Wetiko

[David Morris]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/18/1027504/-

Among the Anishinabe people (also known as Ojibwa or Chippewa) there was a
type of disease which the people called wétigo. They described this as a
soul sickness and called those afflicted with it windigos—a term which can
be translated as “cannibal” or “soul eater.” Windigos were destructive not
only to themselves, but to those around them: they consumed the souls of
other people with their greed.

When the Anishinabe first encountered Europeans, many of the people thought
the Europeans were windigos. They saw the Europeans as exploiting the
environment, consuming it with little regard for the next seven
generations. The Anishinabe were concerned about the European obsession
with private property and their seeming inability to share.

For the past four centuries, the Anishinabe have lived in contact with and
have been changed by European cultures. Wétigo is not a disease of interest
to most of today’s people. So why write about it here?

There are times when the ancient or traditional views may lend some insight
into contemporary society. Perhaps, the traditional concept of wétigo (soul
sickness) can help us understand some of the problems which currently exist
in the United States.

The traditional Anishinable saw the European obsession with private
property as an illness. The European desire to “own” land and to transform
it with no concern for the greater good of the tribe puzzled most
Anishinabe, and many spiritual leaders viewed this as spiritual
cannibalism. In other words, the Europeans were windigos who were eating,
metaphorically, their children’s flesh—that is, future resources, both
physical and spiritual, that would benefit the next seven generations.

The antidote to wétigo is government, and more importantly the
understanding that government is about the public good. It is about making
collective decisions for the next seven generations, without concern to how
these decisions might impact a single individual. Government is the people,
all of the people without regard for gender, sexual orientation, individual
wealth, or intellectual capacity. Government is about the common welfare.

With a society that seems to emphasize the individual over the tribe (that
is, the community, the country), the stage is set for wétigo or soul
sickness. With an emphasis on winning and losing, on acquiring great
individual wealth (greed), it is easy for people to become windigos—soul
cannibals fixated on “feeding” themselves without concern for the common
welfare.


Paul Levy, "Dispelling Wetiko"

*“*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 while simultaneously accusing other people of
doing it.

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’ 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

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.

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.
The disease itself is now demanding that we pay attention to it, or it will
kill us.”

This disease, this wetiko (cannibal) psychosis, is the greatest epidemic
sickness known to man.” 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.” 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.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20161219/ea3195e5/attachment.html>