It all started, pre-Covid, in a conversation with a close friend. He was wondering if there’s some pervasive psychological affliction causing all of us to behave in ways that result in the ecological destruction of our world. ‘Mind virus’ was the exact term he used. I found the concept strangely attractive and disquieting. I was reminded of this:
Memes are to culture what genes are to biology.
This was Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk quoting evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, 1976) in an essay published in Kosmos in 2016: “Seeing Wetiko: On Capitalism, Mind Viruses, and Antidotes for a World in Transition.” They write:
Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by greed, excess, and selfish consumption (in Ojibwa it is windigo, wintiko in Powhatan). It deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others (others in the broad sense, including animals and other forms of Gaian life) is a logical and morally upright way to live… The wetiko meme has almost certainly existed in individuals since the dawn of humanity. It is, after all, a sickness that lives through and is born from the human psyche.
Apparently, wetiko is the viral meme that my friend perceived—the mind virus. That’s the premise.
Everyone (well, almost everyone) accepts the science—the incontrovertible biophysics of DNA, genes and genetic transmission of biological traits. I’m willing to bet, though, that relatively few would give equal status to Dawkins’ analogy of mind, memes and memetic transmission of cultural traits. After all, sociology is not a ‘hard’ science—what’s the evidence? For that I should probably read Dawkins’ book, but I don’t think it’s necessary. Don’t we, in fact, have all the evidence we need in our destructive, pathological, ecocidal patterns of behavior? In the deep dissatisfaction, unhappiness and dis-ease we feel afflicts our daily lives? Ladha and Martin write,
What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness?
39 years ago, I began my training to become a physician and scientist. To me, no idea better explains what has happened to us culturally than wetiko. And yet, “There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.” – Carl Sagan.
I don’t think the same can be said of culture. But, what the heck… why not approach the ‘wetiko is a mind virus’ hypothesis in the same way? Ladha and Martin write, “You may dismiss this line of thinking as New Age woo-woo or, worse, a leftist conspiracy theory. But this approach of viewing the transmission of ideas as a key determinant of the emergent reality is increasingly validated by various branches of science, including evolutionary theory, quantum physics, cognitive linguistics, and epigenetics.” Fancy words. As Carl was fond of saying, “Well… maybe.”
First, can we actually prove the existence of wetiko? A proof requires evidence:
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed—for lack of a better word—is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind.
In a documentary based on his book “Capital in the 21st Century”, author Thomas Piketty notes that Gordon Gekko’s famous speech in the movie Wall Street (1987) struck a chord, generating real currency within our culture that persists to this day. Gekko’s “Greed is good” is equivalent to wetiko’s “greed is morally upright.”
So, is this psychological illness, wetiko, real? One might as well ask if schizophrenia is real. Is not the observation that Gekko’s meme has persisted and propagated evidence enough? “Greed is good” has gone viral. And as we know all too well, viruses are hard to get rid of.
So what now? Let’s assume (on the abundance of cultural evidence laid out by Ladha and Kirk) that wetiko exists, that it’s embedded in our ‘global operating system’, and that it’s bad. How do you edit out a cultural idea? Can one kill a meme?
Not really. However, when the cultural context in which memes emerge changes, memes fade away—they become culturally irrelevant. This anyway is what Lauren Michele Jackson posits in A Unified Theory of Meme Death. But this particular meme, wetiko, is cross-cultural and long-lived… as in its definition quoted above. As a scientist, I see obvious biological analogs—like the viruses that live in our bodies for as long as we’re alive (embedded in our operating system), that our immune systems never quite vanquish, and vaccines (if available) merely suppress.
Can we vaccinate ourselves against wetiko? (It’s so tempting here to extend the analogy to the whole pandemic lexicon of herd immunity, boosters, vaccine equity, anti-vaxxers, and so forth, but I won’t.) Ladha and Kirk provide some guidance. First, we have to ‘see’ wetiko:
A key lesson of meme theory is that when we are conscious of the memetic viruses we are less likely to adhere to them blindly. Conscious awareness is like sunlight through the cracks of a window. Thus, one of the starting points for healing is the simple act of seeing wetiko in ourselves, in others, and in our cultural infrastructure.
To my mind, this is akin to accepting that a biological virus exists (even though we can’t ‘see’ it), that it threatens one’s health (people are obviously dying from it), and that getting vaccinated might be a really good idea. Having thus ‘seen’ wetiko, we have particular obligations:
Those of us that are within these structures, from the corporate media to philanthropy to banking to the UN, have access to the heart of the wetiko monster. It is up to you what you will do with that privilege.
And for the other 99% of us, we can work in various ways to ‘undermine’ the system. They make a few suggestions:
For those of us on the outside, we can organize our lives in radically new ways to undermine wetiko structures. For example, the simple act of gifting undermines the neoliberal logic of commodification and extraction. Using alternative currencies undermines the debt–based money system. De-schooling and alternative education models can help decolonize and de-wetikoize the mind. Helping to create alternative communities outside the capitalist system supports the infrastructure for transition. And direct activism such as debt resistance can weaken the wetiko virus, if done with the right intention and state of consciousness.
Honestly, this doesn’t seem to be nearly enough guidance, but Ladha and Kirk can be forgiven because the whole point of their article was in the title: “Seeing Wetiko”. That’s the first step.
