part0020

People have to be cured of their spiritual sickness before they can build a just society. It is no great accomplishment to adapt to and be considered sane by an insane society. To become well adjusted in and to a wetiko-driven society is to become insane. The culture of wetiko promotes the systematic destruction of the human heart, which when fully internalized, alienates us from everything human in ourselves, save what reproduces the conditions of the system. Adopting the values of our oppressors, however, ensures the continuation of our own dehumanization. The system is set up to be a setup such that a person oppressed by the system of wetiko must adopt the values of wetikos if they want to rise in positions of power and rank. Big Wetikos learn to exploit every situation to their advantage and sacrifice in themselves everything that doesn’t advance this motive. To become a Big Wetiko requires a lot of back-stabbing, ass-kissing, drinking, scheming, strategizing, and maneuvering; it is an acquired taste. It requires the corruption of other young people who, in turn, will become new initiates co-dependently entangled with and hooked into the system. It is very easy to be seduced into becoming a wetiko in our society because of all of the perks and incentives, for people toting the wetiko party line tend to get promoted, get better salaries, and typically get testimonials and finally, the symbolic gold watch when they retire. Because of all of the benefits of the role, there is not merely a passive disinterest, but rather, an active resistance for wetikos to self-reflect upon the evils of the system they are participating in and being fed by, an unwillingness which continually supports the wetikoized system and nourishes the wetiko parasite within them and their society.

Built into the very fabric of the system of wetiko is a progressive disincentive for its members to realize the level of depravity into which they have fallen. What keeps us stuck in denial is an inner self-protective mechanism that shields us from the overwhelming awfulness of the shock that would necessarily ensue if we were to consciously experience and shake off the lies that we have been living, a disillusionment that would be too much for most people to bear. The major obstacle blocking us from seeing through our own self-deception is our unwillingness to consciously experience the pain, shame, guilt, mortification, and trauma of this realization. Part of this realization is dealing with the shock of realizing that we have given away our power to those in positions of power over us who have misused that power; it is quite a shock to realize that those who were supposed to be protecting us were the very ones from whom we most needed protection. These multilevels of realization literally shatter our self-image, our identity of who we think we are, as well as our sense of belonging to a collective, social fabric. It is truly an unforgettable, soul-shattering moment when we have the courage to look in the mirror and see that we have been “out of our minds,” “beside ourselves,” having suffered a genuine “break from reality,” in the sense that we have been unwittingly supporting the collective madness and have been complicit in our own victimization. To see the magnitude of the depraved situation we have been faithfully living in and to realize how sick we have become can be so overwhelmingly traumatic that we shun its onset, as this horrifying realization has programmed within it a counter-incentive to fully experience itself.

What is required from us is a courage and clarity analogous to that experienced by cult members who with brutal honesty snap out of their collective brainwashing and repudiate the systems of belief in which they were held in thrall. Realizing our complicity in the collective madness is simultaneously liberating and traumatizing, creating higher orders of freedom while simultaneously inducing a form of PTSD, itself a form of madness. In other words, to realize how we have been part of the collective madness is truly “shocking” and induces a form of madness, just as trauma can literally cause a fever in a person. The fever is potentially the organism’s way of metabolizing and healing the trauma, just as the trauma of seeing how perilously asleep we’ve been can propel us to wake up. This form of trauma can potentially so “shake us up” that it can snap us out of our fear-based, frozen paralysis of feeling stuck and can mobilize and inspire us into empowered action. Paradoxically, it is the trauma itself that activates the response in us which potentially leads to its own creative resolution.

In these moments of shock we have the opportunity to break our habitual patterns, see through our implicit assumptions, snap out of our denial, and step out of our programming so as to literally rewire ourselves. These shocks are like gaps in our awareness that are open doorways to potentially higher orders of freedom. These brief moments in time don’t last very long, however, so it is important to expeditiously go through these portals and take advantage of them when they are available. If we don’t, there are backup systems in place for dealing with shocks within our psyche that can override this potential opening in our awareness and re-install the ruling, reigning mechanical programming within our wetikoized mind.

Forbes writes, “the wetiko disease has so corrupted European thinking (at least of the ruling groups) that wetiko behavior and wetiko goals are regarded as the very fabric of European evolution … if we continue to allow the wetikos to define reality in their insane way we will never be able to resist or curtail the disease.” 1 It should be noted that indigenous people are not free from the wetiko virus as well. While there are indigenous cultures that are governed by wisdom, there are also indigenous cultures that are ruled by wetiko. We should be careful to not romanticize and idealize indigenous, aboriginal cultures as contrasted to European cultures, which would be too simplistic and dualistic a view. 2 When wetikos possess power in any culture (or more accurately, when power possesses them), they are in a position to influence, define, and create a level of reality that, though based on falsehood, operates as if it is real. In words that would be just as relevant with regards to the Obama administration, author Ron Suskind quotes a neocon in the George W. Bush administration as saying, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities.” 3 If left in positions of power, wetikos will ultimately dream up into full-bodied materialization their own, as well as our, worst nightmare into reality.

Full-blown Big Wetikos are morally insane, and abuse power simply because they can. The development of a rigid patriarchy follows wetiko disease like a shadow. In other words, cultures dominated by wetikos tend to organize themselves around the calcified, archetypal mythic pattern of the “negative patriarchy,” which, simply put, is founded on domination over others (see archetype of the negative father in the Glossary). This figure of the wicked father has (arche)typically dissociated from and lost touch with feeling, with eros, with relatedness, with creativity, with the heart, with compassion, and with love. The archetypal, negative patriarchy suppresses the feminine, as well as the spontaneity of life itself. The negative father is dissociated from mother nature and the environment, which it objectifies and tries to dominate, instead of being in relationship with. To quote Forbes, “ ‘Might makes right’ [the defining characteristic of the negative patriarchy] is the wetiko belief, but it is often accompanied by self-serving doctrines of ‘divine will,’ ‘manifest destiny,’ ‘providence,’ ‘the march of civilization,’ ‘doing God’s work,’ ‘stopping communism,’ or comparable slogans.” 4 These slogans are the mantras, or words of power, by which the collective spell of group-think is disseminated throughout the collective psyche. Any rationalization will do, as long as it serves as cover for the wetikos to continue to exploit others, centralize power, and feed their ever-expanding sickness. Big Wetikos may never know nor be forced to come to terms with the harm they have caused, as oftentimes they have ensconced themselves in the privileged position of the victors who rewrite history on their own terms. Many of our society’s historians, themselves infected by the wetiko virus, exalt aggressive and exploitative behavior, categorizing as “primitive” and “backward” those who don’t forcibly “conquer” others, thereby subtly and subliminally brainwashing the young into the ways of the world of wetiko.

Speaking about how our species has never been able to get a handle on what is at the root of our self-destructive behavior, Forbes comments, “Unfortunately, most of these efforts have failed because they have never diagnosed the wetiko as an insane person whose disease is extremely contagious. Nor have they, generally, understood that the [seemingly] non-wetikos, whether flunkies, pimps, or the most oppressed, are often ‘secret carriers’ of the disease.” 5 The wetiko virus can only thrive in the global human family if, as in any family system, each member enables and is complicit in the abuse. A field phenomenon, wetiko incarnates by embodying itself through various interconnected, form-fitted roles arising in the field, all at various stages of the disease. Each of these figures are various representations of the multiple faces of the underlying pathogen. Wetikos can be hard to recognize because the people who are its instruments often seem to be normal, well-intentioned, innocent-looking people; and yet, it is these seemingly ordinary people, not unlike you and I, who often become “secret carriers” of the disease. To the extent that we are not aware of this insidious, nonlocal, psychological disease, both in others and potentially within ourselves, we can very easily become its secret carriers, its unwitting accomplices.

Forbes writes, “But this we must emphasize over and over, that the whole wetiko disease is not limited to the brutes and goons who handle the gun, the lash or the instruments of torture . The nice people in the offices, the typists, the lab technicians, the clerks and, of course, the owners, directors, stockholders, senators, generals and presidents who use, profit from, and feed on human exploitation are also cannibals to one degree or another.” 6 The Big Wetikos could never get away with the murder that they do without “the nice people in the offices” enabling them. These “typists, lab technicians, and clerks” are just “following orders,” and yet are unwittingly complicit in the insidious evil that is being spread throughout the world with their cooperation. Modern, corporate, technological systems are set up to distance us, both physically and psychologically, from what we do for a living and the ultimate, potentially destructive consequences of our actions. Even “the nice people in the offices,” people just like you and me, are tiny cogs in the great predatory machine, complicit in the impersonal evil of the faceless system and the destruction it wreaks upon all life. In the last few centuries, a new breed , or re-incarnation, of wetiko has come on the scene—the multinational corporation.

Wetiko is an entity that becomes co-dependently entangled and inextricably coupled with others in its environment in order to survive. It serves us to differentiate the interdependent roles in the field which “conspire” (which literally means to “breathe together”) to create and sustain the wetiko disease. All these figures collaboratively enable the bug of wetiko to play out its reign of (t)error. Forbes writes, “The most guilty of the wetikos are, I would think, those who mastermind, justify and profit most from such systems. Such persons are the ‘master predators.’ ” 7 The full-blown Big Wetikos, the “master predators” in positions of power, can be suave and sophisticated, highly intelligent, educated people of refined taste, with offices in places like New York and London; they can be highly respected by society, all of which makes their malady hard to recognize. Some are cast in the role of “protecting the abuser”—the master predator’s handlers, minions, sycophants, enablers, supporters, and followers—while others are complicit by simply remaining silent and looking away. Others, in the face of such unmitigated evil, pick up the role of feeling powerless, thinking “what’s the use?” Some politically active sorts can pick up the role of attempting to fight the disease in ways that simply strengthen the diabolical polarization in the field, which is the signature of the disease itself and only serves to feed it. Whatever the roles, they are all just multiple guises wearing the same underlying uni-form.

All wetikos, including the Big Wetikos, are only pawns in the hand of the underlying archetype itself, however. It is as if Toto, in The Wizard of Oz , pulls away the curtain, but instead of there being an old man behind the curtain, there is no one there but the formless archetype itself. The archetype “clothes” itself in numberless variations of people throughout history, as it is the animating power that shapes what plays out in the world theater. Unless we recognize and deal with the deeper archetypal process that is in-forming world events, we are doomed to unconsciously re-create them, as if we are stuck in a recurring dream. If the master predators are removed from their positions of power, but if the underlying system which spawned them remains in place and is not dealt with, “Central Casting” will send others who will eventually pick up and assume their vacant and vacuous roles. Even if the system itself is changed, but the underlying psyche out of which it emerged remains unconscious, over time the system with its concomitant roles will emerge in a new guise. These power-mad roles exist as potentials in the field waiting to be filled, fleshed-out, and incarnated, as these roles are an expression of the full spectrum of possibilities implicit in the underlying field, reflecting, as always, this same range of potentials within ourselves. The nonlocal field is seamless, and the roles do not, and cannot, exist in isolation, but rather, in co-relation to each other, as well as to the whole field itself, in an interconnected web of infinite interrelatedness.

To awaken to the dreamlike nature of reality, the symbolic dimension of existence, is to realize that events in our world are lower-level shadows or reflections of a higher-dimensional reality. It is important to see the whole system, rather than fixating on, and demonizing, one of its parts as separate from the whole. Focusing on an individual person is analogous to contemplating one finger on a glove without recognizing the underlying hand in-forming and animating all of the interconnected and fundamentally inseparable fingers in the glove. To concretize a localized manifestation of a nonlocal pathology in an individual would be analogous to only seeing the circle that a three-dimensional sphere makes as it passes through a two-dimensional plane. The circle is a lower-level reflection of a higher-dimensional entity (the “sphere” of wetiko’s influence), just as the person taken over by the wetiko bug is a surface expression of a deeper, more fundamental pathogen that pervades the underlying field. To use another example, the person momentarily afflicted with wetiko is like a shadow on a wall, cast from a globe hanging from the ceiling, relative to the globe. The shadow on the wall is a re-presentation and projection of the higher, three-dimensional entity of the globe into a lower dimension of space. Studying the shadow within its proper context relative to the globe is the way of understanding the object casting the shadow (the higher-dimensional entity of the “global” wetiko psychosis). By tracking the variety of shadows the object is casting, we are illuminating an unknown, mysterious object from as many different angles as we can imagine. From enough of these shadows it becomes possible to reconstruct the illumined object. In these examples, the point is not to focus on the personal manifestation of the disease, but rather, to see the deeper, nonlocal field that is giving shape to, in-forming, and pervading the particular, localized outbreaks of the disease in the greater body politic. Seeing, in Jung’s words, “the numinous character of the reality in the background” 8 is the very expansion of consciousness which becomes the doorway connecting us to a deeper part of ourselves, as well as to each other. Recognizing the underlying field paves the road to healing.

In the culture of wetiko, people at various stages of the disease pick up seemingly different and separate roles from each other, but when the deeper, underlying pattern comes into focus and is seen, it can be recognized that all of these interlocking roles fit together like a higher-order mosaic. This process couldn’t play itself out without all of its parts reciprocally co-arising relative to each other. The whole field’s myriad fluid and unfixed roles—each of us at various moments in time picking up the different roles—are mutually conditioning each other in a seamless, interpenetrating net of relations, as if these roles are appendages of a higher-dimensional organism that is revealing itself through our non-linearly orchestrated and coordinated interplay.