So

[Project Willow]

Well I think Mckenna's talking about ALL culture, not just the culture we don't like, or at least all culture not based on boundary-dissolving plant hallucinogens. (Which, if you haven't really been there, I imagine is hard to agree with, but I think it rings true.) In fact I think he's specifically talking about the culture we do like hence the wording 'culture is not your friend' - you think it is, but it is not.

Towards the end of the video when someone in the audience asks: "How do we fight back?" He answers: "By making art." So you're telling me that's a euphemism for getting high on 'shrooms? Are you nuts?

Any endeavor or activity that is part of the bond building communication system between humans, hell, every aspect of our beings can and will be exploited by those who seek power. All culture is not our friend? As a generalization that is a particularly useless statement. Culture mediates and enriches communication, incorporating all forms (even non-verbal thought forms), strengthening social bonds, which are, in turn, necessary to survival. Any resistance movement must understand the weapons aimed at it, for defense or counter attack, including how our need for culture is exploited. Don't eschew, disdain, or dismiss it, understand it and use it.

As for 'shrooms, I guarantee you the thugs on top have done all of those drugs and know how to exploit those states of mind as well.

My dear departed friend happened to think that art was such a powerful tool for change she instituted a new grant program that rewards artists for using it in novel, dominant-culture jamming ways. Well, we'll see how that works out.

[Zap]

Oh man, I almost missed Hugh's slinking, evasive return to the board!

So far, barracuda, I think you're just vehemently uninformed, unlike other usernames who who do all they can to deflect away from CIA media and who, for the same reason, try to badjacket the messenger.

What part of this leads you to evoke Pinnochio and worse? Better make sense or I'm putting you in the same folder as orz, professorpan, and Zap.

[compared2what?]

As I was saying when technology so rudely interrupted me. The statement "Culture is your enemy" contains a false dichotomy. And I don't mean that in a bad way, necessarily. For McKenna's purposes, it's a rhetorical device, and it works just fine for the point he's seeking to make, within the context of some other points he's seeking to make.

That notwithstanding, in reality, it ain't so neat and discrete. You are a part of your culture, and furthermore an active participant in it. As was McKenna, whose work is a part of our culture that I very much doubt he intended his readers to regard as the enemy. As was Ted Kaczynski, for mercy's sake. Because everybody is.

People have both independent agency and free will, the exercise of which results in (among other things) culture. Which has neither free will nor independent agency. One corollary of which is: We make culture. It does not and cannot make us without our participation. The nature and extent of which is determined by us and is therefore our responsibility. Not culture's. Other people may very well, through the exercise of their independent agency and free will, try to deprive us of ours by using culture as one of their weapons. However, while they can and do sometimes succeed -- which, btw, means they're the enemy -- if culture was the only weapon they had, they just wouldn't be that much of a threat absent our collaboration. It's not like culture runs on ethanol. It only has one power source, and we're it. Oh. Hmm....Plus also, just as a reminder: Given the false-dichotomy aspect of things, we're it.

I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm totally down with cursing the darkness. It's a fabulous thing. That doesn't mean it's the same thing as lighting a candle, though. But whether you want the former to have more cultural currency than the latter or the other way around, it's totally within your power to exercise your free will and independent agency to exert an influence on the direction in which you'd prefer to see the cultural current flowing. Just do one more and the other less. Nothing is easy. But neither is everything impossible. That's just the way it be's.
__________________

cf. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin, 1936

ON EDIT: I mean, obviously, there are grips and grips of things that are primarily or largely culturally determined. But the quality of your judgment and the use to which you put it doesn't have to be one of them. Unless, you know, it has to be. Depends on how repressive the culture already was when you first became complicit with it.

[Joe Hillshoist]

"Between thought and expression lies a lifetime"

Thats beautiful.

And profound.

And thanks very much. That cd is now in my stereo, being my friend culturally. Cheers.

"The possibilities are endless."

If you knew the relevence of that statement to my lifetime, specifically those words spoken by someone else when i was tripping off my head on shrooms 14 and a half years ago....

Sometimes culture is part of the web of magic that wraps itself around us from the beginning of time to the end. And the web has strands that go places you never expect.

Cheers.

[Penguin]

"The possibilities are endless."

Sometimes culture is part of the web of magic that wraps itself around us from the beginning of time to the end. And the web has strands that go places you never expect.

Cheers.

I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm totally down with cursing the darkness. It's a fabulous thing. That doesn't mean it's the same thing as lighting a candle, though. But whether you want the former to have more cultural currency than the latter or the other way around, it's totally within your power to exercise your free will and independent agency to exert an influence on the direction in which you'd prefer to see the cultural current flowing. Just do one more and the other less. Nothing is easy. But neither is everything impossible. That's just the way it be's.

Yeh..

[Project Willow]

I'm just full of hard edges anymore, sorry. Should have said congrats on your nuptuals to Secrets and left it at that.

[§ê¢rꆧ]

No need to apologize PW. I was really overtired and not thinking too clearly.

Sometimes I like to take things out as far as they will go, you know, to get perspective on an idea. And I love making a kind of mental campsite in my mind squarely in the spot of paradoxes and contradictions.

I still think there is more than just a rhetorical device to 'culture is not your friend' and that it has to do with the kind of thinking that comes when entheogens are a regular part of the human diet.

When I was tripping as often as I could back in the day, I didn't have any time for the Media Entertainment Complex. It seeemed really remote and irrelevant. Even high culture - a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, while breathtaking, struck me as kind of dead scene, like a mausoleum. Now that I cannot/do not want to trip so much (I'm not sure which it is to be honest), I find my self falling into the media trance more and more (especially now with Hulu, watch what you want when you want, bah).

And yeah, culture is all humans do, so there are lots of shifting definitions going on here. I'm really tired again now, so I'll quit before I say something even more inane.