Create Your Own Culture
The deepest defiance is becoming unrecognizable to the world that made you.
The late philosopher and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna believed the greatest rebellion wasn’t protest — it was refusing to be predictable, profitable, or programmable.
He urged people to actively participate in creating culture rather than passively consuming it:
"We have to create culture. Don't watch TV, don't read magazines. Create your own roadshow."
McKenna's perspective encourages a grassroots approach to cultural evolution — a radical contrast to the top-down, technocratic visions associated with accelerationism and Dark Enlightenment philosophies.
These ideologies seek to engineer desire itself — to optimize, control, and dictate what we value, want, and believe.
Creating your own culture is to express your weird inner world through art, language, ritual, and other values that are genuinely your own.
It's a form of resistance and an exercise in letting go of false desire.
Authenticity isn’t something you achieve — it’s what remains when you let go of everything you’re not.
I think he was talking about sovereignty of mind.
Creating your own culture isn’t just aesthetic rebellion, it’s psychological deprogramming.
In a world optimizing us into algorithms, weirdness is a form of liberation.
Thanks for this reminder.
i love this - at the risk of sounding cynical, I just thought I should say that based on Kant's ideology of experience and theory & depicting the potential importance of beauty and life, I was highly dissatisfied with one of Marcus Aurelius's teachings of ACCEPTANCE. When I first read "thoughts without a thinker by Mark Epstein, Open to Desire, The power of Now by Eckart Tolle - Those three teachings in particular that I was so fascinated with for so long thinking Analysis and mind games is the best approach, but oh my goodness I had never been so insulted by I guess you could say a "higher calling" because it had led me toward all kinds of uncertainty which leads to what I believe you are saying in this short essay to be that we must be wise in our creative outlet and not succumb to societal norms and expectations, especially through plant medicine which have been remarkable teachers for eons now.. I resonate alot with your words because I firmly believe we have to be careful with our rhetoric and how we use it in certain settings, you know :)