Wetiko. We-tick what? What-eek-o! It’s a native American concept, but it didn’t start with them. Arguably, wetiko has been around as long as mankind has – at least as long as what the Bible asserts is original sin. But we aren’t here to talk about the Bible, simply using it as a temporary frame of reference, just as the word “wetiko” is a frame of reference. Wetiko is old stuff and in the minds of most, completely transparent.
Wetiko is large and malevolent, and it touches you everyday. You could say that wetiko even rules you in a sense, even if it doesn’t own you outright. So what is it? Wetiko is a disease of the soul, a parasitic mind virus within a collective psychosis of the world-at-large. This mind virus operates quietly in the background within the unconscious blind spots in the human spirit. Wetiko causes humans to be blind to the mind virus within, often compelling them to act against their own best interests, a psychosis that is a cancer of the human spirit.
Wetiko is parasitic in that it acts on each human soul, together and separately, while hiding its presence in the mind. Wetiko animates the madness that plays out in your life, and the lives of every human in this world. The only way to fight this mind virus is to wake up to the reality of it, while working to understand how wetiko operates and distributes itself, so that you are able to begin fighting it. It is a battle to be sure.
Wetiko has been called by many names, and it invades everything man touches. That includes women and children too. Wetiko underlies every form of destruction in and against everyone. Because of wetiko, humanity seems to be more conscious that ever of entering a new age of darkness, and with that darkness, opportunity.
The real issue lies within the “wetiko-world” that humanity has already created and allowed to exist. Collective behaviors and government policies the world over drive us toward multiple foreseeable disasters, as if we are lemmings diving off a cliff into complete oblivion. In this age, humans have become increasingly destitute of vision, in a psychic trance of demonic proportions which tends to compel destruction at most every turn and opportunity. Wetiko is so pervasive that it is fully normalized into life, and most people simply accept it blindly, without giving it a thought. Humans even use the evil of wetiko as a tool to gain power, and to hold control over others by any and all means.
We have collectively become conditioned to think that insanity would be obvious, and that we would see and know insanity if it existed. Yet, this insanity is actually more of a mania, a collective psychosis that each of us actively and passively participate in. This mind virus pervades the present and creates the future. We are incapable of dealing with the horrors of the past, and what lies within us, so wetiko patterns continue to invade any future of humanity. This is especially true when these patterns are ignored or magnified.
While humans might tend to color wetiko with religion, wetiko isn’t religious. It’s a condition of the mind and how it perceives and colors the vision of the world that each of us share.
The folklore in the Plains and Great Lakes American natives tell of wendigo, giants that possess humans. These creatures lust for flesh, growing in strength and power with each human they consume. They want for more, and can never be satisfied, causing mayhem and destruction to everything around them.
“Basil H. Johnston, an Ojibwe teacher and scholar from Ontario, gives a description of a wendigo:
The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash-gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody ... Unclean and suffering from suppuration of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.” [1]
You can take this literally if you want, but this infection is clearly spiritual and one of the spirit. As a concept, the wetiko mind virus “can apply to any person, idea, or movement infected by a corrosive drive toward self-aggrandizing greed and excessive consumption, traits that sow disharmony and destruction if left unchecked…. (they) unravel and destroy the ecological balance around them”. [1]
Wetiko is the consuming drive towards greed, excessive consumption, the tendency to be self-absorbed, the very personification of selfishness, along with disregard for the lives of others. The worse exhibitions of wetiko cannibalize the lives and substance of others, using other people to sustain themselves without apology or self-conflict. They feel entitled by every life occurrence, knowing no real bounds where the need to consume and cannibalize life is concerned.
These people aren’t aware of their mental sickness as such. The evil is such, that any human being can fall prey to wetiko because of a weakness for it. Yet, it is most evident in those that point to any perceived evil in others, while ignoring or failing to see the same in themselves. Wetiko feeds on fear and polarization, the terminal disagreement among rivals. Wetiko induces the enslaved to serve it. Wetiko is a mental parasite that fools the host into believing he or she is empowering self, while chiefly feeding the parasite that seeks to destroy the host. Wetiko seeks to always be beneath conscious awareness, disguising itself as being the host. In other words, wetiko puts you on as a costume and mimics you. It sets up a false identity in anyone of insufficient strength to fight it. You give your self and power to it. Further, when a human person disconnects from others, each wetiko victim continues to be used, manipulated and exploited by forces here and beyond.
Wetiko replicates itself through the human race, it’s very purpose for existing. In other words:
Humans are the soil for wetiko.
This mind plague is spread through relationships between people and the mental aberrations they create and share. Evidence points, not only to people, but to a quantum connection to other beings, sometimes referred to as demons. The collective psychosis and its multiple tendrils isn’t just government psyop material, but a resident evil that rides mankind. This mind virus reinforces collective egregores or lay lines of madness that work to unwittingly (sometimes) create personal destruction. Mankind is very often battered by the forces of its own overarching mental plague.
The curse is also the cure, alerting humans to the possibility of breaking the stronghold that lies within each of us. Our minds have creative power - either the power to play into the disease to create living material that destroys, or to resist and fight it. Wetiko works in quantum streams, influencing world events and amplifying mental trends of people or groups of people. The mind not only controls what the body does with all the requisite effects that range from negative to positive, but is magnified through the mind into our resident cosmos as spiritual energy. What the energy is and does depends entirely on each of us. Even the unconscious mind is involved. The world around us collectively reflects what mankind does and dreams, how events are shaped in the world. All of this mental energy is deeply intertwined.
It is up to each of us to recognize what is happening in the world and what is taking place in your mind, whether your mind is being influenced or controlled by others. In practice, each of us capable of dealing with wetiko, creating an opportunity for personal improvement without negatively impacting other people. When you join with others with similar ideas, your thinking is magnified in a collective way. Real valuable positive creations are possible, even in a world full of relative darkness. This is just the beginning in dealing with the overarching evil of the global wetiko mind virus.
Yes, it’s time to get the word out!
Very well written piece, which resonates deeply with me. It’s so obvious to me that our species is wrestling with darkness in hitherto unimaginable ways. Like you though, I also maintain hope that we will be able to overcome and be stronger for it.
I hope you don’t mind me recommending this piece I published recently, which touches on a particular aspect of the mind virus you so eloquently describe:
https://open.substack.com/pub/thescrawnyape/p/power-of-addiction?r=392lqs&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post