According to some Native Americans, Wetiko is an evil spirit that usually invades the human spirit. Virus? From selfishness, a psychic pathogen that forces the person to feed his own needs as a hungry being that is never satisfied, such a presence leads us to a kind of involution in which, sooner or later, humanity becomes his worst enemy.
This curious and at the same time disturbing look is described in an almost obligatory reading book. Was Paul Lévy, a well-known admirer of Carl Jung’s legacy and regular columnist for “The Guardian,” who shaped a suggestive book titled?Dispel Wetiko? (Dispel Wetiko, free translation). According to him, we live in a time when much of the psychosocial phenomena around us show that he?Virus? Selfishness is more present than ever.
- Wetiko is a word used by Native Americans to refer to a devilishly evil person who does not care about the well-being or integrity of their fellow men.
But the legacy levy wants to leave us with his book is far from having a negative message, repression or warning, quite the opposite, every virus looks for a host to invade and feed, yet each of us can put in proper defensive barriers. and strengthen our ‘immune system’, so it doesn’t happen.
Is this an interesting thought to explore?
Historian Jack Forbes explained in his book “Columbus and Other Cannibals?”That when indigenous communities had contact with all these European conquerors, who sought to invade their lands and their world, they defined them as people infected with Wetiko. tribe of Canada that used this definition for the first time, although the Ojiwa, for example, used the well-known term “Windigo”.
In any case, your vision of the white man or?Civilized? It emerged from a being affected by the egoism virus, an evil entity that made them want for themselves the life force and resources of nature and other human beings. For his part, Paul Lévy explains in his book that this idea is the same idea that Carl Jung used to talk about the concept of shadow, an archetype of the unconscious that we all share.
Thus, dimensions as common as jealousy, greed, aspiration for domination and selfishness are actually the product of our unconscious community, our darkest shadows and the dissociated “I” of consciousness is what is carried away by the worst acts. To say that this evil spirit already defined by the American Indians was for Jung a different entity, something that never came from outside to possess us, but that was always within us.
In fact, we all carry this shadow within us, but is it up to us to give it more or less power?
Can we beat him and eliminate him? The selfishness of our lives. One way to do this is to get acquainted with what Carl Jung called a “demon,” the demon of our shadow. So one thing we should have obvious from the beginning is that this demon feeds on and out of greed, envy, contempt or need for domination. All these dimensions, in turn, have had terrible effects throughout our history.
Wetiko’s wickedness reigned over our reality for a long time, and it also moves easily in many of our most common social groups today, we strengthen the virus, we obey it and we let it go, so, as Carl Jung explains in his Books as “Encounter with the Shadow”, our responsibility is to become aware of it and become aware of all the impulses that navigate our unconscious abyss.
If we all let ourselves be carried away by these impulses, appropriate what the other has, manipulate our family members for their own benefit, or make the most of it, even if the cost would harm others, we would fall into a collective. psychosis in which we would end up getting lost. Selfishness is not a modern evil, it is an old disease that we have not yet eradicated.
Paul Levy reveals in an almost enlightening way that to work our own shadow in order to dispel or deter Wetiko, we must practice self-reflection. In the end, this inner demon is just our whole personality, even if it isn’t. developed, unused and careless.
It is a part of ourselves that we hide: in doing so, we allow you to seek your food, feed on greed, envy and contempt to fill your gaps, therefore, we are able to cure the selfishness of the virus by working within us. enriching our personal knowledge and grapping with this shadow that diminishes our quality of life and the very concept of humanity.