Thursday, November 06, 2008
Terence McKenna on individuality and democracy's inherent tendency to atomize, cheapen and reject the human experience: "We have been infantilized by our cultural institutions to accept the notion of ourselves as citizens consuming these regurgitated scientific models which are then hashed through by Madison Avenue and then handed down to us by the organs of mass culture and this is supposed to be what we anchor our lives on."
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10 comments:
Fancy talk to rationalize what abused nerds always do: withdraw from society and strike an above-it-all pose that no one believes for a second. They wait by the phone for society to call and beg for to be rescued by the nerds.
I prefer to think of Terrance as a hopeless romantic and advocate of the human spirit. I have a warm spot in my spirit for him and others who point out the silly ways in which we behave, and after all, society deserves and needs a good kick in the pants on a regular basis.
Michael
To the first poster: Neo-conservatives aren't even in the White House anymore. What the hell are they doing on Posthuman Blues?
What about my post makes me a neocon?
--First Poster
McKenna was an explorer of the psyche who held a revealing mirror to the absurdity, horror and beauty of the human experience. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but this typically isn't the route taken by withdrawn nerds.
Well, sorry, that was a bit of knee-jerk reaction admittedly. However, McKenna was one of the brightest, most articulate spokesmen of the counterculture in the past few decades, and i took your post to be a conservative rejection of that. I guess you were swiping more at a particular type of nerd, but Mckenna wasn't any kind of nerd at all. and he certainly wasn't waiting on any phone calls from society!
Ditto.
c: "exammos"
For god sake turn the music off :(
I kinda like the music . . .
Frankly, I always wonder a little about how much psychedelics have either enhanced or hindered McKenna's philosophical underpinnings or sources, and how it may have somehow "biased" either his thought process or opinion of some things.
But here he had some very cogent, worthwhile things to say about democracy and elements of freedom of thought and action, based on an alternative perspective on (and modality of) evaluation and of certain cultural "normalities" or cultural assumptions that, in fact as McK. suggests, are seriously out of whack and often don't reflect a better possible reality and the human role within in society, especially as a "consumer" of all the mainstream "givens" we do kind of anchor our lives to usually, whether we're conscious of it or not, and the lesson is we should be much more conscious and action oriented when it comes to owning our own piccadillos and predilictions in this mass consumption society, and he not just talking about what you can buy at Wal-Mart! 8^}
Good stuff, basically.
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