Wetiko Review. ~ my book review on Wetiko: Healing the…

~ my book review on Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World (2021) by Paul Levy.

In Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), there is an invisible world beyond ours consisting of towering labyrinthian corridors that channel unlucky travelers’ energies into a central three-dimensional rhombus known as the beating heart of . Here is power and energy and order; discerning humans cannot help but be drawn to it. In truth, Leviathan is a cosmic being that has crucially intervened in the evolution of the ancient human psyche and manifests as a bridge into Hell. It doubles as the dark god of the Cenobites, otherworldly beings that use flesh, hunger, and maximalist desires to bind human souls into daemonic rituals of transformative pain x pleasure x death. Leviathan pulses with electrical energy and casts out myriad beams of anti-light; it is like an unhallowed lighthouse reaching constantly for wayward human souls. When its sublime spotlight makes contact with a human being, it reveals to them via vivid psychoactive re-experience all of the worst sins of their life. Leviathan is the source of both humanity’s ingenious technology and our penchant to use our power for the sake of war, control, and insatiable greed.

In Paul Levy’s 2021 book Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World, he outlines that the diabolical will of such a dark Leviathanic heart has become ascendant in modern human society. It is an egregore that goes by various names, his is ‘ wetiko,’ and the concept represents a kind of contagious sickness that inhabits us — to accumulate, to control, and to see everything outside of us as an enemy combatant in a zero-sum game. That means other people, animals, plants, the environment of Earth itself — it is all separate and likely hostile to us in the end. Wetiko is the shadow force deep within the alligator lake of our psyche urging us to eat them before they eat us in turn.

Wetiko can represent each of the 7 deadly sins, but greed is perhaps best suited to describe wetiko in a nutshell. (Personified, wetiko is the vampire.)

Wetiko is the psychic force that pulls us over the edge, that takes us too far past equilibrium, that posits we can draw endlessly from nonrenewable resources — or manipulate others — without inevitable consequences for our bodies and souls.

Wetiko can be fed and reinforced by forces within and without; the modern man can see its exploitative influence and effects all around us. {Many people end up becoming the unwitting automatons of wetiko’s voracious will.}

Excerpt:

Levy’s writing on the subject is consistently clear and frequently inspiring. He manages a strategic approach of *circumambulating* wetiko from a variety of angles, meaning he writes in spirals and may repeat himself in service of his thesis. It is an expansive topic that seems to require such wide and nigh alchemical mental overwatch. To lay the groundwork, he gets into Jungian psychology, the Kabbalah, and the fictional “mind parasite” conceptions of sci-fi writers Colin Wilson and Philip K. Dick. Later, he gets into direct examples of modern wetiko and especially the manner in which we can resist its influence through creative action.

Excerpt: The source of the problems confronting humanity are fundamentally not economic, political, or technological, but rather are to be found within the human psyche.

Once wetiko is studiously defined, Levy describes how it manifests in our world. Like a cancer of the soul, it drives us into war and over-extracting the environment — and in these ways and more — it thrives well in the economic formation of hyper-accelerated globalized capitalism. That being said, this is far from just a book about the ills of capitalism or a critique of an endless-growth-at-all-costs philosophy. Levy is hardly a Marxist and more of a spiritualist with a deep understanding of life’s dialectics, cause-and-effect relations, and the natural breakdowns of health that tend to develop while under a mass regime of such manufactured inequality and manipulative mind control mechanisms.

The American empire can be seen as the beating heart of the world economy as hegemon. We are also the primary abettors of the social and spiritual contagion that is wetiko. Much of Levy’s book becomes an exploration of how much of wetiko’s role as a deviant force within our midst is how it must continuously deceive us from within in order to prevent us from seeing what it has wrought, through our will, in the world around us.

Excerpt: The danger is when the pathological liar is in a position of power and is taken seriously by the wider public. Like Faust, the liar is bound to make a pact with the devil and slip off the straight path. In this, he takes those who are enabling him, as well as anyone under his sphere of influence, into the abyss too. To quote clairvoyant and spiritual teacher Rudolf Steiner, “This effect of ‘untruth as truth’ contains an enormous force of evil. And this force of evil is made full use of in various ways and by different interests.” The result of the systemic institutionalization of lies and untruths is a disabling of our discernment and a deadening of awareness, which serves the forces of darkness. Lying has become an accepted means of discourse among us the likes of which has never been known. Lying has gone pandemic in our world…The mind parasites are masters of deception, tricksters par excellence. Though this can sound like the ravings of a paranoid madman, it is actually the opposite-a clear-sighted articulation of what we’re up against. The part of us that thinks that any talk about mind parasites is crazy is the very part of us that is taken over by the mind parasites. In Weissman’s writings it was becoming clear to him that these mind parasites weren’t just messing with individual people’s minds, but were wreaking havoc through the collective unconsciousness of our species, a process that was playing out en masse in the world theater. In his papers he wrote that he felt no doubt whatsoever that all of the wars of the twentieth century were a deliberate contrivance of these vampires. It is as if “the beast” of war is a virulent collective incarnation-in living (and dying) flesh and blood-of these mind parasites writ large. If we look at the state of the world today, once we cultivate the eyes to see these psychic vampires, we notice their influence everywhere throughout our planetary “culture” (or lack thereof).

However, within wetiko itself is the cure and power to outshine its darkness and overcome its greedy proclivities. Just as in alchemy, or the Hero’s Journey, one must delve into the putrefying darkness of the soul in order to emerge with the elixir in hand. Wetiko can be likened to our vampiric void within; it acts as an entity that conjoins our worst impulses while also illuminating our unconscious imagination. And it is from our unconscious imagination that all the dreams, inspirations, discoveries, and the love of art and women and the beautiful sublime come from.

Thus, wetiko acts as a dueling & synthesizing force to awaken us to our true creative power and introduce us to the everlasting force of LOVE. {Key thesis: the state of compassionate *love* is our ultimate destination as humans and members of the collective World-Soul.}

Levy proclaims this realization of our inner creative power as human souls is our way out of the trajectory of catastrophe we seem to be on. Only by our cogent will and bold imagination can wetiko be identified and transcended. And only in this way can the modern human being evolve.

So even while wetiko uses our worst instincts to lead us to the cliffside, it is also instilling within us the capacity to fly.

Excerpt: It is an archetypal idea that a divine spirit was imprisoned in matter, and it was humanity’s divinely sanctioned role to somehow free this spirit. The Savior doesn’t come down from the celestial heavens, but rather, it arises from below, from the depths, from the unconscious. The Savior doesn’t come solely from the light, but through the darkness as well. Great discoveries invariably come from the depths, just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but from the Earth upward. No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell…In the same way that God has to become estranged from himself in order to become more fully who he is, according to the Kabbalah it was only after the vessels break that humanity’s potential to become fully itself is set in motion. It’s as if some form of destruction, deconstruction, or disintegration is a prerequisite for individuation and is necessary for the birth of the Self.

Paul Levy’s wetiko thoughtform is powerful and not for the faint of heart (or the pure rationalist). It is also rather reaffirming for those of us that can keenly feel the spiritual malaise and endless hunger around us. Wetiko is a multiform daemon in need of exorcism and that requires observation, study, and a furious imagination.

The answer to living underneath any damnable reign is to do your best to self-actualize, or become who you are truly meant to be. Today, Levy posits, this act of *individuation* must necessarily involve the presence of wetiko and its many gloaming emanations. {We’ve all encountered wetiko; we’ve all embodied it before.}

In the end, the interpenetrative force of wetiko demands of us that we awaken and become aware. Only from dawning awareness may we work to create a world outside of its dark dominion. Collective change is coming and continuous and already underway, of course. Levy’s words are a boon for those initiated into the belief that living another way on this planet is not only possible — it is inevitable. ~

Mega-Excerpt: One of the greatest and most challenging problems facing us today is that our reason alone is no longer sufficient to meet our problems. Once mass psychology (what Jung refers to as “a dangerous germ”) prevails and fear and emotion reach a certain pitch, the possibility of reason having any effect ceases. Once mass psychology gains enough momentum, a collective possession results that can quickly turn into a psychic epidemic. This psychic epidemic is none other than what is meant by the word wetiko.

Our overly intellectual and rationalistic attitude is a sickness. Our overly rationalistic worldview-what Berdyaev refers to as our “rationalistic madness” (folie raisonnante) and what Jung refers to as “rationalistic hubris”-has torn our consciousness from its transcendent roots, disabling our ability to respond to numinous symbols and ideas. Oftentimes, behind much over-rationalism is the quest for control. Interestingly, one of the deeper processes going on in the global body politic is the attempt to centralize power and control. We are desperately in need of the illumination of a holy and whole-making spirit, a spirit beyond our accepted reason, logic, intellect, and our habituated, conditioned way of thinking. Jung described a timeless archetypal force, Wotan, that became activated and infested Germany in the 1930s and 1940s as Nazism. The energy of Wotan-the ancient God of storm and frenzy-could seize and possess people (individually or collectively), inspiring a state of collective fury and transpersonal mania. The archetypal energy of Wotan is an unconscious factor that exists in latent form within the human psyche. Once it becomes catalyzed, it can influence people to fall under its spell and become its instruments. In this sense it is related to how wetiko manifests as a collective psychosis. For once Wotan/wetiko is enlivened, it seizes everything in its path and uproots and overthrows everything that is not firmly rooted. This same force expresses itself today in different forms of corruption, criminality, genocide, dispossession, systemic inequality, war, and the ravaging of natural and emotional worlds. It leads to narco-states, warlords, nonspiritual jihads, and inhospitable worlds that would typically stretch the limits of our imagination except for the fact that it’s manifesting as our present reality.

Originally published at https://zsoro.substack.com.