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Title: Seeing Wetiko Author: Alnoor Ladha, Martin Kirk Date: 2016 Language: en Topics: anti-capitalism Source: https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/seeing-wetiko-on-capitalism-mind-viruses-and-antidotes-for-a-world-in-transition/
Itâs delicate confronting these priests of the golden bull
They preach from the pulpit of the bottom line
Their minds rustle with million dollar bills
You say Silver burns a hole in your pocket
And Gold burns a hole in your soul
Well, uranium burns a hole in forever
It just gets out of control.
â Buffy Sainte-Marie, âThe Priests of the Golden Bullâ1
What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of
extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation,
the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism we see all around us have
roots in a mass psychological infection? What if we went on to say that
this infection is not just highly communicable but also
self-replicating, according to the laws of cultural evolution, and that
it remains so clandestine in our psyches that most hosts will, as a
condition of their infected state, vehemently deny that they are
infected? What if we then told you that this âmind virusâ can be
described as a form of cannibalism. Yes, cannibalism. Not necessarily in
the literal flesh-eating sense but rather the idea of consuming others â
human and non-human â as a means of securing personal wealth and
supremacy.
You may dismiss this line of thinking as New Age woo-woo or, worse, a
leftist conspiracy theory. But this approach of viewing the transmission
of ideas as a key determinant of the emergent reality is increasingly
validated by various branches of science, including evolutionary theory,
quantum physics, cognitive linguistics, and epigenetics.
The history of this infection is long, strange, and dark. But it leads
to hope.
The New World fell not to a sword but to a meme.
â Daniel Quinn2
One of the most well-accepted scientific theories that helps explain the
power of idea-spreading is memetics.
Memes are to culture what genes are to biology: the base unit of
evolution. The term was originally coined by the evolutionary biologist
Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins writes, âI
think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged ... It is still
drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is
achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene
panting far behind.â He goes on, âExamples of memes are tunes, ideas,
catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building
arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping
from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in
the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain, via a process which, in
the broad sense, can be called imitation.â3
One of the high priests of rationalism, the scientific method, and
atheism, is also the father of the meme of âmemes.â However, like all
memes or ideas, there can be no ownership in a traditional sense, only
the entanglement that quantum physics reminds us characterizes our
intra-actions.4
Of course, similar notions of how ideas move between us have been around
in Western traditions for centuries. Plato was the first to fully
articulate this through his Theory of Forms, which argues that
non-physical forms â i.e. ideas â represent the perfect reality from
which material reality is derived.
Modern articulations of the Theory of Forms can be seen in Pierre
Teilhard de Chardinâs idea of the Noosphere (the sphere of human
thought) and Carl Jungâs Collective Unconscious, where structures of the
unconscious are shared among beings of the same species. For Jung, the
idea of the marauding cannibal would first be an archetype that
manifests in the material world through the actions of those who channel
or embody it.
For those who prefer their science more empirical, the growing field of
epigenetics provides some intellectual concrete. Epigenetics studies
changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather
than any physical alteration of the gene itself. In other words, how
traits vary from generation to generation is not solely a question of
material biology but is partly determined by environmental and
contextual factors that affected our ancestors and then are triggered
within our genetic sequence through activation events in our life.5
We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills,
and the winding streams with tangled growth as âwild.â Only to the White
man was nature a âwildernessâ and only to him was the land infested by
âwildâ animals and âsavageâ people. To us it was tame. Earth was
bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great
Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal
frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it âwildâ
for us.
â Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle6
Many spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, Sufism (the mystical
branch of Islam), Taoism, Gnosticism, as well as many Indigenous
cultures, have long understood the mind-based nature of creation. These
worldviews have at their core a recognition of the power of
thought-forms to determine the course of physical events.
Various First Nation traditions of North America have specific and long
established lore relating to cannibalism and a term for the thought-form
that causes it: wetiko. We believe understanding this idea offers a
powerful way of understanding the deepest roots of our current global
polycrisis.
Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by
greed, excess, and selfish consumption (in Ojibwa it is windigo, wintiko
in Powhatan). It deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the
life-force of others (others in the broad sense, including animals and
other forms of Gaian life) is a logical and morally upright way to live.
Wetiko short-circuits the individualâs ability to see itself as an
enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment and raises
the self-serving ego to supremacy. It is this false separation of self
from nature that makes this cannibalism, rather than simple murder. It
allows â indeed commands â the infected entity to consume far more than
it needs in a blind, murderous daze of self-aggrandizement. Author Paul
Levy, in an attempt to find language accessible for Western audiences,
describes it as âmalignant egophreniaâ â the ego unchained from reason
and limits, acting with the malevolent logic of the cancer cell. We will
use the term wetiko as it is the original term, and reminds us of the
wisdom of Indigenous cultures, for those who have the ears to hear.
Wetiko can describe both the infection and the body infected; a person
can be infected by wetiko or, in cases where the infection is very
advanced, they can personify the disease: âa wetiko.â This holds true
for cultures and systems; all can be described as being wetiko if they
routinely manifest these traits.
In his now classic book Columbus and Other Cannibals, Native American
scholar and historian Jack D. Forbes describes how there was a
commonly-held belief among many Indigenous communities that the European
colonialists were so chronically and uniformly infected with wetiko that
it must be a defining characteristic of the culture from which they
came. Examining the history of these cultures, Forbes laments,
âTragically, the history of the world for the past 2,000 years is, in
great part, the story of the epidemiology of the wetiko disease.â7
We would presumably all agree that the behavior of the European
colonialists in North America can be described as cannibalistic. Their
drive for conquest and material accumulation was a violent act of
consumption. The engine of the invading culture sucked in the lives and
resources of millions of humans and other animals, and turned them into
wealth and power for themselves. The figures are still disputed, but it
is safe to place the numbers of humans killed in the âfounding of the
New Worldâ at tens of millions. It was certainly one of the most brutal
genocides in history. And the impact on more-than-human life was equally
vast. These heinous acts were enacted with a moral certainty
rationalizing the destruction in the name of âprogressâ and
âcivilization.â
This framing belies the extent of the wetiko infection in the invader
culture. So blinded were they by self-referential ambition that they
could not see other life as being as important as their own. They could
not see past ideological blinders to the intrinsic value of life or the
interdependent nature of all things, despite this being the dominant
perspective of the Indigenous populations they encountered. Their
ability to see and know in ways different from their own was, it seems,
amputated.
This is not an anti-European rant. This is the description of a disease
whose vector was determined by deep patterns of history, including those
that empowered Europeans in their drive for âglobal explorationâ as
certain technologies emerged.
The wetiko meme has almost certainly existed in individuals since the
dawn of humanity. It is, after all, a sickness that lives through and is
born from the human psyche. But the origin of wetiko cultures is more
identifiable.
Memes can spread at the speed of thought, but it requires generations to
change the core characteristics of a culture. What we can say is that
the fingerprints of wetiko-like beliefs can be traced at least as far
back as the Neolithic revolution, when humans in the Fertile Crescent
first learned to dominate their environment by what author Daniel Quinn
calls âtotalitarian agricultureâ â i.e., settled agricultural practices
that produce more food than is strictly needed for the population, and
that see the destruction of any living entity that gets in the way of
that (over-)production â be it other humans, âpestsâ or the natural
environment â as not only legitimate but moral.
This early form of wetiko-logic received an amplifying power of
indescribable magnitude with the arrival of Christianity. âLet us make
mankind ... rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over
the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that
move along the ground,â said an authority no less than God in Genesis
1:26. After 8,000 years of totalitarian agriculture spreading slowly
across the region, it is perhaps not surprising that the logic finds
voice in the holy texts that emerged there. It was driven across Europe
at the point of Roman swords in the two hundred years after Christâs
death. It is no coincidence that, in order for Christianity to become
dominant, the existing pagan belief-system, with its understanding of
humanityâs place within rather than above nature, had to be all but
annihilated.8
The point is that the epidemiology of wetiko has left clear indicators
of its lineage. And although it cannot be pathologized along geographic
or racial lines, the cultural strain we know today certainly has many of
its deepest roots in Europe. It was, after all, European projects â from
the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution, to colonialism,
imperialism, and slavery â that developed the technology that opened up
the channels that facilitated the spread of wetiko culture all around
the world. In this way, we are all heirs and inheritors of wetiko.
We are all host carriers of wetiko now.
I donât know who discovered water, but I can tell you it wasnât a fish.
â Attributed to Marshall McCluhan
When Western anthropologists first started to study wetiko, they
believed it to be only a disease of the individual and a literal form of
flesh-eating cannibalism.9 On both counts, as discussed, their
understanding was, if not wrong, certainly limited. They did, however,
accurately isolate two traits that are relevant for thinking about
culture: (1) the initial act, even when driven by necessity, creates a
residual, unnatural desire for more cannibalism; and (2) the host
carrier, which they called the victim, ended up with an âicy heartâ â
i.e., their ability for empathy and compassion was amputated.
The reader can probably sense from these two traits the wetiko nature of
modern capitalism. Its insatiable hunger for finite resources; its
disregard for the pain of groups and cultures it consumes; its belief in
consumption as savior; its overriding obsession with its own material
growth; and its viral spread across the surface of the planet. It is
wholly accurate to describe neoliberal capitalism as the primary
cannibalizing force of life on this planet. It is not the only truth â
capitalism has also facilitated an explosion of human life and ingenuity
â but when taken as a whole, capitalism is certainly eating through the
life-force of this planet in service of its own growth.
Of course, capitalism is a human conception and so we can also say that
we are phenomenal hosts of the wetiko mind virus. To understand what
makes us such, it is useful to consider a couple of the traits that
guide the evolution of human cultures.
We have decades of evidence from social science describing just what
highly contextual beings we are. Almost all aspects of our behavior,
including our moral judgments and limits, are significantly shaped in
response to the cultural signifiers that surround us. The Good Samaritan
studies, for example, show that even when people are primed with the
idea of altruism, they will walk by others in need when they are in a
rush or some other contextual variable changes.10 And the infamous
Stanley Milgram experiments show how a large majority of people are
capable of shocking another human to a point they know can cause death
simply because an authority figure in a white lab coat insists they do
so.11
We really are products of our environment, and so it should be taken as
inevitable that those who live in a wetiko culture will manifest, to one
degree or other, wetiko beliefs and behaviors.
Looking through the broader contextual lens, we must also account for
the self-perpetuating nature of complex systems. Any living network that
becomes sufficiently complex will become self-organizing, and from that
point on will demonstrate an instinct to survive. In practical terms,
this means that it will distribute its resources to support behavior
that best mimics its own logic and ensures its survival.12
In other words, any system that is sufficiently infected by wetiko logic
will reward cannibalistic behavior. Or, in Jack Forbesâ evocative
language, âThose who squirm upwards [in a wetiko system] are, or become,
wetiko, and they only perpetuate the system of corruption or oppression.
Thus the communist leaders in the Soviet Union under Stalin were at
least as vicious, deceitful and exploitative as their czarist
predecessors. They obtained âpowerâ without changing their wetiko
culture.â13
This ensures that the essential logic of cultures spreads down through
generations as well as across them. And it explains why power-elites
self-organize resources to maintain a high degree of continuity in
distributions of power, when those distributions efficiently serve their
survival and growth. When this continuity is interrupted or broken,
revolutions occur and the system is put under threat.
However, as the above quote suggests, the disruption must happen at the
right level. Merely trading one wetiko for another at the top of an
otherwise unchanged wetiko infrastructure (as in the case of Stalin
replacing the czars or, more contemporarily, Trump replacing Obama) is
largely pointless. At best, it might result in the softening of the
cruelest edges of a wetiko machine. At worse, it does nothing except
distract us from seeing the true infection.
The question, then, for anyone interested in excising the wetiko
infection from a culture is, where does it live within the host body? In
one respect, because it is a psychic phenomenon that lives in
potentiality in all of us, it is non-local. But this, though ultimately
important to understand, is not the whole truth. It is also true that
there is a conceptual place where the most powerful wetiko logic is
held, and that, at least in theory, makes it vulnerable.
In the same way that a colony of bees will instinctively house its queen
in the deepest chambers of the hive, so a complex adaptive system buries
its most important operating logic furthest from the forces that can
challenge them. This means two things: first, it means embedding the
logic in the deep rules that govern the whole. Not just this national
economy or that, this government or that, but the mother system â the
global operating system. And second, it means making these rules feel as
intractable and inevitable as possible.
So what is this deep logic of the global operating system?
It comes in two parts. First, there is the ultimate purpose, which we
might call the Prime Directive, which is simply to increase capital, as
the term capitalism would imply.
We often dress this up in a narrative that says capital generation is
not the end but the means, the engine of progress. This makes the idea
of dethroning it feel dangerous and even contrary to common sense. But
the truth is, we have created a system that artificially treats money as
sacred. At this point in capitalismâs history, life is controlled by
capital, more than it controls the forces of capital. If you need
further proof, look no further than how we define and measure progress:
GDP. More on that below.
Then, there is the logic for how we, the living components of this
system, should behave, which we would summarize with the following
epithet:
Selfishness is rational and rationality is everything; therefore
selfishness is everything.14
This dictates that if we all prioritize ourselves and maximize our own
material wealth, an invisible hand (ah, what a seductive meme!) will
create an equilibrium state and life everywhere will be made better. We
are pitted against each other in a form of distributed fascism where we
cocoon ourselves in the immediate problems of our own circumstances and
consume what we can. We then couch this behavior in the benign language
of family matters, national interests, job creation, GDP growth, and
other upstanding endeavors.
Put these two parts of the puzzle together and itâs easy to see why the
banker who generates excess capital receives vast rewards and is
labelled productive and successful, almost regardless of the damage s/he
causes. Those who are less successful at producing excess capital,
meanwhile, are rewarded far less, regardless of the life-affirming good
they may be doing. Nurses, mothers, teachers, journalists, activists,
scientists â all receive far less reward because they are less efficient
at obeying the Prime Directive and may even be countermanding the
operating principle of self-interest. And as for those who are actually
poor â well, they are effortlessly labelled not just as practical but
also moral failures.
This capital expansion infection is so far advanced precisely because
the system requires exponential capital growth. The World Bank tells us
that we have to grow the global economy by at least 3 percent per year
to avoid recession.15 Letâs think about what this means. Global GDP in
2014 (the last full year of data) was roughly USD $78 trillion.16 We
grew that pie by 2.4% in 2015, which resulted in the commodification and
subsequent consumption of roughly another $2 trillion in human labor and
natural resources. Thatâs roughly the size of the entire global economy
in 1970. It took us from the dawn of civilization to 1970 to reach $2
trillion in global GDP, and now we need that just in the differential so
the entire house of cards doesnât crumble. In order to achieve this rate
of growth year-on-year, we are destroying our planet, ensuring mass
species extinction, and displacing millions of our brothers and sisters
(who we commonly refer to as âpoor peopleâ) from around the world.
So when people tell us that the market knows best, or technology will
save us, or philanthrocapitalism will redistribute opportunities (pace
Bill Gates), we have to understand that all of these seemingly common
sense truisms are embedded in a broader operating system, a wetikonomy.
And the more they are presented as unchangeable, the more often weâre
told, âthere is no alternative,â the more we should question. There is
actually a beautiful irony in the fact that, when we know what weâre up
against, such statements are our signposts for where to look to create
change.
It is not that we are against markets, technology, or philanthropy â
they can all be wonderful, in the right context â but we are against how
they are being used as alibis to excuse the insanity of the wetiko
paradigm that they are inseparable from. We are reminded of Jack Forbesâ
heavy words; âIt is not logical to allow the wetikos to carry out their
evil acts and then to accept their assessment of the nature of human
life. For after all, the wetiko possess a bias created by their own evil
lives, by their own amoral or immoral behavior. And too, if I am
correct, they were, and are, also insane.â17
Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate â just like genes
replicate, and infect, and move into the organism of society. And,
believing as I do, that society operates on a kind of biological
economy, then I believe these memes are the key to societal evolution.
But unless the memes are released to play the game, there is no
progress.
â Terrence McKenna, Memes, Drugs and Community18
You might just be a black Bill Gates in the making.
â BeyoncĂ©, Formation19
A key lesson of meme theory is that when we are conscious of the memetic
viruses we are less likely to adhere to them blindly. Conscious
awareness is like sunlight through the cracks of a window.
Thus, one of the starting points for healing is the simple act of seeing
wetiko in ourselves, in others, and in our cultural infrastructure. And
once we see, we can name, which is critical because words and language
are a central battleground. To quote McKenna again: âThe world is not
made of quarks, electromagnetic wave packets, or the thoughts of God.
The world is made of language. Earth is a place where language has
literally become alive. Language has invested matter; it is replicating
and defining and building itself. And it is in us.â20
His last line is critical for exploring our own agency in the
replication of wetiko. We are all entangled in the unfolding of reality
that is happening both to and through us. In place of traditional
certainties and linear cause-and-effect logic, we can recast ourselves
âas spontaneously responsive, moving, embodied living beings â within a
reality of continuously intermingling, flowing lines or strands of
unfolding, agential activity, in which nothing (no thing) exists in
separation from anything else, a reality within which we are immersed
both as participant agencies and to which we also owe significant
aspects of our own natures.â21
If wetiko exists, it is because it exists within us. It is also
entangled with the broader superstructure, relationships, and choice
architecture that we are confronted with within a neoliberal system on
the brink of collapse.
Forbes reminds us that we cannot fight wetiko in any traditional sense:
âOne of the tragic characteristics of the wetiko psychosis is that it
spreads partly by resistance to it. That is, those who try to fight
wetiko sometimes, in order to survive, adopt wetiko values. Thus, when
they win, they lose.â22 As such, reform-based initiatives, from the
sharing economy to micro-lending, have succumbed to the co-optation and
retaliation of wetiko capitalism.
However, once we are in the mode of seeing wetiko, we can hack the
cultural systems that perpetuate its logic. It is not difficult to
figure out where to start. Following the money usually leads us to the
core pillars of wetiko machinery. Those of us that are within these
structures, from the corporate media to philanthropy to banking to the
UN, have access to the heart of the wetiko monster. It is up to you what
you will do with that privilege.
For those of us on the outside, we can organize our lives in radically
new ways to undermine wetiko structures. For example, the simple act of
gifting undermines the neoliberal logic of commodification and
extraction. Using alternative currencies undermines the debtâbased money
system. De-schooling and alternative education models can help
decolonize and de-wetikoize the mind. Helping to create alternative
communities outside the capitalist system supports the infrastructure
for transition. And direct activism such as debt resistance can weaken
the wetiko virus, if done with the right intention and state of
consciousness.
By contracting new relationships with others, with Nature, and with
ourselves, we can build a new complex of entanglements and thought-forms
that are fused with post-wetiko, post-capitalist values.
We have to simultaneously go within ourselves and the deep recesses of
our own psyches while changing the structure of the system around us.
Holding a structural perspective and an unapologetic critique of modern
capitalism â i.e. holding a constellational worldview that sees all
oppression as connected â serves our ability to see and live the
alternatives.
Plato believed that ideas are the âeyes of the soul.â Now that the veils
obscuring wetiko are starting to be lifted, let us give birth to, and
become, living antigens, embracing the polyculture of ideas that are
challenging the monoculture of wetiko capitalism. Let us be pollinators
of new memetic hives built on altruism, empathy, inter-connectedness,
reverence, communality, and solidarity, defying the subject-object
dualities of Cartesian/Newtonian/Enlightenment logic. Let us reclaim our
birthright as sovereign entities, free of deluded beliefs in market
systems, invisible hands, righteous greed, chosen ones, branded
paraphernalia, techno-utopianism and even the self-salvation of the New
Age. Let us dance with thought-forms through a deeper understanding of
ethics, knowing, and being,23 and the intimate awareness that our
individual minds and bodies are a part of the collective battleground
for the soul of humanity, and indeed, life on this planet. And let us
re-embrace the ancient futures of our Indigenous ancestors that
represent the only continuous line of living in symbiosis with Mother
Nature. The dissolution of wetiko will be as much about remembering as
it will be about creation.
Endnotes:
by the Native Canadian singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie from her
1992 album entitled Coincidence and Likely Stories.
Broadway Books (2008), p. 50.
her book, Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007). Barad writes about
intra-action, rather than interaction, to illustrate how entanglement
precedes thingness. In other words, there are no things as such, just
relationships â and these ongoing relational dynamics are co-responsible
for how things emerge.
Holocaust survivors have different stress hormone profiles than those
from otherwise very similar circumstances but whose grandparents did not
suffer through the Holocaust. Rodriguez, T. âDescendants of Holocaust
survivors have altered stress hormones,â Scientific American (March
2015), accessed at:
exploitation, imperialism and terrorism. Seven Stories Press (2008),
p.46.
account of the systematic annihilation of paganism by the new Christian
religion.
1 (Jan., 1933), pp. 20â24: The George Washington University Institute
for Ethnographic Research.
situational and dispositional variables in Helping Behavior.â Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology (1973), Vol. 27, Number 1, pp.
100â108.
.
(2014), Chapter 8.
exploitation, imperialism and terrorism. Seven Stories Press (2008),
p.46.
the authors in a two-part essay entitled âCapitalism is Just a Story and
Other Dangerous Thoughts.â See more at:
.
exploitation, imperialism and terrorism. Seven Stories Press (2008),
p.37.
.
debuted at the 2015 Super Bowl. For a critical analysis, see Dianca
Londonâs article entitled BeyoncĂ©âs capitalism, masquerading as radical
change.
mushrooms, the Amazon, virtual reality, UFOs, evolution, shamanism, the
rebirth of the goddess, and the end of history. Harper Collins (1992).
living relations to our surroundings: Sensing similarities rather than
seeing patternsââ Theory and Psychology, 2014.
exploitation, imperialism and terrorism. Seven Stories Press (2008),
p.61.
as an âonto-ethico-politico-epistemology.â Ontology refers to what is in
the world. Epistemology is about how we know what is in the world. And
ethics is how we should engage in the world. These are not separate, but
emerge materially in an ongoing dynamic. The nature of reality and the
nature of knowledge are entangled â not fixed or final or determinate â
and thus cannot be divorced from power and what we find valuable or
just.