Worse, that moral injury was more devastating than PTSD.
Not combat exposure. Not physical wounds. The wound to one’s sense of right and wrong cuts deeper than almost anything else. That wound is moral injury and it starts with moral injustice.
I am not comparing boardrooms to battlefields. What I’m saying is that the mechanism is the same. When you discover that the institutions you built your career around were designed to serve a very specific set of interests, and yours wasn’t one of them, something takes a hit. When the governments you trust to provide the services you need decide to cut back without letting you know, something takes a hit.
When a relationship of any kind takes a turn for the worst (and it doesn’t matter what your worst means, it came as a shock,) something always take a hit. And that hit shows up as exhaustion. As cynicism. As working hard and moving slowly and not being able to figure out why. As the voice at 2am that says: what if I’m wrong again?
For business, government and institutional leaders, moral injustice tends to arrive in a few recognisable shapes. The organisation that claimed to hold values it never actually held. The pressure to stay quiet about something that didn’t sit right. The thing you did or didn’t do that you can’t quite put down. Watching something happen that you couldn’t stop. And the slow cracking of the assumptions the whole thing was built on. Y’know, that good work gets rewarded, that institutions act in good faith, and that if you do the right thing, it matters.
None of this is weakness. It’s a human response to ethical rupture. And right now, we are seeing ethical ruptures all around us aren’t we? And collectively, most of us wake up every day with hearts pounding a bit harder, the pit in our stomach a bit deeper, the ache in our heads or bones a bit stronger.
That’s why, to close out season four this year, my podcast is going somewhere I haven’t taken it before. A four-part series with a clinical psychologist who works specifically at the intersection of psychology and the climate crisis and the daily world events we can barely keep up with, let alone make sense of. Together, we are exploring what moral injustice does to us and what moral injury looks like for humanity. And what moving forward actually requires.
It starts where most honest conversations have to start. By giving the thing the right name. Moral injustice. Please join us.