“…what civilisation is, is 6 billion people, trying to make themselves happy by standing on each-others shoulders and kicking each others teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation. And yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have; the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific knowhow, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us; the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary and we do not fight back against the dehumanising values that are handed down as control icons. This is something…I mean, I don’t really want to get off on this tare because it’s a lecture in its self but…culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various intuitions; churches, companies, tax-collection schemes and what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It dis-empowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture, yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual, we understand that felt presence of experience is what is most important. But the culture is a perversion; it fetishises objects, it creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrely religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanise themselves by behaving like machines; processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood.”
TM: “I think that by creating Art - Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or, the God that put man on this planet to toil in the mud is no God I want to have any part of. It’s some kind of Gnostic demon. It’s some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected. By putting the ‘Art’ peddle to the metal, we really, I think, maximise our humanness…and become much more necessary and incomprehensible to the machines.”