“This book will change your life!”

I wish I had a Pound for every time I’ve seen that claim on the back of a book. Very few things change our lives; but lots of things change our minds. And a life without regard to the mind’s capabilities is a wasted life.

These things changed my life: meeting my wives and having my kids.

These things changed my mind: Listening to the speeches of Jo Grimond, being taught English by Howard Ogdon, living in East Germany, going to University, writing a thesis on Hitler’s psychopathology, migrating to London, bumming around in Greece, joining the ad agency CDP, meeting lots of MPs and Ministers, retiring, getting ripped off by Scottish Widows, the Iraq War, starting The Slog, observing trails of sexual depravity in Plymouth and Stafford, experiencing the Left’s fascist reaction to my articles about Gordon Brown’s health, seeing my Bear Notes slaughtered by Ben Bernanke, analysing the power of Newscorp, and watching the rise and rise of the sociopathic wing of the Conservative Party.

I would argue that the life-changers were hormonal, and the mind-changers entirely to do with stepping outside my comfort zone of settled thinking. Both those conclusions – and these days I’ve grown to see everything as a hypothesis that might one day, just possibly, be a conclusion – are significant for me.

I think that the denial of species wiring is the most common mistake that greedy and Utopian politicians make…and their unwillingness to face it is the cause of almost all our ills. I sometimes have the suspicion that if you made a crucifix out of hormones and pointed it at Harriet Harman, for instance, she’d self-immolate. And if you made one out of money, Lloyd Blankfein would go blind.

But the unwillingness to admit mistakes, go beyond the tramlines, and slaughter sacred cows is every bit as damaging. Here we are in 2013, and Berlin insists that austerity creates growth (Arbeit macht frei?) the Conservative Party sticks rigidly to the daft notion that cutting 10% (while throwing 90% at screwed-up banks) will create growth, while Ed Balls is absolutely convinced, up there in his Morley Redoubt, that weaving this way and that (today stimulus, tomorrow stimusterity) will bring growth again with Labour. Again, Keemosabbe?

You have to walk the walk in this life. Whenever I hear some pillock say “We need to think outside the box on this one”, I know that being trapped in a Think Tank will make ex boxio thinking utterly impossible for the poor dear. Protest ye not good people, just break free and have an original thought.

Thoughts like, ‘We need a Resistance, but is the Opposition up to it?’; ‘We need a recovery, but is Friedmanite Globalism up to it?’; ‘We need a cultural leader, but are any of them up to it?’; ‘We need to abolish Murdoch, but is the Establishment up to it?’; and even, ‘We need to protect Liberty, but is the Judiciary up to it?’

Most of us do not lead a life: rather, our lives are led by a potentially deadly combination of chance meetings and crooked opinion leaders. None of us can fully control every aspect of our destinies, but we could at least make the effort to take control of the direction. People often say to me, “With all that you have, you should consider yourself very lucky”. My riposte is usually, “I never take what I have for granted, but I’m fortunate – not lucky”. Luck is the random fruit of pulling on a slot machine: fortune is the persistence that eventually puts one in the right place at the right time.

Very few people have the aware consciousness to divine wherein lies fulfilment. I think (without being in any way patronising) it behoves those of us who do to become teachers, tutors and mentors to anyone who seeks enlightenment, but is currently in the Dark. There has never been a better time for such seers and sages to offer that assistance.

This is how genuine, positive revolutions begin: from the bottom up, not the top down.

Earlier at The Slog: The very odd psychography of Michael Gove’s Sikh School mania