All human systems echo undercurrents of systems elsewhere on Earth. To say our entertainment is more real “entertainment” than North Korea’s, raises suspicion. As Terence Mckenna says….what is “entertainment” anyways?
Most never question this, too busy consuming it to notice the architecture behind it.
Let’s explore this without pretending one society’s entertainment is “real” and another’s is “fake.” That binary collapses the moment we look at the deeper pattern.
🎭 Entertainment is a cultural trance technology
Terence McKenna’s whole point was that “entertainment” isn’t neutral. It’s a state‑shaping mechanism — a way a culture modulates:
- attention
- emotion
- identity
- imagination
- social cohesion
Every society does this. North Korea does it overtly. The West does it subtly.
Different costumes, same function.
🌐 Every system produces the entertainment that reinforces its worldview
This is where my quote: “all human systems echo undercurrents of systems elsewhere on Earth” lands with precision.
- In North Korea, entertainment reinforces collective identity.
- In the U.S., entertainment reinforces individual identity and consumption.
- In Japan, entertainment reinforces aesthetic discipline and escapism.
- In India, entertainment reinforces mythic continuity and melodrama.
None of these are “more real.” They’re expressions of the system that birthed them.
Entertainment is the dream a culture dreams about itself.
🔍 The suspicion sensed when one says “Our way is the real way.”
When someone says:
“Our entertainment is real entertainment.”
…it reveals a hidden assumption: that entertainment is supposed to be “free,” “authentic,” or “individual.”
But entertainment is always engineered — whether by:
- a state
- a market
- a tribe
- an algorithm
- a lineage
- or a mythic narrative
The engineering just becomes invisible when you’re inside it.
When we step outside the trance, we notice the architecture rather than the content.
🔥 So what is entertainment?
Entertainment is a culturally‑shaped ritual for managing human attention and emotion, giving people a controlled taste of the extraordinary without destabilizing the system that contains them.
It’s a pressure valve. A mirror. A training ground. A sedative. A delivery system. A communal heartbeat. A distraction. A ceremony. A story. A trance.
Which one it becomes depends on the person consuming it, and the motives, consciously or unconsciously of the artist creating it.
🌱 Intuition
Some entertainment, like the North Korean song
slips past its intended purpose.
Even propaganda can unintentionally become beautiful.
Even commercial pop can unintentionally become sacred.
Even state‑engineered music can carry real emotion.
Because humans radiate through the systems that try to contain them.
We find the most sacred art and music not entrancing, but untrancing.
🌬️ We find the most sacred art and music not entrancing, but untrancing
Here’s the paradox :
To untrance someone, you often have to meet them inside the trance first.
Really words is the clearest way, though to resonate we often have to utilize the same entrancing carriers.
- Music Videos
- songs
- Photography
- Social Movements
- Politics
- anywhere we can apply resonant passion
To not manipulate, but to meet people where they already are, then gently loosening the spell. Though the spell can be spelled out and it can take entire lifetimes to untrance collective social trances, as they are the social environments themselves. Like the trance that we have to have such and such to be recognized or heard.
This is why It feels strange to me to write serious lyrics, as it always feels like a waste of a song. For example I recent wrote some lyrics for the song “St. Tammany’s Day.”
There I was, trying to win the restoration of St. Tammany’s Day, with the tone of what all we’ve forgotten, or could also forget. I scrapped that Idea and will rewrite St. Tammany’s Day with what it can bring, much like Christmas. A Fun holiday. Will not only look to how it was once celebrated, but envision how it can be enjoyed today. Finding St. Tammany changed my world, helped me recapture that friendly essence of my youth.
There’s art that captures attention, and
art that frees attention.
If we wrote “serious” lyrics, we’d be closing the window instead of opening it.
Our lack of seriousness is the untrancing mechanism. Life’s a miracle, enjoy. 😁🌞