(View videos from the talk here.)

“I’m hopeful to see you all here visioning a different future. A future based on equality, diversity and respect for the land. And I’m excited and I’m hopeful for the impact that you’re having on the world…. And so I say to you today…if you wish to align yourselves with the dispossessed and the marginalized, reject the language and ideology of colonialism, conquest and exploitation.” – Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, January 23, 2012

Not long after protesters set up camp on Wall Street, indigenous activists began to question the use of colonial language to claim spaces that have been under occupation for over 500 years.

The unfortunate response, from some quarters, has been that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) should maintain a “united” front, disregarding the multiple hierarchies within the 99 per cent, as well as the rights and demands of indigenous peoples. Others, however, agree that there is a need to address this fundamental issue.

On Monday, January 23, Occupy Toronto sponsored a panel discussion, “Indigenous Perspectives on the Occupy Movement,” at Beit Zaitoun. The speakers provided a forceful yet constructive critique. They recognized the hopefulness of Occupy’s worldwide repudiation of capitalism, while also calling on activists to rethink the language and strategies of the movement so that it does not reinscribe colonialism by undermining Indigenous struggles. Furthermore, they proposed that a movement that seeks to seriously challenge economic inequality, environmental exploitation and other forms of oppression must stem from a commitment to decolonization.

Following a prayer by Daniel Beaton and a lively introduction by artist Tannis Nielson, the first speaker was writer, scholar and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson of Alderville First Nation. Currently, Simpson is an Adjunct Professor in Indigenous Studies at Trent University and an instructor at the Centre for World Indigenous Knowledge, Athabasca University. She began her talk by establishing a sense of the history of this land and ongoing Indigenous struggles to resist occupation.

For Simpson, her community and her ancestors “occupation” has meant “400 years surviving under a system that has brought countless waves of gendered violence, colonialism, conquest and dispossession.” She noted that Indigenous people make up the longest-standing anti-capitalist social movement on the continent.

Simpson called for a broader conception of resistance, than simply arguing it’s more than just direct action. Given hundreds of years of genocidal practices, survival itself is a form of resistance for Indigenous peoples. Simpson explained:

“Resistance isn’t just direct action and protest, sometimes just surviving is resistance. Sometimes having the will to live is resistance. Building a cultural and political resurgence based on Indigenous values, philosophies and traditions is resistance. Giving birth to and raising our children to know their responsibilities as Indigenous peoples, to have a connection to their homelands, to speak their languages and to tell their stories is resistance.”

It is important that the Occupy movement recognize this history of resistance, so as not to erase Indigenous presence on, and protection of, the land. Simpson ended with a powerful suggestion: “If you want to be really brave and radical, place the concerns and the issues of Indigenous women at the centre of your de-occupation.”

The second speaker was Clayton Thomas-Muller of the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, also known as Pukatawagan, in Northern Manitoba. Thomas-Muller is an Indigenous rights and environmental justice activist. Among the many hats he wears, he is the Tar Sands Campaign Director for the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and was named “Climate Hero 2009″ by Yes Magazine.

Thomas-Muller urged Occupy activists to acknowledge and educate themselves about local and transnational grassroots activism to avoid sacrificing existing social organizations. To make his point, he told the audience about where he was when news of OWS emerged. He was attending the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance Congress in Raleigh, North Carolina. This alliance is a network of 86 Indigenous and people of colour social justice organizations from across the United States. Their platform for 2012 is: “No war. No warming. Build a people’s economy!” As news of OWS grew, people at the Congress were shocked that none of them — important activists from all over North America — were in the loop about this pivotal event. They asked themselves, “Why aren’t we there?”

For Thomas-Muller, this pointed to a major problem with the Occupy movement. Many of the young, white, middle-class occupiers lack a sense of history and accountability. While his own organization takes direction from, and answers to, grassroots Indigenous groups across Canada and the U.S., Occupy does not have a clear base. As a result, he fears that OWS may grow at the expense of long-term activism that is based in anti-oppression and anti-colonial frameworks. His own organization, the IEN, relies on a network of activists in different cities. This past fall, support for IEN’s campaign against tar sands exploitation in Alberta was detrimentally affected by activists whose energies were sapped by Occupy.

Thomas-Muller urged that, as it grows, Occupy needs to think through how to support and build on existing organizations, rather than create scenarios that detract from their capacities. Thomas-Muller was hopeful about the possibility for the “convergence” of movements. But, he insists, decolonization is the way forward, rejecting the movement’s language: “Occupy’s offensive.” Indigenous peoples “can’t just forget about it.”

The final speaker was Tom B.K. Goldtooth, Executive Director of the IEN. He is also an author, filmmaker and a policy adviser on environmental protection, climate mitigation and adaptation. Goldtooth raised a number of questions about where Indigenous peoples fit within Occupy’s agenda, interrogating the strategic frame of the “99 per cent” slogan. If Occupy is taking back for the 99 per cent, he asked: “Who are they? Who are we? Take back from whom? Where are we [Indigenous people] in that 99 per cent?” By asking these questions, Goldtooth pointed to the insufficiency of a framework that views the majority as equally oppressed, erasing a colonial history.

At the same time, Goldtooth emphasized the urgency for collaboration and solidarity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists who seek not to “fix the system,” but to get rid of it altogether. He proposed a protocol for collaboration. First, he called on Occupy activists to think about how they are reaching out to Indigenous people. He insisted that they must be approached as nations who have jurisdiction on this land:

“We are your older brothers and we are your older sisters… the ones who have immigrated here — by choice or not by choice. It’s very important to have opportunities like this to have dialogue….but we also have to take a moment to recognize that we have certain demands that we have put forward that are quite consistent.”

Furthermore, Goldtooth argued, Occupy activists should follow the protocols that all visitors to a village must follow. Visitors — those who are not Indigenous to the land — must enter the community gradually and respectfully. They must allow the hosts to address their own agenda first, before adding more items. When the time is right, the hosts will add the visitor’s items to the agenda. The ground is then set for dialogue and collaboration.

In Goldtooth’s view, collaboration is essential. Indigenous peoples have already had many casualties resisting capitalist exploitation and colonialism. They should not, Goldtooth concluded, have to take on the corporations on their own. “It’s going to take all of us to resist.”

Vannina Sztainbok is a lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She teaches in the areas of gender, race, social inequality and citizenship studies.

The Osage chief Big Soldier said of the dominant culture, “I see and admire your manner of living. . . . In short you can do almost what you choose. You whites possess the power of subduing almost every animal to your use. You are surrounded by slaves. Every thing about you is in chains and you are slaves yourselves. I fear that if I should exchange my pursuits for yours, I too should become a slave.”

The essence of the dominant culture, of civilization, is slavery. It is based on slavery, and it requires slavery. It attempts to enslave the land, to enslave nonhumans, and to enslave humans. It attempts to get us all to believe that all relationships are based on slavery, based on domination, such that humans dominate the land and everyone who lives on it, men dominate women, whites dominate non-whites, the civilized dominate everyone. And overarching everyone is civilization, is the system itself. We are taught to believe that the system— civilization—is more important than life on earth.

If you don’t believe me, ask yourself, what do all of the mainstream so-called solutions to global warming have in common? The answer is that they’re all trying to save industrial capitalism, not the real world. They all take industrial capitalism as a given, as that which must be saved, as that which must be maintained at all costs (including the murder of the planet, the murder of all that is real), as the independent variable, as primary; and they take the real, physical world—filled with real physical beings who live, die, make the world more diverse—as secondary, as a dependent variable, as something (never someone, of course) which (never who) must conform to industrial capitalism or die. Even someone as smart and dedicated as Peter Montague, who used to run the indispensable Rachel’s Newsletter, can say, about an insane plan to “solve” global warming by burying carbon underground (which of course is where it was before some genius pumped it up and burned it), “What’s at stake: After trillions of tons of carbon dioxide have been buried in the deep earth, if even a tiny proportion of it leaks back out into the atmosphere, the planet could heat rapidly and civilization as we know it could be disrupted.”

No, Peter, it’s not civilization we should worry about. Disrupting civilization is a good thing for the planet, which means it’s a good thing. Far more problematical than the possibility that “civilization as we know it could be disrupted” is the very real possibility that the planet (both as we know it and as we have never bothered to learn about it) could die. Another example: in a speech in which he called for “urgent action to fight global warming,” and in which he called global warming “an emergency,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gave the reason he wants urgent action to combat this emergency: “We must be actively engaged in confronting the global challenge of climate change, which is a serious threat to development everywhere.” Never mind it being a serious threat to the planet.

He’s worried about “development,” which is in this case code language for industrialization.

This is insane. It is out of touch with physical reality. In all physical truth to be civilized is to be insane, to be out of one’s mind, out of one’s body, and out of all realistic touch with the physical world.

Civilization is a disease, a highly contagious disease that kills the land, that kills those who live with or on the land, that attempts to kill all who do not accede to becoming its slaves.

Civilization is an addiction. My dictionary defines the verb addict as “to bind, devote, or attach oneself as a servant, disciple, or adherent.” In Roman Law, an addiction was “A formal giving over or delivery by sentence of court. Hence, A surrender, or dedication, of any one to a master.” It comes from the same root as diction: dicere, meaning to pronounce, as in a judge pronouncing a sentence upon someone. To be addicted is to be a slave. To be a slave is to be addicted. The heroin ceases to serve the addict, and the addict begins to serve the heroin. We can say the same for civilization: it does not serve us, but rather we serve it.

There’s something desperately wrong with that.

We must stop this addiction, this disease, from enslaving us, stop it from killing the planet. And while there are many actions we can and must take to protect the land and the human and non-human people we love from this culture, in many ways the first and most important step we must take is to decolonize our hearts and minds. That process of decolonization will look different for every person. It will look different for men than women. It will look different for those who are indigenous than for those who are not.

But there are some common features. Decolonization is the process of breaking your identity with and loyalty to this culture—industrial capitalism, and more broadly civilization—and remembering your identification with and loyalty to the real physical world, including the land where you live. It means re- examining premises and stories the dominant culture handed down to you. It means seeing the harm the dominant culture does to other cultures, and to the planet. If you are a member of settler society, it means recognizing that you are living on stolen land and it means working to return that land to the humans whose blood has forever mixed with the soil. If you are an indigenous person it means never forgetting that your land was stolen, and it means working to repossess that land, and it means working to be repossessed by that land. It means recognizing that the luxuries of the dominant culture do not come free, but rather are paid for by other humans, by nonhumans, by the whole world. It means recognizing that we do not live in a functioning democracy, but rather in a corporate plutocracy, a government by, for, and of corporations. Decolonization means internalizing the implications of that. It means recognizing that neither technological progress nor increased GNP is good for the planet. It means recognizing that the dominant culture is not good for the planet. Decolonization means internalizing the implications of the fact that the dominant culture is killing the planet. It means determining that we will stop this culture from doing that. It means determining that we will not fail. It means remembering that the real world is more important than this social system: without a real world you don’t have a social system, any social system. All of this is the barest beginnings of decolonizing. It is internal work that doesn’t accomplish anything in the real world, but makes all further steps more likely, more feasible, and in many ways more strictly technical.

Another way to put this is what my friend the environmentalist and medical doctor John Osborn says: the first step toward cure is proper diagnosis. Decolonization means making that proper diagnosis.

There is an even more basic process common to all decolonization, no matter who you are. It is this. The Russian author Anton Chekhov once assigned a young writer to create a story in which someone squeezed every drop of slave’s blood out of his body.

This is what we must do.

Civilization cannot survive free men and women who think and feel and act from their own hearts and minds, free men and women who are willing to act in defense of those they love.

This sourcebook is about squeezing every last drop of slave’s blood out of your body. This sourcebook is about breaking your addiction to the dominant culture, and about remembering what it is to be a free woman or man, what it is to live with a land that lives with you, and how to protect and defend that land, and your freedom, as if your life depends on it.

Because in all physical truth it does.

Activist and philosopher Derrick Jensen is the author of Endgame, The Culture of Make Believe, and A Language Older than Words, among many other books; he lives in northern California. Jensen’s philosophy and rousing calls to action are debated amongst radicals, environmentalists and solidarity activists worldwide. His writings and other works can be found at www.derrickjensen.org.

Download the sourcebook: Unsettling Ourselves: Reflections and Resources for Deconstructing Colonial Mentality [PDF]

From Redwire

On January 27, I had the privilege of attending a talk given by Jessica Yee. However talk cannot properly describe the event that took place. Jessica Yee challenged the lecture form as she coaxed the attendees from being a passive audience into active participants.  The energy in the room was definitely alive. She left no room for dispassion and her strength was infectious, asserting from the beginning that we must “learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable”. She didn’t ask, or bade us into this process gently, Yee commanded it of us and it was assumed we were naturally capable. With these sentiments she set forth exposing us to a series of very uncomfortable and painful truths.

It’s important to note that before she began she acknowledged the land she stood on and that she came as a visitor, as an ally, recognizing that the subject of violence against women in this territory in particular is of the utmost urgency. She paid tribute to the importance of recognizing the efforts of local women working towards their aims. “I bring the spirits of my ancestors here with me” were her words exactly, and she described a time when the Mohawk came to the aid of the people of this territory when they were in need, how she came with this same disposition, upholding the importance of Indigenous people standing in solidarity with one another’s communities.

“I’m not here to talk on some lofty theories on violence against women, I want to know what you plan on doing once you leave this room, because this isn’t about just going to a talk, I saw Jessica Yee speak and wasn’t that nice!”

Projected on the wall behind her were a series of illustrations, all demonstrating oppression resulting from colonization. They were well done, in comic book style and one featured a woman on the phone with the words “I’ve been raped/ My boyfriend beat me” to which a police officer replied “Native, go figure…” All of the images were equally candid and forthright. Shortly after Yee began speaking she revealed that these drawings were in fact done by an 11 year old. There was a quiet yet strong reaction from the audience, impressed that an 11 year old possessed such strong social awareness, they also seemed filled with a kind of urgency. The hope of age creating a shield of ignorance and thus protecting younger generations from unfortunate realities did not apply here. Jessica Yee stressed that we needed to listen to what the voices of our children are saying, adding that “Often its not what we say, but what we listen to.”

With this Yee set the tone for the evening by keeping the voice of this young person in our minds.

Marginalization doesn’t happen by accident was precisely the subject at hand. She reminded us that we must start at the beginning to have the strength to go forward by reasserting “Mother Law”, with “woman as the first environment”; the values of womanhood as a source of power and strength are embedded in Indigenous society. She explained the tenants of Mother Law as the highest potential for social change, where we must come together to reassert this law, keeping in mind that we do not need permission to do so. Reasserting Mother Law is something fundamental to ending violence against women.

Click here to read the full article →

Related: Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples

Unsettling America’s recommended reading: Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide

Reimagining old ways of life and death

By Dustin Craun, Adbusters

The philosophical and spiritual problems of our age are so great that what our time calls for are new manifestos of knowledge and being. We need a kind of spiritual change that exceeds the political. Unfortunately most of us in the Westernized world spend more time trying to escape from ourselves (sex, shopping, addiction, fashion, entertainment, success), than we ever spend reflecting on the state of our existence, our heart or our soul. We are people driven by our desires: desires which destroy our hearts and any ability to have a connection to the greater spiritual realities that are all around us. As the Qur’an says, “God does not change the condition of a people, until they change their own condition.”

In the classic decolonial manifesto, Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire described Western life as a poison infecting the planet. Césaire wrote that to understand our existence, “First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.” For Césaire, “a gangrene has set in … a center of infection has begun to spread …” The poison Cesaire warned of is a philosophical and spiritual poison that infects each of us today.

In the American Indian scholar Vine Deloria Jr’s final book, The World We Used to Live In, he writes: “The secularity of the society in which we live must share considerable blame in the erosion of spiritual powers of all traditions, since our society has become a parody of social interaction lacking even an aspect of civility. Believing in nothing, we have preempted the role of the higher spiritual forces by acknowledging no greater good than what we can feel and touch.” The de-sacralization of the self and our lifeworlds is leaving our spiritual hearts dead.

To save ourselves, to avert catastrophe, we need to make what Walter Mignolo calls an “epistemic geopolitical move.” That demands a form of critique that is deeply engaged in what is known in Arabic as muhasabah, or self-examination, on three levels: examination of the self and one’s spiritual state; an examination of the dominant hierarchies that we all interact with such as gender, race, class, sexuality, and religious domination; and finally an examination of one’s local knowledge and the place from which critique is emanating. In recentering on the sacred in this process of self-examination, we can learn from Chicana feminists and the emerging idea of “decolonial love.”

Laura Pérez, UC Berkeley Professor of Ethnic Studies, connects “decolonial love” to the Mayan principle of In’Laketch: tu eres mi otro yo (you are my other me). Pérez explains that “not only are we interwoven, we are one. I am you and you are me. To harm another is thus to literally harm one’s own being. This is a basic spiritual law in numerous traditions.” This shift in the geopolitics of knowledge involves a turn away from Descartes and Western modernity’s centering of human consciousness in the mind, to a recentering of consciousness in the spiritual heart (qalb). This idea of a heart centered knowledge is central to many spiritual traditions including Christianity, Buddhism and Islam, and is echoed by Subcommandate Marcos and the Zapatista adage to center politics below and to the left, where the heart is in Aztec and Mayan cosmology.

Similar to Gloria Anzaldua’s concept La Facultad, a form of inner knowledge, is the Islamic concept of Al Basira, the eye of the heart, which is the center of spiritual perception if properly developed. As the great Mystic philosopher Al-Ghazali put it in his masterwork of the inner sciences of Islam, Ihya’ ulum al-din, “Creation refers to the external, and character to the internal, form. Now, the human is composed of a body which perceives with ocular vision (basar) and a spirit (ruh) and a soul (nafs) which perceive with inner sight (basira). Each of these things has an aspect and a form which is either ugly or beautiful. Furthermore, the soul which perceives with inner sight (basira) is of greater worth than the body which sees with ocular vision.” In seeing with the eye of our heart we can begin to differentiate between form and meaning, as the outward forms of things are not always their internal and spiritual reality.

The vision of our hearts has become blinded by the poison of base materialism. In the verse poetry of the early female Sufi saint, Rabi’a al-Adawiyya: “O children of Nothing! Truth can’t come in through your eyes, Nor can speech go out through your mouth to find [God], Hearing leads the speaker down the road to anxiety, And if you follow your hands and feet you will arrive at confusion. The real work is in the Heart: Wake up your Heart! Because when the Heart is completely awake, Then it needs no Friend.”

To break from the chains of modernity, we must learn both from philosophers of decoloniality and the spiritual sciences. Ultimately, we must walk down the path of love, to see each other in the divine light we were born into. As the great mystic philosopher Ibn Arabi said, “I believe in the religion of love, whatever direction its caravans may take, for love is my religion and my faith.”

Dustin Craun is a writer, educator and community organizer who lives in Berkeley, California. This essay is excerpted from his forthcoming book titled Decolonizing the Heart in an Upside Down World.

The sudden volte-face of famed Liberal destroyer Chris Hedges in his recent demonization of the Black Bloc, sinisterly entitled ‘The Cancer of Occupy’, is a wonderful introduction for North American activists to the field of Postcolonial Theory. Edward Said’s seminal text ‘Orientalism’ examines how Western study of ‘The Orient’ contributes to the functioning of colonial power. Representations of ‘The Orient” in Western texts purporting to offer knowledge and insight into ‘other’ countries actually perpetuates the dichotomy between the West and ‘Others’ – in so doing, reaffirming the colonial relationship, even long after postcolonialism has apparently been established following the decolonizing process. The role of former colonizer is adopted in the discourse by the white, educated Chris Hedges, who writes glowingly of Greece’s response to their economic crisis in an article from May 2010:

Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.

The Greeks, here, take the liminal role of “other”. In Hedges’ terms, they mimic his intellectual, activist ideals, without ever becoming equal to him. They are the student: he the master, echoing Thomas Babington Macaulay’s ‘Minutes on Indian Education’ printed in 1835, which set out an agenda to train ‘natives’ who were ‘Indian in blood and colour’ to become ‘English in taste, in opinions, in morals, in intellect’. These mimics would constitute a class who could protect British interests and help them in exerting rule over the empire. They would emulate, but never initiate or fully embody the ruling class values, in so doing ensuring their subjection and reliance on the colonizer. Hedges exhorts his ideal Occupiers to do the same, to denounce Diversity of Tactics, and to hurl their anarchist and Black Bloc comrades beneath the bus, by handing them over to the police. Hedges quotes indignant former eco-terrorist Derrick Jensen struggling with the radical aversion to resorting to the representatives of militaristic rule, to deal with internal problems: “When I called the police after I received death threats, I became to Black Bloc anarchists ‘a pig lover.’”

This indignity alone, it seems, is enough to fuel Jensen and Hedge’s disturbing anti-anarchist rant.

Frantz Fanon writes in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, that:

… it is not the colonialist self or the colonized other, but the disturbing difference in between that constitutes the figure of colonial otherness – the white man’s artifice inscribed on the black man’s body.

Fanon’s works examine the psychological affects of colonialism upon people of color in a predominantly white world. His work remains salient, particularly in the context of the Western desire to appropriate, claim and ‘orientalize’ the revolutionary activities in ‘other’ countries, in order to inscribe their name upon the successful results. Egypt under Mubharak is characterized as bad and anti-American, anti-democratic, inhumane…. Egypt revolting in order to embrace democracy is appropriated, through Western discourse, as a prodigal student of Western ideals. This can be seen clearly in Hedges’ ‘white man’s artifice’ – the approbation he gives to his students, the Greeks. “Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out”, Hedges’ exhorts Greece gloatingly. Compare this to his contradictory attitude to the “cancerous” anarchists of the Black Bloc, who, it seems, follow similar tactics to those Hedges admires in Greece – though the Black Bloc of Oakland have not yet come near to the violence and chaos of Greece. Despite this, Oakland’s Black Bloc has provoked the ire of a Master who finds himself discarded and bypassed – overtaken, unwanted, and left to struggle in their wake. Hedges does not recognize the autonomous discourse the Oakland Black Bloc utilize – or perhaps he feels slighted that they abandoned the “accepted” discourse, and appropriated another, before he, the patriarchal father, gave permission. The Oakland Black Bloc is not subject to Hedges, the colonizer, does not, therefore, have “the white man’s artifice inscribed on the black man’s body”, and so is rejected and penalized by Hedges:

Random acts of violence, looting and vandalism are justified, in the jargon of the movement, as components of “feral” or “spontaneous insurrection.” These acts, the movement argues, can never be organized. Organization, in the thinking of the movement, implies hierarchy, which must always be opposed. There can be no restraints on “feral” or “spontaneous” acts of insurrection. Whoever gets hurt gets hurt. Whatever gets destroyed gets destroyed.

There is a word for this—“criminal.”

Greece: the underdogs of Europe, the European ‘other’, are allowed – even encouraged – to riot. Violence, looting and vandalism are approved when it is to cast out the Colonizer’s enemy, which could, perhaps, result in the strengthening of a new colonialist discourse, the ‘other’s’ continuing subjection to a new colonizer – that which Hedges represents.  Fanon notes that “The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into the natives’ heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation and bestiality”.

We see this at play in Hedge’s dark fear-mongering of the consequences of diversity of tactics in Oakland and the “Black Bloc”:

…the Occupy movement, through its steadfast refusal to respond to police provocation, resonated across the country. Losing this moral authority, this ability to show through nonviolent protest the corruption and decadence of the corporate state, would be crippling to the movement. It would reduce us to the moral degradation of our oppressors. And that is what our oppressors want.

Yet these are the same tactics – less violent, less widespread – that Hedges applauded in Greece.

Hedges is not alone in reproducing paradoxical colonialist discourse when talking of ‘other’ countries. Frequently, self-proclaimed ‘nonviolent’ participants in the Occupy movement talk in adoring terms of those in Tahrir Square and Syria, invoking the misty-eyed myth that their struggles with state oppression and police brutality in America, are somehow comparable to their comrades’ battles in the Middle East. Again, Said’s ‘Orientalism’ is worth invoking with the central tenet that knowledge is never innocent. Knowledge is always profoundly connected with the operations of power. Holding up Gandhi and Dr Martin Luther King as fuzzy and politically correct (because brown) proponents of nonviolence, Western nonviolent pacifists conveniently slide over the white lauding of both Gandhi and MLK precisely because both these figures failed to threaten the hegemony of the ruling classes by participating in the colonialist discourse in the language of the colonizer. Both Gandhi and MLK were, in a sense, “different” in blood and color, but “western” in taste, in opinions, in morals, in intellect, and in perpetuating the moral and ethical superiority of the nonviolence both individuals had appropriated from the western discourse itself. Gandhi’s notion of nonviolence was forged as a hybrid between Emerson, Thoreau, Tolstoy and ‘Ram Rajya’. King’s was formed predominantly by Gandhi’s influence, and a trip to postcolonial India in 1957.

The translation which occurs in Western colonial discourse mythologizes these Middle-Eastern struggles as somehow equal to North American struggles, and yet different to them. Such myths either promote the idea that the Egyptian revolution has been ‘nonviolent’ and ‘non-violent’, or that the violence on the side of the oppressed in, for example, Tahrir Square, is accepted and acceptable, without acknowledging or explaining the contradiction that it is never acceptable in North America. This promotes and sustains the idea that those in Western countries are, again, the same but different. They are different because they are better. North Americans and Europeans cannot expect revolutionaries in foreign lands to adhere to the same moral and ethical superiority as themselves, the true practitioners of nonviolence and pacifism. The Egyptian revolutionaries protesting in Tahrir Square get a free pass to throw stones because they are ‘less than’ North American protestors, and it sustains North American superiority to characterize our struggle in the West as a struggle which takes place on a higher moral and ethical plain. Despite the fact police brutality is a common and everyday occurrence for many Americans, particularly those living in poverty and homelessness, middle-class educated Occupiers such as Hedges decry the notion of violence as daily routine, because it occurs mainly to uneducated, socially, economically and racially ‘inferior’ sections of the American population. Revolutions on American soil must therefore adhere to a puritanical notion of nonviolence that brings the terminology under the Hegemonic control of those privileged few such as Hedges, who manipulate the discourse to give themselves the advantage, and discredit those who are ‘other’:

This is exactly what pacifists have done in phrasing the disagreement as violence vs. nonviolence. Critics of nonviolence typically use this dichotomy, with which most of us fundamentally disagree, and push to expand the boundaries of nonviolence so that tactics we support, such as property destruction, may be supported within a nonviolent framework, indicating how disempowered and delegitimized we are. – Peter Gelderloos

This emphasis on creating clear, defined dichotomies in order to “delegitimize” thinkers is another tool favored by the colonizer to oppress. The conflation between violence and diversity of tactics is thus another method of controlling and subjugating difference through language. The colonizer creates “the other” in order to define themselves by the perceived deficiency. Hedges’ draws the Black Bloc as the “other”, using colonizing language to create a fantastical, faceless bogeyman against which he can define himself and the “good” members of the Occupy movement, not these fakers, these hooligans, these “Black” bloc anarchists. The binary opposition of black/white good/bad is never explicitly stated, but played upon through Hedge’s powerful, derogatory language. Language is power. In deliberately misappropriating the tactical term ‘black bloc’ as an adjective, and in some cases even a noun, Hedges, perhaps intentionally, creates a mythical, frightening, all-powerful and wholly evil enemy… which does not actually exist:

The Black Bloc movement bears the rigidity and dogmatism of all absolutism sects. Its adherents alone possess the truth. They alone understand. They alone arrogate the right, because they are enlightened and we are not, to dismiss and ignore competing points of view as infantile and irrelevant. They hear only their own voices. They heed only their own thoughts. They believe only their own clichés. And this makes them not only deeply intolerant but stupid.

The struggle for the power to name oneself is enacted within words – to remove that power of naming is a specifically colonial, patriarchal act. No matter to Hedges that the diversity of tactics advocated by the anarchists he quotes and praises in the article on Greece, pushes not towards the replacement of hegemonic nonviolence with an “absolutist sect”, but rather towards a coalition of thought and action which represents the broadest spectrum of thinking and action by which to challenge the structures of oppression. To Hedges, preaching the exclusion of these faceless ‘black bloc’ individuals (which he later clarifies, somewhat disparagingly, given their impressive build up, as “a handful of hooligans”) there is no apparent contradiction. All who approve of violence in Egypt / Greece / Syria by the revolting masses, cannot ever hope to introduce it into their actions in North America. To do so is tantamount to a revolution – against the white, educated face of Hedges and his reformist sect. In a patriarchal twist of breathtaking hypocrisy, Hedges justifies his bigotry by claiming to be speaking “for” segments of the Oakland activist population who apparently cannot speak for themselves, presumably, in Hedges’ eyes, because of their race:

These anarchists represent no one but themselves. Those in Oakland, although most are white and many are not from the city, arrogantly dismiss Oakland’s African-American leaders, who, along with other local community organizers, should be determining the forms of resistance.

The contradictions of colonialism lie in its attempt to “civilize” its “other” – in this case, the Black Bloc anarchists – and simultaneously to fix them into perpetual otherness. We see this clearly in the apparent acceptable face of Diversity of Tactics in Syria, Greece and Egypt – but it’s abhorrence in North America and Europe.

In the process of decolonization, intellectuals and activists in the immediate political fall out of the deconstruction of empire, must still fight with its continuing legacy. In order to succeed in successfully destroying the dominant definitions of race, class, language and culture, they must offer an alternative to the old colonialist discourse, a new form which establishes itself as a formidale, powerful and distinct identity. This is what Oakland’s Black Bloc, the anarchists and the radicals of the Occupy movement are doing. The fact that they face resistance from the colonizer, represented by the white, educated face of Hedges, is only evidence that they are succeeding in challenging the old hegemonic ways of thinking. In the meantime, they leave Chris Hedges and his ilk struggling with the internal contradictions faced by their role as former colonizer, striving vainly to justify and sustain their old methods of control in the face of tumultuous revolution.

Like Sisyphus, we must imagine them happy.

In the first part of this series, we contemplated the idea of a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that has been wreaking havoc throughout human history that Native Americans call wetiko. In part two, we inquired into how the wetiko bug disrupts and deranges a living system, using the world financial system as our case study. The wetiko virus is like a parasite that literally feeds off, takes over and aberrates the curren(t)cy of the infected system. The wetiko pathogen originally manifests as a disturbance in the field of the collective unconscious of humanity itself, creating the psychic ley lines upon which world events are erected and energized. The origin of this virulent disease is to be discovered within the psyche (please see my article It’s All in the Psyche). Because of the psychic nature of wetiko, it serves us to understand the psychological underpinnings of the virus, which is to say, how it affects our day to day relationships and lives. We begin to ‘see’ the bug when we are able to get in focus and recognize ‘its’ psychological signature in both ourselves and others. The fact that the source of the wetiko germ is within the psyche means that the cure for this disease lies hidden within the psyche as well.

Wetiko psychosis is at the very root of humanity’s inhumanity to itself in all its various forms. As a species, we need to step into and participate with our own spiritual and psychological evolution, which means that we must focus our attention on and contemplate this ‘topic of topics’ before this virulent madness destroys us. Up until this point in our history we have been too easily distracted by the ruses of the wetiko bug itself. The disease itself is now demanding that we pay attention to it, or it will kill us. Its cure is the most pressing and fundamental issue facing us today. Author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen writes in his foreword to Jack D. Forbes book about wetiko psychosis, “Columbus and other Cannibals is, I think, the most important book ever written on one of the most important topics ever faced by human beings: why is the dominant culture so excruciatingly, relentlessly, insanely, genocidally, ecocidally, suicidally destructive?”[i] Historian Arnold Toynbee points out that a civilization doesn’t die from being invaded from the outside, but unless it creates culture which nourishes the evolution of the creative spirit, a civilization invariably commits suicide. As if possessed, our civilization is, trance-like, sleepwalking in a death-march towards our own demise. The most pressing and inevitable question of our time is not just ‘why?’ but more urgently, how can we stop this seemingly out-of-control, self-destructive, hell-bent part of ourselves?

‘Psycho’-Analysis

The origin of wetiko is the human psyche. Psychologically speaking, shadow projection is at the very root of wetiko disease. Shadow projection is a process in which we split-off from and project out our own darkness onto others. It is our misguided attempt at a ‘final solution’ to the problem of the evil within ourselves which actually deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil. Projecting the shadow opens up the door and invites in the vampiric entity of wetiko to make itself at home in the most intimate spaces of our own psyche. It is through the dynamic of shadow projection that the wetiko bug digs in and entrenches itself within our psyches, where it is then able to commandeer the executive function of the psyche to its own ends. When we project the shadow, we unwittingly become a conduit for evil to possess us from behind, beneath our conscious awareness, and to act itself out through us. When there is mutual shadow projection between individuals, groups or nations, each side has an unconscious investment in the other playing out the projected evil so as to prove their own self-righteous innocence, a dynamic which becomes self-reinforcing and continually feeds the polarization in the field. Shadow projection, as it collectively plays out en masse on the world stage is an outer reflection of the initial process within ourselves of our be-night-ed effort to exterminate our own darkness (please see my article Shadow Projection: The Fuel of War). When shadow projection happens en masse, it is as if the archetype of evil emits its toxic radio-activity underground, through the shared unconscious of the collective, and manifests collectively as destructive psychic epidemics.

In shadow projection, we attempt to master and experience power over the internal condition that originally proclaimed our powerlessness to ourselves not by becoming conscious, but by unconsciously identifying with, becoming, and then acting out the power to externally destroy. Unconsciously acting out unbound power without restraint is our perverse way of defending against the internal breakthrough of feelings of helplessness. Evacuating and relocating our inner darkness outside of ourselves by demonizing the ‘other’ seemingly protects us from feeling our vulnerability and pain. Our inner anxiety about our existential ‘power to be’ attempts to resolve itself in the power to act free from restraint. In an unmediated expression of our disempowered inner condition, our unconscious acting out does not surmount the need for compulsive repetition, however, but rather, assures it. Wetikos’ modus operandi, their ‘M.O.,’ becomes to root out and kill everything that feels tender, vulnerable and alive within themselves, thus systematically murdering anything and everything within them that could possibly melt or produce a crack in the ice that encases their heart.

Because full-blown wetikos are soul murderers who continually recreate the on-going process of killing their own soul, they are reflexively compelled to do this to others; for what the soul does to itself, it can’t help but to do to others. In a perverse inversion of the golden rule, instead of treating others how they would like to be treated, wetikos do unto others what was done unto them. The wetiko is simply a living link in a timeless, vampiric lineage of abuse. Full-blown wetikos induce and dream up others to experience what it is like to be the part of themselves which they have split off from and denied, and are thus not able to consciously experience – the part of themselves that has been abused and vampirized. In playing this out, wetikos are transmitting and transferring their own depraved state of inner deadness to others in a perverse form of trying to deal with their own suffering. Paradoxically, wetikos both try to destroy others’ light, as it reminds them of what they’ve killed in themselves, while simultaneously trying to appropriate the light for themselves.

Wetiko disease is an expression of the convincing illusion of the separate self gone wild. Bewitched by the intrinsic projective tendencies of their own mind, full-blown wetikos are unconsciously doing the very thing they are reacting to and accusing other people of doing. Projecting the shadow onto others, they will accuse others of projecting the shadow onto them. To use an extreme, but prototypical example, it is like someone screaming that you’re killing them as they kill you. If their insanity is reflected back to them, they think it is the mirror that is insane. Suffering from a form of psychic blindness that believes itself to be sightedness, full-blown wetikos project out their own unconscious blindness and imagine that others, instead of themselves, are the ones who are not seeing. Governed by the insane, self-perpetuating logic of fear and paranoia, those taken over by the disease fear that if they don’t attack and rule over others, they are in danger of being attacked and ruled over themselves. In their convoluted, upside-down, flawless illogic, wetikos re-act to their own projections in the world as if they objectively exist and are other than themselves, thinking that they themselves have nothing to do with creating that to which they are reacting (please see Aparticipatory Delusional Syndrome (ADS)). Someone fully taken over by the wetiko bug is like a kitten endlessly reacting to her reflection in a mirror as if it is another kitten separate from and other than herself. The evil we see in the full-blown wetikos is a reflection of our own evil; if we don’t recognize this, we will just be projecting our shadow onto them. We are then guilty of the very same thing (shadow projecting) we are essentially reacting to and of which we are accusing them.

The term wetiko is a Cree term (windigo in Ojibway, wintiko in Powhatan) which, to quote Forbes, refers to “an evil person or spirit who terrorizes other creatures by means of terrible evil acts.”[ii] Wetikos are the human instruments for the transpersonal ‘spirit of evil’ to terrorize the world. In wetiko disease, we unwittingly become drafted into being foot-soldiers in the war not ‘on,’ but ‘of’ and ‘for’ terror. The wetiko parasite feeds on and harvests the emotions of fear and terror. Terror is the essence of its insidious ‘ill-usory ill-logic.’ In wetiko disease, the psyche takes the ‘terror’ that haunts it from within, and in its attempt to master it, unwittingly becomes taken over by it, thus becoming an instrument of terror in the world. We have then become the thing we most feared, ‘creatures of the European nightmare world,’ as we psychologically terrorize ourselves, as well as terrorizing the world at large. Wetiko is the bug which feeds the experience of terror within our mind and out in the world, fueling one of its more prominent manifestations in our world today: the ‘Global War on Terror.’

A Frankenstein Monster Come to Life

Wetikos suffer from what is called ‘pseudologia phantastica,’ a form of hysteria characterized by a talent for believing their own lies. “Lying,” Forbes writes, “in fact may represent a key strand in the entire epidemiology of wetokoism.”[iii] Ultimately deceiving themselves as they believe in the propaganda of their own lies, full-blown wetikos become strangers to themselves. Wetikos continually have to invest their life-force in lying to themselves, while at the same time fooling themselves into believing that they are not doing so, a version of what George Orwell referred to as ‘doublethink.’ Suffering from amnesia, they have forgotten what it is to remember, and to ‘seal’ the deal, they have forgotten that they have forgotten. The result is that they split their mind in two. Falling into denial, and yet denying they are in the state of denial, becomes a process that they are invested in at all costs, or it would blow their denial. Anything that threatens their perverse state of affairs has to be destroyed. Hiding from their lie, they are in essence hiding from themselves, which is pure madness.

Instead of living from and out of an awareness of the psyche, full-blown wetikos continually avoid awareness of the psyche, a habitual pattern which becomes their internal compass and continual default, their M.O. Taking refuge not ‘in,’ but ‘from,’ themselves, wetikos are continually fleeing from themselves, endlessly circling around in the hamster wheel of samsara. All of their energy gets invested in fueling their own, and others, deception. Their will becomes dedicated to hiding from the truth of what they are doing, a truth which endlessly pursues them, as they continually avoid relationship with themselves. Wetikos become wedded to the full-time occupation of keeping one step ahead of themselves, a process which, once it gains a certain momentum, attains a seeming autonomy that is self-generating (please see Autonomous Complexes). As this inner process progresses, it gains a sovereignty over their psyche, as if a self-created Frankenstein monster has come to life in the flesh. The wetikos have then created their own sci-fi nightmare, with themselves in the starring role. Once created, a mind-virus like wetiko, just like the Frankenstein monster, gains a seeming life of its own, independent of its creator. It then holds its creator in its thrall, unable to escape from the out-of-control hell of their own making.

Speaking of someone possessed by the wetiko virus, Forbes writes, “such a person cannot be authentic. Such a person is not merely a pimp, he is also a ghost, as it were, a mere imitation of a person. His life is an imitation of life…their life is less than that of a wild (free) animal who is, after all always authentic.”[iv] Wetikos become unreal to themselves, a simulation of themselves. Split in two, they become schizoid, dissociated from themselves, duality having seemingly established itself as the reigning logic at the core of their being. Different parts of the person taken over by wetiko become compartmentalized, neither connected to each other nor to the whole. This process of inner fragmentation serves to hide from the wetikos what they are doing to themselves, as they become their own never-ending ‘cover-up.’ This psychological dynamic is kept in place by how painful it is to behold and contemplate the modes of avoidance they construct to protect themselves from what they do not want to know. And yet, as painful as it is, it is only in the seeing of what they are doing (to themselves) that there is any possibility of becoming free from this malignant malady.

Wetikos can psychopathically (and thus toxically) mimic the human personality perfectly. If it serves their agenda, they can be convincing beyond belief, making themselves out to be normal, caring, politically correct human beings. They are unable, however, to grasp emotionally the meaning implicit in the thoughts and feelings they are exhibiting.  They lack insight into how they differ from others, for they do not differ from others as they see others. They are skillful at pretending love and devotion, as if they are imitating a person. Impersonating themselves, their existence is a true parody of life. They can’t distinguish between their mimicked (pseudo) responses of love, remorse, etc., and the genuinely felt responses of a healthy person.

Full-blown wetikos are emotionally stunted, as their feelings are confined to the primitive, archaic emotions of anger, frustration, numbness and rage. Suffering from a deep disorder of feeling in which they can not allow themselves to consciously feel, they typically swing between numbness and rage. Fixed in their own limited and myopic point of view, they have no capacity to see themselves as others see them. Proclamations to the contrary, they have no empathy nor compassion. They can’t see the world through others point of view, only through their own, which in Hannah Arendt’s opinion is a primary characteristic of what she calls the ‘banality of evil.’ Wetikos don’t relate to others as autonomous, independent beings, but rather, as pawns to be used as means to their own selfish ends, objects to be manipulated for their own narcissistic benefit, rather than as ends in themselves, subjects with their own intrinsic value and valid viewpoints. Because they have lost connection to their soul, they cannot hear the pleas of nor see the soul in others. They refuse to see the harm their actions are doing to others, as this would injure their overly-positive, inflated narcissistic self-image, which protects them from consciously feeling their shame and guilt (read more about Malignant Narcissism). Seemingly unable to consciously experience their guilt animates more shadow projection, which fuels the wetiko pathogen in a continually self-regenerating feedback loop. Unwilling to experience their guilt, wetikos are afraid of being exposed, of being found out, which is an outer reflection of the terror that the wetiko parasite within us feels at potentially being illumined.

We secretly feel a sense of guilt when we shadow project, because we inwardly know we are not in our integrity. This sense of guilt itself is the very feeling from which we split-off. Our guilt does not allow us to feel our guilt, which is what we secretly feel guilty over. To the extent that we don’t consciously experience our guilt, we become caught in an infinitely-perpetuating double-bind in which we project out our guilt and darkness, which just perpetuates the very thing we feel guilty about, ad infinitum.

Big wetikos[v] may never know nor be forced to come to terms with the harm they have caused, as oftentimes they find themselves in the privileged position of the victors who rewrite history on their own terms. Many of our society’s historians, themselves infected by the wetiko virus, exalt aggressive and exploitative behavior, categorizing as ‘primitive’ and ‘backwards’ those who don’t forcibly ‘conquer’ others, thereby subtly and subliminally brainwashing the young into the ways of the world of wetiko.

The Self-Destructive Evil of Empire

Being a field phenomenon, wetiko psychosis doesn’t just express itself individually, but its nonlocal tentacles are continually manifesting collectively throughout the underlying field of consciousness. The multi-headed hydra that is the wetiko collective psychosis materializes itself in families, groups, nations, and in whole species such as ours. Wetiko’s ‘body politic’ has an intrinsic and insistent need for centralizing power and control, fueled by the bottom line of corporate-driven profits. Speaking about the monster of ever-expanding empire, Forbes writes, “imperialism and exploitation are forms of cannibalism and, in fact, are precisely those forms of cannibalism which are most diabolical or evil“[vi] A ‘front’ for the underlying wetiko virus, the military-industrial-criminal-complex, with its ultimately self-destructive, built-in need for endless expansion is like a systematic runaway in cybernetic theory. The Frankenstein monster of ever-enlarging empire is like a runaway locomotive gaining speed, approaching the event horizon of its inevitable ‘crash,’ all under the deceptive banner of ‘progress.’ Meanwhile, this ‘progress’ destroys people, families, communities, and potentially, the biosphere itself upon which human life depends. “Wetikos,” Forbes writes, “have taken their Satan to the four-corners of the world, and they have made him their God.”[vii]

Evil is like a pathogen that enters a system, be it an individual, nation-state, or world-system, and exploits the system, knocking it off balance. Such disturbances can transform something wholesome, such as the drive to reproduce, into something evil – the drive to rape. Etymologically, the meaning of the word ‘evil’ has to do with ‘excess’ as well as to ‘transgress boundaries.’ Full-fledged wetikos are rapists of the human soul. The word ‘rape,’ etymologically speaking, is derived from words that mean to overwhelm, to enrapture, to invade, to usurp, to pillage, and to steal, which are all characteristics of someone who is taken over by the wetiko virus.

Wetiko disease is a self-devouring operating system that leaves nothing unmolested. It is a living death sentence that, if left unchecked, destroys everything within its dominion, including itself. Wetiko psychosis ensures that everything is sacrificed on its altar of death and destruction. From a galactic perspective, our planetary so-called ‘civilization’ is a living, spreading outbreak of wetiko psychosis that is threatening to destroy not only its human host, but the entire planetary biosphere which makes life on earth possible as well. Speaking of wetikos’ ravenous hunger, Forbes points out, “It’s voracious, rapacious, appetite will cause it to literally eat itself.”[viii] Forbes continues, “The rape of a woman, the rape of a land, and the rape of a people, they are all the same…Brutality knows no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. Arrogance knows no frontiers. Desire knows no edges. These characteristics all tend to push towards an extreme, always moving forward once the initial infection sets in.”[ix] Untreated, this psychic infection gradually takes hold of the wetikos’ being, corrupting their heart, poisoning their psychic body politic from within. Like the virus of evil insinuating itself into the soul in incremental, un-noticed steps, at a certain point this leukemia of the soul becomes irreversible, inevitably leading to its host’s destruction. The wetiko virus’s pathogenic effects within an individual are a microcosmic fractal iteration of the collective, macrocosmic dynamics of the disease; how wetiko works within each of us is synchronistically mirrored with stunning perfection in how it is playing out throughout the greater body politic.

Unchecked by a psychic vaccine, the disease, like an addiction running rampant, is progressive and is thus getting worse over time. Forbes writes, “The wetikos destroyed Egypt and Babylon and Athens and Rome and Tenochitlan and perhaps now they will destroy the entire earth. But neither the ‘junkie’ looking for money for a shot of heroin nor the capitalists destroying Amazonian forests for big profits are able to stop their own destructive behavior.”[x] Wetikos can’t help themselves. Suffering from a compulsion to destroy, if left to themselves they are unable to stop their suicidal behavior. Having lost their internal freedom, they are singularly lacking in options.

Having mesmerized themselves, wetikos have, ultimately speaking, become their own victim. Running like a tape that loops back into itself in endless iterations, their self-hypnosis is dedicated to forever forestalling the prospect of the gnawing anxiety of confronting and dealing with the insanity of what they are doing, both to themselves and others. Like the subject of a master hypnotist, their attention becomes attenuated, narrowed and constricted to their limited and particularized viewpoint. After a certain point, wetiko disease becomes so completely internalized that the person so afflicted, as if compulsively repeating their initial moment of trauma, moment by moment recreates their own psychosis without any external stimulus at all. Having unconsciously identified with the aggressor, they become their own perpetrator, police state and control system. Their pathological inner state in-forms their actions in the outer world, which becomes the channel through which their ravaged inner landscape plays itself out and takes on embodied form.

An inner sickness of the soul, wetiko is unique in that it is a boundary-dissolving disease, collapsing the distinction between the inner and the outer, between dreaming and waking. Wetiko nonlocally materializes itself in, as and through the medium of the outside world, which becomes the canvas for its full-bodied revelation of itself. Wetiko nonlocally in-forms, gives shape to and configures events in the world so as to synchronistically express itself, which is to say that just like in a dream, events in the outer world are symbolically expressing an inner, psychological situation (please see my article The World is Psyche). Wetiko can only be ‘seen’ when we snap out of our literal way of interpreting our experience and start seeing with symbolically informed awareness. At the same time, wetiko itself can become the impetus for expanding our consciousness and recognizing that the world itself is a continually unfolding, living revelation of itself that is speaking symbolically, which is the language of dreams.

A Cult(ure) of Madness

People have to be cured of their spiritual sickness before they can build a just society. Forbes says, “to adjust to a wetiko society is to become insane.”[xi] It is no great accomplishment to adapt to and be considered sane in and by an insane society. The culture of wetiko promotes the systematic destruction of the human heart, which when fully internalized, alienates us from everything in ourselves, save what reproduces the conditions of the system. Adopting the values of our oppressors, however, insures the continuation of our own dehumanization. The system is set up to be a set up such that, to quote Forbes, “a person oppressed by wetikos adopts the values of wetikos as he ‘rises’ in position. The wetikos taught him well, but they taught him falsely.”[xii] Big Wetikos learn to exploit every situation to their advantage and sacrifice in themselves everything that doesn’t advance this motive. To become a “Big Wetiko,” Forbes comments, “requires a lot of back-scratching, back-stabbing, drinking, and maneuvering. It also requires the corruption of other young men (and women), who in turn, will become hooked into the system.”[xiii] Speaking about how “very, very easy” it is to become a wetiko in our society because of all of the perks and incentives, Forbes writes, “they do get promoted, they do get better salaries, and they do get testimonials (and a gold watch) when they ‘retire.’”[xiv] Because of all of the ‘benefits’ of the role, there is not merely a passive disinterest, but rather, an active resistance and counter-incentive for wetikos to self-reflect, a contraction which simply feeds their compulsion and further reinforces their addiction to power.

Forbes writes, “the wetiko disease has so corrupted European thinking (at least of the ruling groups) that wetiko behavior and wetiko goals are regarded as the very fabric of European evolution…if we continue to allow the wetikos to define reality in their insane way we will never be able to resist or curtail the disease.”[xv] It should be noted that indigenous people are not free from the wetiko virus as well. There are indigenous cultures that are governed by wisdom, but there are also indigenous cultures that are ruled by wetiko. We should be careful to not romanticize and idealize indigenous, aboriginal cultures as opposed to European cultures, which would be too simplistic, and dualistic of a view.[xvi] When wetikos possess power in any culture, or more accurately, when power possesses them, they are in a position to influence, define and create a certain level of reality that, though based on falsehood, operates as if it is real. In words that would be just as relevant with regards to the current Obama administration, author Ron Suskind quotes a neocon in the previous Bush administration as saying, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality─judiciously, as you will─we’ll act again, creating other new realities.”[xvii] If left in positions of power, wetikos will ultimately become and dream up into full-bodied materialization their own, as well as our, worst nightmare into reality.

Evil can take many forms – political, social, economic, militaristic, and psychological. Forbes says, “predation can lurk under many guises, such as ‘patriotism,’ profit-seeking, ‘protecting our way of life,’ and ‘investment returns.’”[xviii] Many ‘isms’ themselves are simply thought-forms used by wetikos themselves to justify their rape, criminality, murder and evil. Wrapping their cause in the mantle of goodness allows Big Wetikos, who are in fact full-fledged predators, to sleep at night, seemingly guilt-free. In a form of self-entrancement, they have so thoroughly convinced themselves of the rightness of their actions that they rarely, if ever, have any ethical qualms about what they are doing. Where the evil of wetiko is endemic, there tends to be an ethical, developmental arrest in both individuals and throughout the society.

Full-blown, big Wetikos are morally insane, and abuse power simply because they can. This is why, to quote Forbes, “the development of rigid patriarchy follows the wetiko disease.”[xix] In other words, cultures dominated by wetikos tend to organize themselves around the calcified, archetypal mythic pattern of the ‘negative patriarchy,’ which, simply put, is based on domination over others (read about The Archetype of the Negative Father). To quote Forbes, “‘Might makes right’ is the wetiko belief, but it is often accompanied by self-serving doctrines of ‘divine will,’ ‘manifest destiny,’ ‘providence,’ ‘the march of civilization,’ ‘doing God’s work,’ ‘stopping communism,’ or comparable slogans.”[xx] These slogans are the mantras, or words of power, by which the collective spell of group-think is disseminated throughout the collective psyche. Any rationalization will do, as long as it serves as cover for the wetikos to continue to exploit others, centralize power and feed their sickness.

Interconnected Roles in a Nonlocal Field

Speaking about how our species has never been able to get a handle on what is at the root of our self-destructive behavior, Forbes comments, “Unfortunately, most of these efforts have failed because they have never diagnosed the wetiko as an insane person whose disease is extremely contagious. Nor have they, generally, understood that the [seemingly] non-wetikos, whether flunkies, pimps, or the most oppressed, are often ‘secret carriers’ of the disease.”[xxi] The wetiko virus can only thrive in the global human family if, just like in any family system, each member enables and is complicit in the abuse. Being a field phenomenon, wetiko incarnates by em-bodying itself through various interconnected, form-fitted roles arising in the field, all at different stages of the disease. Each of these figures are various re-presentations of the multiple faces of the underlying pathogen. Wetikos can be hard to recognize because the people who are its instruments seem like normal, well-intentioned, innocent looking people, and yet, it is these seemingly regular people, just like you and me, who often become the ‘secret carriers’ of the disease. To the extent that we are not aware of this insidious, nonlocal, psychological disease, both in others and potentially within ourselves, we can very easily become its ‘secret carriers,’ its unwitting accomplices.

Forbes writes, “But this we must emphasize over and over, that the whole wetiko disease is not limited to the brutes and goons who handle the gun, the lash or the instruments of torture. The nice people in the offices, the typists, the lab technicians, the clerks and, of course, the owners, directors, stockholders, senators, generals and presidents who use, profit from, and feed on human exploitation are also cannibals to one degree or another.”[xxii] The Big wetikos could never get away with the murder that they do without ‘the nice people in the offices’ enabling them. These ‘typists, lab technicians and clerks’ are just ‘following orders,’ and yet, are complicit in the insidious evil that is being spread throughout the world with their co-operation. Modern, corporate, technological systems are set up to distance us, both physically and psychologically, between what we do for a living and the ultimate, potentially destructive consequences of our actions. Even ‘the nice people in the offices,’ people just like you and me, to the extent that we are not aware of how we are feeding, and being fed by, the wetiko virus, are tiny cogs in the great predatory machine, complicit in the impersonal evil of the faceless system and in the destruction it wreaks upon all life.

Wetiko is an entity that becomes co-dependently entangled and inextricably coupled with others in its environment in order to survive. It serves us to differentiate the interdependent roles in the field which ‘conspire’ (which literally means to ‘breathe together’) to create and sustain the wetiko disease. All of these figures collaboratively enable the bug of wetiko to play out its reign of (t)error.  Forbes writes, “The most guilty of the wetikos are, I would think, those who mastermind, justify and profit most from such systems. Such persons are the ‘master predators.”[xxiii] The full-blown, Big Wetikos, the ‘master predators’ in positions of power, can be suave and sophisticated, with refined tastes, highly intelligent, educated people, with offices in places like New York and London, and can be highly respected by society, all of which makes their malady hard to recognize. Others are cast in the role of ‘protecting’ the abuser─the master predator’s handlers, minions, sycophants, enablers, supporters and followers─while others are complicit by simply remaining silent and looking away. Some pick up the role of feeling powerless, thinking ‘what’s the use?’ Some politically active sorts can pick up the role of attempting to fight the disease in a way that simply strengthens the diabolical polarization in the field, which just feeds and is the signature of the disease itself (please see my article Spiritually-Informed Political Activism). Whatever the role, it’s all just multiple guises wearing the same underlying uni-form.

All wetikos, including the Big Wetikos, are themselves just pawns in the hand of the underlying archetype itself, however. It is like when Toto, in The Wizard of Oz pulls away the curtain, but instead of their being a man behind the curtain, there is no one there but the formless archetype itself. If the master predators are removed from their positions of power, but if the underlying system which spawned them remains in place and not dealt with, over time others will simply pick up their ‘vacant,’ and vacuous roles.  These power-mad roles exist as potentials in the field waiting to be filled, fleshed-out and incarnated, as these roles are an expression of the full spectrum of possibilities implicit in the underlying field, reflecting, as it always does, this same range of potentials within ourselves. The nonlocal field is seamless, and the roles do not, and cannot, exist in isolation, but rather, in co-relation to each other, as well to the whole field itself, in an interconnected web of infinite relatedness.

It is important to see the whole system, rather than only fixating on, and demonizing, one of its parts as separate from the whole (please see my article Danger: Fasci-Nation with Bush). Focusing on an individual person is analogous to contemplating one finger on a glove without recognizing the underlying hand in-forming and animating all of the interconnected, and fundamentally inseparable fingers in the glove. To concretize a localized manifestation of the pathology in an individual would be analogous to only seeing the circle that a three-dimensional sphere makes as it passes through a two-dimensional plane. The circle is a lower-level reflection of a higher-dimensional entity (the ‘sphere’ of wetiko’s influence), just as the person taken over by the wetiko bug is a surface expression of a deeper, more fundamental pathogen that pervades the underlying field. To use another example, the person momentarily afflicted with wetiko is like a shadow on a wall─cast from a globe hanging from the ceiling─relative to the globe. The shadow on the wall is a re-presentation and projection of the higher, three-dimensional entity of the globe into a lower dimension of space. Studying the shadow within its proper context relative to the globe is the way of understanding the object casting the shadow (the higher-dimensional entity of the ‘global’ wetiko psychosis). In these examples, the point is not to focus on the personal manifestation of the disease, but rather, to see the deeper, nonlocal field that is giving shape to, in-forming and pervading the particular, localized outbreaks of the disease in the greater body politic. Seeing, in Jung’s words, “the numinous character of the reality in the background,”[xxiv] IS the very expansion of consciousness which becomes the doorway connecting us to a deeper part of ourselves, as well as to each other. Recognizing the underlying field paves the road to healing.

In the culture of wetiko, people at various stages of the disease pick up seemingly different and separate roles from each other, but when the deeper, underlying pattern comes into focus and is seen, it can be recognized that all of these inter-locking roles fit together like a higher-order mosaic. This process couldn’t play itself out without all of its parts reciprocally co-arising relative to each other. The whole field, with all its myriad, fluid and unfixed roles─each of us at various moments in time picking up the different roles─are mutually conditioning each other in a seamless, interpenetrating net of relations, as if appendages of a higher-dimensional organism that is revealing itself through our nonlinearly orchestrated and coordinated interplay.

Stepping Out of Separation

The in-spirit-ed organism of wetiko is a field phenomenon, and can only be seen when we snap out of the illusion of imagining we exist as a separate self and recognize and become conversant with the deeper, underlying and more fundamental nonlocal field in which we are all indissolubly inter-connected. “The field,” as Einstein once succinctly put it, “is the only reality.” In modern physics, the field─the invisible organizing principle of the universe─has become more fundamental than matter. Instead of relating to any part of the field as an isolated entity, it’s important to contemplate the entire interdependent field as the ‘medium’ through which wetiko manifests itself. The native American concept of wetiko disease is a social phenomenon, a relational dynamic of the field itself that can not be understood, and does not exist in isolated individuals apart from the social milieu in which they move, interact and have their being. Seeing the nonlocal field drives a stake into the very heart of the prevailing scientific, materialistic perspective, which ironically enough, still attempts to see the world as ‘machine.’

Seeing the field, and stepping out of the perspective that we are separate from each other converges into being the same experience. Seeing ‘through’ the illusion of the separate self, rather than seeing ‘through the separate self’ as a lens through which we view the world, entails recognizing that even the full-blown wetikos, the master predators themselves, are not separate from us. The Big Wetikos are fully em-body-ing, in person-ified form, a pathological tendency that exists in potential within ourselves. It is as if they are the externalized materialization of this potential within ourselves that we’ve projected outside of ourselves and literally collectively dreamed up into manifestation. Recognizing this generates compassion for this part of ourselves. It is only through compassion that we immunize ourselves from the virus.

Paradoxically, although wetiko disease doesn’t exist in isolated individuals separate from the field, someone taken over by the wetiko bug, though merely its instrument and not, in the ultimate sense ‘who they are,’ literally can be said to be ‘the incarnation’ of the disease in human form. The person so possessed (think of, like I did in my book, George W. Bush, as one example) is the ‘revelation‘ of the pathology in living flesh and blood. The person so stricken is showing us, in fully embodied, personified form, the underlying infrastructure and dynamics of this trans-human disease. When someone is so possessed, they are the local crystallization ‘in form’ of a nonlocal, and ultimately ‘formless’ phenomenon. The person taken over has been dreamed up into materialization to be a living, breathing ‘symbol’ of the nonlocal disease, an embodied reflection of an archetypal, and yet pathological, part of ourselves. Recognizing this is to realize that this person doesn’t exist as an isolated, discrete entity, a skin-encapsulated ego, separate from the surrounding field. Seeing the person so possessed in their true context─as literally inseparable from all of us─becomes a portal through which we can refine our inner vision and see through the transparent illusion of the separate self. Seeing that the person so taken over is not separate from the field is a reflection of our own condition. Seeing the other’s transpersonal nature enables us to not person-alize ourselves.

Holographically enfolded within the psyche of every human being, the wetiko virus pervades and underlies the entire field of consciousness, and can therefore potentially manifest through any one of us at any moment if we are not mindful. The wetiko bug is something that we all have unconsciously acted out in our lives at one time or another. We’ve all had our wetiko ‘moments,’ that’s just the way it works. Recognizing this cultivates humility, which helps to psychically immunize us from the pernicious effects of the disease. This realization ultimately collapses the boundary between those who have the disease and those who don’t. Wetiko’s nonlocal nature ultimately makes the question of who has the disease irrelevant, as we all have it to varying degrees, or rather, it has us. We are all in the soup together. This realization engenders both compassion and forgiveness. This does not mean, however, that the Big Wetikos are not ethically, spiritually, and legally responsible for the unimaginable carnage they have caused.

The primary line of distorted code through which the wetiko virus deviates our mind is the presumption of the separate self. The un-reflected upon acceptance of the axiom of separation is what makes all of the other delusions that make up wetiko possible. Seeing the diabolical nature of the disease entails realizing that it is the bifurcating ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mind of duality which splits the world into opposites, that is itself the generative root of the wetiko germ.

This series of articles began by invoking the spirit of wetiko through our shared act of inquiry. As we shed light on wetiko, we become sensitive to its movements within ourselves. At this point the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, for there is no place for the spirit to hide. We are then in a position of having access in our lucid, self-reflective awareness to a sacred vessel which can nourish the very spirit which is to be venerated. To come full circle and successfully accomplish the original, healing intent of our magic ritual, the hidden, powerful spirit of wetiko needs to be ‘contained;’ this is the archetypal point behind the sacred alchemical idea of a mystical vessel which transforms the entire universe.

As people who are becoming wise to the wiles of wetiko help each other to step out of the illusion of separation together, a psychic alchemical container that is greater than the sum of its parts gets created. This holy grail-like vessel of collectively shared lucidity is reciprocally conjured up through our shared realization. This higher-dimensional mystic container is forever stimulating, stabilizing and strengthening itself in a positive feedback loop which literally gives birth to and inspires the creative spirit. This jewel-like higher-dimensional entity composed of consciousness itself is a lucidity generator that is tapping into the zero point energy of the mind, a form of higher-mind technology that attracts the rest of the universe into itself. When we recognize that we exist not apart from, but relative to each other, our connection with each other is ‘hermetically sealed’ with the stamp of Hermes. We then relate with each other in such a way so that none of our projections unconsciously leak out into the world, for the simple reason that the world is recognized to be our projection. This is the very realization which bonds us together and through which we are united with the world, each other and ourselves. Becoming ‘tight’ in this way, we are ‘blessed’ by the master magician ‘Hermes/Mercury,’ the God of the sacred art of alchemy (please see my article The Sacred Art of Alchemy). ‘The Force’ is then with us. Empowered, we are able to trans-fix, trans-mute, trans-form and liberate the vampiric spirit of wetiko, while simultaneously snapping out of our en-trance-ment of ourselves.

Emptiness

Supposedly the greatest ruse of the devil is to convince us that he doesn’t exist. Or on the other hand, is the suggestion that the devil does exist that is implicit in the previous statement a deception of the devil (who is, after all, considered a liar), and as such, is a disguised form in which the devil has insinuated himself into not only our conversation, but into the world at large? It is important to shed light on this murky area: An evil, archetypal figure like the devil doesn’t exist in the way we have been imagining he does if we have been imagining that he exists objectively, as something apart from ourselves.

The devilish wetiko virus, like a vampire, if left to its own devices, would die, as it is only able to exist if there is someone outside of itself on whom it can feast. A vampire has no intrinsic, independent, substantial existence in its own right, it only exists relative to us. The pathogenic, vampiric, mind-parasite called wetiko is nothing in itself, yet, it has a ‘reality’ such that it can destroy our species. The fact that something that only exists as a function of ourselves can destroy us is pointing at the incredibly vast invisible power that is inherent within our being. Ultimately speaking, in wetiko disease we are not being infected by a physical, objectively existing virus outside of ourselves, but rather, the origin of the wetiko psychosis is within us. The fact that a vampire is not reflected by a mirror can also mean that what we need to see is that there’s nothing, no-thing to see, other than ourselves. The fact that wetiko is the expression of something inside of us means that the cure for wetiko is within us as well.

In the Gnostic Dialogue of the Savior, it says, “Whoever does not know the root of evil is no stranger to it.”[xxv] Wetiko forces upon us the evolutionary responsibility to come to terms with the evil within our own hearts. To the extent we have not rooted out the wetiko bug within ourselves we are complicit in the co-creation of the evil playing out in the world. The part of us that is colluding in the creation of a collective psychosis like wetiko is the part of us that is mad, for why else would we be doing this? To the extent we’re not fully awake, we each have a part of us that’s mad, which gets acted out in our life. How can we not have a part of us that’s mad, living in a world gone mad, a world that is not separate from, but rather, a reflection of ourselves? It is only by confronting what is insane and inhuman in ourselves that we become truly human. It is important to face how we have been deviated by wetiko, for if we cannot see how we have been set off course, we can’t orient ourselves to find our true path in life. Seeing how we’ve been led astray is a form of illumination. To see how wetiko operates with our co-operation is to gain critical insight into the elusive workings of our own mind.

We capture within ourselves and truly ‘see’ the nature of wetiko disease─‘Vampire/Cannibal Psychosis‘─when we realize that, just like a dream, its full-bodied manifestation in the world theater is a reflection of a process going on deep within our very soul. We are all dreaming up the wetiko epidemic together. Seeing through our experience in this way gives world events a certain transparency, as well as rendering us transparent to ourselves. Seeing through ourselves makes it unlikely that we would fall prey to and be seduced by any wetiko inspired impulses that pulsate through us. This intimacy with ourselves enables us to step into and embody a role in the field of being like a ‘psychic T-cell’ that helps to heal the malignant cancer in the collective body politic of the world soul. Seeing the dreamlike nature of the world and ourselves helps to generate a culture of compassion, which is a ‘wetiko dissolver’ par excellence. Compassion can, however, when necessary, set a fierce boundary, displaying itself in the most fearsome of ways.

The Solution

Just as a vampire can’t stand the light of day, a bug like wetiko can’t stand to be seen. Flooding light on wetiko’s machinations takes away its seeming autonomy and alleged power over us, such that it can no longer compel us to act it out unconsciously. Paradoxically, ‘seeing’ this vampiric parasite is to relate to it as other than ourselves, while at the same time recognizing it within ourselves. Though the vampire is a figure within us, it is not us. In differentiating ourselves from the vampire, we recognize the difference between ourselves and it. Seeing the vampire, we don’t identify with our subjective experience of the vampire within. This is to say that in seeing the vampire, we free ourselves from our unconscious identification with and possession by it, and step back into ourselves.

Forbes laments, “One of the tragic characteristics of the wetiko psychosis is that it spreads partly by resistance to it. That is, those who try to fight wetikos sometimes, in order to survive, adopt wetiko values. Thus, when they ‘win,’ they lose, or at least, the people lose.”[xxvi] When we see people who are taken over by wetiko and we feel superior to them, our feeling of superiority is itself a symptom of the disease. If we unconsciously react against wetiko, having judgement, anger, hatred, etc., we are then acting out, however well-intentioned, the same process of shadow projection that underlies the wetiko disease in the first place – which is to dissociate from, project outside of ourselves, and react to our own evil. We are then unconsciously reacting to the unconscious part of ourselves which the wetikos embody. This re-action is an unconscious ritualistic invocation and re-enactment of the initial impulse within ourselves of turning away from and contracting against a part of ourselves. This is the timeless, primal act which called forth and spawned the spirit of wetiko in the first place. To the extent we are unaware of what we are doing, we, as ‘reps’ for wetiko, are compulsively re-enacting our trauma, participating in re-creating the wetiko virus in this very moment. We are then playing out our unresolved internal affairs in the outside world by, in and through our reaction, unwittingly becoming a vector that is carrying the wetiko bug out into the world (please see my article, Triggered by Evil). Instead of unconsciously reacting and projecting the shadow outside of ourselves, when we consciously relate to and take responsibility for the evil within ourselves, we are energetically withdrawing and dis-investing from our complicity in the continual re-animation of evil in the world.

The way to engage with wetiko disease is to (at)tend to what it triggers within us (please see The Lion’s Gaze). Just as the way to cut off the head of the mythic Medusa is to look at her reflections in the mirror-shield, the way to stalk the vampiric entity of wetiko is to track and sense its fingerprints within ourselves by looking into the mirror of our own mind. The evil of wetiko can be too much to stare at directly, however, just as looking at the snake-haired Medusa face on turns us to stone. Vampires are ‘petrifying,’ which means both ‘terrifying,’ as well as ‘paralyzing’ and ‘turning to stone.’ They petrify their victim, just like a mouse becomes immobilized by the transfixing gaze of the serpent. Vampires are not a creature to be messed with by the frivolous. Mapping wetikos nonlocal footprints, both out in the world and in the co-responding places within ourselves that are being touched, is to discover the nonlocal multi-dimensional ‘anatomy’ of wetiko. It is impossible to encounter wetiko and not be activated, as wetiko’s nonlocal force-field is activating by its very nature, in that it is co-extensive and interwoven with our own. Our unconscious, knee-jerk reactivity is the primary way that the wetiko psychosis regenerates and propagates itself in the field. Like a pathogen invading a body, this virulent psychic bug strikes and hooks us through our weakest point in the unconscious, the tenderest and most vulnerable spot within ourselves through which we are most likely to re-act.

Wetiko is like a psychic nautilus machine that is continually ‘working’ us. Humanity’s highest virtues are called upon when we are confronted by evil. Encoded within the evil of the wetiko virus is its own psychic vaccine, a potential inoculation against our own ignorance and laziness, which if not overcome, will overcome us. The wetiko bug’s existence requires us to strengthen our muscle of discernment. The virus demands that we cultivate impeccability within ourselves, or we don’t stand a chance. Wetiko literally demands that we step into our power and become resistant to its oppression such that we discover how to step out of bondage and become free, or else! Instead of a typical virus mutating so as to become resistant to our attempts at healing it, the wetiko virus forces us to mutate relative to it. It is as though the evil of wetiko is itself the instrument of a higher intelligence. This higher power, through the revelation and understanding of wetiko, connects us to a sacred, creative source within ourselves. The wetiko bug is the greatest catalytic force of evolution ever known─as well as not known─to humanity.

Naming is a magical act, typically done when something new is born into our life. Like Adam naming the animals in the Garden, we have to name something before it can be formally ‘discovered’ and brought into our shared collective cartography. It was only by naming these creatures that Adam could differentiate and distinguish himself from them and realize who he was. Finding the name for this higher-dimensional, malignant virus of the psyche helps us to more easily recognize it and get a ‘handle’ on it, which is the first step in taking away its destructive power over us. Seeing wetiko and calling it by its rightful name initiates a process that resigns it to the ranks of the unemployed, leading to the wetikonomy that it animates being put out of business. The energy that was being invested and bound up in feeding the wetiko pathogen then returns to nourish and be nourished by the creative wholeness of the psyche. Naming something creates ‘currency’ in the economy of the psyche. To name something is to evoke it, to call it out, which is an expression of an intrinsic, magical power that we all have within us. This is related to the Australian Aboriginal belief that we ‘sing’ the world into being – that we are creating as we name things.

Understanding the meaning of the name ‘wetiko‘ is a form of exorcism. Jung says, “For mankind it was always like a deliverance from a nightmare when the new name was found.” It will serve us greatly as we introduce the word ‘wetiko’ into our planetary dialogue, making wetiko part of our day to day vocabulary. In ‘spell’-ing a word, we are casting a spell, calling forth a spirit, and creating a universe, all while discovering our ability to name. In divining the true name we are de-‘literal’-izing language, as we create language to ‘symbol’-ize our experience. The word wetiko, being a sacred name, is like a mantra, a word of power, in that the speaking of it empowers the idea. Let us therefore ‘spread the word.’ We are only able to name ‘wetiko‘ when we see, and register, its nonlocal nature, both throughout the world and within ourselves. This can only be done when we ourselves become acquainted with our nonlocal nature, to the part of us that is woven into both the evil of wetiko and the wholeness of the divine. Like that great maxim of medicine states, “Do not attempt to cure what you do not understand.” The famous Greek philosopher Socrates reminds us that if we want to understand something, we first must name it. Naming something means to find our experience of its nature within ourselves. Indigenous, wisdom-based cultures understand the exorcistic power of finding the right name of a ‘demon,’ which is precisely what they would understand the wetiko pathogen to be (please see The Daemonic).

Its simultaneously diabolical and mercurial energy makes the Native American idea of wetiko disease incredibly hard to describe in words. Whether we refer to this trickster-like entity as a virus, parasite, tapeworm, vampire or a demon, or call it wetiko disease or malignant egophrenia doesn’t matter. These various names are interchangeable, as they are naming one and the same thing. There is no one definitive model for this disease, however, as each model has both its utility as well as its limits. When all of these models are combined and looked at together, it gives us a greater resolution and capacity to see what no one particular model by itself can reveal.

The Idea of a Cure

Finding the right name(s) invokes the sacred, creative and transformative power of the ‘Word.’ Wetiko is the word made flesh in its most depraved form. In finding the name, however, we are accessing the divinely sponsored power of the word to create an idea, which is a living psychic organism of real value and merit, with an intrinsic power all its own. Ideas are ways of regarding things, the means by which we see, as well as perspectives through which we view the world. The word ‘idea,’ etymologically speaking, has to do with both ‘to see’ as well as ‘to know.’ In other words, a novel idea opens our inner eye and helps us know by giving us in-sight into something previously unconscious. What Plato called the “eyes of the soul,” ideas are the modes of consciousness through which we envision and create our life. In finding the right name(s), we are impregnating and incubating a novel idea. We can then spread and give birth to our meme by sharing it, as we create our own mind anti-virus, a living antigen to the heretofore unrecognized mind-virus of wetiko. As Communist China’s Chairman Mao openly confessed, the one thing he was most afraid of was a new idea. For nothing is more powerful than a magical idea whose time has come.

Let’s spread the word.

May these words be of benefit for all beings.

[i] Forbes, Jack, Columbus and Other Cannibals, p. ix.

[ii] Ibid., p. 24.

[iii] Ibid., p. 43.

[iv] Ibid., p. 60.

[v] People taken over and possessed by the wetiko pathogen─‘full-blown wetikos’─might be petty tyrants at home or at work but might not wield real power in the world. What Forbes refers to as “Big Wetikos,” however, are full-blown wetikos who have climbed the wetiko ladder, jumped through the wetiko hoops, and have risen in the ranks. ‘Big wetikos’ (be they the super wealthy, CEO’s of corporations, bank presidents, or leaders of nation-states) find themselves occupying positions of power where they can influence and control events in our world so as to game the system.

[vi] Forbes, Jack, Columbus and other Cannibals, p. 24.

[vii] Ibid., p. 188.

[viii] Ibid., p. 164.

[ix] Ibid., p. xvi.

[x] Ibid., p. 164.

[xi] Ibid, p. 173.

[xii] Ibid, p. 60.

[xiii] Ibid., p. 120.

[xiv] Ibid., p. 60.

[xv] Ibid., p. 38.

[xvi] I want to thank Jonathan Zap for this clarification in a comment that he wrote after Part 1 of this series. To quote Zap, “There’s an anthropologist with a lecture on ted.com who provides considerable evidence that the per capita war death rate of an indigenous rainforest tribe is much higher than that of Western Civilization (even during the 20th Century). Western Civilization because of its far greater novelty magnifies the outer edge of light and the outer edge of dark,” (please see zaporacle.com for more of his writings)

[xvii] From the article by Ron Suskind titled “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” in the New York Times magazine of October 17, 2004.

[xviii] Forbes, Jack, Columbus and other Cannibals, p. 150.

[xix] Ibid., p. 42.

[xx] Ibid., p. 48.

[xxi] Ibid., p. 171.

[xxii] Ibid., p. 68.

[xxiii] Ibid., p. 68.

[xxiv] Jung, CW 10, Civlization in Transition, par. 886.

[xxv] (II, 5, 134.5-20)

[xxvi] Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals,  p. 61.

The following is Part Two of a series. Read Part One here.

In Part One of this article, I contemplated a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that I call malignant egophrenia and indigenous people call wetiko which is undermining the evolutionary development of our species. Wetiko/malignant egophrenia (heretofore referred to as wetiko) is nonlocal, in that it is an inner disease of the spirit, soul and psyche that explicates itself through the canvas of the outside world. Certain people, groups of people, corporate bodies, or nation-states embody and act out this psychological malady in the world. Specific situations in the world, such as the destruction of the Amazon rainforest by myriad multi-national corporations, or Monsanto instituting terminator seeds as it tries to gain control of the production of the food supply, are real-life enactments, both literally and symbolically, of this self-destructive, inner process. Certain potent symbols in our shared waking dream are literally showing us this inner, vampiric dynamic, a stupefying process in which we get bled dry of what really counts.

Seen as a symbolic entity, the global financial system, for example, is the revelation of wetiko disease displayed graphically and schematically in its architecture, operations and overall design, so that anyone with a trained eye can discern the telltale signs and spore prints of this maleficent psycho-pathology getting down to business. The global economy (which can appropriately be referred to as the ‘wetikonomy‘), displays the fear-based, linear logic of wetiko disease as it reduces everything to the bottom line of dollars and cents. We are living inside of a horrifying, abstract economic structure that itself is a living symbol and re-presentation of the out-of-control insanity of the wetiko virus. The global financial system is one of the most rapid vectors and pathways through which the virus of wetiko is going pandemic in our world.

The economy as an entity is a projection of the collective human psyche, but particularly of the “Big Wetikos,” who hold a disproportionate power in crafting its operating system and in running its day-to-day operations in the world. In the wetikonomy, money has become indispensable for our biological survival, as well as our psychological well being and need for social prestige. This results in the drive for acquiring money becoming hardwired into the most primal centers of our lower, animal nature. This can generate a dependency that can easily lead to a treadmill that spirals downwards towards degeneracy, a true ‘rat race’ in which we become addicted to chasing after ‘the buck,’ as we increasingly worship Mammon (the God of the love of money; Interestingly, the esteemed economist John Maynard Keynes considered the love of money a form of mental illness). Our need for money becomes the ‘hook’ through which the Big Wetikos, who control the supply and value of money, can ‘yank our leash’ and manipulate humanity. To say it differently, the economy is engineered by a few, the “Big Wetikos,” who then utilize their creation to manipulate the collective human psyche and in so doing influence and warp it in a wetiko-like way.

Using the global financial and monetary system as our case study, we can see and understand how the wetiko virus operates in the psyche and in the world, which are both interactive and co-creative reflections of each other. The invention of money was a breakthrough in human affairs, an innovation in which real wealth is allowed to be symbolically re-presented by something else. Money is a construct, something made up, which adds convenience in the trading of goods and services that have value. The wetiko-created fiat money system, however, is the doorway through which a deviant distortion in this co-operative process of exchanging value amongst ourselves emerges. The wetikonomy’s fiat-currency is not backed by real value, but rather, is a system in which, as if by magic, money is created out of thin air. Having fallen through the rabbit hole, we now live in a world where money materializes simply by decree (fiat) of an elite cabal of Big Wetikos, who can exchange the tokens of value they have conjured up for the time and natural resources of everyone else. The wetiko-economy is basically a legitimized counterfeiting operation. The Big Wetikos use their military and police state ‘enforcement’ resources to ensure that others cannot accumulate and circulate capital outside of their system. As if that isn’t bad enough, in a further diabolic sleight of hand, this virtual fiat currency, backed by nothing real and having no intrinsic value in and of itself, is then equated with debt, thus making it worse than nothing. This total inversion of our concept of value itself is a glaring symbol in our midst primal screaming that there is something terribly amiss with our financial system. There is indeed something wrong with a virtual, bubble economy that is decoupled from the real economy and is dictated and manipulated by the few at the expense of the many.

The over-leveraged wetiko economy is a ‘phantom menace,’ in that there is hardly any real substantial value changing hands except in appearance. Unlike a real economy that is based on, backed by and generates genuine wealth, the wetikonomy, because it has no conventional solid, objective, substantial reality, has only a phantom-like, apparent existence. It is as if authors of a fantasy novel or a fairy tale are trying to ‘market’ and ‘sell’ their creation as nonfiction, and we, as consumers, are ‘buying’ it, believing it to be true. Collectively pretending the fiction is real, we have forgotten that we are playing a mass game of ‘make believe.’ The bubble economy of wetiko is a con-fidence game (a ‘con’ game), a con-struct of our mind maintained in each moment by the belief that the system is real, solvent and legitimate.

A virtual, synthetic economy such as ours is a product cooked up by the fevered imagination of the wetiko financiers. Like a collective dream, or a mass spell, it is a concoction based upon mutually shared agreements among its participating members. The wetikonomy in which we live, unlike a free market economy, is subject to the intervention of and manipulation by the central bank, an entity which has interposed itself between us and the market. The agency of the central bank, in its attempts to interfere with and control a natural, self-regulating marketplace, is a living symbol of the wetiko pathogen and how it disrupts a living system.

Just as a vampire can’t stand to be seen and thus avoids the light of day at all costs, as it is only able to operate by the deceptive cover of darkness, so the very nature of the institutions and operations by which the phantom wetikonomy functions must be kept hidden from the light of public awareness. The financial instruments of the wetikonomy are purposely crafted to be incredibly complex and hard to understand so as to hide and obfuscate the theft that is happening. Hiding the reality of what they are doing is one of the ‘chief features’ of wetiko finance. Replacing transparency with opacity, it has become standard account-ing practice in the wetikonomy to ‘cook the books’ so as to avoid being held account-able. If clearly illuminated and exposed to the light of collective disclosure and transparency, the shell-game and Ponzi scheme that IS the global financial system will be revealed to be the staggering and unlawful deception that it is. In a vast computerized web of electronic transfers and accounting shenanigans, the global economic system has become an insanely desperate pyramid scheme, a high-tech casino-like scam. A monstrous, planet-wide Madoff-like rip-off done with smoke and mirrors, the wetikonomy is like a massive optical illusion that is projected by the Big Wetikos, a cadre of master spell-casting wizards, who have nearly infinite resources at their disposal to make their illusion seem real. The wetikonomy, like apparitions of majestic castles in the sky, is a magical display that captivates and holds spell-bound the credulous, semi-conscious masses, who are more than willing, based on their childlike need to hope and believe in an authority outside of themselves, to give away their power so as to quell their fear. This is a regressed form of magical thinking writ large on the world stage.

At first glance, an optical illusion looks one way, but when we investigate further, we can see the illusion for what it really is. If this grand financial illusion were to be unmasked and collectively seen through, the underlying and pervasive ‘fraud as a business model’ approach to running the global economy would reveal itself to be the spectral phantasm that it is. Once the seemingly rock-solid, concrete skyscrapers of the wetikonomy reveal themselves to be a stage set with nothing behind it, built on ever-shifting sand, it is not enough just to realize this and do nothing. It is then our responsibility to re-create and re-dream a different set of agreements regarding how to be in relationship with each other. This sets the stage to re-engineer the system of wetiko-ized control mechanisms that, through locked-in contractual relationships, freezes the economy in a corporate, and wetiko-ized trajectory. The power structure in a wetiko-ized society is inherently fiscal instead of political, which is why political change doesn’t result in economic change. It is the banks that control the government, not the other way around. As our collective realization gathers momentum, however, such a process of waking up en masse could dissolve the wetikonomy to its empty core, bursting the bubble economy and collapsing the whole artificial edifice – the artifice – of fake finance, like the house of cards that it is. This realization lays the groundwork for a more enlightened financial and investment system grounded in real economics, a healthy environment and the cultivation of a humane human civilization.

The unsustainable illusion that is the wetikonomy, however, is based on and supported by violence or the threat of violence, from a personal level up to the capacity to collectively wage war, both visible and invisible. The ability and willingness to kill is not an illusion. This is why many people collude in supporting and perpetuating the illusion, for to not do so inevitably leads to some form of coercion, which is a subtle (or not so subtle) form of violence. In the highly uncivilized world of the wetikonomy, ‘might makes right.’ The nature of the beast that we are dealing with needs to be factored into the equation of how we creatively and strategically respond.

The wetikonomy, to use journalist Matt Taibbi’s infamous phrase describing the major global investment bank Goldman Sachs, is a “vampire squid” that is sucking, draining off and redistributing more and more wealth from the poor, and the formerly middle class, into the hands of the already unthinkably wealthy. This “great vampire squid,” to quote Taibbi, is “wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Unlike a real economy that creates wealth, the vampire squid wetikonomy, a global, organized crime syndicate, extracts and extorts wealth from the real economy and from real people like you and me. There is an actual creature called Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, which literally translates as Vampire Squid from Hell, a living symbol and perfect description of wetikonomics.

The Big Wetikos, are debt ‘pushers,’ in that they inject credit into the would-be victim, artificially enlarging, pumping up and ultimately poisoning the recipient. The more money owed the better, as the bigger the meal of debt off of which the predators will be able to cannibalistically feed. The bigger the debt, the deeper the pockets they can pick, and the more blood there is for the vampires to drink. They create VSID — ‘Vampire Squid Induced Debt,’ whose victims become its slaves and indentured servants. As it says in Proverbs (22:7), “The borrower is servant to the lender.” The modern-day, debt-based wetikonomy is designed to have an exponentially, ever-increasing debt that in principle can never be paid off, analogous to how in wetiko disease there exists an insatiable hunger that can never be satisfied. The economic system imposed on humanity by the rapacious Big Wetikos is a perversion of the original, wholesome meaning of the word ‘eco-nomy,’ which has the same root as the word ‘eco-logy,’ and refers to the harmonious management of a household. The wetikonomy, instead of creating value and wealth that can be shared by all, impoverishes and enslaves the vast majority of humanity while simultaneously enriching the Big Wetiko predators. Big Wetikos are the ‘anti-Robin Hoods,’ as they rob from the poor to give to the rich (themselves). The Big Wetikos buy up all of the assets that have tangible, real world value, like land for example, in exchange for their made-up fiat currency. Once the exchange is made, and they are in possession of the stuff of real value, they then devalue and debase the currency, which becomes ‘worth less’ as time passes. The people are left holding an empty bag, while the Big Wetikos are increasingly in possession of everything else of value. The Big Wetikos are financial terrorists, actively engaged in warfare against humanity, using weapons of financial mass destruction (WFMD’s).

In a wetikonomy, a perverse synergy occurs in the revolving door between government and high finance. The political system becomes a front for and extension of the banks. The United States Treasury is bankrupt, which is to say that it is owned by the banks. Having the upper hand, an international clique of banking elites are the ones who give the orders and, appearances to the contrary, choose the politicians who will occupy the positions of power to do their bidding. This is clearly evidenced by President Obama stacking his cabinet with the very same people who created the economic crisis in the first place, all of whom have intimate insider connections with and allegiance to a corrupt cabal of high financiers.

In a wetikonomy such as ours, the Big Wetikos who create economic crises get rewarded for their actions, gaining untold riches. Think of the bank bailouts, a criminal heist of historical proportions, where the banks blackmailed our nation, putting a metaphorical gun to our government’s head, threatening that if we don’t give them what they ask for, they will crash the global economy and we will have martial law. We acquiesced at the expense of our national sovereignty. True to form, there was very little accountability regarding how the banks used this money, and much of what happened to it is still a mystery. In the total opposite of what happens in a ‘real’ economy, in the bailout, money was invested and sucked into the least productive aspect of the economy — the financial system — all at the expense of the taxpayers. The Big Wetikos get the booty, and the risks and liabilities are then dumped onto the general population, increasing our nation’s debt, and turning almost everyone else into ‘serfs.’ The inevitable austerity measures, e.g., cuts in retirement benefits and social services, will then be put squarely on the backs of the working people. Taxpaying citizens will be forced to pay off the debt over decades of hard work and toil, as they become indentured servants to the bank. As it is said, ‘Crime that pays, stays.’ We live in a ‘klepto-plutocracy’: a ruler-ship by really wealthy thieves. We need to ‘wake up’ to that we are being taken for all that we are worth.

The result is the largest gap in the distribution of wealth between the rich and poor since right before the 1929 Great Depression, which creates enormous economic instability, a situation that the Big Wetikos can then use to their own advantage. This transferring of assets from the broad class of working people and entrepreneurs to the super-rich is no accident, but is purposefully being implemented by the cold-blooded, Big Wetiko banksters and power brokers, who operate as a global banking cartel, so as to continually centralize their power and control. Unfortunately, this isn’t some sort of wacky conspiracy theory. The evidence is all around us, fully visible to anyone who has the eyes to see. A global robbery is in progress; the Big Wetikos are enacting a financial coup d’etat of staggering proportions right in front of our eyes. It is quite symbolic that the one time in the New Testament that Jesus got really pissed was towards the money-changers. Big Wetikos in positions of power in high finance, manipulating the markets so as to loot the planet’s treasuries and precious resources, have become the modern-day pirates, ransacking and pillaging humanity and all living things. This real world process is an externalized reflection of the psychic coup d’etat being perpetrated by the wetiko bug within our own psyche. This is to say that we can recognize a deep process within ourselves as it is revealed to us in the seemingly outside world. Seeing this is to begin to spiritually awaken, as we aren’t just ‘waking up’ to the fact that we are being robbed, but are ‘waking up’ to the deeper, dreamlike nature of our overall situation.

The Big Wetikos are not just draining the resources of individuals, but are sucking up the real assets of and taking down the economies of entire nations around the world (Think of what is happening in Europe now, i.e., Greece and Ireland, and ever more so in the U.S.). One striking symbol of this process is the IMF (International Money Fund), a vampire squid-like entity if there ever was one. The IMF is essentially a bankrupt institution backed by a cadre of banks that are themselves mostly insolvent. The IMF is constantly on the lookout for real assets to scarf up so as to sate its voracious debt-driven hunger. When a country finds itself in financial dire straits (a crisis oftentimes created by a coordinated, criminal cabal of financial terrorists that are in league with the IMF), the IMF swoops in, and offers a seemingly beneficent, helping hand in the form of bailouts to the ailing country in their time of need. The IMF, however, effectively loots and pillages the country that it is purportedly aiding, for once the country accepts the IMF’s ‘help,’ the IMF winds up taking over the country’s real assets to pay back the loan, thus turning it into an economic hostage. Each country that the IMF subjects to its ‘economic shock therapy’ becomes a laboratory experiment by which it continually refines and perfects its financial weaponry. The crisis in Greece is a recent example of this sinister experiment in how to financially take down and extract the wealth from an entire country. The resulting austerity measures imposed upon the now enfeebled and hobbled country are akin to a modern form of feudalism. Subsequent to Greece, Ireland was taken down using the same tactics, and other nations (Portugal, Spain and Italy to name but a few) are in the cross-hairs of this internationally organized form of financial warfare.

As the wetiko infection progresses in the global body politic, the global economic system becomes gradually redesigned to exert more and more effective top-down control by the few over the many, to the benefit of the elite few. These very hard economic times we live in, unbelievably, are the times of the greatest profits for certain select corporate conglomerates in all of history. Are people aware of this eye-opening and mind-blowing fact? It is revealing that the very phrases used to describe the grand larceny occurring daily in and as the global financial system are terms that specifically apply to the psycho-pathology of wetiko disease, such as ‘predatory lending,’ ‘liar loans,’ ‘zombie banks,’ ‘disaster capitalism,’ ‘financial terrorism,’ ‘monster capitalism’ ‘voodoo economics,’ and ‘tapeworm economics,’ to name but a few.

The one thing the Big Wetikos are most afraid of, however, is large numbers of people seeing through their charade and realizing that the emperor has no clothes. If enough people clearly see what the Big Wetikos are doing — committing unconscionable crimes against humanity on a grand scale while they play roulette with our planetary inheritance — their gig will be up. This is an externalized reflection of how the wetiko virus within ourselves is terrified of being seen, for once the bug is seen, it is ‘out of business.’ The global financial system is a symbolic reflection openly revealing the psycho-spiritual disease of wetiko ‘in business.’

The wetiko economic system is a bribery system. The Big Wetikos give us a tiny, overflow trickle of the over-the-top profits they unjustly reap, in which we gladly share. We then pretend that we are ‘clean,’ that we are not complicit in the systematic evil that is playing out. We fall under the self-inflicted illusion that we are not responsible and are merely victims of the system, and yet, we are simultaneously feeding off and supporting the very evil of the system as it kills us. Energetically, on the level of the deeper, underlying field, we pay a steep price if we are buying into this Faustian pact with the Devil. We receive what appear to be benefits, wetiko ‘frequent flyer miles,’ so to speak, but at the ultimate cost of our own genocide. Similar to accepting candy from a predator, the rush of immediate gratification provides an apparent short-term benefit at the cost of our integrity, our freedom and ultimately, our lives. Our true power comes when we see our culpability and complicity in this process and accept our responsibility, thus enabling our ability to respond, which gives us the power to choose differently and change things.

The wetikonomy is both a symbol of and a portal through which we can see the bug of wetiko as it in-forms a living, yet diseased system emerging from the human mind. When we see the workings of the wetiko virus in any system, be it the financial system, the family system, or within our own selves, we are at the same time generating a living antibody of awareness which neutralizes the virulence of wetiko. Seeing how the global financial system is literally being animated and driven by the wetiko virus is to pop into a heightened state of awareness in which we are seeing a wetiko-ized system from outside of itself. We could only do this if we are beginning to see with healthy, wetiko-free eyes, and are thus separating and freeing ourselves from the toxic system. As we increasingly illumine the workings of wetiko, we more and more ‘distinguish ourselves’ from it.

Our real debt is to ourselves; we owe it to ourselves to take a closer look and in-form ourselves and see through the business of wetiko. We can discover how money can be used as a tool that helps us cultivate and share true abundance. The return on our investment of attention will truly stimulate the neglected real economy and further inspire deeper heights of lucidity. This allows us to tap into the place within ourselves that is untainted by wetiko, through which we can consciously leverage and redesign the system to our collective advantage, which is to say, for the benefit of all. Herein lies our power to overcome the plague of wetiko, and in so doing, to build a world that works for everyone.

I would like to thank Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari.com, for our many years of discussion about integrating spiritual and economic phenomenon. For an excellent detailed case study of wetikonomics, please go to Catherine’s Dillon, Read and Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Stock Profits.

Teaser image by nerissa’s ring, courtesy of Creative Commons license.

The following is Part One in a series. Read Part Two here.

In the book Columbus and other Cannibals, indigenous author Jack D. Forbes lucidly explores a psychological disease that has been informing human self-destructive behavior that Native American people have known about for years. After reading his book, it was clear to me that he was describing the same psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that I wrote about in my book, The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis. I introduce the idea that from the dawn of human history our species has fallen prey to a collective psychosis which I call malignant egophrenia. Speaking about this very same psychic epidemic, Forbes writes, “For several thousands of years human beings have suffered from a plague, a disease worse than leprosy, a sickness worse than malaria, a malady much more terrible than smallpox.”[i] Indigenous people have been tracking the same “psychic”[ii] virus that I call malignant egophrenia for many centuries and calling it “wetiko,” a Cree term which refers to a diabolically wicked person or spirit who terrorizes others. Professor Forbes, who was one of the founders of the Native American movement during the early sixties, says, “Tragically, the history of the world for the past 2,000 years is, in great part, the story of the epidemiology of the wetiko disease.”[iii] Wetiko/malignant egophrenia is a “psychosis” in the true sense of the word as being a “sickness of the soul or spirit.” Though calling it by different names, Forbes and I are both pointing at the same illness of the psyche, soul and spirit that has been at the root of humanity’s inhumanity to itself.

As if performing a magic ritual, in exploring the entity of wetiko, we first have to invoke its spirit and enter into relationship with it. We must contemplate and engage wetiko as objectively as we are able, as if it exists outside of ourselves, lest we get too “mixed up” with the object of our contemplation. Due to its unique psychic origin, the epidemiology of wetiko is different than any other disease. An intrinsic challenge to our investigation of the wetiko virus is that it is incarnating in the very psyche which itself is the means of our investigation. Aware of this conundrum, Forbes explains that he is attempting to examine the disease, “from a perspective as free as possible from assumptions created by the very disease being studied.”[iv] If we are not aware of the frame of reference through which we are examining the wetiko virus, our investigation will be tainted by the disease, obscuring the clear vision needed to start the healing process. Studying how wetiko disease manifests in others, as well as in the “other” part of ourselves, will help us to see “it” more objectively. Seeing this psychological disease manifesting in the world is the looking glass through which we can potentially recognize this same illness as it arises subjectively within our own minds.

After evoking an entity like wetiko, in order to study it as objectively as possible, we have to hermetically seal it within an alchemical container. This ensures that its mercurial spirit doesn’t vaporize back into the invisibility of the unconscious, where it would act itself out through us. Jung continually emphasized the importance of developing a container or vessel in which to catch troublesome spirits like wetiko. He writes, “Therefore, if anything is wrong, take it out of its place and put it in the vessel that is between your neighbor and yourself…For love of mankind, create a vessel into which you can catch all that damned poison. For it must be somewhere — it is always somewhere — and not to catch it, to say it doesn’t exist, gives the best chance to any germ.”[v] Wetiko is an elusive spirit that is challenging to pin down and say it is “this” or “that.” At the same time, it is critical that we attempt to delineate its properties. Unlike a physical virus, the wetiko bug can not be isolated materially, but its characteristic signature can be detected and seen in the peculiar operations of a psyche that is under its spell. To not recognize the existence of the wetiko germ — “to say it doesn’t exist” — allows the psychic infection to act itself out unrestrained. Being “always somewhere” is to be nonlocal, which means that it is always around, even potentially, or especially, within ourselves. In calling forth the wetiko spirit, we are simultaneously creating, through our inquiry itself, the container in which we can study this bug so as to understand what in fact we are dealing with, see how it operates out in the world, in others, and subjectively, within ourselves. In order to come full circle in our contemplative exercise/exorcise, we have to homeopathically take our contemplation back within ourselves. As if in a dream where the inner is the outer, we can recognize that the wetiko virus that we have been tracking “out there,” outside of ourselves, is a reflection of and co-related to the same process within ourselves. Encoded in wetiko’s symptomology is a revelation, something that is most important for us to know.

A Disease of Civilization

Wetiko/malignant egophrenia is a disease of civilization, or lack thereof. To quote Forbes, “To a considerable degree, the development of the wetiko disease corresponds to the rise of what Europeans choose to call civilization. This is no mere coincidence.”[vi] The unsustainable nature of industrial civilization is based on, and increasingly requires violence to maintain itself. Genuine “civilization,” in essence, means not killing people. Referring to the lack of “civility” in modern society, Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization and responded by saying, “I think it would be a good idea.” It makes sense that native people would know about malignant egophrenia, as they were both oppressed by, but weren’t, at least initially, under the “curse” of modern civilization. Being under the sway of modern civilization can feel like something foreign to our nature is being imposed upon us, as if we are living in an occupied land. Modern civilization suffers from the overly one-sided dominance of the rational, intellectual mind, a one-sidedness that seemingly dis-connects us from nature, from empathy, and from ourselves. Due to its disassociation from the whole, wetiko is a disturber of the peace of humanity and the natural world, a sickness which spawns aggression and is capable of inciting violence amongst living beings. The wetiko virus is the root cause of the inhumanity in human nature, or shall we say, our seemingly inhuman nature. This “psychic virus,” a “bug” in “the system,” in-forms and animates the madness of so-called civilization, which, in a self-perpetuating feedback loop feeds the madness within ourselves.

Forbes continues, “this disease, this wetiko (cannibal) psychosis, is the greatest epidemic sickness known to man.”[vii] We, as a species, are in the midst of a massive psychic epidemic, a virulent collective psychosis that has been brewing in the cauldron of humanity’s psyche from the beginning of time. Like a fractal, wetiko operates on multiple dimensions simultaneously — intra-personally (within individuals), inter-personally (between ourselves), as well as collectively (as a species). “Cannibalism,” in Forbes’s words, “is the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit.”[viii] Those afflicted with wetiko, like a cannibal, consume the life-force of others — human and nonhuman — for private purpose or profit, and do so without giving back something from their own lives. One example that symbolizes our self-destructive, collective madness is the oil companies’ destruction of the Amazonian rainforest, the lungs of our planet. This is literally a full-bodied revelation showing us what we are doing to ourselves. Another literal example that is symbolically illustrating the wetiko complex in action is Monsanto genetically engineering terminator seeds that do not reproduce a second generation, thus forcing farmers to buy new seeds from Monsanto for each year’s new crop. This makes survival for many poor farmers impossible, which has triggered a wave of suicides among farmers, as Monsanto grows richer from the process.

Forbes writes, “The overriding characteristic of the wetiko is that he consumes other human beings, that is, he is a predator and a cannibal. This is the central essence of the disease.”[ix] Predators, “full-blown” wetikos are not in touch with their own humanity, and therefore can’t see the humanity in others. Instead, they relate to others either as potential prey or as a threat to their dominance. As if a different breed who is more animal-like predator than ordinary human being, someone fully taken over by the wetiko psychosis consumes others’ lives, physically, emotionally, psychically and meta-physically, beyond just the material body and physical possessions to the level of meaning itself. Wetikos are the “anti-artists” of our culture, embodying the opposite of what creative artists do. Unlike an artist (please see my article “The Artist as Healer of the World”), who creates life-enhancing meaning and enriches the world without robbing others, a wetiko takes and consumes without giving anything back, continually draining and impoverishing the planet of resources.

We are currently in the midst of “the greatest epidemic sickness known to man” (please see my article “Diagnosis: Psychic Epidemic”). Many of us don’t even realize this, as our collective insanity is so pervasive that it has become normalized. Our collective madness has become transparent to us, as we see and interpret the world through it, rendering our madness invisible, thereby unwittingly colluding with the collective psychosis that is wreaking incredible death and destruction on our planet. Being “trans-parent,” our madness is beyond its mere appearance, which is to say, “beyond being apparent,” i.e., not visible. Our collective psychosis is invisible to us, as it expresses itself both in the very way we are looking, as well as all of the unspoken ways we have been conditioned not to perceive. Due to its cloak of invisibility, we don’t see our madness, a psychic blindness which makes us complicit in the creation of our madness.

Many of us can’t fathom the level of evil to which full-blown wetikos have fallen prey, and of which they are capable. Our lack of imagination of the evil existing in potential in humanity is a direct reflection of a lack of intimacy with our own potential evil, which enables the malevolence of wetiko to have nearly free rein in our world (please see my article “Shedding Light on Evil”). In our psychic blindness we are complicit in the spreading of the evil of the wetiko psychosis, a systematic evil whose depth is beyond the capacity of words to fully describe. Evil paralyzes the ability to language our experience, creating a seemingly unbridgeable gap between language and the event it is supposed to describe. Finding that place of no words, we simultaneously discover and create a new language, a language which is universal and transcends language itself, a language known as art.

A Parasite of a Different Order 

When people are infected by the wetiko virus, Forbes writes, they are “the host for the wetiko parasites.”[x] The wetiko germ is a psychic tapeworm, a parasite of the mind. Just like certain computer viruses or malware infect and program a computer to self-destruct, mind-viruses like wetiko can program the human bio-computer to think, believe and behave in ways that result in our self-destruction. Wetiko is a virulent, psychic pathogen that insinuates thought-forms into our mind which, when unconsciously en-acted, feed it, and ultimately kills its host (us). It doesn’t want to kill us too quickly however, for to successfully implement its agenda of reproducing and propagating itself throughout the field, it must let the host live long enough to spread the virus. If the host dies too soon, the bug would be prematurely evicted and would suffer the inconvenience of having to find a new residence.

Like a cancer of the mind that metastasizes, in wetiko disease, a pathological part of the psyche co-opts and subsumes all of the healthy parts of the psyche into itself so as to serve its pathology. The personality then self-organizes an outer display of coherence around this pathogenic core, which “masks” the inner dysfunction, making it hard to recognize. In a psychic coup d’etat, the wetiko bug can usurp and displace the person, who becomes its puppet and marionette. Like a parasite, the wetiko virus can take over the will of an animal more evolved than itself, enlisting that creature into serving its nefarious agenda. Once the parasite becomes sufficiently entrenched within the psyche, the prime directive coordinating a person’s behavior comes from the disease, as it is now the one calling the shots. Just as someone infected with the rabies virus will resist drinking water, which would flush out the infection, someone taken over by the wetiko parasite will have nothing to do with anything that will help them get rid of the disease. Wetikos are phobic towards the light of truth, which they avoid like the plague. In advanced stages, this process takes over the person so completely that we could rightfully say the person is no longer there; they are just an empty shell carrying the disease. In a sense there is just the disease, operating through what appears to be a human being. The person becomes fully identified with their mask, their persona, but it is as if there is no one behind the mask.

Alien Intrusion

Speaking in his own language about the predation of the wetiko virus, the spiritual teacher Don Juan, of the Carlos Castaneda books, mentions that the ancient shamans called this “the topic of topics.”[xi] Don Juan explains, “We have a companion for life…We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master.”[xii] This sounds just like the state of affairs being pointed at in the Bible when, for example, The Gospel of John refers to the devil as “the ruler of this world” (14:30; 16:11), and Paul speaks of Satan as “the god of this world” (Cor. 4:4). The Gnostic Gospel of Phillip, talking about the root of evil that lies within all of us, makes the similar point that unless this evil is recognized, “It masters us. We are its slaves. It takes us captive.” (II, 3, 83.5-30) Speaking about the predator, Don Juan continues, “It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don’t do so.”[xiii] It is striking how Don Juan’s description of the effects of these predators is being enacted in our increasingly militarized society, as our freedoms and liberties get taken away step by step. It is as if an inner, invisible state of affairs existing as a yet unrealized archetypal pattern deep within the soul of humanity is revealing itself by materializing in, as, and through the outside world.

To quote Don Juan, “Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico.”[xiv] Don Juan is referring to an “energetic fact” that I imagine most of us can relate to; i.e., there is “something” within us that stops us from expressing our true creative genius and attaining our full potential. These predators are “time-bandits,” consuming the precious hours of our lives, as if we are wage-slaves on a prison-planet “doing time.” Deepening his description of these predators, Don Juan elaborates, “They took over because we are food for them…we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, gallineros, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros.”[xv] The wetiko virus particularly flourishes in overpopulated cities, where people are “coop-ed up.” When we buy into group-think and are enlisted as a member of the herd, we become like sheep that are being led over the edge of a cliff, or cattle that are being raised to be slaughtered.

Don Juan continues, “The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind.”[xvi] It is as if these predators are in competition with us for a “share” of our own mind. The predator shape-shifts and assumes our form, and if we are unaware of its masquerade, we will identify with its invasive thought-forms as if they are our own, and act them out. We will mistakenly believe that we are acting on our own impulses, with our best interests in mind. This predator, Don Juan continues, “fears that any moment its maneuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied.”[xvii] The wetiko predator has an inner necessity, a brute compulsion born out of terror, as it continually has to feed itself so as to postpone its ever-approaching death. Don Juan continues, “Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them [the predators].”[xviii] Cloaking itself in our form, this predator gets under our skin and “puts us on” as a disguise, fooling us to “buy” into its false version of who we are. (This is why the shortened name of Malignant Egophrenia is “ME disease,” referring to a distortion of our identity, i.e., our sense of “me”-ness). Instead of being in our power and serving ourselves, we “unwittingly” (which means to be “out of our wits,” i.e., not in our “right” mind) become the servant of the predator. Instead of being a sovereign being who is creating with our own thoughts, we will then be created by them, as the predator literally thinks in our place. It is as if the predator is sitting in our seat.

Speaking of the predator’s scheme, Don Juan says, “it proposes something, it agrees with its own proposition, and it makes you believe that you’ve done something of worth.”[xix] It is as if there is an alien “other,” an extraterrestrial, metaphysical entity which is subliminally intruding its mind into ours in such a way that we identify with its point of view and dis-connect from our own. Don Juan refers to this situation as a “foreign installation,” as if some alien race has set up a space station inside of our minds. This is exactly what the Gnostics — the ones who “know” — are pointing at when they talk about alien predators called “Archons” who infiltrate and subvert the workings of our mind.[xx] To the extent that we are not conscious of this alien take over of our psyche, we become drafted into the predator’s sinister agenda, unwittingly becoming its slaves. This state of inner, psychological warfare is mirrored by the sinister psy-ops (psychological operations) being instituted by the powers-that-be in the outside world. The disease feeds on our unawareness of it.

Vampires

Forbes writes, “The wetiko psychosis is a sickness of the spirit that takes people down an ugly path with no heart…After all, the wetiko disease turns such people into werewolves and vampires, creatures of the Europeans nightmare world, and creatures of the wetiko’s reality.”[xxi] The wetiko psychosis takes people down, period. Werewolves and vampires are shape-shifting creatures, symbolic representations of the horrific potential within all of us to be taken over by and act out the archetypal shadow, regressing to an archaic level of the psyche and become like a predatory animal or nonhuman creature. When these not-yet-humanized psychic energies break through into consciousness and are not mediated through consciousness, Jung writes, “they sweep everything before them like a torrent and turn men into creatures for whom the word ‘beast’ is still too good a name.”[xxii]

Vampires, considered to be the darkest creature of evil’s arsenal, have haunted our imagination for ages, as they are representatives of a living process that exists deep within the human psyche. A vampire is not a human figure, but rather, is a soulless creature, a being who has lost its soul; or if it hasn’t lost its soul, its soul has been “damned,” which is a soul that is lost. Either way, there’s something missing. Isolated from the world, it has lost any connection with the part of itself that is related to everything else; from its point of view, the world exists simply for its use. Although it has lost connection with its heart and soul, a vampire hasn’t lost its mind (though in one sense it has), as vampires often have clever and incisive intellects that cloak their pathology, making their disease hard to see. This is similar to how people in a deep state of trauma can have brilliant minds as well, a gift that can hide the extent of their trauma, making their malady hard to recognize. The sharpness of the vampire’s mind, instead of being devoted to gaining insight into their malady and healing from it, however, is used for the “passing on” and propagation of their dark art.

One of the undead, a vampire is death taking living, human form. The wetiko virus is ultimately not a living life-form, but rather, a living form of death. Wetiko, like a virus, is “dead” matter; it is only in a living creature that viruses acquires a “quasi-life.” Members of the living dead, vampires are neither truly alive, nor truly dead. Like a full-fledged vampire, “full-blown” wetikos have forfeited their humanity, becoming a conduit for the impersonal, transpersonal and depersonalizing wetiko virus to incarnate through them. They are a living portal, an opening in the third-dimensional fabric of space/time through which this contagious, virulent higher-dimensional virus can spread itself throughout the field, both locally and nonlocally.

Lacking a sense of soul, wetikos are efficient “machines,” dedicated to preserving and serving “the state,” which, to quote Forbes, “is itself a creature of the wetikos who have seized control of its power apparatus.”[xxiii] A full-fledged wetiko has become a robotic automaton, conditioned to react to certain stimuli like a reflex. They have become part of “the machine,” with no spontaneity, creativity, originality, nor free thinking programmed in. De-humanized, wetikos have lost touch with any sense of aesthetics, of appreciating the inherent beauty of life, and have become “an-aesthetic,” i.e., anesthetized and numb to what it is to be a human being. Emissaries of an authoritarian, militarized, patriarchal planetary “culture,” the wetiko bug breeds fascism, and terror. To quote the great healer Wilhelm Reich, “Fascism is the vampire leeched to the body of the living, the impulse to murder given free rein.”[xxiv] Fascism is the outer, collective political expression of an individual’s ravaged inner landscape that has been crippled and suppressed by the authoritarian civilization of “the machine.”

Like a vampire, in full-blown wetikos there is nobody home, which is one of the reasons why, symbolically speaking, vampires have no reflection in a mirror (which, mythologically speaking, reflect back images of the human soul). Full-blown wetikos are empty to the core, so there is nothing to reflect. Inwardly there is just an infinite void, a sponge that can never be saturated, a devouring black hole that is feeding on the universe. Their atrophied soul has been emptied out like a piece of wood hollowed out by psychic termites. Full-blown wetikos are so compulsively possessed by and identical with the unconscious in its destructive, consciousness-negating form that they are not able to see nor think about themselves, which philosopher Hannah Arendt claims is one of the primary characteristics of evil. Unable to self-reflect, they can no longer access within themselves the faculty of the psyche from which such activity derives. One of the reasons we can’t see a vampire’s reflection in a mirror, however, is because our own inner, unconscious vampire obscures the reflection, which is to say that the unacknowledged specter of our own shadow gets in the way.

A vampire casts no shadow. In order to cast a shadow, there has to be a source of light. In a vampire there is no light, only infinite darkness. Not being a living being, a vampire has no inherent reality, no substance. Only a thing of substantial existence can produce a shadow. Vampires can’t cast a shadow, however, because they are the living embodiment of and identical with the archetypal shadow. A shadow casts no shadow of itself, as the shadow itself has no substance. There are benefits that accrue to the vampire because of its ability to not cast a shadow — it is then easier for the vampire to hide its true identity, move in the hidden shadows, become invisible, and be able to prey on people. Not casting a shadow, the vampire, a shape-shifter who is a master of camouflage and disguise, is able to easily seduce and entice the unaware, as sugar-coated vampires entrap us through our unconscious shadow and blind-spots. This is to say that the loss and dis-owning of our shadow can lead to vampirism. The vampire archetype gets activated within us when we turn our backs on our own darkness, rendering our shadow invisible to ourselves. We can’t see vampires because we have chosen not to see those aspects of ourselves that are most like the vampire. Our reluctance to see our own vampiric qualities blinds us to the vampiric energies in others.

In addition to the weak and defenseless, vampires seek out people who are on the verge of a quantum, evolutionary leap in consciousness, but have not yet fully integrated their realizations and come out the other side.  These individuals are in an energetically sensitive and “charged” condition, and their openness and vulnerability invites the vampiric entities to help themselves and gorge on the light of their expanding awareness. The strategy of these predators is to distract us so as to keep our attention directed outwards, thereby stopping us from finding the light within ourselves, which would “kill” the vampires. If we hold up a mirror and reflect back the insanity being exhibited by those stricken by the wetiko psychosis, we run the very real risk of being accused of being the ones who are crazy. If we do manage to connect with the light within ourselves and try to share it with others, these nonlocal vampiric entities (what I have in previous articles called “nonlocal demons,” or NLD for short), not bound by the third-dimensional laws of space and time, will try, via their “connections” to the nonlocal field, to stop us by influencing other people to turn against us. This process can destroy us, or, if we have the meta-awareness to see what is happening and are able to skillfully navigate our way through, can serve to further strengthen our intention, deepen our connection with the light of lucidity, hone our skill of creatively transmitting our realizations, and cultivate more open-hearted compassion. It is as if these psychic, nonlocal vampires are guardians of the threshold of evolution.

Just like vampires, full-blown wetikos have a thirst for the very thing they lack — the mystical essence of life — i.e., the “blood” of our soul. In “consuming” other human beings, wetiko disease is a feeding thing, a psychic eating disorder in which the stricken psyche consumes other psyches, as well as, ultimately, itself. Wetikos are what are called “psychophagic,” i.e., soul-eaters. Savaged by the ferocity of their unending hunger, full-blown wetikos have become possessed by an insatiable craving that can never be filled. This vampiric feeding is an unholy parody, a satanic reflection, of the self-renewal of life. This perverse inner process is mirrored collectively by the consumer society in which we live, a culture that continually fans the flames of never-ending desires, conditioning us to always want MORE. As if starving, we are in an endless feeding frenzy, trying to fill a bottomless void. This process of rabid, obsessive/compulsive consumption is a reflection of a deeper, inner shared sense of spiritual starvation. The entity of the global economic system itself is a living symbol of out-of-control wetiko disease “in business.”

Viruses like wetiko are all about copying themselves. A virus can’t replicate itself, however; it has to use some other vehicle as its means of reproducing itself. They need us to be their birthing chamber. To the extent we are not aware of their ploy, these higher-dimensional spirit parasites put us on, wearing us like their third-dimensional space suits. These psychic vampires are compelled to replicate themselves through us so that we can then “pass on” and transmit the bug to others. This process is analogous to when someone is infected with the rabies virus. In advanced stages of the disease, like a rabid animal they will be taken over by the irresistible urge to bite other creatures so as to pass on the virus. People taken over by the rabies virus are a living, frothing symbol of what the wetiko virus does in its full-blown virulent stage.

In a vampiric lineage, the wetiko virus’s self-propagation is accomplished through the medium of the “family system” (be it our family of origin, or the human family), as the legacy of abuse (be it physical, sexual, political, emotional, psychological, or spiritual) gets passed down, both individually and collectively, and transmitted over generations, continually incarnating itself through the living. It is through the traumatic shattering of our wholeness that wetiko passes its fractured logic and distorted code into the body/mind of another. As if under a curse, our species has been suffering from a collective, inherited form of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Remaking their victims in their own image, the wetikos’ victims join the legion of the “damned,” themselves becoming holders of an unholy lineage. This “curse” will continue until we intervene in the spreading of this vampiric mind-parasite, and the chain of never-ending abuse is stopped.

Highly Contagious

Speaking about wetikos, Forbes says, “they are insane (unclean) in the true sense of the word. They are mentally ill and tragically, the form of soul-sickness that they carry is catching.”[xxv] Wetiko psychosis is highly contagious, spreading through the channel of our shared unconsciousness. Its vectors of infection and propagation do not travel like a physical pathogen. This fluidly moving, nomadically wandering bug reciprocally reinforces, feeds off of and into each of our unconscious blind-spots, which is how it nonlocally propagates itself throughout the field. In wetiko there is a code or logic which affects/infects awareness in an analogous way to how the DNA in a virus passes into and infects a cell. People who are channeling the vibratory frequency of wetiko align with each other through psychic resonance to reinforce their shared agreement so as to uphold their deranged view of reality. Collaboratively supporting their mutual psychosis, groups of people drawn together by the unconscious can potentially become a socio-political force with which to be reckoned. When a group of people are in agreement about anything, whether it is true or not, their alignment with each other exerts a contagious, magnetic field-of-force which can sway and attract the unaware into itself.

People taken over by the wetiko virus usually don’t suspect a thing about how they have been “conned.” The wetiko culture offers no incentive for them to self-reflectingly speculate upon their depraved circumstance; on the contrary, the nonlocal field configures itself to conspire, enable and further cultivate their psychosis. When someone is a full-blown, unrecognized wetiko, the field around them torques so as to protect, collude with, and feed into their psychosis in a way that en-trances everyone around them. Once under the wetiko spell, they lose the capacity to recognize the wetiko pathology in others. In a situation of “group narcissism,” wetikos at different stages of the disease assume particular postures and roles relative to each other so as to protect and shield themselves from their own insanity and darkness. They feed and reinforce each others’ narcissism because it enhances their own. Speaking about the type of person who is typically susceptible to fall prey to the wetiko virus, Forbes writes that it is usually the individual “whose strings are pulled by others or who follow a life-path dictated by others. Thus they are ripe for the wetiko infection.”[xxvi] Not in touch with their inner guidance, they project authority outside of themselves, and become very suggestible to the consensus, agreed-upon opinion of the dominant pack. Losing touch with their own discernment and ability for critical thinking, the “mass man” becomes part of the mindless herd and falls prey to “group-think,” whose members co-dependently enable each other to uphold their shared version of the (wetiko) world. Their group consensus about the nature of reality gets increasingly harder to sustain as time passes, however, as, like a house of cards ready to collapse at any moment, their vision of the world is based on the fundamental error of not being true. Strangely enough, people under the collective enchantment of wetiko become fanatically attached to supporting an agenda that oftentimes is diametrically opposed to serving their own best interest. This is an outer reflection of the inner state of being under the sway of the self-destructive wetiko parasite.

By being “unclean,” it is as if there is an un-holy or evil spirit that has taken up residence in the beings of those taken over by wetiko. They are unwittingly being used as instruments, as covert operatives of this darker, unclean spirit to proliferate itself in the wider field. Secret agents of the disease, wetikos’ secret is self-secret, in that it is secret even to themselves. As is true for any of us when we are taken over by something other than ourselves, carriers of wetiko don’t know how possessed they are at any given moment. The experience of being taken over by something more powerful than themselves always happens in their blind spot (please see my article “Are We Possessed?”).

The wetiko bug influences our perceptions by stealth and subterfuge so as to hide and obfuscate itself from being seen. Like a higher-dimensional, alien form of psychic foliage, the wetiko germ implants its seeds into and takes root and germinates within our mind, distracting and deviating us from our true vocation, calling and spiritual path. The alien, and alienating, effect of the wetiko virus, the very thing we need to see, is disguised by the way we think, perceive, and give meaning to our experience. When someone becomes a full, card-carrying member of the cult of wetiko (please see my article “The Bush Cult”), it is as if their mind has been colonized by the virus in such a way that they themselves don’t have the slightest clue about their own pathological condition. Wetikos don’t experience themselves as needing help; for them other people are always “the problem.” They usually don’t mind their disease, or even recognize it, because it is all they know, and their leaders and the very society they live in encourage them in it. They neither have an appreciation of their disorder, nor do they realize how truly sick they are.

Forbes writes, “one of the major traits characterizing the truly evil and extreme form of wetikoism is arrogance.”[xxvii] In being “full-blown,” wetikos are arrogantly puffed up with their own self-importance, i.e., “inflated.” Instruments for evil, wetikos are arrogantly, ignorantly and self-righteously convinced they are in possession of the truth and working for the highest good. It is as if they are unable to know that what they are doing is evil, unable to register their actions as anything other than good. Forbes concludes, “In any case, the wetiko disease, the sickness of exploitation, has been spreading as a contagion for the past several thousand years. And as a contagion unchecked by most vaccines, it tends to become worse rather than better with time. More and more people catch it, in more and more places, and they become the true teachers of the young.”[xxviii] Wetiko culture gets taught both at home and in “the academy,” where people become “certified” in the ways of its world, and are thus accredited and empowered to spread its corrupting ways on ever grander scales.

Speaking about the rapidly spreading wetiko contagion, Forbes writes, “It is spread by the wetikos themselves as they recruit or corrupt others. It is spread today by history books, television, military training programs, police training programs, comic books, pornographic magazines, films, right-wing movements, fanatics of various kinds, high-pressure missionary groups, and numerous governments.”[xxix] All of the mainstream, culturally-sanctioned, corporatized institutions are in the business of indoctrination, telling us what to think and not think about, as well as how to think. Our mind is continually being massaged into shape by the prevailing culture, as if our ‘true face’ is being “lifted.” It is as if our spiritual pockets are being picked. Our “civilization” has become the mouthpiece for the propaganda organ of the disease, entrancing us to “buy” into its viewpoint as we are bled to death of what really counts most. The “culture” (sic) that in-forms and forms around wetiko illness is itself a channel of its transmission, and if we sign on the dotted line and subscribe to its viewpoint, its life-denying culture will gradually subsume us into itself, as we become unwitting agents doing ITS bidding. This is how the ever-expanding, self-generating psychic empire of collective psychosis “works,” as it takes over and increasingly approaches “full-employment.”

Full-blown wetikos might be petty tyrants at home or at work but still might be one of the impoverished and oppressed, wielding no real power in the world at large. What Forbes refers to as “Big Wetikos,” are full-blown wetikos who have climbed the wetiko ladder, jumped through the wetiko hoops, and have risen in the wetiko ranks so as to find themselves occupying positions of power where they can influence and control events in our world so as to game the system. The Big Wetikos who control the levers of power, be they the super wealthy, CEO’s of corporations, bank presidents, or leaders of nation-states, are particularly dangerous, as they define the terms of our dialogue, dominating the agreed upon historical narrative. Managing our perceptions through the propaganda engines of the mainstream, corporate media which they control (please see my article “The War on Consciousness”), Big Wetikos in positions of power create the limits of our conversation and debate. Wetiko is an idealogical virus whose “currency” is the syntax of ideas. Wetiko deviates our mental syntax, i.e., the rules of how we form language, thereby distorting the semantics, the meaning we place on our experience of ourselves and the world. Wetiko is a semantic disorder, as it alters the axioms through which the psyche shapes, casts and “spells” its words, thereby conjuring up its experiences. The thought-forms and beliefs that express and represent the wetiko virus act as an intrinisic, built-in control system, defining the limits of what we imagine our possibilities are, as individuals, nations and as a species. Wetikoism supports and perpetuates whatever prevailing myths, stories, dogmas and (un)holy books reinforce its nefarious, self-serving agenda. Books, and other forms of information, which don’t support wetikos warped version of the way things are, are metaphorically speaking, “burned” (or in some cases, literally — the books of the aforementioned Wilhelm Reich, for example, were actually burned by the United States Government. In describing what he called “the emotional plague,” Reich was in his own way pointing at the evils of the wetiko virus).

We live inside of a world that, like a dream, is an interactive mirror inseparable from our own inner being. A reflection of a condition deep within ourselves, wetiko disease is an unmediated, direct manifestation of the dreamlike nature of the universe, which is the very realization that wetiko is showing us. Recognizing the dreamlike nature of our situation creates a living antibody made out of awareness itself that is custom-designed to neutralize the psychic pathogen of wetiko. This is to say that encoded within the deadly pathology of wetiko is an insight and revelation which is its own cure (please see my article “Shadow Projection is its own Medicine”). Its own self-revelation, wetiko disease provides its own psychic medicine, but in order to receive its healing ‘benefits’ we have to recognize and more deeply understand this miracle in psycho-spiritual health care. How amazing — the very thing that is potentially destroying us is at the same time waking us up. A potential catalyst for our evolution as a species, we are all co-creating and dreaming wetiko up together. Wetiko is a truly quantum phenomenon, in that it is the deadliest poison and the most healing medicine co-joined in one superposed state. Will wetiko kill us? Or will it awaken us? Everything depends upon if we recognize what it is potentially revealing to us. The prognosis for wetiko/malignant egophrenia depends upon how we dream it.

Now that we have the dia-gnosis and pro-gnosis, all we need is to discover the cure, which requires having ‘gnosis’ itself…. To be continued in Part 2.

This article first appeared on Paul Levy’s website. © Copyright 2010.

[i] Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals, p. xv.
[ii] ‘psychic’ is used throughout this article as the adjective form of “psyche” and not with any parapsychological connotation
[iii] Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals, p. 46.
[iv] Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals, p. xvii-xviii.
[v] C. G. Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, vol. 2, p. 1321.
[vi] Ibid., p. 39.
[vii] Ibid., p. xvi.
[viii] Ibid., p. 24.
[ix] Ibid., p. 49.
[x] Ibid., p. 60.
[xi] Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity, p. 218.
[xii] Ibid., p. 218.
[xiii] Ibid., p. 218.
[xiv] Ibid., p. 219.
[xv] Ibid., p. 219.
[xvi] Ibid., p. 220.
[xvii] Ibid., p. 220.
[xviii] Ibid., p. 220.
[xix] Ibid., p. 229.
[xx] Please see Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief, by John Lash. His website is metahistory.org.
[xxi] Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals, p. 188.
[xxii] Jung, The Symbolic Life, CW 18, par. 1374.
[xxiii] Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals,  p. 153.
[xxiv] Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. xvii.
[xxv] Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals, p. 18.
[xxvi] Ibid., p. 43.
[xxvii] Ibid., p. 52.
[xxviii] Ibid., p. xix.
[xxix] Ibid., p. 49.

Tom B.K. Goldtooth is the Executive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), headquartered at Bemidji, Minnesota. A social change activist within the Native American community for over 30 years, he has become an environmental and economic justice leader, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Tom co-produced an award winning documentary film, Drumbeat For Mother Earth, which addresses the affects of bio-accumulative chemicals on indigenous peoples, and is active with many environmental and social justice organizations besides IEN. Tom is a policy advisor on environmental protection, climate mitigation, and adaptation. Tom co-authored the REDD Booklet on the risks of REDD within indigenous territories and a member of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change — the indigenous caucus within the UNFCCC.

Clayton Thomas-Muller, of the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation also known as Pukatawagan in Northern Manitoba, Canada, is an activist for Indigenous rights and environmental justice. With his roots in the inner city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Clayton began his work as a community organizer, working with Aboriginal youth. Over the years Clayton’s work has taken him to five continents across our Mother Earth. Based out of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Clayton is involved in many initiatives to support the building of an inclusive movement for energy and climate justice. He serves on the board of the Global Justice Ecology Project and Canadian based Raven Trust. Recognized by Utne Magazine as one of the top 30 under 30 activists in the United States and as a “Climate Hero 2009” by Yes Magazine, Clayton is the Tar Sands Campaign Director for the Indigenous Environmental Network. He works across Canada, Alaska and the lower 48 states with grassroots indigenous communities to defend against the sprawling infrastructure that includes pipelines, refineries and extraction associated with the tar sands, the largest and most destructive industrial project in the history of mankind.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a writer, activist, and scholar of Michi Saagiik Nishnaabeg ancestry and is a band member of Alderville First Nation. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba, is an Adjunct Professor in Indigenous Studies at Trent University and an instructor at the Centre for World Indigenous Knowledge, Athabasca University. She has also lectured at Ryerson University, the University of Victoria, the University of Manitoba, and the University of Winnipeg. Leanne has worked with Indigenous communities and organizations across Canada and internationally over the past 15 years on environmental, governance and political issues. She has published three edited volumes including Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence and Protection of Indigenous Nations (2008, Arbeiter Ring), and This is An Honour Song: Twenty Years Since the Barricades (with Kiera Ladner, 2010, Arbeiter Ring). Leanne has published over thirty scholarly articles and raised over one million dollars for community-based research projects over her career. She has written fiction and non-fiction pieces for Now Magazine, Spirit Magazine, the Globe and Mail, Anishinabek News, the Link, and Canadian Art Magazine.

Headdress was created to expose the negative and offensive ways in which Native American imagery is appropriated in “fashion” and “trendy” photographs on popular internet sites. The zine is composed entirely of found images from blogs, juxtaposed with critical quotes from theorists and bloggers examining the effects of cultural appropriation.