There can’t have been much good to come out of the eurozone austerity ‘strategy’, but I do believe very strongly in the Buddhist maxim that good will come out of bad in the end. So tonight, I am that man looking for something good to take out of the wholesale destruction of societies and political institutions.

I think there is just the one thing thus far, and it’s this: Man is very slowly relearning the lesson wise people have understood for millennia, that it’s not primarily systems protecting liberty and equality, but rather how human beings decide to treat each other. When I was at University, there was a theorist called Talcott Parsons who invented a description of social interaction called Structural Functionalism. Like all those presentations I’ve yawned through from management consultants over the years, it consisted entirely of arrows,  boxes, circles and diagrams that wound up looking like those stage acts where guys on motorcycles build a shape about five levels high.

Parsons never struck me as the kind of bloke you’d want to have lunch with, because his ideas had almost no humanity. Born seventy years later, he would without question have become a banker, and done the same diagrams to prove that f*ckwits with frontal lobe behavioural problems – and the crooked institutions that tolerate them – are more important than real people. He saw citizens largely as a cross between chess pieces and ants: things which could be moved about to obey his organisational structures. Pretty early on, I realised that Talco had his cart about four miles in front of his horse, because he didn’t understand horses, and carts were more fun.

Every senior politician in the world outside of a few South American countries (and even fewer exceptions in Asia) is unconsciously wedded to the Talcott Parsons Weltanschauung: that they are the puppeteers, and woe betide any marionette who wanders outside his or her box. Most multinational CEOs, investment bankers, EU commissioners and secret policemen are of exactly the same opinion. France votes against an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ form of EU Constitution; it is deemed “a mistake”, and ignored. Ireland rejects a Treaty; the process is repeated until it stops saying no. Papandreou insists he must put a bailout plan to a referendum; he is told “in your dreams, El Greco”. In Britain during eight years, the voter numbers deciding to leave the EU move steadily from 38% to 55%; their wishes are ignored.

What the ClubMed disaster is re-teaching electors now can be summed up in ten words: any system can be buggered by greedy and manipulative humanity. Democracy as a system doesn’t automatically stop oligarchy, only fine people can do that. Greece had a junta, and then got democracy back. But those running that democracy created for themselves an oligarchy so self-seeking, so corrupt, and so utterly without ethics or compassion, armed riot police and mercenaries have to guard the home of every Minister. Every high-profile politician in the country has to be given an armed guard while driving anywhere.

Oligarchies all die in the end because they don’t listen. If they don’t hear the gossip, they don’t know what’s going on. And if they don’t know what’s going on, they don’t grasp what’s going to happen to them. From Marie Antoinette to Erich Hönecker, the end always comes as a surprise. Everything in David Cameron’s body language gives away the fact that he clearly thinks we like him, and – even more staggering – that we actually believe the risible evasions he has offered in relation to Newscorp, Met Police corruption, Jeremy Hunt, and a paedophile cover-up in the Conservative Party.

Ed Miliband is no better. Written clearly on every banal facial expression he offers is an obviously mistaken belief that we think he might be getting tougher on immigration because he really believes in doing that, or he turned on Murdoch in the end because he wants to slay dragons. Nick Clegg is the same: he tries time and again to suggest he is supporting or opposing stuff based on principle, when the bloody family dog has grasped that he’s supporting draconian Secret Courts legislation because he’s run out of road when it comes to toleration from the Tory Party.

Boris Johnson defends City bankers, and would have us believe it’s got nothing to do with being London Mayor. Jeremy Hunt goes to New York for Newscorp pow-wows, and pretends it was a fact-finding trip. Michael Gove heaps praise on Rupert Murdoch, and asks us to accept that this has nothing to do with his leadership ambitions. Tom Watson ignores the damning evidence of phone hacking at Trinity Mirror, and then dismisses charges of tribal bias.

The problem here is not the system, but the people who have somehow come to inhabit it. And in turn, the problem with these people is that they have the wrong values: they see it as a conduit for their egoistic ambition, not as something designed to benefit society as a whole.

Until public figures generally realise that they must set an example and serve unselfishly – and above all treat the citizenry as both their equal and their employer – things will keep getting steadily worse.

It’s hard to sleep soundly knowing that not one of the names listed above would recognise themselves as part of the problem.