part0007

In 1997, a strategic planning group at the CIA made a visit to my company in Washington, DC. They brought with them a woman whose job and title were classified. I was not allowed to know them. Upon listening to my presentation on how to strengthen the American economy by transforming our investment model, she looked at me and said, “You know what your problem is? You don’t understand where evil comes from.”

My search to understand evil and its transformation is what attracted me to Paul Levy’s invaluable work.

The question of where evil comes from and how it transmits through our society like a contagious virus is profoundly important. Our economic problems are symptoms of our governance, which is, in turn, a symptom of a problem we have with evil. If we want to address our economic problems, we have to deal with the root problem—the ascendancy of evil and its institutionalized use of invisible weaponry and forces, including financial systems.

Paul Levy’s book, Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil , is an exploration of our inhumanity and how we participate in it. Paul calls the collective psychosis under which we labor “wetiko,” a Cree term that refers to a diabolically wicked person or spirit who terrorizes others. He leads us through the manifestation of wetiko in our culture, our media, our economy, and, most important, ourselves.

Solving a problem requires that we take responsibility for it. “This is my problem. I will study it. I will master it. I will take responsibility for it. And I will act to do that which I can do.”

Taking responsibility is not something that is encouraged. We are encouraged to be victims. We are encouraged to blame “them.” In doing so, we give away our power. We reject the opportunity to take responsibility, to identify our complicity in the process, and, by changing how we feel and act, to reinvent our world individually and collectively.

In the summer of 2000, I asked a group of 100 people at a conference of spiritually committed people who would push a red button if it would immediately stop all hard narcotics trafficking in their neighborhood, city, state, and country, thus offending the people who controlled an estimated $500 billion to $1 trillion a year in global money laundering and the accumulated capital therein. Out of 100 people, 99 said they would not push such red button. When surveyed, they said they did not want their mutual funds to go down if the U.S. financial system suddenly stopped attracting such capital. They did not want their government checks jeopardized or their taxes raised because of resulting problems financing the federal government deficit. They preferred, instead, for adults to actively attempt to addict their neighbors’ children and engage them in illegal activities in a criminal, genocidal process.

Our financial profiteering and complicity are not limited to aristocrats and the elites who do their bidding. Our financial dependency on and participation in unsustainable economics in the form of suppressed knowledge and technology, covert force, organized crime, and global warfare are broad, ingrained, and deep.

Whatever is occurring in our world under highly centralized decision making, it takes millions of people to implement it. This means we are all involved.

In helping us understand and face the lies that weave through our lives, Paul Levy’s work leads us to our extraordinary opportunity. We hold within our spirits, our thoughts, and our actions the power to transform our individual participation and, by so doing, our collective situation.

It is a rare philosopher and spiritual leader who can help us to look into the mirror of our collective participation and denial. Yet Paul Levy accomplishes this and more. He helps us find a way to explore the most intimate connections between our spiritual and material lives and the wider psychic storm and power lines in which we struggle. He makes a way through our madness, our “spiritual starvation,” to invoke our imagination to literally “change our mind.”

As I read Dispelling Wetiko , I often hear in my mind a favorite passage from the New Testament:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

As you read Dispelling Wetiko , you will be challenged. You will savor moments of “Aha!” When you have finished, you will find that something has shifted. There will be fewer spiritual calluses between your imagination and your daily life. You will see a way forward that you had not seen before. You will feel less isolated, more hopeful. You will never quite look at the world in exactly the same way again.

Catherine Austin Fitts is the publisher of The Solari Report and a managing member of Sea Lane Advisory, LLC, and of Solari Investment Advisory Services, LLC. She is a former managing director and member of the board of Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co. Inc., a former Assistant Secretary of Housing, and a former president of the Hamilton Securities Group, Inc.