Culture (Part 3)

Chapter from “Culture Is Not Your Friend: Sex, Death, Drugs & Madness”.

Basic Antivirus

The most common way to counteract the influence of the culture virus, is to install another virus to kill it. This does not take care of the problem, only replaces it.

It substitutes pestilence for cholera, syphilis for gonorrhoea, Baptist for Buddhist, the decadence of the West for the repression of the East, the illusion of democracy for the reality of dictatorship.

The trick is to go beyond culture, and to look at what lies behind it. Do you believe in the values that your culture is built upon? Do you agree with how these values have been translated into reality? Share on X

“If you keep yourself as the final arbiter you will be less susceptible to infection by cultural illusion.” – Terence McKenna

Imagine peeling away the layers of your identity as you would peel the layers of an onion. Do this until you arrive at what John Rawls calls the original position, a neutral state where you do not know your race, your sex, your gender, nationality, religion, level of intelligence, education or wealth. Then from behind this veil of ignorance, create the perfect world in which to live. Does it look anything like the one you are living in now?

If you did not know what sex you would be born into, would you willingly accept and create a world in which half the population were routinely stripped of their rights, freedom and autonomy, seeing as that might end up being you?

If you did not know if you would be rich or poor, would you accept a world in which the top one percent own 40% of the nation’s wealth? Probably not. But in your culture, these things may be accepted as normal. Even if they are illogical.

Advanced Antivirus

Escaping culture is not easy. The culture virus will do whatever it can to hang on to its host – you. Even if that means putting you in jail. Which is why if you do decide to fight it, you should exercise extreme caution. Culture not only fights back, but it fights dirty.

So, is there a cure for culture?
Yes.
But it is either illegal or difficult to come by, and many are afraid of it. Most of all those in power.

The cure for culture is psychedelics.

“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.” – Terence McKenna

When the hippies started experimenting with their own consciousness during the 60’s, it led them to the understanding that what their culture had taught them was wrong.

They began protesting against the Vietnam war, the men grew their hair long, the women reclaimed their sexuality and expressed it as they saw fit. They began to question the accepted dogma of ‘get a degree, get a job, raise a family’, preferring to travel and meet people instead, to create art, live in communes, spend time in nature and grow their own food.

Their ways of living were completely at odds with the conservative culture at the time. The culture panicked and fought back by banning that which had turned their young away from them – psychedelics.

The way that conservative cultures view psychedelics can be compared to how the aliens in the movie “Invasion Of The Body Snatchers” were viewed.

In the movie, an alien life-form is colonising the Earth by attacking people in their sleep and cloning their bodies, growing copies of them inside seed pods. These new humans look exactly like their former selves and have all their memories and experiences intact, but they are somehow different.

This is how the conservative culture views the transformation of the people who take psychedelics, for you are not the same person going out of a trip, as the one who went in. You may very well ‘change overnight’ after being united with the plants.

The movie can also be seen as a metaphor for how culture changes people to make them fit in, by stripping them of their humanity and turning them into soulless clones.

“He’s trying to change people to fit the world. I’m trying to change the world to fit people.” – Jack Bellicec, “Invasion of the body snatchers”

Today there are only a handful of places left where you can get psychedelic drugs legally. Psilocybin in the form of magic truffles can still be purchased in the Netherlands. These are safe and quality controlled drugs that you can buy at smartshops.

The pure form of DMT is a Schedule I drug under the UN 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances and banned in most countries. DMT in the form of Ayahuasca is either illegal, in a legal grey area or tolerated. Some churches, like the Santo Daime and Uniao de Vegetal have been allowed to continue working with Ayahuasca as a sacrament under the auspice of religious freedom.  

There are a number of other psychedelics as well, but these are the ones you are more likely to find legally, and that are the safest to work with.

In part 5 of the series – Antivirus, I will take a more in depth look at psychedelics. For now, I will simply say that there is a way to cure the culture virus.

However, be careful with how you approach these substances. Do not under any circumstances buy psychedelics from street dealers. You want to expand your mind, not blow it up with bad drugs. Share on XThere is no quality control on the streets, no oversight and no guarantees. If you feel the need to use them, go find them where they are legal and people know how to use them.

Be aware that it takes time to integrate a psychedelic experience. The world you left behind will still be the same, but you will have changed. You may find yourself stuck in the middle, unable to slip back into your culture and unable to move forward in the direction that your new insights are pulling you. Be prepared for this.

How long this discomfort lasts depends on your ability to integrate the knowledge gained during the psychedelic trip.

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Only seek out these compounds if you really want to change, and are ready to change.

© Merlyn Gabriel Miller