I first met this word not beside a campfire. It was in a book.
One year I was reading ADHD in an Agrarian Society. A book on why traits that would have been adaptive in hunter-gatherer societies are classified as disorders in agrarian and industrial societies. A passage caught me. "In the age of Wetiko, ADHD risks being branded as failure."
Wetiko. An unfamiliar word. I wondered why the author had chosen it. I began to look. Jack Forbes. Paul Levy. Cree tradition. Algonquian languages. Cannibal monster. A tool for the critique of civilization. The further I followed the materials, the heavier the word grew.
One day I asked my Cree sister, Debbie. From 1997 to 2013 I visited that community nearly every year, and at one point in those long years — twenty-three or twenty-four years ago now — a Cree family of the Maskwacis nation took me in as kin. Since then I call her my sister. Adoption did not reconfigure my identity. I am Korean first. But the memory and the meaning of those years remain inside me. "Wetiko — what does it mean in Cree?"
My sister answered shortly.
"Eating too much."
That answer held me for a long time. Not a grand theological exegesis, not a scholarly definition. An everyday phrase in a Cree community. When a child grabs too many cookies; when someone takes more than the community's share — the phrase that comes out naturally in such moments. "Eating too much."
And yet that very ordinariness was the warning. The Cree community did not teach this danger as a special philosophy. It etched it into everyday language. "Don't eat too much." At the table, on the hunting ground, in every moment of the community. So that it would not grow into a sickness.
All the heavy things I had read in the books of Forbes and Levy — spiritual cannibalism, self-concealment, endless hunger — finally come back to that one phrase from my sister. Eating too much. Not knowing the limit of one's appetite. Taking more than necessary. And what happens when that accumulates.
This chapter traces how that ordinary warning became a diagnosis of an entire civilization. How the wisdom the Cree carved into daily speech was, by twentieth-century Indigenous thinkers, expanded into an academic category. Why it is the language that pinpoints the past five hundred years of Western history. And — why we today need this name.
Begin with simple background.
Wetiko (witigo, witiko). Or, depending on regional dialect, Wendigo and other forms. A shared traditional concept among many Algonquian peoples — Cree, Ojibwe, Innu, Anishinaabe, and others.¹
Originally the concept was transmitted as a being of supernatural lore. The figure of a fear: that during the long winter of the northern forests, when food has run out, extreme hunger and isolation may drive a person to eat human flesh. Once one has begun to eat human flesh, he is no longer human. He becomes Wetiko. A spirit of endless hunger that lives by eating the life force of others. And — once one has eaten, he wants to keep eating, and the hunger is never satisfied.
This story has been carried in Cree and Ojibwe communities for a long time for a practical reason. The northern forest is a resource-limited environment. For a community to survive, the wisdom of the limits of consumption is essential. One must constantly reflect on how much one is taking. The Wetiko story was an educational device that transmitted this reflection across generations. "Don't eat too much. Otherwise you may become Wetiko too."
But — in the second half of the twentieth century, Indigenous intellectuals began to read this concept in a new way. What they saw: Wetiko is not merely a supernatural monster. It is also the name of a social and civilizational disease. An entire community, an entire civilization, can fall into the state of Wetiko. And a civilization in that state can eat its way into other communities.
This reinterpretation transformed the concept into an academic category. The decisive figure of that transformation was — Jack Forbes, whom we will meet in the next section.
Wetiko.
The one who brought Wetiko into the academy was Jack D. Forbes (1934–2011).¹ An American scholar of Powhatan-Lenape descent. He devoted his life to the study of the history and culture of Native America and to the nature of European colonialism. He co-founded the Native American Studies Department at UC Davis and left several books.
One of his major works is Columbus and Other Cannibals. First published in 1979, with a revised and expanded edition in 2008.² Its subtitle compresses the book's theme: "The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism."
Forbes's central claim is firm. Since Columbus, the essence of European civilization has been Wetiko. This is not metaphor. It is diagnosis. What the Cree concept of Wetiko points to — the spiritual disease of feeding upon the life force of other beings — has been the core engine of Western civilization over the past five hundred years.
How is such a claim possible? Let us follow Forbes's logic.
Forbes defines Wetiko as spiritual cannibalism. The qualifier "spiritual" matters.
Bodily cannibalism is eating another human's body. It has occurred in limited form in many cultures throughout history (extreme survival in famine, ritual cannibalism, wartime practices). Mostly it is exceptional and limited. It is not sustainable — a society that eats humans for long depletes its own population.
Spiritual cannibalism is different. It is eating another being's soul, life force, time, possibility, dreams. To use a person's eight hours of the day for one's own profit. To take the resources of one community and consume them elsewhere. To melt down a civilization's art and turn it into one's own currency. To convert a child's childhood into factory labor. To turn a forest's centuries of life into a month's revenue.
These are spiritual cannibalism. Not eating the body, but taking what is most precious in that being. And turning it into one's own profit.
Forbes's central insight is this. Spiritual cannibalism is far more destructive than bodily cannibalism. Because it is sustainable. One eats a group spiritually, then moves on to the next. In the process the eaten remain alive. Only their life force is being slowly, steadily extracted. They are being depleted. And once depleted, they are discarded. Elsewhere there is fresh prey.
This is the system that has been operating for five hundred years. Eating Indigenous Americans, then African slaves, then Asian colonies, then the Western world's own internal workers, and now the natural world. The list of prey changes; the structure remains identical.
It is symbolic that Forbes placed Columbus in the title. Columbus is not a hero but the face of Wetiko. A single sentence quoted from his journal is decisive. November 27, 1492, about a month after the meeting with the Arawak:
"These people are very docile and timid. They have no weapons, and they will give us anything we want. With fifty men we can subjugate them all and govern them however we want."³
This is the first eyewitness record of Europe meeting the Americas. Not "we have met kind people," but "how can we dominate these kind people" was the first thought. Within this single sentence is the heart of Wetiko. The encounter is seen as an opportunity for plunder. The kindness of the other is received as the signal of prey.
Forbes sees this moment as a turning point of history. Europe's pre-existing Wetiko tendency — Crusades, witch hunts, civil wars — expanded to planetary scale at this moment. Afterward the same logic spread across the Americas, into Africa, into Asia. The world became one end of a food chain.
Forbes's book at first held a marginal position. The American academic mainstream ignored it or dismissed it as "radical." But over time his insight was extended by several authors. The most well-known is the work of Paul Levy.
Levy is an American Jungian psychologist and a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner. In 2013 he published Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil.⁴ A work that extended Forbes's concept of Wetiko into a psychological framework.
Levy renamed Wetiko "Malignant Egophrenia (ME disease)". "Egophrenia" is his neologism, paired with schizophrenia. If schizophrenia is the splitting of the self, egophrenia is the swelling and rigidification of the self. A state in which the ego has grown so large that it sees every other being as an instrument of its own expansion.
Levy's central resource is the psychology of Carl Jung (1875–1961). Jung developed the concept of "the Shadow". Every individual carries a dark side of the self that is not consciously accepted. Aggression, greed, fear, resentment. These are repressed into the unconscious. Yet they do not disappear. They accumulate in the unconscious, and at some moment erupt explosively, or are projected (projection).
Projection is seeing one's own darkness in another. I see in my neighbor, in a foreigner, in another race, the violence I do not accept in myself. They then feel threatening, and hostility toward them is justified. In fact the source of that hostility is within me.
The shadow is also collective. An entire society can carry a dark side it does not accept. That is the collective shadow. And when the collective shadow gives rise to collective projection — the conditions are set for large-scale violence. The Holocaust, witch hunts, ethnic cleansing, colonial massacres. All can be understood as the external projection of a collective shadow.
Levy's insight: Wetiko is the archetypal name of the collective shadow. What the Cree knew in the form of "the cannibal spirit" is what Jung translated into the academy as "the collective projection of the shadow." Two languages point to the same thing.
The decisive insight Levy added is the self-concealing nature of Wetiko.
What is Wetiko's most lethal feature? Aggression? Greed? No. Failing to recognize that one is sick. This is Levy's central claim.⁵
Other diseases announce themselves through symptoms. Fever, pain, weakness. The patient knows that he is ill. So he seeks treatment.
Wetiko is different. Its symptoms feel rather like experiences that strengthen the self. Accumulating wealth. Expanding power. Extending territory. All these are wrapped in the name of "success." One infected with Wetiko feels that he is flourishing.
And so long as this self-perception holds — healing is impossible. Because the problem is not recognized as a problem. Wetiko sustains itself by denying its own existence. This is in some sense Wetiko's "genius." It deceives not only its victims but itself.
Why does this dynamic matter? Because it fundamentally changes how one might fight Wetiko. Direct confrontation cannot defeat Wetiko. Because Wetiko believes itself not to be the object of confrontation. It feels it is "doing what is just." External criticism is received as attack, and the defenses harden.
The only way to heal Wetiko is self-recognition. The moment when the infected himself realizes "Ah, I had been infected with Wetiko." In that moment, healing first becomes possible.
This is also why this book is necessary. Naming. The act of giving the disease a name is the first step of healing.
Let us distinguish how Wetiko works in concrete terms. I propose four core mechanisms.
Reification is making a living being into a "thing." Reducing subject to object.
The earlier chapters of this book offer many examples. The gold artworks Inca artisans had spent decades making, melted into ingots (Chapter 7). This is the reduction of form to mass — a reduction from objects bearing meaning to mere material. The worker classified as "human resource" in the factory (Chapter 8). The human becomes resource. A resource is something to be used efficiently. Consumers analyzed as "target customer segments." Human desire becomes the raw material of advertising.
The philosophical root of reification is in Cartesian dualism, which we saw in Chapter 8. The dichotomy of subject (the thinking thing) and object (the extended thing). Every being must be classified into one of these two categories. The list of "subjects" is narrow — traditionally European male Christians. The rest fall into the category of "objects." Women, non-Europeans, children, animals, nature. Once an object, it becomes something that can be manipulated.
The everyday expression of reification is in language. "Utilize people." "Invest time." "Manage relationships." We are so accustomed to such phrases that we fail to notice the ontology contained in them. But each time we use these words, we are reclassifying a living being as object.
Abstraction is the reduction of concrete being to numbers, categories, statistics.
"About sixty million people died in the Second World War." There is no terror in this sentence. Because the number sixty million exceeds the scale a human can experience. This is related to a famous saying often attributed to Stalin (whether he actually said it is debated): "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic."
The power of abstraction lies in creating distance. A drone pilot, thousands of kilometers away on a computer screen, "neutralizes a target." That the target was a father, that his son was beside him, becomes a pixel on the screen. A trader "takes a short position." That the sale means the loss of jobs for thousands of households is not visible. A management consultant recommends "a 30% reduction in workforce." The collapse of one person's life becomes a number on a spreadsheet.
Abstraction is the condition for Wetiko to operate at scale. The human moral sense holds up relatively well to small-scale, direct cruelty. But large-scale, abstract cruelty is much easier. Because the face has disappeared.
The concept the great twentieth-century philosopher Hannah Arendt coined after analyzing the Eichmann trial — "the banality of evil" — points at this.⁶ Eichmann was not a monster. He was a bureaucrat processing piles of paperwork. Each paper carried orders for the transport of thousands. To him they were numbers, not faces. Abstraction separated him from cruelty. And abstraction made the scale of the Holocaust possible.
Separation is the absolutization of the boundaries between I and you, human and nature, body and mind.
Cartesian dualism, which we saw in Chapter 8, is the philosophical completion of this. Mind and matter are essentially different. Human and animal are essentially different. The rational and the emotional are essentially different. These claims of "essential difference" each erect a wall.
The boundary itself is not the problem. Without a distinction between self and other, there is no relationship. The problem is in absolutizing the boundary. Making it an impermeable wall. The illusion that nothing of yours can come into me, that nothing of mine can flow into you.
Within this illusion — exploitation ceases to be a moral problem. Because "you" is a being essentially other than I. Your pain is not my pain. Your fall is not my fall. So using you for my profit becomes inevitable and natural.
Erich Fromm's analysis in his 1976 work To Have or to Be? is precisely of this.⁷ Modern society has shifted from "the being mode" to "the having mode." In the being mode I am connected with the world. In the having mode I am separated from the world, and try to own a part of that world. Even love becomes an object of possession. Even experience becomes an object of accumulation.
Separation also takes place within the self. Body separated from mind. Thought separated from feeling. Work separated from life. Each of these separations builds an inner Wetiko. A part of me exploits another part of me. This is also the root of the self-exploitation Byung-Chul Han diagnosed (see Chapter 8).
The last and most lethal mechanism. Wetiko's self-concealment.
As we saw in Levy's analysis above, Wetiko does not know it is Wetiko. It always tells a good story to itself.
"We are civilizing." — The self-justification of nineteenth-century European imperialism.
"We are teaching the Indigenous to read." — The official mission of Canadian residential schools.
"We are improving market efficiency." — The language of twenty-first-century neoliberalism.
"We are revolutionizing humanity's productivity." — The rhetoric of Silicon Valley today.
These stories are not lies. Lies would be simpler. They are partial truths. And being partial truths they are stronger. It is true that some Indigenous children at residential schools did learn English. It is true that market logic in some ways increased efficiency. The partial truth conceals the total destruction.
Wetiko operates through good intentions. This is its most terrifying feature. Many colonial administrators truly believed they were "helping the Indigenous." Many missionaries truly believed they were "saving souls." Many tech leaders today truly believe they are "making the world a better place." Their good intentions are not a lie. But the fact that those good intentions are inseparable from structural destruction is the essence of Wetiko.
When evil shows the face of evil, defense is easier. When evil shows the face of good — defense is much harder. Often even the victim does not know that he is a victim.
The German-Austrian Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965) published a short book in 1923. Its title was I and Thou (Ich und Du).⁸ A thin book of about 150 pages, but one that profoundly influenced twentieth-century philosophy.
Buber's argument is concise. The human possesses two fundamental modes of relationship. The I-It relationship and the I-Thou relationship.
The I-It relationship is the relationship with an object. The relationship in which I use, analyze, experience, possess something. In this relationship "It" is, to me, object. I observe it, measure it, exploit it. If necessary, I discard it. In this relationship I remain subject; the It remains object. The boundary is clear.
The I-Thou relationship is the relationship of meeting. The relationship in which I face another being. In this relationship "Thou" is not my object. I do not observe it, I am with it. I do not measure, I participate. In this relationship the boundary between I and Thou melts. I become I, Thou becomes Thou, but at the same time we become we.
Buber said both relationships are necessary. Without I-It, neither science, technology, nor society would be possible. Some activities require objectification. The problem is that the modern world reduces every relationship to I-It.
"Every It-world has need of one Thou. But modern man has lost the eyes to see the Thou."⁹
Wetiko is the tendency to reduce every relationship to I-It.
This is how I understand Wetiko in this book. Wetiko is the suppression of the I-Thou relationship. Blocking the meeting of one living being with another as living being. Reducing the other to object, to resource, to tool.
When this reduction is complete — no exploitation is a moral problem. Because using "It" is not in the realm of morality. I do not "exploit" my pencil. I use it. When the same logic is applied to the worker, to nature, even to the family — cannibalism becomes daily life.
Buber's insight is this. If we do not recover the I-Thou relationship, we lose our very humanity. Because being human comes from the capacity to face another being as Thou. When that capacity dies, we — technically human — become spiritual automata.
Buber wrote this before the Holocaust. He did not know the prophetic weight of his book. But the world of the I-It he described eventually produced the gas chambers. Millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and the disabled were processed as "It." Document numbers. Transport allocations. Selection categories. They were, literally, "It" when they died.
Buber was himself a Jew, expelled from Germany. He survived and emigrated to Israel. But after the Holocaust his message became still more urgent. And in the twenty-first century today — it is still urgent. Because Wetiko continues to operate, changing form.
The last part of this chapter returns to the present. Wetiko is not a problem of the past. It has seeped into the daily life of all of us in this very moment.
Korea is an extreme example of this phenomenon. The highest suicide rate in the OECD. The lowest birth rate in the world. Among the workers who work the longest hours in the world. What do these statistics point to?
Burnout. Eating one's own life force.
Recall the structure Byung-Chul Han diagnosed in The Burnout Society (2010) (Chapter 8). The disciplinary society of the past operated by external coercion. The factory foreman, society's moral injection, state power. The neoliberal society operates by self-coercion. No one orders you to work more. You make yourself work more. "You must achieve." "You can be better." "Don't waste your potential."
This is internalized Wetiko. Because there is no external master, there is no one to rebel against. I myself am my master and slave. I do not rest. If I rest, I feel guilty before myself.
If this state continues for years, decades — body and mind are exhausted. This is burnout. And burnout comes earlier and earlier. A great share of Korean university students already show burnout symptoms. Even middle-school students.
As one trained in medicine, let me add: burnout is not mere "fatigue." It is a biological state. Chronic stress weakens the immune system. Inflammation markers rise. Aging accelerates. The risk of cancer rises. Cardiovascular disease rises. Depression and anxiety become daily life. The price of self-exploitation is stamped on the body.
Yet contemporary medicine's habit is to approach these symptoms as the individual patient's "stress management problem." It recommends meditation, exercise, rest. These help. But they do not touch the root of the problem. The root is structure. The structure of a society that does not let people rest. If medicine fails to recognize this structure, medicine becomes a collaborator with Wetiko. By treating only symptoms, it helps the structural exploitation continue.
I will return to this theme in Chapter 17 on Salutogenesis.
Paired with burnout is another modern symptom: loneliness.
Recent research has begun to treat loneliness as a public health crisis.¹⁰ The United Kingdom officially appointed a "Minister for Loneliness" in 2018. The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on loneliness in 2023. Its conclusion: "A lack of social connection causes health damage equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day."
Why has loneliness so increased? One answer is the marketization of relationship. Friendship has become "the social media network." Love has become "the dating app." Community has become "the customer community." Each of these substitutions preserves the surface of relationship while removing its depth.
This is Wetiko's subtle work. It does not abolish relationship altogether. That would be too blatant. Instead it changes relationship into transaction. Transaction is I-It relationship. You give me value, I give you value. If the calculation balances, the relationship continues. If not, it ends. This has become the substance of many relationships today.
Loneliness is the side effect of this substitution. Inside transaction there is no Thou. There is no meeting as being. I may have hundreds of friends — and remain alone. Because none of them is my Thou.
And the largest-scale Wetiko: the climate crisis and the collapse of ecosystems.
The earth's life force is being extracted. Through fossil fuels, deforestation, ocean overfishing, soil degradation. The speed of this extraction is taking place at a geological-time-unit ratio. Scientists have named the present age the Anthropocene. The age in which human activity fundamentally transforms the basic systems of the earth.
Many technical solutions to the climate crisis are discussed. Solar, wind, electric vehicles, nuclear. Carbon capture. Ecological restoration. All of these are needed. But these are not the fundamental solution. Because the problem is not technology but relationship.
The climate crisis is the inevitable consequence of a civilization that has treated nature as It rather than Thou. If we had met nature as a living being, we would not have arrived where we are. Instead we saw nature as an unlimited storehouse of resources. As a bin for what could be discarded. The result is before us.
Technical solutions alone are not enough. The recovery of relationship is needed. That is — to remember Pachamama again (Chapter 4). To call yaku again as kin. To offer once more to apu. Not literally, perhaps, but to recover the spirit of these.
This is not a recommendation of superstition. This is a realistic strategy of survival. Without treating nature as Thou, we cannot stop destroying her.
A particular form of twenty-first-century Wetiko is surveillance capitalism. The concept analyzed by Harvard Business School's Shoshana Zuboff in her 2019 book of the same title.¹¹
The structure of surveillance capitalism is simple. Platforms like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and TikTok provide a free service. In return they collect behavioral data from the user. They analyze and sell this data. The core product is future prediction — what the user will do next, what he will buy, whom he will trust.
The surface of this business model is convenience. You receive a service for free. But behind it you yourself are the product. Your attention, your emotion, your relationships, your dreams — all of these are extracted, classified, and sold.
This is Wetiko. Because your spiritual energy (attention, time, desire) is converted into the profit of another. And this conversion takes place without your knowing it. The cunning of self-concealment.
Today I turned on the computer to write this book. But from the moment I turned it on — small fragments of my attention leaked in many directions. An email notification. A check of social media. A news headline. Each takes one minute, two minutes. Combined, several hours each day. Where did that time go? It was extracted. My time has ceased to be mine.
Let me bring back the warning at the heart of the Wetiko tradition.
"You too become Wetiko. Once you start eating."
This sentence is the heaviest truth of this chapter.
Wetiko is not a problem of "them." Forbes, Levy, and Buber all emphasize this point. Wetiko is contagious. And this contagion has swept the planet for centuries. No one is uninfected.
I am infected too. Even the act of writing this book is — in some way — the work of Wetiko. I am using the stories of the Inca as material for my book. I am translating the teachings of Cree elders into my own academic analysis. These come from good intent. But good intent alone is not enough. I must continually self-examine. Where am I taking material? Where am I meeting? The boundary is always blurred.
This is the most humble recognition of Wetiko. We are infected. But — knowing this is the first healing. The Cree elder said: "We pass this story to our children. So that they may recognize Wetiko in someone else." Recognizing it within oneself may have to come first.
And after recognition, what is to be done? This question is the theme of the rest of the book.
First, we will see how Wetiko was formalized in history (Chapter 10, Valladolid). Then how it was materialized as economy (Chapter 11 Potosí, Chapter 12 sugar). How it was diffused into East Asia (Chapter 13, 1492 and 1592). How it divided the fates of three civilizations (Chapter 14). These complete Part III.
Then, in Part IV, we move toward healing. Perichoresis (Chapter 15). The Eastern response (Chapter 16). Salutogenesis (Chapter 17). And finally — Chapter 18, in which, holding the question of the AI age, we return to the sound of the water at Tipón.
But for now, as I close this chapter, I keep one word in mind.
Wetiko.
The word a Cree elder taught me. A name carrying thousands of years of wisdom. A concept that pinpoints the world history of the past five hundred years precisely. And — the name of the disease I, and you, must find within myself, and within yourself, today.
Knowing the name is already something.
¹ For biographical information on Jack Forbes, see the official materials of the Native American Studies Department at UC Davis. His major works include Apache, Navaho and Spaniard (1960), Aztecas del Norte (1973), Africans and Native Americans (1988).
² Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism, rev. ed. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008; orig. 1979).
³ Christopher Columbus, The Log of Christopher Columbus, trans. Robert H. Fuson (Camden, ME: International Marine Publishing, 1987), entry for November 27, 1492. The translation has been polished by the author.
⁴ Paul Levy, Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2013).
⁵ Ibid., especially Chapter 2, "Wetiko as Psychic Blindness."
⁶ Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963).
⁷ Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
⁸ Martin Buber, Ich und Du (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1923). English translation: I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner, 1970).
⁹ Ibid., Part I. Translation by the author.
¹⁰ For the public-health implications of loneliness, see U.S. Surgeon General, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023).
¹¹ Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).