“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t
even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and
time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe,
and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody
else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons,
icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to
dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of
thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and
your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your
hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant,
we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And
then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You
want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural
engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all
this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”― Terence McKenna