It’s not that I’m green in any political way, but I do hate seeing plastic carrier bags blowing down the street like tumbleweed, or hanging from trees like Tibetan prayer offerings.

In our house, we refuse to use them, entering supermarkets with rucksacks and other suitable containers, and feeling very virtuous in a dreary sort of way.

The trouble is, the world won’t allow us to dispense with them. Various charities that should know better put large, white plastic bags through the letterbox inviting us to donate items we don’t want.

Yesterday, it was the PDSA, an animal charity. Note to PDSA: wildlife is harmed by plastic bags!

Today it was a “mental health” organization, bleating “You’ll improve your mental health by donating your unwanted items.” Self-serving, or what?

This got me thinking about the whole business of mental health. For a start, what exactly is it?

When I was in my teens (duck out now or take the consequences), I developed an unhealthy taste for the novels of Dostoyevsky. The first one I laid my hands on was A Raw Youth, in the exquisite translation of Constance Garnett.

The work is an extended essay on frenzy. The youth in question stumbles around 19th-century Russia in an advanced stage of frenzied excitement. He clearly mirrors the psychological state of its author.

Callow youth that I was, I lapped it up, reading through the night in a frenzy of anticipation. This was the life for me: a frenzied one. What a pain I must have been in those days.

It’s easy to look back and gasp at the foolishness of young life, but we can’t relive it now. Too late, old chum.

My conundrum is, did Dostoyevsky have “mental health”? Would he even have recognized the pastel, slightly perfumed phrase? He simply got on with writing some of the world’s best political and psychological literature, and inspired countless teenagers with nothing better to do into the joys of a frenzied existence. It explains a lot, doesn’t it?

But would we actually want everyone to have mental health? Wouldn’t it be rather tedious?

In fairness, I’ve always been a laid back sort of fellow, frenzy never came easily, and I soon lost interest.

I’m beginning to think that my concern about plastic bags is the first sign of late-onset mental health.

Now where did I put my copy of Crime and Punishment?

John Evans

There comes a point when you can’t take any more of a good thing.

Specifically, there comes a point when you can’t absorb any more overblown rhetoric about something that can never live up to its billing.

Barack Obama’s coming Presidency is like that.

Obamamania has hit a tipping point when it’s just beginning to shapeshift into its opposite. Ominously, we’re starting to feel jaded by the hype. We know it can’t possibly all be true. We’re aware that some people are talking through their hats bigtime.

Let’s face it, one man can’t possibly be … Barack Obama. The burden would be too great.

The achievement so far — that of a god not a man with smelly feet who snores (Michelle Obama’s words, not mine) — has happened on the back of yet another phenomenal bubble.

We should pity the man. Does he know what he has taken on? Has he the self-knowledge to realize that the greater part of the world’s population is projecting its desires and fantasies onto his frail shoulders?

My opinion is that a measure of competent administration, while keeping his country out of more wars, and gradually purging the vast indebtedness of the nation without bringing it to a shuddering halt, will be the very best he can hope for. Even that short list may not easily be achieveable under current conditions.

It would be a bravura performance if accomplished, given Obama’s political and economic inheritance from the previous administration. It would also deeply disappoint and disillusion two-thirds of the world’s population. As a realist where politicians are concerned, I would regard those simple goals achieved as close to heroic.

The future will be built around carefully-crafted technical solutions to almost unresolvable problems across the board. A truly intelligent President will know that like a bad case of fever, the cure must be to let it run its course, especially given the massive interventions that have already occurred.

The danger for Obama is that expectations are running so high that he will feel impelled to make grand gestures both at home and abroad. Such gestures are never neutral in their effects, though. They are often increasingly destructive well before the desired outcome has had time to make itself felt.

In terms of foreign policy decisions, reversals of current positions offer more hope than new, grandiose pronouncements.

Reversing Clinton’s sliding of NATO right up to Russia’s borders would be a good start. An offer of non-deployment of the “Star Wars” rocket shield to Poland in return for a Russian guarantee of the integrity of its neighbours’ territory, would probably reduce the tense standoff.

NATO is a busted flush, in any case, with Continental Europe refusing to contribute to its burdens.

At home, reducing government’s stake in the U.S. mortgage market, and an unpicking of Bill Clinton’s clumsy attempts to ensure “All must have prizes,” in the shape of houses they could never afford, would be a smart move, but I fear an unpopular one.

As for the last Bush to occupy the White House, Barack Obama will not need me to advise him on areas of policy reversal.

It won’t be spectacular. The times don’t call for that. But President Obama must rein in the “can-do, must-do” pressures from his wilder brethren who crave a Messiah in the White House.

Again, it won’t be easy, and disappointment will result. However, nothing will benefit his country more than a term or two of sobersides, thoughtful governance, stripped of declamatory passions and meaningless promises.

The phrase, “Mission accomplished,” must never pass his lips.

John Evans

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If you are anything like me, you will occasionally — as if by serendipity — come across a book you intended to write yourself.

The book I chanced upon is The Secret History of the World by Jonathan Black, a nom de plume of Mark Booth, Chief Executive of Century publishers, a British imprint of Random House. The author has used his many connections within publishing to amass an impressive array of data on his topic.

The simplest way to explain his subject is to state that science has become a militant materialist philosophy that believes matter precedes mind. Some scientists have even called consciousness “a disease of matter,” as if it were an interloper in a senseless universe.

This view is the complete opposite of what a majority of the greatest minds throughout history have believed — or better, known.

The perennial philosophy, as it has been called — that mind gives rise to matter — is still believed by the larger part of the human race. The last Pope, John Paul II, was taught in his youth by a Rosicrucian master. Following a car accident which nearly killed him, he had a spiritual experience which mirrored exactly what the teacher had taught him. Such was its overwhelming power, the young mystical Pole signed up for a seminary that led all the way to his becoming Pope in Rome.

The Rosicrucians (followers of the Rosy Cross) teach the age-old knowledge of idealism — that all is mind — in a Christian context. It is said that there are 20 miles of books in the Vatican library dedicated to this and similar points of view.

Quantum mechanics comes very close to idealism without quite letting go of the materialist base of science. There is no doubt that Einstein was a thorough-going adherent too. Everything he wrote screams “perennial philosophy”.

The problem is, the early Church came down very hard on anyone who challenged its materialist worldview, and, as Jonathan Black writes, today’s scientism demonizes anyone who as much as suggests an alternative to rocky lumps floating about in a void. Richard Dawkins is a prime example of the modern scientific inquisition. On the face of it, an alliance between early Catholicism and modern science is bizarre, but it’s a fact.

Most early believers in the supremacy of mind formed secret societies based on the Mystery Schools of antiquity, where spilling the beans meant death. According to Black, many of these societies still exist, though often branded with the tag “occult”, a word that simply means “hidden”, as in occluded.

Despite the iron fist in an iron glove approach of the present-day intellectual establishment, the vision of man’s ancient understanding of the universe lives on and thrives. As well as Einstein, the British astronomer James Jeans stated that, “the universe is nothing but a gigantic thought”. Isaac Newton spent most of his life studying aspects of it, so did C. G. Jung, the great Swiss joint-founder of psychology as we know it.

Buddhism and Hinduism are based on it, as are most religions, even Christianity, whose earliest exponents were Gnostics, a term meaning “knowers”, as opposed to believers. They sought, and many found, direct experience of the secret knowledge that mind creates matter, and not the other way round.

Dr Rupert Sheldrake, a contemporary biologist, has conducted many scientific experiments showing the influence of mind over matter, or “extended mind” as he calls it. His recent The Sense Of Being Stared At is a treasure chest of empirical idealism. His other work on the psychic abilities of animals is ground-breaking science at its unprejudiced best.

Black’s book is eye-wateringly comprehensive across the field, but concentrates on the ancient timeline and secret society aspects of the topic.

Anyone who has ever doubted the primacy of matter over mind, should read it with an open mind. It is a richly rewarding classic of its kind.

How is your knowledge of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression that followed it in the 1930s?

Not so good? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. But this is likely to be one of the world’s biggest talking points in coming months and years.

I was reminded of the Depression yesterday by the appearance of one of the legendary names from that distant era in the rescue of U.S. bank Bear Stearns.

J.P. Morgan was the renowned banker called on by the President to sort out the financial mess during one of the slumps of the period. Morgan set about systematically weeding out the companies that should be allowed to go to the wall, and those that were too important to allow to fail.

Yesterday the old feller’s bank, JP Morgan Chase and the New York Federal Reserve combined to stuff funds back into failing giant Bear Stearns, brought low by the gathering credit crunch.

The problem this time around is one of leverage and its effects on banks’ lending ratios — the multiple of lending to capital reserves a financial institution is allowed to build up by the authorities. The Geneva standard is that a bank’s capital must not fall below 8 percent of its lending. That number has been around a long time — I remember it from Alfred Marshall’s ancient classic textbook on economics during my university days.

Eight percent represents a ratio of 12.5 of lending to capital. These days it’s the norm for private equity companies to leverage many times more than that — supported by banks, of course, which then calculate their capital on a hugely inflated valuation for partly subprime debt. When the bubble bursts — as is now happening — both sides of the deal collapse.

Recently-bust Carlyle Capital Corporation (CCC) leveraged its equity 32 times to finance a $21.7bn portfolio of residential mortgage-backed securities issued by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. These instruments were financed by some of the biggest names in world banking.

With the housing market going south with a vengeance, it’s said that many banks’ capital reserves to lending ratios have slipped close to zero. The global financial system is floating on a cushion of fresh air.

There are always the consolations of philosophy for us to fall back on. Not the nitpicking academic variety which parses the meaning of words to death, but the active philosophy of Socrates whose adage, “The unexamined life is not worth living” should be a talisman of the financial sector.

In Britain, Gordon Brown’s Financial Services Authority (FSA), set up by him ten years ago to police the financial markets and the banks, completely missed the Northern Rock collapse, which was due to the bank raising money solely on the money markets and bundling the debts — many subprime — into packages and selling the risk on. When the money markets dried up, the bank had nowhere to go but to the Government to bail it out and eventually to nationalize it.

“The unexamined life is not worth living”. It seems the FSA did not examine the fifth largest bank in the UK, or spot the snake oil splashing around its floors.

Now consider what happened next as an example of both hubris and the reverse of Socrates’s dictum. Brown is calling for a “global financial watchdog” to perform for the entire planet what his FSA did for Britain.

Self-knowledge where art thou? The man has the richest fantasy life since Walt Disney.

Since we can’t have financial stability, or even politicians who examine their actions carefully, we must fall back on the real consolations of philosophy — everything changes and nothing remains the same.

Except death and taxes, of course.

Have you noticed how the world appears to be overflowing with Greek and Shakespearean tragedies right now? From the never-ending Diana Inquest to stuttering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the slow-motion unwinding of the world economy, the planet has become a tangled network of crumbling dreams and broken promises.

Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister

None more so than applies to Gordon Brown, Britain’s newly appointed Prime Minister.

Regular readers may recall that, back in March, one of Syntagma’s resolutions was to give up politics. I chose the wrong moment. From the fall of Blair to the rise and precipitate decline of Brown, it’s been a fascinating rollercoaster of insights into the political psyche.

Brown, who as recently as the summer was basking in a Churchillian glow, amid a welter of crises during the holidays, is now a quivering wreck, shot through by one disaster after another. After waiting and plotting for ten years to get the job, he must now be musing on the old saw, “Be careful what you wish for … you may get it.”

First he reneged on a promised referendum on the EU constitution; then he promoted and backed off an early general election when the polls ran against him. Next, an obscure northern mortgage bank, Northern Rock — which just happens to be the fifth largest in the UK, after the big four — got caught in the worldwide credit crunch. Brown’s own regulatory system didn’t even splutter into action while all this was going on. Now taxpayers are bailing out the bank to the tune of £30 billion ($62bn), which, according to Anatole Kaletsky in The Times (London), is “the biggest financial support operation ever offered to any private company by any government anywhere in the world”.

That was followed by HM Revenue and Customs — a department created by G. Brown himself — losing half the nation’s personal details, including bank account data, in the post. As if that wasn’t bad enough, all this week Brown has been submerged by yet more scandals over unlawful Labour party funding, which is now in the hands of the police at Scotland Yard.

Success in the top political job demands two qualities : leadership, and competence as an administrator. Brown has neither. He hasn’t the charisma to be PM, and lacks administrative abilities. In other words, he has been promoted two or three notches above his level of competence. Moreover, his Cabinet is stuffed full of third-raters and hopeless middle managers who would never make the board in a decent private company.

I fear this Labour government will hang on until mid-2010 — the latest date for the next election — unless the police finally nail them for money-laundering of political donations.

Brown is a clever and highly educated man, someone I would normally admire, but he’s a philosopher not a politician. His fatal flaw is a vanity that delivers an overwhelming desire to be the top dog, although he is conspicuously unqualified for the task.

Even as a philosopher he lacks the wisdom and objectivity to recognize his own deficiencies. Psychologically he’s an observer, not a doer. A backroom wallah, not the front man for a nation.

Self-knowledge requires a degree of personal honesty which the dour Scot has yet to achieve.