[Cognitive Dissonance: So often today we are advised that in order to get better answers we must ask better questions. Then we are scolded and told to think outside the box……just don’t go too far. This box is our cultural conditioning and bias and even though we’re told to move beyond its boundaries, our culture is so familiar and comfortable that for all intents and purposes it’s invisible to us and nearly impossible to see without a determined and sustained effort.
Our cultural training and conditioning influences everything that makes us not only what we are, but what we think we are. Paul Levy regularly ventures beyond the comfortable confines of our cultural point of view and asks tough and at times controversial questions, first of himself and then of others. In the article below, the second of a planned trilogy, Paul introduces the concept that our economic problems are deeper than “just” a rouge cabal of bankers or power hungry individuals and states.
Paul introduced the idea of "Wetiko" (Wihtikow) to a wider audience in part one with his very first sentence. “In the book Columbus and other Cannibals, indigenous author Jack D. Forbes lucidly explores a psychological disease that has been informing human self-destructive behavior that Native American people have known about for years.” In part two Paul examines how Wetiko has infected the world’s economic system and us along with it. With Paul’s’ permission, part two as presented below was lightly edited and the original can be seen at his web site. http://www.awakeninthedream.com/wordpress/ ]
THE GREATEST EPIDEMIC SICKNESS KNOWN TO HUMANITY: PART 2
VAMPIRE SQUID ECONOMICS:
A CASE STUDY IN FULL-BLOWN WETIKO DISEASE
By
Paul Levy
In part one of this article I contemplate a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that I call malignant egophrenia and indigenous people call wetiko (Wihtikow) which is undermining the evolutionary development of our species. Wetiko/malignant egophrenia (heretofore referred to as wetiko) is nonlocal, in that it is an inner disease of the spirit, soul and psyche that explicates itself through the canvas of the outside world. Certain people, groups of people, corporate bodies, or nation-states embody and act out this psychological malady in the world.
Specific situations in the world, such as the destruction of the Amazon rainforest by myriad multi-national corporations or Monsanto instituting terminator seeds as it tries to gain control of the production of the food supply, are real-life enactments, both literally and symbolically, of this self-destructive inner process. Certain potent symbols in our shared waking dream are literally showing us this inner vampiric dynamic, a stupefying process in which we get bled dry of what really counts.
Seen as a symbolic entity, the global financial system is the revelation of wetiko disease displayed graphically and schematically in its architecture, operations and overall design. Anyone with a trained eye can discern the telltale signs and spore prints of this maleficent psycho-pathology getting down to business. The global economy (which can appropriately be referred to as the ‘wetikonomy’) displays the fear-based linear logic of wetiko disease as it reduces everything to the bottom line of dollars and cents. We are living inside of a horrifying abstract economic structure that itself is a living symbol and re-presentation of the out-of-control insanity of the wetiko virus. The global financial system is one of the most rapid vectors and pathways through which the virus of wetiko is going pandemic in our world.
The economy as an entity is a projection of the collective human psyche, but particularly of the “Big Wetikos”, those who hold a disproportionate power in crafting its operating system and in running its day-to-day operations in the world. In the wetikonomy, money has become indispensable for our biological survival as well as our psychological well being and need for social prestige. This results in the drive for acquiring money becoming hardwired into the most primal centers of our lower animal nature. This can generate a dependency that can easily lead to a treadmill that spirals downwards towards degeneracy; a true ‘rat race’ in which we become addicted to chasing after ‘the buck’ as we increasingly worship Mammon, the God of the love of money.
Interestingly, the esteemed economist John Maynard Keynes considered the love of money a form of mental illness. Our need for money becomes the ‘hook’ through which the Big Wetikos (who control the supply and value of money) can ‘yank our leash’ and manipulate humanity. To say it differently, the economy is engineered by a few, the “Big Wetikos”, who then utilize their creation to manipulate the collective human psyche and in so doing influence and warp it in a wetiko-like way.
Using the global financial and monetary system as our case study, we can see and understand how the wetiko virus operates in the psyche and the world, both of which are interactive and co-creative reflections of each other. The invention of money was a breakthrough in human affairs, an innovation in which real wealth was allowed to be symbolically re-presented by something else. Money is a construct, something made up which adds convenience in the trading of goods and services that have value. However, the wetiko-created fiat money system is the doorway through which a deviant distortion in this co-operative process of exchanging value amongst ourselves emerges.
The wetikonomy’s fiat-currency is not backed by real value, but rather is a system in which, as if by magic, money is created out of thin air. Having fallen through the rabbit hole, we now live in a world where money materializes simply by decree (fiat) of an elite cabal of Big Wetikos who can exchange the tokens of value they have conjured up for the time and natural resources of everyone else. The wetiko-economy is basically a legitimized counterfeiting operation.
The Big Wetikos use their military and police state ‘enforcement’ resources to ensure that others cannot accumulate and circulate capital outside of their system. As if that wasn’t bad enough, in a further diabolic sleight of hand this virtual fiat currency, backed by nothing real and having no intrinsic value in and of itself, is then equated with debt thus making it worse than nothing. This total inversion of our concept of value itself is a glaring symbol in our midst primal screaming that there is something terribly amiss with our financial system. There is indeed something wrong with a virtual bubble economy that is decoupled from the real economy and is dictated and manipulated by the few at the expense of the many.
The over-leveraged wetiko economy is a ‘phantom menace’ in that there is hardly any real substantial value changing hands except in appearance. Unlike a real economy that is based upon, backed by and generates genuine wealth, the wetikonomy, because it has no conventional solid, objective, substantial reality, has only a phantom-like apparent existence. It is as if authors of a fantasy novel or a fairy tale are trying to ‘market’ and ‘sell’ their creation as nonfiction and we, as consumers, are ‘buying’ it and believing it to be true. Collectively pretending the fiction is real, we have forgotten that we are playing a mass game of ‘make believe.’ The bubble economy of wetiko is a con-fidence game (a ‘con’ game), a con-struct of our mind maintained in each moment by the belief that the system is real, solvent and legitimate.
A virtual, synthetic economy such as ours is a product cooked up by the fevered imagination of the wetiko financiers. Like a collective dream or a mass spell, it is a concoction based upon mutually shared agreements among its participating members. The wetikonomy in which we live, unlike a free market economy, is subject to the intervention of and manipulation by the central bank, an entity which has interposed itself between us and the market. The agency of the central bank, in its attempts to interfere with and control a natural and self-regulating marketplace, is a living symbol of the wetiko pathogen and how it disrupts a living system.
Just as a vampire can’t stand to be seen and thus avoids the light of day at all costs, as it is only able to operate by the deceptive cover of darkness, so the very nature of the institutions and operations by which the phantom wetikonomy functions must be kept hidden from the light of public awareness. The financial instruments of the wetikonomy are purposely crafted to be incredibly complex and hard to understand so as to hide and obfuscate the theft that is happening. Hiding the reality of what they are doing is one of the ‘chief features’ of wetiko finance.
Replacing transparency with opacity, it has become standard account-ing practice in the wetikonomy to ‘cook the books’ so as to avoid being held account-able. If clearly illuminated and exposed to the light of collective disclosure and transparency, the shell-game and Ponzi scheme that IS the global financial system will be revealed to be the staggering and unlawful deception that it is. In a vast computerized web of electronic transfers and accounting shenanigans, the global economic system has become an insanely desperate pyramid scheme, a high-tech casino-like scam.
A monstrous planet wide Madoff-like rip-off done with smoke and mirrors, the wetikonomy is like a massive optical illusion that is projected by the Big Wetikos, a cadre of master spell-casting wizards who have nearly infinite resources at their disposal to make their illusion seem real. The wetikonomy, like apparitions of majestic castles in the sky, is a magical display that captivates and holds spell-bound the credulous and semi-conscious masses. Those entranced throngs are more than willing, based upon their childlike need to hope and believe in an authority outside of themselves, to give away their power so as to quell their fear. This is a regressed form of magical thinking writ large on the world stage.
At first glance an optical illusion looks one way, but when we investigate further we can see the illusion for what it really is. If this grand financial illusion were to be unmasked and collectively seen through, the underlying and pervasive ‘fraud as a business model’ approach to running the global economy would reveal itself to be the spectral phantasm that it is. Once the seemingly rock-solid concrete skyscrapers of the wetikonomy reveal themselves to be a stage set with nothing behind it and built on ever-shifting sand, it is not enough just to realize this and do nothing. It is then our responsibility to re-create and re-dream a different set of agreements regarding how to be in relationship with each other. This sets the stage to re-engineer the system of wetiko-ized control mechanisms that, through locked-in contractual relationships, freezes the economy in a corporate and wetiko-ized trajectory.
The power structure in a wetiko-ized society is inherently fiscal instead of political. This is why political change doesn’t result in economic change. It is the banks that control the government, not the other way around. As our collective realization gathers momentum, such a process of waking up en masse could dissolve the wetikonomy to its empty core, bursting the bubble economy and collapsing the whole artificial edifice – the artifice – of fake finance like the house of cards that it is. This realization lays the groundwork for a more enlightened financial and investment system grounded in real economics, a healthy environment and the cultivation of a humane human civilization.
The unsustainable illusion that is the wetikonomy is based upon, and supported by, violence or the threat of violence from the personal level up to the capacity to collectively wage war that is both visible and invisible. However, the ability and willingness to kill is not an illusion. This is why so many people collude in supporting and perpetuating the illusion. For to not do so inevitably leads to some form of coercion which is a subtle (or not so subtle) form of violence. In the highly uncivilized world of the wetikonomy ‘might makes right.’ The nature of the beast that we are dealing with needs to be factored into the equation of how we creatively and strategically respond.
The wetikonomy, to use journalist Matt Taibbi’s infamous phrase describing the major global investment bank Goldman Sachs, is a “vampire squid” that is sucking, draining off and redistributing more and more wealth from the poor and the formerly middle class into the hands of the already unthinkably wealthy. This “great vampire squid”, to quote Taibbi, is “wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Unlike a real economy that creates wealth, the vampire squid wetikonomy, a global organized crime syndicate, extracts and extorts wealth from the real economy and from real people like you and me. There is an actual creature called Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, which literally translates as Vampire Squid from Hell, a living symbol and perfect description of wetikonomics.
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis
The Big Wetikos are debt ‘pushers’ in that they inject credit into the would-be victim, artificially enlarging, pumping up and ultimately poisoning the recipient. The more money owed the better, as the bigger meal of debt off of which the predators will be able to cannibalistically feed. The bigger the debt, the deeper the pockets they can pick and the more blood there is for the vampires to drink. They create VSID – ‘Vampire Squid Induced Debt’ - whose victims become its slaves and indentured servants. As it says in Proverbs (22:7), “The borrower is servant to the lender.”
The modern day debt-based wetikonomy is designed to produce an exponentially ever-increasing debt that in principle can never be paid off, analogous to how in wetiko disease there exists an insatiable hunger that can never be satisfied. The economic system imposed on humanity by the rapacious Big Wetikos is a perversion of the original wholesome meaning of the word ‘eco-nomy’, which has the same root as the word ‘eco-logy’ and refers to the harmonious management of a household. The wetikonomy, instead of creating value and wealth that can be shared by all, impoverishes and enslaves the vast majority of humanity while simultaneously enriching the Big Wetiko predators.
Big Wetikos are the ‘anti-Robin Hoods’ as they rob from the poor to give to the rich (themselves). The Big Wetikos buy up all of the assets that have tangible real world value, for example land or office buildings, in exchange for their made-up fiat currency. Once the exchange is made and they are in possession of the stuff of real value, they then devalue and debase the currency which becomes ‘worth less’ as time passes. The people are left holding an empty bag while the Big Wetikos are increasingly in possession of everything else of value. The Big Wetikos are financial terrorists, actively engaged in warfare against humanity and using weapons of financial mass destruction (WFMD’s).
In a wetikonomy, a perverse synergy occurs in the revolving door between government and high finance. The political system becomes a front for and an extension of the banks. The United States Treasury is bankrupt, which is to say it is owned by the banks. Having the upper hand, an international clique of banking elites are the ones who give the orders and, appearances to the contrary, choose the politicians who will occupy the positions of power to do their bidding. This is clearly evidenced by President Obama stacking his cabinet with the very same people who created the economic crisis in the first place, all of whom have intimate insider connections with and allegiance to a corrupt cabal of high financiers.
In a wetikonomy such as ours the Big Wetikos, who create economic crises, are rewarded for their actions and gain untold riches. Think of the bank bailouts, a criminal heist of historical proportions where the banks blackmailed our nation by putting a metaphorical gun to our government’s head while threatening that if we don’t give them what they ask for they would crash the global economy and impose martial law. We acquiesced at the expense of our national sovereignty. True to form, there was very little accountability regarding how the banks used this money and much of what happened to it is still a mystery. In the total opposite of what happens in a ‘real’ economy, in the bailout, money was invested and sucked into the least productive aspect of the economy – the financial system – at the expense of the taxpayers.
The Big Wetikos get the booty while the risks and liabilities are dumped onto the general population, increasing our nation’s debt and turning almost everyone else into ‘serfs.’ The inevitable austerity measures (e.g. cuts in retirement benefits and social services) will then be put squarely on the backs of the working people. Taxpaying citizens will be forced to pay off the debt with decades of hard work and toil as they become indentured servants to the bank. As it is said, ‘Crime that pays stays.’ We live in a ‘klepto-plutocracy’; a ruler-ship by very wealthy thieves. We need to ‘wake up’ to the fact that we are being taken for all that we are worth.
The result is the largest gap in the distribution of wealth between the rich and poor since just before the 1929 Great Depression. This creates enormous economic instability, a situation which the Big Wetikos then use to their own advantage. This transferring of assets from the broad class of working people and entrepreneurs to the super-rich is no accident. It is being purposefully implemented by the cold-blooded Big Wetiko banksters and power brokers who operate as a global banking cartel so as to continually centralize their power and control.
Unfortunately this isn’t some sort of wacky conspiracy theory. The evidence is all around us, fully visible to anyone who has the eyes to see. A global robbery is in progress; the Big Wetikos are enacting a financial coup d’etat of staggering proportions right in front of our eyes. It is quite symbolic that the one time in the New Testament that Jesus became extremely angry was towards the money-changers. Big Wetikos in positions of power in high finance, manipulating the markets so as to loot the planet’s treasuries and precious resources, have become modern-day pirates, ransacking and pillaging humanity and all living things.
This real world process is an externalized reflection of the psychic coup d’état being perpetrated by the wetiko bug within our own psyche. This is to say that we can recognize a deep process within ourselves as it is revealed to us in the seemingly outside world. Seeing this is to begin to spiritually awaken as we aren’t just ‘waking up’ to the fact that we are being robbed, but are ‘waking up’ to the deeper dreamlike nature of our overall reality.
The Big Wetikos are not just draining the resources of individuals, but are sucking up the real assets of and taking down the economies of entire nations around the world. Think of what is happening in Europe now, i.e., Greece and Ireland and even more so in the U.S. One striking symbol of this process is the IMF (International Money Fund), a vampire squid-like entity if there ever was one and essentially a bankrupt institution backed by a cadre of banks that are themselves mostly insolvent.
The IMF is constantly on the lookout for real assets to scarf up so as to sate its voracious debt-driven hunger. When a country finds itself in financial dire straits (a crisis oftentimes created by a coordinated, criminal cabal of financial terrorists that are in league with the IMF) the IMF swoops in and offers a seemingly beneficent and helping hand in the form of bailouts to the ailing country in their time of need.
The IMF effectively loots and pillages the country that it is purportedly aiding, however, for once the distressed country accepts the IMF’s ‘help’, the IMF winds up taking over the country’s real assets to pay back the loan, thus turning it into an economic hostage. Each country that the IMF subjects its ‘economic shock therapy’ to becomes a laboratory experiment by which it continually refines and perfects its financial weaponry.
The crisis in Greece is a recent example of this sinister experiment in how to financially take down and extract the wealth from an entire country. The resulting austerity measures imposed upon the now enfeebled and hobbled country are akin to a modern form of feudalism. Subsequent to Greece, Ireland was taken down using the same tactics. Other nations (Portugal, Spain and Italy to name but a few) are now in the cross-hairs of this internationally organized form of financial warfare.
As the wetiko infection progresses in the global body politic, the global economic system becomes gradually redesigned to exert more and more effective top-down control by the few over the many and to the benefit of the elite. Unbelievably these very hard economic times that we live in are also the period of time during which the greatest profits in all of history are generated by certain select corporate conglomerates. Sadly, most people aren’t aware of this eye-opening and mind-blowing event.
It is revealing that the very phrases used to describe the grand larceny occurring on a daily basis in the global financial system are terms that specifically apply to the psycho-pathology of wetiko disease. A brief scan of the news media exposes several examples such as ‘predatory lending,’ ‘liar loans,’ ‘zombie banks,’ ‘disaster capitalism,’ ‘financial terrorism,’ ‘monster capitalism’ ‘voodoo economics,’ and ‘tapeworm economics’ to name but a few.
The one thing the Big Wetikos are most afraid of is large numbers of people seeing through their charade and realizing that the emperor has no clothes. If enough people clearly see what the Big Wetikos are doing – committing unconscionable crimes against humanity on a grand scale while they play roulette with our planetary inheritance – their gig will be up. This is an externalized reflection of how the wetiko virus within us is terrified of being seen for once the bug is seen, it is ‘out of business’. The global financial system is a symbolic reflection openly revealing the psycho-spiritual disease of wetiko ‘in business’.
The wetiko economic system is a bribery system. The Big Wetikos give us a tiny overflow trickle of the over-the-top profits they unjustly reap and in which we gladly share. We then pretend that we are ‘clean’, that we are not complicit in the systematic evil that is playing out. We fall under the self-inflicted illusion that we are not responsible and are merely victims of the system. And yet we are simultaneously feeding off and supporting the very evil of the system as it kills us.
Energetically and on the level of the deeper underlying field, we pay a steep price if we are buying into this Faustian pact with the Devil. We receive what appear to be benefits, wetiko ‘frequent flyer miles’ so to speak, but at the ultimate cost of our own genocide. Similar to accepting candy from a predator, the rush of immediate gratification provides an apparent short-term benefit at the cost of our integrity, freedom and ultimately our lives. Our true power comes when we see our culpability and complicity in this process and accept our responsibility, thus enabling our ability to respond. This gives us the power to choose differently which leads directly to substantial and long lasting change.
The wetikonomy is both a symbol of and a portal through which we can see the bug of wetiko as it in-forms a living yet diseased system emerging from the human mind. When we see the workings of the wetiko virus in any system, be it the financial and family systems or within our own selves, we are at the same time generating a living antibody of awareness which neutralizes the virulence of wetiko. Seeing how the global financial system is literally being animated and driven by the wetiko virus is to pop into a heightened state of awareness in which we are seeing a wetiko-ized system from outside of itself. We could only do this if we are beginning to see with healthy wetiko-free eyes and are thus separating and freeing ourselves from the toxic system. As we increasingly illumine the workings of wetiko, we more and more ‘distinguish ourselves’ from it.
Our real debt is to ourselves; we owe it to ourselves to take a closer look and in-form ourselves and see through the business of wetiko. We can discover how money can be used as a tool that helps us cultivate and share true abundance. The return on the investment of our attention will truly stimulate the neglected real economy and further inspire deeper heights of lucidity. This allows us to tap into the place within ourselves that is untainted by wetiko, through which we can consciously leverage and redesign the system to our collective advantage, which is to say for the benefit of all. Herein lays our power to overcome the plague of wetiko and in so doing to build a world that works for everyone.
The final chapter of this series exploring wetiko disease (coming soon!) wraps up this inquiry of ours into the nature of our apparent problem. Finding the cure for something like wetiko is an interesting idea….to be continued in part 3.
I would like to thank Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari.com for our many years of discussion about integrating spiritual and economic phenomenon. For an excellent detailed case study of wetikonomics, please go to Catherine’s Dillon, Read and Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Stock Profits.
A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. Paul is a visionary artist and a spiritually-informed political activist. He is the author of The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis, (click here to read the first chapter). Feel free to pass this article along to a friend if you feel so inspired. Please visit Paul’s website www.awakeninthedream.com. You can contact Paul at [email protected]; he looks forward to your reflections. Though he reads every email, he regrets that he is not able to personally respond to all of them. © Copyright 2011.