The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about [Insert celebrity here] or [Insert politician here] or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is sh*t-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs… your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
–Terence McKenna
