omniharmonicWetiko
Wetiko is a concept from Algonquin and other Indigenous traditions describing a cannibalistic spirit or mind-virus characterized by insatiable consumption, selfishness, and disconnection from the relational web of life. In its original context, wetiko referred to individuals so consumed by greed that they would metaphorically (and in some tellings, literally) devour their own community. Contemporary thinkers, particularly Jack Forbes in Columbus and Other Cannibals and Paul Levy in Dispelling Wetiko, have extended the concept to describe the psycho-spiritual pathology driving industrial civilization’s self-destructive trajectory.
The power of the wetiko framework lies in its identification of the meta-crisis as fundamentally a crisis of consciousness rather than merely a crisis of policy, technology, or economics. The drive to extract, accumulate, and consume beyond any possible need — the logic that razes forests, hoards wealth while neighbors starve, and turns living beings into commodities — is understood as a form of possession, a pathological disconnection from the felt reality of interbeing. Wetiko does not reside only in individuals; it is a cultural pattern, embedded in institutions, economic systems, and stories that normalize extraction as rational behavior.
Wetiko connects to the story-of-separation as the ontological ground that makes the wetiko pattern possible — if you believe you are separate from the web of life, consuming it feels cost-free. It relates to dominator-culture as the structural expression of wetiko in social organization, and to collective-trauma as both a cause and consequence of the pattern. Decolonization involves confronting and healing wetiko at both personal and systemic levels. Naming the pattern is itself an act of resistance: once you can see the mind-virus, you become less susceptible to its logic.