Does Standard Bank care about a liveable planet or a free press? Its thuggish handling of a journalist and climate activists during protests at its Johannesburg office this week, and its ongoing support of new fossil fuel development, suggests not.

When activists, writers and thinkers point out society's ills and call out those complicit in upholding them -- these are never convenient truths to hear -- there is always blowback. One playbook strategy is to shame these uppity types by showing their complicity in the system they're trying to tear down.

Abolitionists in the United States were dismissed as hypocrites because they wore clothes made from cotton that had been picked by slaves. School climate protesters today are scorned because they drive to demonstrations in petrol-driven cars. I bank with Standard Bank, even though I know it's considering financing an East African oil pipeline that's going to keep syphoning fossil fuels out of the ground, even though scientists say that's where they must stay if we're to slow the escalating violence of climate collapse.

Our complicity -- we're all complicit -- isn't a sign of our moral failing. It's the result of a system in which we have little choice but to be part of until we've got the alternatives we're demanding.

Slaves had to be freed and the cotton fields tended by wage-earning labour before the garment industry could take a step towards ethical clothing (it's still not...