The Cree Indians of North America, and many First Nations, have a concept called wetiko, a cannibalistic mind-virus that creates an unnatural desire to continually consume human flesh and gives its host an ‘icy heart.’ Martin Kirk and Alnoor Ladha describe the wetiko nature of modern capitalism:
Its insatiable hunger for finite resources; its disregard for the pain of the groups and cultures it consumes; its belief in consumption as savior; its overriding obsession with its own material growth; and its viral spread across the surface of the planet. It is wholly accurate to describe neoliberal capitalism as cannibalizing life on this planet. It is not the only truth—capitalism has also facilitated an explosion of human life and ingenuity—but when taken as a whole, capitalism is certainly eating through the life-force of this planet in service of its own growth.
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Since our modern media machinery, and indeed, technology itself, are derivative sectors of our economic operating system, we must ask, in what way is mass media being driven by the wetiko meme? In which ways is it invading our unconscious and subconscious minds, transforming us into a non-human state?
The Roots of Media
“The deepest cause of the present [human] devastation [of the Earth] is found in a mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human and other modes of being and the bestowal of all right on the humans.” —Thomas Berry
With the beginning of the Enlightenment and Cartesian dualism, which split mind and body and embraced a rigid form of rationalism with religious fervor, we began to believe that our human intelligence made us superior beings and granted us the innate right to use “cheap nature” to our own advantage so that we can accumulate material goods, wealth and power. The world was reduced to a picture—an early precursor to today’s mass media which channels and supports the masculine life-destroying cannibalistic behavior that is both the driver and by-product of patterns in human history, including colonialism, the exploitation of nature, and the extreme subjugation of the Other.
“We have become so desensitized and hypnotized that we fail to notice the mutation and have become confused by what it means to be human and what is beautiful.”
Media has become part of our nervous system, framing and manipulating our thoughts, desires, feelings and the way we see reality — hijacking our spirituality, emotions and value systems. It promotes modern culture’s hypnosis through disassociation, consumerism and propaganda. With the support of commercial speech—and its excessive use of pornography, vanity and subliminal messages—our sense of community, interdependence and symbiosis with the natural world is eradicated.
Through mass media, the Other can now be produced, replicated and stripped of human dignity in a most perverted way so that it can be devoured. We are fed the image of a crying woman holding her dying child, portraying her as a different race or poor so that we can consume her suffering, while at the same time soothing ourselves with the Rolex watch advertised next to her image. Media presents us with superficial ideas of fulfillment, while stifling our true emotions, which are reframed, watered down and relabeled. Our lives and events are turned into narratives for consumption, while simultaneously we are becoming the very emotionless and artificial characters we see portrayed through movies and commercials.
Hyper-masculine Hollywood characters, including most superheroes, villains, robots, and other weaponry, are personifications of the vampiristic spirit of wetiko that is manifested through media—the very medium of memes. We have become so desensitized and hypnotized that we fail to notice the mutation and have become confused by what it means to be human and what is beautiful.
Restoring the Matriarchy
The patriarchy of capitalism found one of its greatest messengers in the modern media apparatus. One of the key avenues mass media employs to distort reality is the ongoing war with the feminine psyche. From the early days of Hollywood, the male and female archetypes were contorted to fit a hetero-normative perspective of masculine power and feminine passivity. The brave warrior and provider always rescued the damsel in distress.
Commercials continue the onslaught of distortion through the promotion of skinny unfeminine bodies. We are shown anorexic teenage girls as representations of the ideal woman’s body and faces that are cold and manipulative. Deep sensuality is taboo because it is too real and dangerous to the neurotic and perverted consumption of a culture that thrives on unattainable pleasures lacking in intimacy, authenticity and connection.
“The empowerment and freedom of woman and motherhood became synonymous with full-time careers, and the ability to maintain success in a patriarchic society.”