Diogenes Fernando is drinking coffee in his VIP tuk-tuk behind the Feisty Fisherman. Not hiding, just staying out of sight. He has some thinking to do, and a decision to make.

Last week, The Man shared his ideas for how Sri Lanka might rescue itself from the economic catastrophe that is consuming us all. And those ideas are … radical, to say the least.

His main point is that parliamentary democracy has failed. Sri Lanka, he said, has been brought to its knees over decades by incompetent elected politicians.

An alternative, he said, is to have competent corporate leaders running things. At worst, it would be the lesser of two evils. But at best, it could bring much-needed fiduciary discipline and shareholder-value principles to the business of government.

This was no idle talk. He is the man with a plan— which is to get elected as an independent MP, then a seat in the Cabinet as a minister without portfolio empowered to kick arse and get things moving in the right direction.

The problem for Diogenes is that he bribed famed astrologer Madam Moonbeam to convince The Man that he, Diogenes, should be his latter-day Svengali, tasked with plotting the best route to high public office.

Which would likely make himself a target of public outrage if such a ‘tycoon takeover’ backfired. But unlike The Man, he would be in no position to escape the backlash by fleeing the country.

Meanwhile, it seems that The Man has also been secretly plotting—quietly coraling top business bosses who are willing to do the needful by underwriting his election campaign.

At the same time he has been taking discreet soundings in the corridors of power to gauge how much support he might expect from the political establishment.

And what he found, he said, is general agreement that corporates understand much better than elected politicians how nations are shaped by market forces, exchange rates, and capitalism’s ‘invisible hand’.

Now, Diogenes is no genius, but even he can see where this is heading. Radical solutions are one thing, he thinks, but if the people ever suspected that the country was being run by a shadowy Bilderberg-style cabal, all hell would break loose.

With good reason. As Winston Churchill famously quipped, democracy might be a terrible system of government, but it’s better than any alternative. That said, things can’t go on as they are, and persuading voters to learn from their past errors of judgement could take a lifetime.

So what to do? One solution might be to leak the whole thing to the media, and stand well back as it explodes. But this would also mean hiding out from The Man on his cousin’s up-country pig farm.

However, shaking the electorate to its foundations might well be worth such an odorous personal sacrifice if it meant having honest and competent politicians emerge when the dust settled…

In the meantime, he muses, some of us can take cold comfort from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Ulysses:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.