This article is a condensation of one that I found on the internet.
I quote:
“Various First Nations traditions of North America have specific and long established lore relating to cannibalism and a term for the thought-form that causes it: wetiko. Understanding this offers a way of understanding the deepest roots of our current global crisis.
Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by greed, excess, and selfish consumption
.
It deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others (others in the broad sense, including animals and other forms of Gaian life) is a logical and morally upright way to live.
Wetiko short-circuits the individual’s ability to see itself as an enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment and raises the self-serving ego to supremacy. It is this false separation of self from nature that makes this cannibalism, rather than simple murder. It allows—indeed commands—the infected entity to consume far more than it needs in a blind, murderous daze of self-aggrandizement.
Wetiko can describe both the infection and the body infected; a person can be infected by wetiko or, in cases where the infection is very advanced, can personify the disease: ‘a wetiko.’ This holds true for cultures and systems; all can be described as being wetiko if they routinely manifest these traits.”
Note by Dona:
“This makes me think of when the Europeans came to the North American continent. They enthusiastically wrote home that they had found a ‘virgin’ land, with huge herds of buffalo, wolves, eagles and other wild life. The Indians had lived on this virgin continent for thousands of years, in small bands or villages. Within one hundred years the herds of buffalo had almost disappeared, as the Europeans shot them indiscriminately for their tongues, leaving the carcasses to rot on the prairie. Wolves, birds, eagles, were brought to the verge of extinction. This was the wetiko disease of the Europeans. Greed and total disregard for other cultures, animals and the earth itself”.
By contracting new relationships with others, with Nature, and with ourselves, we can build a new complex of entanglements and thought-forms that are fused with post-wetiko, post-capitalistvalues.
We have to simultaneously go within ourselves and the deep recesses of our own psyches while changing the structure of the system around us. Holding a structural perspective and an unapologetic critique of modern capitalism—i.e., holding a worldview that sees all oppression as connected—serves our ability to see the alternatives, and indeed, all of us, as intricately connected.
Plato believed that ideas are the ‘eyes of the soul.’ Now that the veils obscuring wetikoare starting to be lifted, let us become living antigens, embracing the polyculture of ideas that are challenging the monoculture of wetikocapitalism.
Let us reclaim our birth right as sovereign entities, free of deluded beliefs in market systems, invisible hands, righteous greed, chosen ones, branded paraphernalia, and techno utopianism .
Wetiko is also called Wendigo From this word comes the term: Wendigo psychosis.
I would like here to refer to the articles ‘ARE WE BEING HYPNOTISED part one and part two.’.
In some Indigenous communities, environmental destruction and insatiable greed are seen as a manifestation of Windigo Psychosis.
In some traditions, humans who became overpowered by greed could turn into wendigos; the myth thus served as a method of encouraging cooperation and moderation. People and corporations who wreak environmental destruction, who destroy communities with their greed, are seen as suffering from the Wendigo Sickness.
The Wendigo is sick because it’s cut off from its roots. It’s a ghost with a heart of ice. It eats everything in sight. Its hunger knows no bounds. When there is nothing left to eat, it starves to death. When it sees something, it wants to own it. No one else can have anything.
This illness feeds on a spiritual void. The Windigos continue to attack people and the environment. They destroy vast territories, forests and wetlands. They crave ‘bitumen’, a tar like substance that is turned into oil through an energy intensive process that causes incredible environmental damage. Farmlands will be wasted. Large boreal forests will be clear-cut. They want rare cancers and other diseases to kill us and breakdown our society to get rid of us.
All over the world, there is a feeling that something is deeply wrong. It is often felt more than seen, an unnamed darkness that keeps millions (even billions) of people disconnected from the reality of authentic life-affirming experience.
Too many of our so-called leaders are asleep at the wheel—they talk about economic growth-at-all-costs as the only viable solution to mass poverty, wealth inequality, the climate crisis, and other planetary-scale crises humanity must confront in the 21st Century.
Those with a spiritual bent might say that a shadowy presence has shrouded much of the Earth. People are sleeping through the same nightmare, unable to awaken within the dream.
If we want to escape from the wetikodisease of our current capitalist culture, our crisis or 2020/2021, we need a credible concept for a new nonviolent global society and for transforming the old matrix of fear and violence into a new matrix of trust, compassion and cooperation.
Healing wetikowould be nothing short of reinventing our entire civilization and basing human existence on new social, ethical, spiritual and sexual foundations allowing profound trust between people as well as between humans and animals.