Last month I was in Languedoc, formerly the fabled Cathar country, a remote outpost of heroic resistance to oppressive distant rulers. This month I am in Edinburgh. Plus ça change.

I don’t feel happy away from home at the moment. Like you, I have a terrible feeling that in the last three months the society we know has been slipping away, and the values we treasured systematically discarded, as the traditional opposition parties flutter away uselessly like old unspooled audio tape, wound round a lamppost at a dual carriageway junction.

A government of crackhead burglars has breached the window locks, smashing porcelain statuettes in a National Trust property, as they blow through looking for something disposable they can flog on fast to their dodgy mates, an Xbox, an iPhone, an ancient forest or a publicly owned bank.

Meanwhile, the centre-right squabble about whether to allow leftwing people to vote for an old leftwing man to lead an old leftwing party, or whether to allow it to be led by one of three wooden spoons with faces drawn on them that, if viewed from a certain angle, might look reassuringly like some of the people that are already in power.

But here I am in the comforting four-week fiction of the Edinburgh fringe, the Kos national stadium of the arts. And I am but a lotus eater, eating a fried lotus supper from the Clam Shell chippy on the Royal Mile, and washing it down with sugary lotus-ade. Burp.

Once again, the same venues have sprung up in the same bars and parks and beer gardens, and there are clowns and jugglers, puppeteers and children’s entertainers, circuses and bread. Yum yum. Ha ha.

Last night at 2am stars burst overhead. But I missed them because I was looking in the gutter. A stream of hot dog’s urine was carrying along a crumpled four-star review of my standup show from the Daily Telegraph, reflections of meteorites glittering gold and yellow around its incoherent bet-hedging. The image seemed profound, but in the clear light of the morning, as I poured out desiccated haggis for the kids, its exact meaning escaped me.

I’m so frightened now of real events I daren’t look at legitimate newspapers. Is it true the Conservatives are brazenly closing down official channels of opposition to strong-arm councils into allowing their friends and donors in the fossil fuels industry to frack everywhere, even under formerly protected national parks? Yes it is. Why isn’t this being stopped?

Amber Rudd, energy secretary, says shale gas must play a part in our energy supplies. But I thought if we got all this stuff out of the ground we would all die? And here, north of the border, the scrapping of wind farm subsidies bites, but will leave the death cult of Daily Telegraph readers delighted. Meanwhile, I am watching a clown and eating battered lotus burger, with lotus stains all over my Batman trainers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by David Foldvari.

Even the artists that ought to be complaining are all just drunk in a Grassmarket bar. And any that say anything, if they happen to be gay or “ethnics” or “women posing as comedians”, will be dismissed as evidence of a leftwing media cabal that controls the country (not terribly effectively, under the circumstances), and then be threatened with rapes and beatings and burnings. And that’s just by the newspaper critics.

When something is playing on your mind, you see evidence of it everywhere. Hence religion. Once I longed for forgiveness – and a ghost appeared to me, in Wolverhampton, and forgave me. But I still do not believe in ghosts, and anyway, the person whose ghost it was would never have chosen to visit Wolverhampton. Alive or dead. So I know it was not real.

As a result of the same mental process, the precious few shows I have managed to see here in Edinburgh, in between performing myself and occupying the children, begin to bleed meanings that probably aren’t there. Am I going mad with post-election grief and fear, or was the kids’ show, Our Teacher’s a Troll, at Summerhall, really a call to overthrow a corrupt government?

In the lean two-performer piece, an evil troll, imaginatively conjured from empty space by flickering lights, takes over a school, chews children’s heads off, sets the survivors to work in a gold mine, and eventually humiliates and oppresses even the compliant staff who thought they might benefit from collaborating with it. Sound familiar?

The troll, brilliantly, justifies its cruel actions by reference to a garbled reading of natural law, not dissimilar to the survival-of-the-fittest theorising that appears to underscore neoliberal free-market dogma, as espoused by the current crop of Conservative trolls from Sajid Javid to George “pencils” Osborne.

Of course, the two dozen under-eights sitting around me weren’t necessarily responding to the story on this level, although a caricature of a dissembling politician seemed universally recognisable, even to infants barely able to speak, who gurgled self-aggrandisingly at his appearance, like horrible West End theatre audiences do at a joke about some supposedly unfashionable brand of kitchenware.

It appears that all is lost until two small children, Holly and Sean, emerge from the silent compliant mass to ask the troll “Why?” Why does he govern them in the way that he does? Under their persistent questioning the troll, and his belief system, eventually crumble. And I left the theatre feeling a little less hopeless, feeling that all it might take to stop the juggernaut of unfairness is for someone, anyone at this stage, to ask why. A child could do it. So why not then a funny, little old man?

Maybe I am projecting my own anxieties on to the piece? Would a kids’ show consciously carry such weight? Or is it natural that any thoughtful piece of art should do so?

The similarly thoughtful young comedian Nish Kumar is currently appearing on the fringe with a show that explains, with knowing playfulness, why, in his opinion, there are no good rightwing comedians and no good leftwing action films, and how he takes the different pleasures he as a human needs from both, ideologically different, genres.

Likewise, it would be hard to imagine an effective children’s show written in support of child slavery and government by oppression and intimidation. It wouldn’t seem right to justify these things to children. But perhaps the market for it would be there. So let’s see someone write one, and let the market decide.

Stewart Lee’s A Room With a Stew is now at the Edinburgh festival fringe and will play in London from 21 Sept