Wetiko, The Virus and The West
How to stop the spiritual spread, one infected mind at a time.
File under: Deep Covid Thoughts.
Have you heard of Wetiko?
You have, by now, almost certainly heard of Mass Formation Psychosis: the armchair psychological diagnosis of a particular widely held worldview as delusional. It started off as a useful concept to understand the rush of misplaced altruism we have seen expressed over the last two years, but has currently devolved into a savage online slur used by gloating ‘Rona deniers to pown dismayed ‘Rona compliers (and, in rare brave instances, vice versa). Most Covid Substackers have written about it at some point, and I am no different — although I prefer the more inclusive term “Toxic Selflessness”.
Well, Wetiko is Mass Formation Psychosis on conspiracy steroids. This time, the spell isn’t just psychological, but also spiritual.
In fact — fitting for our current times — Wetiko is best described not as a spell but a virus. Or, even more fitting: The Virus.
That’s right: turns out, conspiracy terrain theorists don’t deny the existence of viruses in their totality… we just understand them as existing beyond the biological realm. Loophole!
Here is a rare point of unity that everyone — ‘Rona deniers and compliers alike — can agree on. Regardless of the actual biological reality of any supposed unique airborne transmissible pathogen underpinning this pandemic, the phenomenon of The Virus — the sickness, the spread, the mutation, the invisibility, the invasiveness, the fear — is indisputably real. In fact, The Virus archetype has surely never been more real than it is right now.
Yet, at the same time, the harder you look for an actual unique physical viral entity — the more you dive into the swath of shoddy assumptions that hold up the field of virology, from isolation to testing — the more it feels like we are looking in the wrong place. No single pathogen, even if it was cooked up in a lab in Wuhan (Ukraine?), can account for The Virus that is currently spreading amongst us.
So, that begs the question (and things are about to get metaphysical here): is there a better realm of being to understand The Virus than at the biological level? Could the last 2 years make more sense if viewed from a higher perspective?
Back to Wetiko then.
It is a concept that is by no means new, but has been subject to increasing fascination in parts of the Conspiracy and New Age Spirituality (Conspirituality lol, why not) communities as the pandemic has reached peak madness. This fascination is largely due to the work of Paul Levi and his book ‘Dispelling Wetiko’. This is Levi’s definition:
“…a contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via an insidious collective psychosis of Titanic proportions. This mind-virus… covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests.”
The term Wetiko originated in Native American mythology, but the concept itself has parallels in numerous Indigenous cultures. It is also, in this sense, a quite savage indictment on how these cultures view the level of self-awareness and humility present in our current Western/Colonial experiment.
And fair enough too: as I have argued previously, the one solid and indisputable takeaway from a growing shit show of flawed and contradictory pandemic data has been the dismal ‘Rona performance of the Western hemisphere.
Where did it all go wrong? Let me offer a hopefully novel perspective. Rather than looking at factors like obesity, or diet, or population density, or any other material reason why so many non-Western nations have escaped the pandemic largely unscathed, maybe it it time to take a good hard look inwards.
The defining characteristic of this cultural experiment we are embedded in is a fundamental obsession with the material and the physical. Perhaps not originally, but certainly now; this obsession has now been taken to the extent that the study of these domains has morphed into a religious-like practice, otherwise devoted to matters of the soul and spirit. Thus, it takes a foreign culture — still rooted in a wholistic spiritual tradition — to provide the remedy to the ills we are unable to diagnose and treat ourselves.
There are different lenses of spirituality through which we can understand Wetiko. More simply, we can see it as a sickness of the soul, initiated by specific deficiencies that we have in our spiritual armour — the lack of certain crucial virtues, essentially, which leave us open to the unconscious expression of our own worst impulses. Taken further, to degrees most materially-minded people are uncomfortable with: it is the infection of our minds and souls by literal supernatural entities, who enter through these blind spots and take the reins whenever they are allowed.
This is not a worldview that is particularly compatible with our love for material science. As Graham Hancock famously explored in his book Supernatural (soon to be re-released under the title Visionary), Western culture still largely denies the legitimacy of this plane of existence: dismissing it as some mass schizophrenic break from objective reality.
Nonetheless, the plausibility of supernatural possession as a theory and hypothesis for what we see unfolding today is hard to deny. How many people do you know (or used to know, more likely) that have acted in ways completely out of character during this pandemic? How is it that they can act this way, but still return to their normal familiar selves once all talk of viruses and jabs is avoided?
In those acute outbursts of disdain, scorn and de-humanization — which everyone of us who have denied certain aspects of the ‘Rona narrative have been on the receiving end of at some point — it is hard not to conclude that these people temporarily become a different person in a quite profound way. To call them possessed might be a bit of a stretch, but it seems without doubt that they have been ‘infected’ by something outside of themselves.
Have we been looking in the wrong place this whole time? In our materially fixated, Western scientific culture, have we been completely overlooking the true source of the plague of illness and disease that has been spreading amongst us?
Instead of scrambling to boost our immune system through our favorite poison, our preferred supplement, our desired horse de-wormer (don’t @ me ivermectin bros, I was on to the scam most likely before you were) — maybe it is time we shifted focus to strengthening our spiritual protection.
And this advice doesn’t just apply to those who fell for the worst of the pandemic hoax, given they almost certainly aren’t reading this. It remains relevant to our entire Covid-dissident collective.
If you are still gloating in I Told You So’s, still sharing unverifiable de-population porn about inevitable mass die-offs, still focusing on the worst potential future timelines our species can go down rather than doing the necessary work to steer us away from them — then you too remain captured by Wetiko.
May I even go so far as suggesting this: if you are still complying with the narrative that the main causal factor of this pandemic has been a novel biological pathogen — still caught up in never-ending and self-engulfing discourses around redundant statistical measures, around variants, even around lab leaks — then you are at the very least still complicit in perpetuating the spread of this spiritual virus.
If there ever was such a guilty pathogen, which I doubt more and more each day, it is the least of our problems right now. And to continue to focus on this physical dimension of our current predicament shows a lack of desire to fully engage in the spiritual.
While the mainstream ‘Rona narrative has well and truly gone off the rails, there remain fundamental truths that we can take from it: particularly in how it has captured and popularised The Virus archetype.
Wetiko too has only been able to spread across the collective because of widespread deficiencies in our spiritual immunity. And these deficiencies — just like in our physical immune systems — arise from the sin of outsourcing responsibility and blame for our health to external sources, rather than our own actions.
The root problem isn’t Fauci or any other elite psychopath. It isn’t corrupt and/or spineless doctors and nurses unwilling lose their jobs and salaries to speak up. It isn’t the suppression of marginally-effective early treatment options. The problem isn’t even a medical system beset by an unhealthy reliance on the largely unsubstantiated tenets of the Germ Theory of Disease (although moving away from these tenets will certainly be required sooner rather than later).
The problem is a deeper rooted spiritual illness, which might be most accurately described as Western Medical/Scientific Supremacy — the unchecked cultural ego that has given birth to this now unmistakable curse we have unleashed on ourselves and most of the developed world. If we have yet to realise that this is the true problem, then we remain a part of it. The problem is then, more simply, us.
If we are the problem, what is the solution, then? Self-loathing and binge eating/watching?
Well, if we are to listen to people like Levi and the indigenous populations he draws his insights from, the solution — as cliched and New-Age-Cringe as it may sound — is an intense dose of collective shadow work. What is shadow work? Most simply, it is to unashamedly own your own shit — to hold to the light every aspect of our selves that might be complicit in this mess.
On the plus side: with cyber attacks and economic crashes imminent, we might all soon have plenty of quiet time to do this inner work!
How is your apocalypse prepping going? And no, I don’t mean legumes and brown rice.
I resonate with this perspective. I’m into modern day thinker Charles Eisenstein who talks about humanity being in between two stories: The Story of Separation (this being like infected by Wetiko) and the Story of Reunion. This transition has begun and will exponentially become a bumpier ride while we get squeezed into the new paradigm.
No matter which side of the issues you’re on, if you’re seeing “sides”, you’re “othering”. This binary reductive stance turns our victims, enemies, dehumanization... and their looks at solutions where someone has to “win” or “lose”.
If we are going through an evolutionary shift, then this virus (physical, mental, spiritual) is a necessary tool to help us transition as a species: its presence providing immunity and memory cells necessary for us to evolve. It would be wise to remember that enlightenment is a group project.
Now, I say all this, and I believe it, I really do, yet, I still fall into the trap of wanting to be “right”, of being vindicated for the suffering I had to endure as a pariah among my friends and colleagues. But I try and dunk on my own self righteousness more often than the ineptitude of our leaders.
Grateful to be reminded to do the shadow work on a personal spiritual level as well as a public one. The Christians call it “the dark night of the soul”. That’s where we are as a species. But that’s where the shadow work actually gets done best. Hopefully we don’t destroy the physical world while we’re at it.
Oh yes, this is most definitely a part of all this. When we’re in the midst of civilizational collapse and our history is composed of them it is time to question our civilizations and ourselves. Unless we can do better we doom ourselves.