Wetiko: The Psychosis Eating The World Alive
The predicaments we face today have much deeper roots than what could be explained away with ‘capitalism bad’ or ‘fossil fuels bad’. We adopted a deeply flawed way of thinking, globally. More than anything else, we thus need a shift away from this damaged mindset, not a material energy transition into oblivion.
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As British psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist, explained so eloquently our brain’s left hemisphere — responsible for “rational” modes of thinking — went into overdrive, turning our societies upside down and inside out. Waging war on life itself and over-complicating how we do things from science to everyday life, it has turned the world it sought to govern into a Kafkaesque nightmare. Driven by the brain’s left hemisphere’s thirst for abstraction, everything in our infinitely complex, living and animated world has been slowly turned into a set of inanimate polygons, signs, trend-lines and numbers. A static map, which our “civilized” minds now increasingly confuse with reality. A dead, dreary world devoid of mystery, meaning and context, but full of exploitation, debt and obligations to the corporate masters ruling it all. If you ever sought a psychiatric explanation to The End of Reason—or why the Enlightenment ended up destroying itself—look no further for an answer. Is it any wonder then that people try to escape it by indulging in shopping, social media, computer games, drinking or other forms of substance use…? Or that said substances are made increasingly legal to facilitate the process? Something is clearly amiss with our societies — especially in the West.
The history of this process goes much deeper than you would expect, though. Setting off these chain of events was the establishment of commodity markets in ancient Mesopotamia, somewhere between 4500 BC and 4000 BC. Sumerians used clay writing tablets to represent the amount of goods (the number of goats or bushels of wheat, for example) to be delivered, in lieu of presenting the actual merchandise itself. (These promises of a time and date of delivery eerily resembled what us, “modern” humans, would call a “futures contract” six millennia later.) The important thing to grasp here was the act of abstraction — ripping a living breathing interconnected being out of its context. By deliberately forgetting about its qualities, its origin, its history, the way it was grown, the place it belonged to etc.—just in order to ease trade and to keep records—an infinitely complex living creature was replaced with a few symbols on a clay tablet. The goat, the bushel of grain, or the sack of flour has thus been turned into mere numbers with no smell, taste or any emotion attached to it. Just as the left hemisphere likes to think of things: simplified, inanimate, abstract.
Fast forward into the 15th century AD, to the early days of colonization. As we have seen above creating and trading with commodities was already a well established practice in medieval Europe; even banks and financing were parts of Western culture since at least the Assyrians. Yet progress was slow, at least until the discovery of the Americas. With the onset of colonization goods (commodities) have started to flow into Europe like never before, and the process of abstraction helped to hide all the pain and suffering caused by harvesting them. The blood and tears staining Aztec jewelry was purposefully washed away, as the intricate pieces of metalwork were melted and shaped into uniform gold coins and ingots. The sweat and labor of slaves working on plantations were erased from memory as soon as the sugar and cotton they produced was poured into uniform sacks. Just like in Babylon six millennia before, everything robbed and extracted from the “New World” has been turned into neat little units of goods bereft of any prior history.
The same process of forced separation and destruction of context unfolded during the creation of plantations themselves. Plant species, such as sugarcane, were uprooted from their original habitats, together with slaves of African origin, and were placed into a sterilized environment stripped from their original inhabitants. There, they had no choice but to perform their task or perish: deliver profits to their “owners” at minimal investment costs. The same process was repeated time after time: exploration, the killing of inhabitants on the land, establishing a plantation or extracting a finite reserve of minerals, then moving on to the next great opportunity. Discover, destroy, replace, repeat. As one would expect, such a “successful” recipe couldn’t result in anything but exponential growth. It was just way too profitable to keep on plundering the planet, depleting one finite or fragile natural resource after the other. Land. Coal. Oil. Copper. Lithium. Limits be damned.
Colonization would have been impossible without entering a rapacious state of mind. Should the arriving conquistadors had a more wholesome way of thinking—making them capable to see themselves as integral parts of a much bigger whole , the web of life — it would have been impossible for them to wreak such havoc on the Americas. The civilizational psychosis they developed and brought along, called ‘wetiko’ (an evil cannibalistic spirit) by indigenous folks, however, has made them oblivious to their own madness. As Paul Levy, author of Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World put so succinctly:
“Wetiko is a cannibalizing force driven by insatiable greed, appetite without satisfaction, consumption as an end in itself, and war for its own sake, against other tribes, species, and nature, and even against the individual’s own humanity.”
This mental illness made the conquistadors and the following generations of capitalist entrepreneurs look at the world through a lens of separation and otherness, compelling them to act even against their own best interests. It was not themselves they were hurting, after all, but the “others”: the unruly savages, who did not “deserve” the bounty they possessed, or lifeless mountains and rivers—seen as mere resources to be “developed.”1 It shouldn’t come as a surprise then, that in such a mental state everything was reduced to a commodity or a resource to be extracted then discarded. Wood. Grain. Gold. Even humans themselves… (And if that reminds you how corporate CEO-s think nowadays, then you are not entirely off the mark.) In this system “human resources”, raw materials, inputs and outputs, revenues and profit all lost their original meaning. All what mattered in the end were the numbers on a sheet of paper. This way of thinking has predictably resulted in a tilted mental balance: a state in which one was unable to weigh the consequences of his deeds, or feel compassion to his victims. Using McGilchrist’s terminology, for such an increasingly delusional, left hemisphere dominated mind everything was turned into an inanimate object: be it a beautiful 5000 year old tree, or a rich indigenous culture. An obstacle standing in-between the selfish individual and the reward. Wetiko thus should not be treated as just another superstitious belief but as a very much real psychiatric condition, driven by the over-reliance on just one of the two hemisphere’s of the brain.
In fact, wetiko has become so widespread and its roots went so deep in our culture (dating back to at least 4000 BCE in Mesopotamia), that it now goes largely undetected. The ‘evil cannibalistic spirit’ has been with us since the dawn of civilization. It has appeared in many sacred texts, and warnings were aplenty of the dangers it meant to society. It has appeared then was forgotten as civilizations rose and collapsed. There were even lengthy periods, covering the lifetime of entire cultures (like that of Çatalhöyük), where there was no archeological evidence for exploitation, central governments, war and all what comes with it. Even the ‘Dark Ages’ weren’t as dark as we thought. These times, however, were erased from memory, especially during the recent outbreak of the mind-virus, fostered by the discovery of the Americas. Over the past half-millennia this over-abstracting, alienating and ultimately self-destructing behavior has become the norm. We have become fully indoctrinated to treat it as such and only now, at the tail end of the Colombian age, have we realized how deeply infected as a society we had become. It is only now that at least some of us register — after many warnings given by indigenous speakers — that this mindset is indeed destroying the world. Wetiko has made us blind to the futility of the entire human enterprise, together with the systemic feedback loops it set off in the background.
Yet, it was this distorted worldview which gave birth to modern, Cartesian science. By separating objects then trying to describe the “laws” these objects obey, we made some pretty remarkable discoveries. Think: Newton and his laws of motion or Einstein and his theory of relativity. Consequently every bit of information was placed into a neat box of knowledge, labelled then stored in a vast, dusty warehouse of objects. The deeper we went, however , ultimately splitting protons and neutrons to their constituent quarks and gluons , everything started to lose meaning. Now, we have reached a point where not even physicists can tell for sure what matter actually is. This is how we ended up destroying not only the natural world which supported us so far, but the very meaning of life itself.
Rationalism, as Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser observed, proved to be an evolutionary digression with fatal consequences. In our quest for reason we repressed all other mental structures, which we viewed as irrational and hence dispensable. Magic, myth, religion, feeling, empathy, and not least ego-transcendence were all tossed aside in favor of an all consuming mindless search for profits and personal gain. Compered to the hundreds of thousands of years we spent as hunter-gatherers, feeling every bit as inseparable from and responsible for the rest of the world as every other being, it took us a little more than six millennia till we got from first level abstractions (clay tablets representing a herd of goats) to a globalized world economy threatening to upend our entire existence with nuclear war, runaway climate change, or simply by consuming all available resources then leaving a desolate wasteland behind. Our mental constructs took a life of their own and now threaten the life of all beings on this planet. What started as a market, quickly led to further abstractions (such as money, laws or property rights), then abstractions of abstractions (stocks, bonds, derivatives). We have found ourselves, as a result, on a map not even vaguely resembling the terrain, devoid of complexity or interdependencies, let alone nuisances like species extinction, resource depletion, accumulating pollution and ecosystem degradation.
“Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.” — Tom Toro
Yet, just because our ruling caste confuses the map (based on GDP and other artifices) with the terrain, reality will not give a damn. We should not be surprised then, that the system we have built over the centuries has eventually started to turn on its own population, as its resource base and energy supply waned. There is nothing personal in this: numbers are numbers and they have to be delivered—at all costs. You see, as long as everything, from raw material to cheap labor, could have been extracted far away from the “bastions of democracy” at a decent profit, people at home were allowed to be free. As resources began to grow thinner and thinner, yielding less and less profit, however, the system driven by the ‘evil cannibalistic spirit’ started to show its real face. Modern “democracies” across the planet have, as a result, begun to morph into soft and inverted totalitarian states: a political arrangement in which corporations exert a subtle but increasingly substantial power over the system, while maintaining a facade of a democracy. Think: corporate CEOs and billionaires nominated to government roles, campaign donors writing laws, politicians ending up in cushy jobs in a corporate funded think tank or among their board of managers. A complete take-over of the media and the civic discourse. Shutting down dissent and labeling everything but the mainstream narrative dangerous “misinformation”.
Freedom and democracy proved to be nothing but a brief anomaly in this inherently inhumane system arching back to the emergence of the first empires.
This is how the circle of destruction becomes full. The snake bites its own tail. With the age of Columbus approaching its logical conclusion, and as we burn through the last remaining resources of the planet, the cannibalizing force finally turns against modern societies it helped to create. Now, that it increasingly becomes clear that there is no way around fossil fuels—especially when it comes to maintaining a high-consumption lifestyle—and that global economic growth might indeed be over, the race is now on to decide who controls the last batch of metals and fossil fuels on Earth. And if we can’t continue with consumption, as remaining resources prove increasingly harder to get, then we might as well wage war just for its own sake. Wetiko was never about wisdom or foresight.
It is only by rediscovering right hemisphere thinking, and by reinstating it as the ‘master,’ can we survive the coming centuries as a species. We must strive to grasp the world in its entirety, context, and interconnectedness—instead of viewing it as a set of separate, inanimate objects. We need compassion and empathy, as well as a holistic approach to our way of doing things more than ever. Magic, myth, religion, awe and wonder must be restored so that we can become an integral whole again. With that said, I don’t harbor illusions: this civilization has already grown too big, too fast — obeying the maximum power principle — and now it’s approaching (and surpassing) its natural apex by its sheer momentum. In other words: it cannot be saved. Large civilizations, don’t crash and burn in a day, though. They go through a multiple decade-long decline, a chaotic era fraught with all kinds of peril. It’s an ignominious end, I know, but if we manage to traverse along this long, winding road back to a much simpler life without setting the nuclear demons free, those coming out on the other side of the bottleneck might get another chance to start anew. This time, perhaps, without wetiko.
Until next time,
B
Thank you for reading The Honest Sorcerer. If you value this article or any others please share and consider a subscription, or perhaps buying a virtual coffee. At the same time allow me to express my eternal gratitude to those who already support my work — without you this site could not exist.
It’s no wonder then that colonizing nations and their allies were responsible for 92% of the world’s excess carbon dioxide emissions and 74% of excess material use so far. However, with China following the same destructive model of extraction and “value creation”, wetiko will likely continue to thrive as long as resources last.
Let's call forth the Myth of the Wendigo.
"Wendigo" is a far more common usage in general English and modern popular culture, while "wetiko" is a specific cognate used within academic or social commentary contexts. Here in the northern heartland, our Anishinaabe neighbors share with us the Myth of the Wendigo. You should NOT have selected the abstract, academic term - it's left brained, like my definitions below.
"Wendigo is common in general English, horror fiction, films, TV, and internet folklore, referring to the mythological creature, often depicted in popular culture as an antlered, cannibalistic monster (a modern invention and not traditionally accurate). The term also lends its name to the disputed medical term "Wendigo psychosis".
Wetiko is less common in general use. Primarily used within Cree, Anishinabek, and other Algonquian-speaking communities and by authors or academics discussing the concept's original cultural meaning as a "mind-virus" or spiritual sickness embodying insatiable greed and excess."
You selected a term which is technically more correct, but now with a totally abstract, academic usage. You needed to call forth the myth. A reading of Harari's Sapiens leads to the obvious conclusion: Intersubjective Realties are catalyzed by MYTH, not by abstractions. Therefore, we need better myths. Never use an academic abstraction when there is a mythological term available in common usage. Academically, the term is "Wendigo psychosis", NOT Wetiko psychosis.
By the way, as I understand the myths of my Anishinaabe neighbors, "Wendigo psychosis" is an accurate metaphor for the behavior of western Oligarchs, in both the boardroom and in politics, as well as media. Consumerism has infected a large portion of people in modern societies with a more passive version of this mind virus that makes them willing victims as they scramble for more useless things that distract them from the emptiness of their lives.
People don't recover from a mind virus by hearing an academic, left-brained, discourse. They recover if they can envision a powerful myth that bathes the dark virus in clarifying light. While anthropologically incorrect, the vision of a dark, antlered, cannibalistic monster whose greed devours the people around them is likely to be effective in evoking resistance.
To all the readers here -- when you have a choice, evoke the powerful myth; avoid the dry, academic discourse.
I would argue weitiko began long before agriculture or European expansion to the Americas. All expansions of humans into new places led to massive extirpations and extinctions of species, especially the megafauna. Before European expansion, we had the Mongol Empire, the Han Dynasty, The Bantu migrations, Polynesian expansion (leading to the extinction of thousands of species!), the Ottoman Empire, and more, all colonizers. Taking land from other species and other humans is something we've been doing a VERY long time. As Lyle Lewis has argued, what changed the game was developing the spear and a shoulder to throw it with. Add control of fire to that, and bam. We take over the world, and relatively fast (geologically speaking).