W e should probably start addressing the issue of how we're all going to live together, going, as they say, forward. Unquestionably we need a new paradigm. Everything has changed a little and everything is up for grabs. And as with any revolution, there is jockeying for position. And the ones who come out on top from all this will be the ones who get to write the history on it.

As cult Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek says, "The problem is today that when you have chaos and disorder people lose their cognitive mapping. So it is an open struggle as to whose interpretation will win. Never forget that this is how Hitler won."

According to a recent interview with Zizek: "The reason Hitler came to power in the 1930s was because he offered the most attractive interpretation of disastrous events.

"He simply flattered the Germans by claiming that their army had been betrayed in the First World War and by laying all the blame at the feet of the Jews."

So the struggle now, as much as it is to get us all out of this hole, is also to explain and understand what happened. And the explanation we choose to believe will be central to how we choose to move forward together.

There is no question but that what has happened recently has humanised us in ways. Old adversaries are burying the hatchet, people are thinking more beyond their own back yards about society in general and all of us are questioning our values to some extent. We are thinking a bit, if you will, about the meaning of life. We are having the introspective hangover.

And as much as we are all feeling a bit more touchy-feely in ways, we also have what our American friends might call hostility issues. It's been referred to as 'the new rage'. Much of the jockeying for position at the moment has been an effort to capitalise on the new rage. It is an unfocused and splatter-gun kind of beast and just as much as it can alight on any given target, almost on a whim, it is indiscriminate too about where it seeks shelter. Just ask Eamon Gilmore or Joan Burton, just two of the people who, almost despite their best efforts, have managed to benefit from the new rage.

The hard left has a new spring in its step as well. Mindless, unfocused anger has always been the left's stock in trade and it is telling to watch all the old bad elements sweeping in to hoover up a new generation of the disillusioned. Having been licking their wounds since it was proven that their whole big idea didn't actually work, the left are now claiming legitimacy because they reckon someone else's big idea didn't work either. Their narrative, the interpretation of events that they want to use, is that this recession has been a failure of the very capitalist system.

Of course that is not true. In a very literal sense, recession, boom and bust are an intrinsic part of the capitalist model. It feels a bit more extreme than usual this time and it has perhaps been exacerbated in its magnitude and its speed by technology and new forms of debt, but what we are experiencing right now is still just a part of the cycle. It is no consolation to the man with no job that he is part of the cycle, but it is important to be aware of it all the same. At least it gives us a hope that this too will pass.

Capitalism may not be perfect but it's the best thing we have. As much as capitalism is now being blamed for human greed, or for facilitating human greed, you will find that human greed caused capitalism rather than the other way around. And while human greed may not be pretty at times, it exists and always will and a system that doesn't take account of our natural acquisitiveness is never going to work. It wasn't capitalism that got us into this mess and it is only capitalism that can get us out of it.

Bottom line is this and we should never forget it. As dark as things might seem right now they're not half as dark as they were under Stalin. But of course people's memories are short and the romanticisation of the past is a very seductive thing right now. Nostalgia is increasingly proving the new opiate of the masses and what better nostalgia than false nostalgia (or is there any other kind?). Just last week in a glossy newspaper supplement, Izabela Chudzicka, the glossy face of the Polish community in Ireland, was waxing nostalgic for the days of communism in her youth. When the blonde socialites are pining after a bit of totalitarianism you know it's in vogue.

The seductive fuzzy thinking in the air at the moment is this: Rich people and bankers are bad people. They got us all in this terrible mess. We are innocent victims. It is what Zizek would call an attractive interpretation of disastrous events. It flatters the vast majority of us and it identifies a clear enemy at the feet of whom we can lay the blame.

One wouldn't dare compare the left blaming bankers and developers for everything with Hitler's blaming of the Jews, but the mechanics of the situation are similar.

As comfortable as it is to go along with simple, black and white comfort-food logic like this right now, it will do us a grave disservice in the long term. Firstly it renders us all victims and inculcates in us the mindset that we are powerless over our own lives. Secondly, it will create an unhealthy bitterness and cynicism in us all, and thirdly and most importantly, it will mean that we rebuild our world in an unhelpful fashion, ignoring the very people we need most right now.

The Government cannot create jobs. You may have got some impression they could from reading the papers, but in fact they cannot. If anything, right now, the Government needs to shed jobs. It has only ever done this once, having preferred traditionally to automatically hire more people every year, so it is having difficulties coming to terms with it.

So if the Government can't create jobs then who can? Well, not to burst the convenient Marxist cosy consensus, but the people we need to create jobs are the same people who always created jobs -- builders, bankers, entrepreneurs. Oh sorry, had you forgotten that? Had you got so caught up in the demonising of the business community that you forgot they are the ones who routinely risk everything they have to create employment?

Sure, their motives are selfish -- though interestingly money is not the primary or sole motivation for most entrepreneurs -- but the bottom line is they are the ones who drive the economy.

In fact, this is complete thoughtcrime in the current climate but I would even go so far as to say that the arch- demon of them all, Sean FitzPatrick, probably did much more good than harm in his life. You couldn't throw a stone in this country but you'd hit a businessman who wouldn't have got started without Anglo. Certainly, FitzPatrick and Anglo made huge and disastrous errors and certainly, like all of us, people involved got greedy.

But without Anglo and people like them we would probably still be a fairly second-world economy. You can argue that we are now reverting back to the second world but even if our economy reverts to the levels of the early noughties, or even the late Nineties, we'll still be a damn sight better off than we were before the Sean FitzPatricks of the world. And if we criminalise the business and banking class now we'll nobble ourselves for another generation.

Because as much as Jack O'Connor is acting like a man with answers right now, Jack O'Connor ain't gonna give you a job.

And the truth is that the bankers and the builders weren't the only ones who got greedy. This is not easy to say but they got greedy in SR Technics too. They got greedy in Waterford Glass.

The unions got greedy, the public sector got greedy, those of us in the private sector got greedy. And as much as it's nice to have scapegoats like FitzPatrick, and as much as it's not popular to suggest that he is not Satan and that the workers are not saints, it is quite important to be real right now. After all, we've seen where delusion gets us.

Fintan O'Toole and the rest of them may see this current crisis as an opportunity to demonise wealth and success, to penalise people for doing well and to remake Ireland in a new left-wing image and likeness but it would be a grave mistake right now.

If you thought that the job losses up to now were bad, they'd be small change compared to the exodus of investment and jobs out of this country if the Yanks or anyone else thinks we're getting socialist on their asses.

Capitalism may not be fashionable among the chattering classes. So now they've enjoyed our little flutter with the left, let's cop on and remember where our bread is buttered.

- Brendan O'Connor