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On Meet the Press, Tom Brokaw suggested why so many of us are so nail-spitting angry: "For a year now, for a full year, nothing that the American people have been told about the financial condition of this country has proved to be true."

Would that make what we've been told a - what's the word? - lie? Not necessarily. It is possible the people we relied on for information and advice were lying to themselves, too.

About a year ago, a Wall Street friend told me that the big banks are insolvent and that financial insiders know this. He cashed out of the market before last fall's crash, saving his fortune. Nearly every one of his investor friends knew how bad the situation was but still got creamed when the bottom fell out - which makes an interesting point about the power of psychological denial.

Today, everybody knows the big banks are flat broke, but the government still pretends it's not true. Whether the power elites are deceiving themselves, as well as the rest of us, is in a sense beside the point, which is this: By now, it's hard to trust the judgment or integrity of our financial and governmental elites.

This has not been a good decade for the credibility of institutional leadership. President George W. Bush on Iraq and torture, U.S. Catholic bishops on clerical sexual abuse, professional baseball about steroids - the lies go on and on.

We discover only now that our financial system was built on a colossal lie, a belief that its masters and their minions were competent and faithful stewards of the public trust. Instead, these experts - Wall Streeters, regulators, ratings agencies, politicians - were working not for the common good, but their own.

Conventional left-vs.-right partisanship serves to mask the fault that elites of both parties bear for this catastrophe. Only one political force counts in Washington: the Party of Money.

My Wall Street friend left his investment bank a few years back when, at his firm's retreat for top execs at a five-star resort, he saw colleagues behaving like villains in some lurid Marxist cartoon, guzzling vintage champagne and romping like Babylonian grandees. "I realized then that these people had no sense of responsibility to their clients or to anything else," he told me.

Those men lived by lies. Knowing that these financial giants were making enormously important decisions with no awareness of how detached they were from reality, my friend was frightened by how corrupting vast sums were of their judgment. And he was frightened for our future. Now we know why.

Before we can begin to reform the Wall Street-Washington nexus, we have to reform ourselves. We, too, have been satisfied to live by comforting lies. Yes, demand the truth of leaders, but let's have the self-respect to demand the truth of ourselves, too. There's no going back to a way of life built on the attractive but false idea that we can live as we like, borrowing against the future to satisfy today's wants, and suffer no consequences.

With so many elites discredited, where are the leaders we can trust? Where are the ideas that can renew us?

Here's a simple but radical one: When facing down a system built on lies, Czech anti-communist dissident Vaclav Havel developed what he called "anti-political politics." It was a politics based not on theory but on the conviction that "a single, seemingly powerless person" willing to stand on the truth, no matter the cost, is disproportionately powerful.

Truth and basic morality, Havel wrote in 1984, could be a starting point for the renewal of a discredited order. Referring to labor leader Lech Walesa, Havel wrote, "It is becoming evident that politics by no means need remain the affair of professionals and that one simple electrician with his heart in the right place, honoring something that transcends him and free of fear, can influence the history of his nation."

Present outrage is entirely justified. We need more of it to shake the rotten status quo. But anger cannot rebuild, only destroy, if it's not firmly grounded in an immovable personal commitment to truth and common decency. Our failed politicians have had their day. Stouthearted, truth-loving anti-politicians - which is within the power of every one of us to be - represent the only change worth believing in.