Foolery doth shine around the orb like the sun, if we take Shakespeare's word for it -and he was known to be partial to some fools at least, such as Yorick or Lear's attendant. That there are many types of folly, some of them praiseworthy with Christianity chief among them, was adequately explained also by Erasmus, although neither he nor his English epigone clarified the issue as to the ratio of worthy fools to the worthless kind.

Experience, however, can be said to have established that the average fool is also an unmitigated scoundrel. This is the type who lives by the motto "fiat stultitia mea, pereat mundus", unable of course to comprehend that if the world goes under then all of its contents also tumble down into destruction including the fool's own likes and dislikes.

The most succinct definition of such self-defeating foolery is the preference for one's material desire of the moment, the gratification of which will clearly lead to the frustration of the sum total of them in the medium term. The portion of the Greek populace currently incited onto the streets by a corrupt union leadership, whose activities in collaboration with the criminal political elite led to the present economic break down in the first place, vie unfortunately for the distinction of being the prime example of such suicidal ignorance.

They are frothing at the mouth at the prospect of giving up ten percent of their current income as the price to secure the rest ninety per cent in the future. Their declared preference is to keep one hundred percent now, even though this will lead to the complete forfeiture of everything first thing tomorrow morning.

They are egged on to rage against the very institution (the EU) whose generous outlays made possible the extravagant mode of living of an aristocracy of public employees, in complete and scandalous disharmony with any productive labor performed by the said privileged cliques. It is these despicable drones that have brought the life of the capital to a standstill in the past few days, occupying the government budget office and preventing traffic in the main thoroughfare of Athens with the authorities just looking on. It is these thugs, a few dozen former Olympic airways employees violently claiming the outrageous grants and pensions promised to them by the previous government of idiots, liars and quacks, that have unfurled the flag or revolution (!!!!) and national honor all in one. And to defend these kinds of anti-social privilege a few thousands of professional protesters (whose mental operation has been usurped by a reflex of screaming systematically bred in them by abominable party hacks) are periodically trotted out by political leaderships whose victory in the current arm wrestling would condemn these same unfortunate fools to perpetual misery.

No wonder, then, that the game is by no means over, despite the relative calm of the past few days. The prime minister managed, through a round of skilled and dignified diplomacy from Berlin to Washington, to pose the Greek problem in terms that elicited a sympathetic response abroad. But behind this political screen the core wound is still festering. For his enemy is within. And if he loses his nerve in tackling the elements in his own party responsible for (and still defending) the cancerous growth of our anti-social public sector, then the ruin will not be finally averted.

This is not to suggest that the sweeping measures he announced before he embarked on his foreign peregrinations are just. On the razor's edge of destruction they could not possibly be. Masses of people are going to pay for the misdeeds of feudal elites that pampered them with false vistas of social largesse while feeding the insatiable rapacity of parasitic minorities. Still, big electoral majorities did support these mendacious peddlers of a fake paradise. Besides, the stolen billions cannot be gotten back. The only hope is that through a shock revamping that will introduce a modicum of honesty in the administration of the state a new beginning will be made for the sake of the next generation.

Beyond that what is needed here is a true cultural revolution -pardon the expression for its odious historical associations. This, as I have written before, would amount to the restoration of social labor as the leading value and claim in society, after a generation in which socialism came to mean to defraud and shake down and despoil the common weal for the sake of private interest, the most successful looters and parasites posing as the chief "revolutionary" example to follow. It is not in an ironic vein that I suggest that this is tantamount to a return to authentic Marxist values.

One last sad thought. The most deleterious consequence of the current financial breakdown is that it has distracted us from the real task, which is the cultivation of a new collective consciousness. The enterprise of knowledge and culture has been waylaid by the need to deal with the abominable machinations of our worthless social and political leaders. It has been to a great extent inevitable that to dissent from the malefactions of our rulers one would have to roll in the gutter along with them. Just to witness the moral and mental putrefaction of our public space ipso facto soiled and spoiled and contaminated one's own conscience and thought. One found oneself hating and despising, even though it went against one's own best instincts. But hatred and contempt is never a constructive moral or social sentiment, even if its object is the truly hateful and contemptible. The good can never win by evil means. But unfortunately the extremity of the general predicament forced even the best to become in some sense the same as the targets of their aversion. So we all got sucked up in a mighty vortex of ill-feeling, malediction and vindictiveness. This descent into a welter of turpitude, aggressiveness and intolerance is not yet ended. But maybe we are approaching rock bottom.