SOME YEARS AGO I was approached by a wealthy philanthropic businessman with a proposition. He said he wanted me to go to Switzerland, find one of the gnomes of Zurich and ask him what the devil they were playing at.

Of course I demurred. Explained that I found the milk bill confusing, let alone high finance, wouldn't know what to talk about and that the whole thing would be excuriatingly embarassing for everyone concerned.

Now this gentleman wasn't put off easily and approached several other people known to him, business collegues, his local parish minister, that sort of thing. Two weeks ago I met a senior academic also known to this businessman, and we fell to talking. Eventually he confessed. He had taken the bait and gone to Zurich. I was fascinated. Had he known anything about international finance before he went?

No. Was it all not a little embarassing? Strangely, it hadn't been. The gnome he had met had been hungry to have some kind of discussion on the morality of what he was doing.

In retrospect the businessman was being rather ingenuous. At least half a dozen of his pals and associates had been lying in their beds confronting the issue that they knew next to nothing about high finance and, tempted by the offer of the free trip, wondering why this character was so keen that they should step outside their comfort zone and enter the lions' den.

During the last few bizarre weeks all round the world many hundreds of thousands of people have been having the same thoughts. We had all been deluding ourselves that democracy mattered, that we had the ultimate control over our country's destiny, but now it suddenly seems that we are only allowed to play with some of the less dangerous toys in the toy box and that when it comes to the big decisions we had better leave it to Dad who understands these things and if we don't comply we will all be sent straight to bed.

This would all be perfectly fine if we could trust Dad, but it seems he is madder than we once thought our benefactor was.

Because these financiers who tell us constantly that they have everything under control may be clever, and well educated, and proficient at their black art and I fully acknowledge that they are infinitely brighter in every which way than this writer.

Except for one rather critical factor. The end game. The end game? Yes. Where they want to take us. The elephant in the room of all our discussions on the current crisis is that all the sums, all the theories, all the ingenious plans are all based on the notion that we have to expand and grow, when there are only so many sweeties in the sweet shop and the hideous, painful reality is that if we go along with their broad proposition of orienting everything towards growth then chaos will ensue.

Recently a millionaire in Australia called Dick Smith went to his bank and withdrew a million dollars in cash and laid it out for the press to photograph.

Standing above this pile of loot he announced that he was prepared to hand it all over to anyone under the age of thirty who could come up with a plausible theory on how the world could be run without everything being predicated on a growth model.

He wasn't trying to discredit the greens; his concern was genuine, just like my earlier benefactor he was saying it was time to stop being infantilized by the financiers and recognise that they don't have the right answer because we don't ask them the right question.

There is nothing complex to understand. We all have to learn to live simply if we are to live at all and that is a cast iron reality that our new masters fail to factor into their equations.

I still find the milk bill confusing, but that is a truth that even I can comprehend.

Can you?

MAXWELL MACLEOD