Feeling a personal obligation to the society and world one lives in is something that is at times difficult to do. We all have our own lives, after all, and few if any of us are saints. The tendency is too get distracted and fall into everyday patterns of behavior, worrying only about oneself, friends and loved ones and worrying about issues of personal interest or concern.

Nevertheless, we all live in an interconnected world in which our actions impact on those around us and vice-versa. None of our actions can be considered in isolation from the larger social milieu we inhabit, and it is in fact impossible to seal ourselves away from our neighbors, not even those on the other side of the world, so as to live in some happy, hermetic isolation.

The hackneyed English expression, "What goes around, comes around," may sound vapid and trite, but it does contain a kernel of truth: In the social sphere, one´s actions have a cumulative effect that usually do, in the end, rebound upon you.

Much has been written about the various crises in Russia over the past 10 years from all sorts of ideological directions, factoring in the influence of all kinds of sociopolitical elements: the structure of the Soviet nomenclatura, the ossification of central planning, the effects of pernicious Western economists, the hangover left behind by Soviet ideology and so forth. This is all well and good. But it should not be forgotten that one element of the wild every-man-for-himself period of the criminalization of the Russian polity was simple zealous egotism on the part of s section of the population that, at best, did not think about the consequences of their actions on the well-being of the country and, at worst, positively did not give a damn.

Amid a welter of learned studies tracing all kinds of "objective" factors, we should not forget that sometimes almost banal, common-sensical ethical observations really are, at bottom, correct.