This is not another self-help book. It really isn’t. I wouldn’t do that to you. Self-help books are damaging to the self-esteem. Self-help books are like diets, or the gym contract some bastard relative gave you for your birthday: they promise to help you, but really they mock you. They build up your expectations, and then they leave you feeling low and craven and flinching at loud noises and sudden movements.
Like diets and gym contracts, self-help books offer the illusion that you can do something to significantly improve yourself – you can become slimmer, wiser, more attractive to air hostesses or that guy who works in the accounts department and rides a motorbike on weekends. You will draw upon yourself good fortune and the golden blessings of a universe that looks on you and is well pleased with what it sees. Self-help books lift you aloft on the wings of hope and then, when you have failed once more, they drop you like a losing lottery ticket, face-down like a piece of buttered toast.
Self-help books, to be brief, are no good, and the reason is plain: they expect you to do all the work. Taken to its logical conclusion, a self-help book would be a collection of blank pages and a pen. (A proposal, incidentally, which sadly found scant favour with my publisher when first I pitched it. I even brought my own sheaf of foolscap and a ballpoint pen which I stole when signing the security register in the downstairs lobby. “Look,” I said persuasively, “I can already give you the manuscript.” Publishers, alas, are made of sterner stuff.)
No matter how quick and easy they promise to be, selfhelp books have the common failing of requiring you to put in some effort. The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, say, may seem to have achieved the astonishing feat of condensing several millennia of accumulated cultural learning into seven convenient bite-sized chunks, like so many KFC nuggets of deep-fried wisdom, but you are still expected to memorise the laws, or at least scribble them down on the back of your hand, and then, I suppose, do something about them. This is the fundamental truth that writers of self-help books overlook: if we were capable or even likely to do these things for ourselves, we wouldn’t need their poxy books.
If you are like me – and deep down I think you are – you aren’t mad keen on working hard to improve yourself. Human beings are a little like Liberia or the Durban beach-front or London’s Millennium Dome: there is not really a lot you can do to make them fundamentally better. By the time you realise there’s a problem, there’s not much else for it but to tear it all down and start over again. Speaking for myself – and I hasten to point out that I am neither the Durban beachfront nor Liberia, although on occasion certain so-called friends have pointed out an alleged physical similarity to the Millennium Dome – that all seems like a little too much trouble.
I am here to tell you that that is okay. Don’t be ashamed; say it with me: We are lazy, we are idle, we are downright inert, and we don’t give a damn. We are the secret truth of society, the bedrock upon which any decent civilisation is built. We are the yawning majority who can’t quite believe that firming up our bellies and becoming nicer human beings really will be worth the kind of effort demanded of us. We have always been here, and we will be here a long time after the fanatical self-improvers have shuffled off to their just rewards.
What’s more, we have nothing of which to be ashamed. We are the best part of this tawdry world. You don’t see us invading neighbouring countries or launching political parties. None of us invented boy bands or cellphones that ring with the theme tune from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. We couldn’t be bothered. We just want the quiet life. We want to eat well, live well, have sex with attractive people, perhaps drive a fast car on the open road while drinking a beer, but we are not prepared to bend the laws of nature to do it. We prefer to slipstream in evolution’s wake.
If it weren’t for us, this world would be a bleaker place. We are, for instance, solely responsible for almost every item of dinner-party conversation worth hearing. The snappy aphorism, the casual item of waspish gossip, the – if you will pardon the expression – bon mot were all invented by people like us: people interested in maximum effect for minimum effort. If it weren’t for us, it would be all personal trainers and striving toward the light and embracing change and similar appalling notions. We are interested in none of that. If it weren’t for us, this world would implode from boredom.
Of course, this is no reason to get complacent. Like the stegosaurus or the fondue set with matching forks (which, let no one tell you different, is not cool and never will be again), if we fail to adapt to the changing times, we are doomed to extinction. We will be banished to the back of the kitchen cupboard; Steven Spielberg will make movies about us. We need to learn to stay attractive to our mates, to stay wealthy and healthy and secretly to thrive, that we might pass our genes to the generations that follow slouching in our shadow.
That is why I have written this book. If you want to take three easy steps to being a fabulous person with a wonderful life, close this book immediately. This is not the book for you (although you should feel free to buy several copies for your friends). This is the self-help book for people who want to take no steps at all. This is the self-help book for people lying on the sofa. This book will tell you how to reap the rewards of being a better person, without having to trouble yourself with the unnecessary burden of actually becoming better.
(It is not even necessary to read this book. Simply buying it and keeping it displayed in a prominent position will make you brighter, happier and more desirable. Our pages have been treated with a revolutionary new formula that allows wisdom, through a process we have patented under the name Osmatix™, to pass directly from the page into the atmosphere, where it can easily be inhaled from a reclining position. In countries of the northern hemisphere where this book is on sale, you can identify Osmatix™ by its mild aroma of cooking oil. In the southern hemisphere it is characterised by the slight odour of stilton.
If you would like to take advantage of this unique opportunity, we have provided a number of blank pages at the back of this book. Besides making the book look thicker on the shelves, these pages will allow you to pretend to be reading – at the beach, perhaps, or on public transport – while in fact giving you the opportunity to rest your eyes and think about last night’s episode of Sex and the City.
Alas, however, if you are planning to share this book with your life-partner or members of your immediate family or your colleagues at work, it is my duty to inform you that Osmatix™ is a highly sophisticated compound. Like a gosling newly hatched, it bonds and imprints itself to the particular chemical properties of whoever first opens this book and breathes its heady scent. The Osmatix™ of this book will work for you, and you alone. Your husband or your secretary will just have to buy their own copy. This obviously is bad news for you, but good news for us. In fact, to members of the publishing industry, the smell of Osmatix™ resembles nothing so much as newly folded money.)
So follow me, brothers and sisters, into a brave – well, bravish – new world. A world, at any rate, in which our cowardice is well hidden. And as we go, remember our mantra. Whisper it to yourself. Print it on a card and keep it prominently displayed on your refrigerator door or the dashboard of your car. Have it tattooed inside your eyelids, so that you can read it while you take your afternoon nap. If you like, you can strip to the waist, take out your drums and chant the mantra to the steady pulse-beat of your throbbing bongos. (Although if you do choose to go the half-naked drumming route, I must ask you to go down to the bottom of the garden and crouch in the shrubbery where decent folk can’t see you.)
Do you have the mantra ready? Do you? Oh. Sorry, I thought I had told you already. Our mantra is: “Anything can be faked.” You can add any ohms and ahs and ululations you might require, but that is the gist of it: anything can be faked.
(Except insincerity, I suppose. It is difficult to fake insincerity. And having bad hair; that is something that can’t be faked. You either have bad hair or you don’t, I’m afraid. But other than these things, the mantra holds pretty much true.)
Are we ready now? Are we? Right, follow me.