“We have to create culture. Don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow.”

In 1999, Terence McKenna delivered a lecture called Shamans Among the Machines, offering a sharp critique of modern, mass-consumer culture.

It’s here that he drops one of his most famous lines: “Culture is not your friend.”

McKenna argued that mass culture isn’t designed to make us free, creative, or fully conscious, but to condition, distract, and domesticate us.

It trains people to consume, conform, and identify with manufactured values — status, trends, celebrity, fear — keeping attention fixed outward rather than inward. This erodes imagination and personal autonomy.

His antidote was simple: withdraw psychic energy from cultural noise and create something yourself — art, ideas, lived experience.

Creation restores agency. Passive consumption gives it away.

As he put it:

“By putting the art pedal to the metal, we maximise our humanness and become much more necessary and incomprehensible to the machines.”

In another lecture, McKenna sharpened the point:

“If you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered… This is shit-brained thinking. That is all cultural diversion.”

His message endures because our predicament remains the same. Culture will happily think for you, unless you decide to think, and create, for yourself.

Source: Shamans Among the Machines (1999), Terence McKenna.