The Psycho Cyclops speaks

This gob-smacking extract in the Telegraph from Brown's address at Lambeth Palace to a group of leading clergy, including the Archbishop of Futility:

We know here in the West that what may begin as a benign attempt by a politician to explain their religious motivation too often ends with the spectacle of them hinting that God has sanctioned or ordained a course of action. Whether in foreign affairs - perhaps hinting at a justification for weapons or a war - or in domestic affairs - perhaps justifying intrusive laws in deeply personal matters best resolved in the privacy of conscience and family.

Billed as an attack on Blair and Bush, what it illustrates - particularly the last bit - is the maniacal outcome of cognitive dissonance, which is the psychic cost of simultaneously holding two or more mutually contradictory beliefs. Evidently, the more passionately those beliefs are held, the greater the psychic cost.

Which explains Brown completely. Faced with the impossibility of reconciling his belief in himself as a force for good and the amorality of the means he employed to stay in power, he bankrupted the country in an attempt to drown out the psychic noise.