Culture is Not yr Friend

Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you.
Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.


We have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

Our world is in danger by the absence of good ideas.
Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
If the words ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ don’t include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn’t worth the hemp it was written on.
Culture and ideology are not your friends. They are not your friends. This is a hard thing to come to terms with, because a certain kind of alienation lies at the end of this thought process.

Culture is a closed system of thinking and values, of the sort I am denouncing; and the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency, is your culture. And I realise with ... joy, that here I skirt the bounds of political correctness, because everyone is running around saying, you know, “Recapture your roots, get in touch with your Swedishness, your Irishness, your whateverishness”… and that’s all very fine, but I think it’s your humanness that may have eluded you in all this ethnocentric graspingness .... !

video of this talk : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Lw30BeBZ6k
















text : Terence McKenna (extracted from three varied talks).
images : Liu Bolin, a Chinese artist best known for his "Invisible man" photographic series.
video : Terence Mckenna, 03:30min video, from the lecture "Into the Valley of Novelty".
more 'Culture is not your Friend' : 10 min audio on youtube ; 1 hour audio on youtube ;

Fri, Nov 9, 2012  Permanent link

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