Wetiko

I have been reading recently about wetiko which is a Native American word to describe, as they saw it, a sickness which is a cannibalising force that takes over people's minds leading to selfishness, insatiable greed, appetite without satisfaction and consumption as an end in itself. Jack Forbes, a Native American scholar, defined it as "the consuming of another's life for one's own private purpose or profit".

Wetiko prevents us from seeing ourselves as part of an interdependent and balanced whole and 'raises the self-serving ego to supremacy'. The author Paul Levy who has written many books on wetiko describes it as ‘malignant egophrenia’ where the ego, out of control, has no limits and consumes far more than it needs in 'a blind, murderous daze of self-aggrandizement'.

Mmmm. Does this sound familiar? It seems to me to encapsulate perfectly what is going on in our very divided world where Western capitalist countries have become very rich off the backs, and at the expense of, the poor ones, where we have a hugely wealthy minority getting richer at the expense of the majority (shareholders putting profit into their own pockets instead of re-investing it in the services they provide being one such example) and the planet's resources being relentlessly plundered for economic gain at the expense of the planet itself. It seems to be humanity's cautionary tale - that left to our own devices, the ego takes over.

So what do we do? Well, it seems to me that we should all learn about wetiko and understand that it is a part of human nature. And then we have to understand that in order to avoid it we need to do some work on ourselves. It doesn't necessarily mean learning about the Enneagram (although it most definitely helps) but we have to do whatever helps us to understand who we are, whatever it is that helps us connect to our essential self (instead of the ego) and to a sense of purpose. Because without understanding there can be no learning.