Watching Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday reminded me of what Swiss philosopher and psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung thought: “Only 200 people really understand what the world is, and how it works.”

Plainly, none of them has made it into the House of Commons.

Reading about the cash-for-legislation gravy train in the House of Lords last week — mainly among appointed Labour members — it seems that the luminaries are sparsely represented on the red benches too.

Next up were the “show trials” of our top bankers before the Treasury Select Committee in Portcullis House. I failed to spot a single member of the illustrious order among the grovelling and shamefaced money men.

A day later, during Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s grilling by Heads of Select Committees, it was apparent that our PM is far from understanding how banks work, let alone the planet. As a “saviour of the world” he cuts a droopy figure.

Are we in Britain unusual in having no-one from the great 200 among our leaders and shakers, or is this state of affairs evenly spread across the global political and financial elites?

Alas, I have to report, I truly think it is. Nobody who knows what the world is, and how it works would feel comfortable in the spheres of politics and banking. And yet these trades are vital to our civilization and way of life. Are we doing something wrong?

I’ve come to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of people are programmed to operate within a rather narrow band of experience — even the high-flyers among us. Once activity breaches the limits of that band, whether above or below, they are like fish without water, humans without oxygen. They rapidly lose all sense of reality.

No-one can really be trusted to behave well in the wider interest when events are excessively good or painfully bad. Unfortunately, we are moving rapidly from the former to the latter condition, where we will be no better served than we were in the wild, expansionary phase.

Whereas in the growth period we could at least fend for ourselves, we are now dependent on other people to lift us out of the communal mess. Many of our fellows will be in thrall to people they never intended to imbue with such power over them.

Already the bogey of fascism is being held up to make us feel more at ease in the Marxist version of human life, which has never failed to destroy the human spirit and snuff out any light on the horizon.

So where are Jung’s 200 outstanding ones?

Perhaps they are Nobel Prize winners. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, thinks Britain should default on all its bank liabilities, as Iceland has done.

Since British bank debt far and away exceeds our annual income as a nation, that would not only make us a pariah State never to be trusted again, it would also plunge international finance into an unstoppable economic ice age.

Paul Krugman, a recent economics Nobel laureate, who once praised Gordon Brown in the New York Times as “the man who saved the world”, now writes, “this looks an awful lot like the beginning of the second Great Depression”.

That has been apparent for quite some time. Even depression guru Ben Bernanke at the Fed is struggling to hold the line, while keeping the printing of money in reserve. His British counterpart, Mervyn King, is treading water too. The ECB chief, Jean-Claude Trichet, is behind the curve on rates as well as on “quantitative easing”, which the Germans are determined to oppose.

All are waiting for the “tipping point” when it will probably be too late to act effectively.

It’s almost as if this were meant to happen, with the key players frozen at their desks. The world may have to go through this calamity to purge the vast excesses of the past.

In Jung’s late memoirs, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he presents a view of the world at variance with both scientific and popular opinion. As a psychologist, he knew the power of mentality, and how a belief system can become embedded in the collective unconscious, for good or bad. “Psychological contagion” was one of his more powerful phrases.

Those few who really understand what the world is and how it works, may be standing aside and bowing to the inevitable.

In the end, there’s no difference between down and up. They just taste different.

John Evans

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