Treadwell's is an esoteric bookshop in Tavistock Street (Covent Garden) that has a tradition of holding lectures and events covering the by-ways of belief, philosophy, folk culture and literature. 

In the last year or so, at its evening lectures, I have heard a Cambridge academic (and intelligence analyst) give a remarkably persuasive account of the hidden codes in Francis Bacon's writings (the seventeenth century fixer not the twentieth century artist), first hand accounts of Transylvanian Romany folklore and the latest research on parapsychology (of which more perhaps on another occasion).

My business partner 'worries about me' (with a smile) because I give time to these things. After all, lectures on H.P. Lovecraft or on 'demonhunters of Japan' do not seem very conducive to business development.

On the other hand, some of the best solutions to difficult problems seem to arise from a preparedness, wholly rationally, to get outside prevailing 'group-think', sweep away the chatter (gerede) of the world and just see what happens when insights from other worlds are brought to bear on the day-to-day issues of running a life, a business and the servicing of clients.

There is hybrid vigour in taking disparate ideas and seeing what happens when you put them together, a creative alchemy that alters perception without relying on shrooms and funny compounds. Applied with common sense to real world problems, when conventional means are not working, such creativity can often move us on to our destination far more safely than following the old rut until we fall off a cliff in the fog.

Treadwells' cultural interludes spark creative ideas, fresh connections between familiar thoughts and new uses of language. The 'use-value' of Treadwell's events or of art or religion is not the point, of course, but there is still a 'use value' in such thinking nevertheless. 

There is a deep mainstream prejudice against radical intellectual experimentation. It is as if the system as a whole depends on us all conforming to certain shared ideas - to such an extent that we seem to believe subconsciously that a breach in that belief system might bring the whole thing tumbling down. Is it possible that our 'way of thinking' is as coherent as (say) Soviet Marxism but equally as vulnerable to changed conditions?

When the system starts to crack (as we have suggested elsewhere might be the case), then it is logical to ask how much of this is down to how we think and how much our thinking will change as the system changes.

I am not suggesting that we are in the middle of an intellectual revolution but, rather, that our thinking patterns may be going through the early stages of patterns of correction and Schumpeterian 'creative destruction' analogous to similar processes in the economy.

This may result in some very personal re-evaluation alongside the process of re-allocating investment portfolios and calculating the effects on pensions of a house price collapse.

Do you, without thinking, normally adapt your own thinking to a group that you are part of? In Russia in the 1950s, would you have unquestionably seen your factory manager role in terms of Marxist dialectic or, in France in the 1650s, would you have understood that your sickness was due to malign witchcraft?

Do you suppress doubts that you may have in case you are excluded from decision-making in the future - or in case you are made to look a fool? Have you ever wanted to say 'I told you so' only to remember that you may have thought that there was trouble coming but that you never actually pointed it out to anyone at the time? Are you going down with a sinking ship because you did not follow your own animal instinct to head for the lifeboat?

We have scarcely touched the surface of what new technologies might do to our culture and personal development - another theme of this Blog. There is no precedent for some of the changes in human relationships that the new technologies will eventually instigate - unless it be some of the risky experimentation of distinctly off-the-message-board radical practitioners of the esoteric arts. 

This is not to accept an esoteric version of the world (TPPR is cooly rationalist about ends and means in business and politics) but only to see that other ways of seeing may have things to teach the wider culture about coping with technological changes that may partly detach mind from body and then do so without restraint of geography and with a changed sense of time (which is one of the most remarkable subjective effects of entry into, say, a virtual world).

Several acquaintances have noted that working at a screen intensely on a project in which one immerses oneself is a mild version of an altered state, that the mind melds with the technology so that the creative flow ceases to be 'thought' in the way that most traditional writing, calculation and thinking is experienced. 

The hypothesis here is that the mind creates content that flows through the body on to a screen so that, at times, the quality of experience is 'transcendental' - some handwriters and creative thinkers have always been able to reach this state.

Regardless of technology, a compulsion to tell a story can operate beyond rational thought. Some minds think in numbers or music or colours. What happens when technologies widen the circle for which this creativity is 'normal'. Will the market price of creativity plummet or will creativity be applied more effectively and more widely? Or both?

All that is being suggested here is that new technologies may take something attributable to very few (the intellectual altered state) and make it an experience for the many - and that, across the culture as a whole, this will come to change perception and so thought.

At this point, we cannot resist a relevant political comment as we watch the implosion of the British official centre-left in a welter of incompetencies and alleged dodgy dealing (exemplified by Andrew Gilligan's investigation of a key member of the Mayor of London's circle in the Evening Standard tonight).

Everything that is going wrong with the New Labour Project is also going wrong with modern democracy - neither the Left not the Conservatives would do much better in this crisis of poor delivery and petty corruption. 

In part, we can put this crisis down to the practical problems of managing a modern late-capitalist liberal democracy with its multiple variables, including free consumer choice (like instant withdrawal of your cash from a building society) and a free media (with its intense scrutiny of political conduct) .

Future historians may be able to give a clean and cogent account of this crisis for their students much as our historians can give such an account of the crisis in the Roman Imperium between Marcus Aurelius and Diocletian. We cannot.

In hindsight, current problems will look far clearer than they to do to us and will include causes economic, technological, institutional, cultural and social. I won't add causes spiritual because that is beyond the whit of any analyst, but we can certainly add causes ethical and imaginative. 

The current crises in the Labour Party and in the wider political system are not only crises of management but are crises of basic moral sense and of imagination. Donations policy (say) has not only been administratively incompetent but has lacked any intrinsic sense of what is right and proper, while the problem of funding politics has not been addressed imaginatively.

People working to Machiavellian norms without core values and the creative flexibility to match management technique to social reality are, inevitably, going to end up on the rocks in a free society.  And this is what has happened - problems have been swept under the carpet because people like Blair and Brown either cannot imagine the consequences of failing to deal with problems head-on or, cynically, believe that they can 'busk' it.

The age of priests and moral exhortation is over, but people are going to start requiring more consistent ethical values as well as greater levels of administrative competence from their political class. This does not mean not having a mistress hidden away somewhere or being holier-than-thou about nicking the company's pencil sharpener but it does mean having values and behaviour that are more aligned in the public arena.

Given the nature of the current technological revolution, this almost certainly means a re-acquisition of the imaginative and predictive function in politics (synthesis as well as analysis) as the only way to make an effective use of political power that is both reasonably competent and trusted.

We could quite safely close down all the think-tanks that have emerged since the early 1990s in favour of having many more Treadwells around - salons devoted not to having young inexperienced policy wonks tell us what to think but encouraging us to think, as equals, for ourselves.

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