wetiko
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intro’d to the word/concept via this post by Alnoor..
2016 – seeing wetiko – capitalism mind viruses and antidotes for world in transition.. via fb share by Michel:
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. We believe understanding this offers a powerful way of understanding the deepest roots of our current global polycrisis.Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by greed, excess, and selfish consumption (in Ojibwa it is windigo, wintiko in Powhatan).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendigo (see below)
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. Author Paul Levy, in an attempt to find language accessible for Western audiences, describes it as ‘malignant egophrenia’—the ego unchained from reason and limits, acting with the malevolent logic of the cancer cell. We will use the term wetiko as it is the original, and reminds us of the wisdom to be found in Indigenous cultures, for those who have the ears to hear.
Wetiko can describe both the infection and the body infected; a person can be infected by wetiko or, in cases where the infection is very advanced, 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.”
By contracting new relationships with others, with Nature, and with ourselves, we can build a new complex of entanglements and thought-forms that are fused with post-wetiko, post-capitalist values.
We have to simultaneously go within ourselves and the deep recesses of our own psyches while changing the structure of the system around us. Holding a structural perspective and an unapologetic critique of modern capitalism—i.e., holding a constellational 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 wetiko are starting to be lifted, let us give birth to, and become, living antigens, embracing the polyculture of ideas that are challenging the monoculture of wetikocapitalism. Let us be pollinators of new memetic hives built on altruism, empathy, inter-connectedness, reverence, communality, and solidarity, defying the subject-object dualities of Cartesian/Newtonian/Enlightenment logic. Let us reclaim our birth right as sovereign entities, free of deluded beliefs in market systems, invisible hands, righteous greed, chosen ones, branded paraphernalia, techno utopianism and even the self-salvation of the New Age. Let us dance with thought-forms through a deeper understanding of ethics, knowing, and being,23 and the intimate awareness that our individual minds and bodies are a part of the collective battleground for the soul of humanity, and indeed, life on this planet.
short ness
And let us re-embrace the ancient futures of our Indigenous ancestors that represent the only continuous line of living in symbiosis with Mother Nature. The dissolution of wetiko will be as much about remembering as it will be about creation.
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wikipedia doesn’t have wetiko.. but does have wendigo:
In Algonquian folklore, the wendigo or windigo is a cannibal monster or evil spirit native to the northern forests of the Atlantic Coast and Great Lakes Region of both the United States and Canada. The wendigo may appear as a monster with some characteristics of a human, or as a spirit who has possessed a human being and made them become monstrous. It is historically associated with cannibalism, murder, insatiable greed, and the cultural taboos against such behaviours. The legend lends its name to the disputed modern medical term Wendigo psychosis, which is considered by psychiatrists to be a form of culture-bound syndrome with symptoms such as an intense craving for human flesh and a fear of becoming a cannibal. In some Indigenouscommunities, environmental destruction and insatiable greed are also seen as a manifestation of Windigo Psychosis.
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The Wendigo is seen as the embodiment of gluttony, greed, and excess: never satisfied after killing and consuming one person, they are constantly searching for new victims
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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. This belief continues in the living cultures, with humans and corporations who wreak environmental destruction, who destroy communities with their greed and racism, now 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. Canada and US are presently in an advanced stage of the “Wendigo Psychosis”. The Mohawks call it the “Owistah” disease. … The Windigos continue to attack our people and our environment. They relentlessly destroy our 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. It will pollute the Athabaska River, fill the air with toxins, and 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.
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rna ness et al – deep enough
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fb share via Michel – seeing wetiko via the rules
“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.Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by greed, excess and selfish consumption (in Ojibwa it is windingo, wintiko in Powhatan). It deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others (others in the broad sense, including animals and other forms of Gaian life) is a logical and morally upright way to live.”
https://therules.org/seeing-wetiko-creative-brief/
when we are conscious of the narratives that shape our lives and culture we are less likely to replicate them blindly
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In place of traditional certainties and linear cause-and-effect logic, we can recast ourselves “as spontaneously responsive, moving, embodied living beings—within a reality of continuously intermingling, flowing lines or strands of unfolding, agential activity, in which nothing (no thing) exists in separation from anything else, a reality within which we are immersed both as participant agencies and to which we also owe significant aspects of our own natures”
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Once we are in the mode of seeing wetiko, we can hack the cultural systems that perpetuate its logic.
wetiko: us perpetuate\ing… our broken feedback loop
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july 2016
dreaming beyond capitalism.. a culture w/o fear by Martin Winiecki (also mentioned on brexit ness page)
http://www.kosmosjournal.org/news/dreaming-beyond-capitalism-a-culture-without-fear/
The Westerners found a deeply interconnected tribal society living in profound symbiosis with the Earth. Seeing the bulldozers coming closer and closer, they asked the Elders of the tribe how they could survive. Their answer was surprising and straightforward: “Don’t try to help us here. Go back to your own culture and change the dream of the modern world! It is because of this dream that we are perishing.
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The further he inquired, the more he realized this fear is not only in the “mentally ill,” but also appears in the “sane” as fear of what others could think of them, as speech anxiety, as fear of authorities and institutions, fear before and after intercourse, fear of the future, of getting sick and so on. “This inconspicuous, socially omnipresent and ‘normal,’ fear is neurotic,” he writes. “Fear is not only the product of capitalism, but part of its foundation, an element without which this entire system would collapse.”
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For Duhm, the consequence was clear: If we want to escape from the wetiko disease of our current capitalist culture, 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 wetiko would 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.
a nother way
Martin Winiecki was born 1990 in Dresden, Germany, and is coordinator of the Terra Nova School in Tamera Center, Portugal where 160 residents of the center are working for a society free of violence and greed.
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via Alnoor Ladha.. on nodapl at standing rock
Angry Progressive (@WhiskersCrowley) tweeted at 6:36 PM – 16 Mar 2017 :
Memory, Fire and Hope: Five Lessons from #StandingRock by @alnoorladha
https://t.co/QuHKLTjgZy via @TheRulesOrg #NoDAPL https://t.co/X9p7hU3LTc (http://twitter.com/WhiskersCrowley/status/842535068665102336?s=17)the forced closure of the encampment is simply the latest chapter in a violent, 500-year-old history of colonization against the First Nations. It is also the latest chapter in the battle between an extractive capitalist model and the possibility of a post-capitalist world.
1. There is a global convergence of movements – Over 300 North American tribes had came together for the first time in history. Standing alongside them were over 100 Indigenous communities from all over the globe. A contingent from the Sami people, the Indigenous peoples of Scandinavia, had traversed the Atlantic to show their support the day I arrived. They were joined by black bloc anarchists, New Age spiritualists, traditional environmentalists, union organizers and ordinary Americans who have never attended a protest……various movements from around the world including the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, the Pink Tide in Latin America, the landless people’s movement from India, the anti-austerity movement in Europe, the global Occupy movement, and the countless “awakenings” spreading across the African continent are uniting as expressions of the same impulse: a belief that the neoliberal capitalist system has failed the majority of humanity and a new world is emerging.
2. A more holistic activism is emerging – ..Charles Eisenstein ..we will receive an invitation to .. ‘the deplorables.’ ..Pancho Ramos-Stierle : ‘Brother, your soul is too beautiful to be doing this work.’..stare hate in the face …hold a compelling invitation to the haters to fulfill their beauty.”
3. Occupation of space is a critical tactic – ..a physical spectacle that forces the corporate media to tell the stories it would otherwise like to ignore. It creates networks of solidarity and deep relationships that span beyond the time and space of the occupation..
4. We are Nature protecting itself – ..Although Indigenous peoples represent about 4% of the world’s population they live on and protect 22% of the Earth’s surface. Critically, the land inhabited by Indigenous peoples holds the remaining 80% of the planet’s biodiversity…During COP 21 in Paris, Indigenous youth groups carried banners that read: “We are Nature protecting itself.”
5. There is a common antagonist – ..the deadly logic of late-stage capitalism…a cannibalistic global economy that requires perpetual extraction, violence, oppression, in the service of GDP growth, which in turn, benefits a tiny elite at the expense of the world’s majority….a Algonquin word, wetiko, that refers to a cannibalistic spirit that consumes the heart of man..We are not just fighting a pipeline; we are fighting the wetiko spirit that has taken hold of our planet like invisible architecture
Wetikois inherently anti-life. And what we are all fighting for is a new system that recognizes our interdependence with the Earth and with each other, and that allows our highest selves to flourish.
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from Douglas Rushkoff‘s team human:
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a belief in reincarnation or karma would make it hard to engage in such inhumanity w/o some *fear of repercussion
*wrong reason to not engage in inhumanity.. cancer all the same
a circular understanding of time is incompatible w such extraordinary, singular moments as an apocalypse.. everything just is, and has always been.. no such thing as progress..just seasons/cycles.. humans can’t take a genuinely original action..
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people used to believe in circles. they came to believe in lines..
perhaps it’s neither..
ie: good bye cycle.. grab x-d glasses
on encountering the destructiveness of european colonialists, native americans concluded that the invader must have a disease. they called it wettiko: a delusional belief that cannibalizing the life force of others is a logical and morally upright way to live..
thurman interconnectedness law: when you understand interconnectedness it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying – Robert Thurman (@BobThurman)
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the native american believe that wettiko derived from people’s inability to see themselves as enmeshed, interdependent pars of the natural environ.. once this disconnect has occurred, nature is no longer seen as something to be emulated but as something to be conquered.. women, natives, the moon, and the woods are all dark and evil, but can be subdued by man, his civilizing institution, his weapons, and his machines..
control.. civilization.. structural violence.. et al
wettiko can’t be blamed entirely on europeans. clearly, the tendency goes at least as far back as sedentary living, the hoarding of grain, and the enslavement of workers
testart storage law.. descola control law
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while europeans took their colonial victories as providential, ..
native american saw white men as suffering from a form of mental illness that leads its victims to consume far more than they need to survive ..
and results in an ‘icy heart’ incapable of compassions
clearly, the wettiko virus prevailed, and the that emerged from this aggressive extraction.. still uses the promise of a utopian future to justify its wanton exploitation of people and nature in the present..
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be you. 