You're listening to an upstream sneak peek with Martin Kirk, founder and director of The Rules. Watico, it's a fascinating concept. It's one we originally came across when we read a book called Columbus and other

Cannibals by a Native American activist and philosopher called Jack Forbes.

He wrote this book in the 70s and it was one of the foundational books for the current Native American

rights movement and it identified this term, this concept called Watiko which has its variations

many First Nations in North America.

Some call it Windingo, some call it Winterco.

But the same basic concept is shared across many of them.

And the idea is that it's a word for a cannibal they would call a

cannibalistic spirit that we might in our modern terminology call a thought form or a meme but

essentially it's a thought complex a thought logic that drives greed excess and selfish

consumption and they talk about as a psychic infection that deludes its

host into believing that consuming the life forces of others for your own

self aggrandizement or purely for profit is a logical and morally upright way to live.

So immediately I'm sure you can see how you could describe

modern capitalism as in many ways a Wettico system or a system affected by Wettico

logic. The constant need for growth, the constant need for ever more capital,

the disregard for the damage that it causes in the meantime, if you just look at the fact

that we're now entered into the sixth mass extinction event

on this planet largely because of the demands of capitalism. You can see that this is very much the

Wattico that I that First Nations concept of the spirit driven by greed

and selfish consumption applies very well to modern capitalism so what we've done is we've

launched a campaign called Seeing Watico.

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