Brief: Wetiko: Original, New Age & Marxist Views

Conspirituality

This episode explores the concept of Wetiko—a Cree spiritual metaphor for a cannibalistic evil spirit that grows larger and hungrier as it consumes others—through its evolution from indigenous roots to modern conspiracy theories and New Age spirituality. Matthew Remsky examines

Key takeaways

• Wetiko originally refers to a Cree concept of an evil spirit born from greed and cannibalism during famine, symbolizing systemic corruption rather than individual malice.
• The modern reinterpretation of Wetiko in Q-adjacent circles reduces it to a 'mind virus' or 'psychosis,' stripping away its anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist roots.

Main topics

• Wetiko as a Cree spiritual concept
• The evolution of Wetiko into New Age and conspiracy theory discourse

Notable quotes

'The more it eats, the larger it becomes, and so the larger its next hunger is.'

'This is the logic of compound growth. Each year's successfully absorbed surplus cannot relieve the following year's pressure.'

Conclusion

While conspiritualists correctly identify systemic failures of late capitalism, their spiritualized framing of these issues—such as through Wetiko—is ultimately

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:03) Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep Podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Speaker 1 (0:37) Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Speaker 3 (0:53) we've got a very different kind of sponsor for this episode, the Jordan Harbinger Show, a podcast you should definitely check out since you're a fan of high quality, fascinating podcasts hosted by interesting people. The show covers a wide range of topics through weekly interviews with heavy hitting guests. And there are a ton of episodes you'll find interesting since you're a fan of this show. I'd recommend our listeners check it out. We have a fair amount of overlap. You know, Jordan recently did an episode on remote viewing and how the U.S. government spent millions of dollars on this ESP pseudoscience. You might also look up an episode called Saving Bro's Soul from Alt-Right Rabbit Hole. Anyway, you can't go wrong with adding the Jordan Harbinger show to your rotation. It's incredibly interesting. There's never a dull show. Search for the Jordan Harbinger show. That's H-A-R-B as in boy, I-N as in Nancy, G-E-R on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Speaker 2 (1:53) Hello, everyone. I'm Matthew Remsky. This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the roots and intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism. You can follow myself, Derek and Julian, on Blue Sky. The podcast is on Instagram and threads. And you can support our Patreon. And you can also find me on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. This brief is a little audio essay called Wetiko, Original New Age and Marxist Views, and it patches up what I see as a whole in our archive. This would be the Cree concept of Wetiko, a cannibal or evil spirit who grows larger but also hungrier as he devours his fellows and the world. It's a compelling metaphor that was in scattershot circulation. during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022. Several Q-adjacent influencers, including Bernard Gunter and Laura Matsu, described Wetiko as a hyperdimensional mind virus operating through unhealed trauma and cultural blind spots. They said it was fueling collective psychosis. But of what type? They said it was the psychosis of political division. and occult hostile forces, and this was giving rise to all manner of social chaos. So there's a June 2020 episode of their podcast, The Cosmic Matrix, called Divide and Conquer and the Wetico Mind Virus, in which Gunther and Matsu use Wetico to frame the George Floyd protests as a psyop. They talk about visual anomalies and bystander footage, so a missing camera angle. an ambulance crew allegedly not checking a pulse. These are all evidence of staging. They also tag Black Lives Matter as a revolutionary Marxist ideology coordinated with Antifa and funded by George Soros to engineer regime change. Matsu talked about her own past as a vegan social justice warrior who she now argues was, quote, using my own unhealed wounds. around racism to fuel my hatred towards white people. So her earlier activism was actually WETCO possession rather than political conviction, in her view. Gunter also says, admits really, we've been getting into Q lately, and they discuss a Q drop that says they want you divided, they want race wars, they want class wars, confirming for them the larger WETCO framework. Now, I think this concept put them both outside and above the typical QAnon house of mirrors, because if Q was a machine for generating meanings for chaos, Weteco could explain the origins of the machine. Now, at the time, I didn't look into it because it seemed both banal and kind of toothless, something that Gunther had fixated on as a branding hook. And other people were picking it up as well, but it didn't seem to get a lot of traction. But I'm turning back to it because there's something in it in the vein of chapter six of the book that we published, which is called Conspiritualists Are Not Wrong. That's the name of the chapter. The book is called Conspirituality. So I'll link to that. In our chapter, we basically argued that conspiritualists are highly sensitized to the systemic problems they are responding to. State neglect, predatory for-profit health care, corporate collusion, institutional betrayal, and genuine histories of abuse and genocide. But their proposed solutions are false or harmful. The movement succeeds because it offers a compelling mythic narrative. A fall from organic grace, an awakening journey, a participatory heroism that public health communications flat bureaucratic messaging can't quite compete with. We also wrote about how legitimate grievances from Me Too to missing and murdered indigenous women to distrust of medical authority got absorbed into QAnon and adjacent movements, sometimes through genuine identification, as in... abuse survivors drawn to save the children framing, and also through appropriation, as when white nationalists would co-opt indigenous sovereignty language. We concluded that conspiritualists rightly diagnosed late capitalism's self-perpetuating dysfunction, but wrongly extended this into generalized distrust and, of course, scapegoating, including antisemitism. But into that vacuum, They offered something psychologically real. Salvation and meaning. Now, with Wetiko, I think they could have offered something materially real as well, had they been more familiar with the modern indigenous reporting on the source via Jack Forbes, the Powhatan Ranape, Delaware Lenape scholar, the Native American Studies founder at UC Davis and author of the 1992 book,