Dreaming Beyond Capitalism: A Culture Without Fear
By Martin Winiecki
In the 1990s an unusual encounter took place in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In plant rituals, shamans of the Achuar, a tribe living in pristine forest that had never been in touch with Western civilization, received the warning that the “white man” would try to invade their lands, cut down the forest and exploit the resources. Deeply shaken, they called out to the Spirits for help. Soon after white people did approach them, coming to them however with supportive intentions – a group of activists from the United States, searching for ways to protect Indigenous Peoples from the oil industry. The Westerners found a deeply interconnected tribal society living in profound symbiosis with the Earth. Seeing the bulldozers coming closer and closer, they asked the Elders of the tribe how they could survive. Their answer was surprising and straightforward: “Don’t try to help us here. Go back to your own culture and change the dream of the modern world! It is because of this dream that we are perishing.”[i]
This experience gave rise to the Pachamama Alliance, an international educational network dedicated to changing the dream of the Western world.
(image) What is the dream of the Western world? When asked, most young people say: A perfect partner, a beautiful house, successful career, lots of money and travel to exotic places. Amplified a million times a day by Hollywood and the advertisement industry, promoted by parents, self-help gurus, schools and fairytales, this lifestyle became the central motif of our collective longing, the blueprint of globalized society.
(image) Fulfillment became a matter of possession, of how much wealth, fame, power and sex we earned for ourselves. Rewarding people with profit and status for the most competitive and destructive behavior, worshiping the golden calf of maximal economic growth, capitalism has effectively manufactured and then exploited people’s dream image. Humanity’s general ethical decline is the result of this collective corruption.
(image) “Social being determines consciousness” – MarxFirst Nation tribes from North America coined a term to describe the ‘disease of the white man’ – wetiko. In their understanding, wetiko consists of two essential characteristics: chronic inability for empathy and an egoistic fixation on ones own personal benefit and profit. The First Peoples used this word specifically because they could not fathom any other explanation for the behavior of the European colonialists. While often declared as unchangeable psychological features of humanity, greed, selfishness and violent impulses may in fact not be our “human nature” as many claim, but rather the outcome of our alienation under capitalist conditions. Marx said, “Social being determines consciousness.”[ii] According to epigenetic research, our genetic programming contains (image) many different possibilities of existence. Whether wetiko takes holds of our psyche or we become compassionate strongly depends on the social structures we live in. We only consider egoism, hatred and brutality to be “normal” because over the past few thousand years our civilization has been conditioned in this way – basing its economy on war, its social organization on domination and conformity, its religion on punishment, damnation and sin, its education on coercion, its security on the elimination of the supposed enemy, its very image of love on fear of loss.
Patriarchal conditioning – carried out worldwide, generation after generation, with the most aggressive means – has created a cultural matrix of violence and fear, which at present nearly all of humanity more or less unconsciously follows. This matrix, or more accurately ‘patrix’, steers the global processes of politics and economics in similar ways as people’s interpersonal relationships, families and love lives. As psychoanalyst Dieter Duhm writes, “Automatic, usually unconscious, habits of thinking stand behind our daily misery.”[iii]
(image) Use of Agent Orange resulted in widespread birth defects in VietnamDuhm started out as a leading Marxist writer during the anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960s and 70s in Germany, when he asked himself how it could be that billions of people comply with and obey the rules of society without being forced to do so. Shaken by the horrors of the Vietnam War, he needed to find a credible answer for how to overcome the imperialist system causing these atrocities. Working as a psychoanalyst, he faced the same basic structure in all his patients – no matter whether they suffered depression, heartache or schizophrenia – deep-rooted existential fear. The further he inquired, the more he realized this fear is not only in the “mentally ill,” but also appears in the “sane” as fear of what others could think of them, as speech anxiety, as fear of authorities and institutions, fear before and after intercourse, fear of the future, of getting sick and so on. “This inconspicuous, socially omnipresent and ‘normal,’ fear is neurotic,” he writes. “Fear is not only the product of capitalism, but part of its foundation, an element without which this entire system would collapse.”[iv]
For Duhm, the consequence was clear: If we want to escape from the wetiko disease of our current capitalist culture, we need a credible concept for a new nonviolent global society and for transforming the old matrix of fear and violence into a new matrix of trust, compassion and cooperation. Healing wetiko would be nothing short of reinventing our entire civilization and basing human existence on new social, ethical, spiritual and sexual foundations allowing profound trust between people as well as between humans and animals.
In 1978 Duhm started out with a group of people to engage in an interdisciplinary research project for social and ecological sustainability to develop precisely such a concept. Having witnessed the failure of countless communes in the 1970s, most due to unresolved interpersonal conflicts around money, power and sex (i.e. the inability of the groups to resolve wetiko among one another), the project focused its cultural experiment on creating new social structures able to resolve the psychological substratum of fear. They knew the answer could not be found in therapies, spiritual exercises and rituals alone, as helpful and healing as they may be – but that a whole new way of communitarian coexistence would have to be developed, from which one would no longer need to retreat in order to become human. Rather, it would be designed in a way that would foster compassion, solidarity and cooperation.
The development of such a society would need to begin with initial models researching its basic structures and demonstrating its viability. Thereby, an adventurous research project began, establishing functioning communities of trust. The deeper they went the more they realized they needed to work on all basic areas of human existence: starting with the intimate questions of sexuality, love and partnership, questions of raising children, coexistence with animals, self-sufficiency in water, energy and food systems. From this experiment, the peace research center, Tamera, came into life along with the vision of creating “Healing Biotopes” as catalysts for planetary system change.
(image) Solar-powered village by Sunvention, via TameraFor much of the last million years, human beings have lived in communities; in fact, the era in which we have not is only a tiny fraction in the entirety of human history. In order to subjugate people under their systems of dominance, patriarchal rulers systematically destroyed tribal communities, thereby inflicting a profound collective trauma onto humanity. Humanity thereby lost its spiritual, social and ethical anchor, drifting off in a self-destructive frenzy of atomization, self-interest and othering. As we are reaching the pinnacle of a culture of global wetiko, the last throes of late-stage capitalism, healing our collective trauma, re-establishing functioning communities based on trust, and making our human existence compatible with the biosphere and nature again, may well be our only opportunity to secure ourselves and our children a future worth living on Spaceship Earth.
Martin Winiecki was born 1990 in Dresden, Germany, and is coordinator of the Terra Nova School in Tamera Center, Portugal where 160 residents of the center are working for a society free of violence and greed.
[i] Speech by Lynne Twist at the “Awakening the Dreamer” Symposium. USA, Los Angeles. Sept. 2008.
[ii] Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. New York: International, 1970. Print.
[iii] Duhm, Dieter. Beyond 2012. The Birth of a New Humanity? What Is the Shift of Consciousness?. Bad Belzig: Verlag Meiga, 2010. Print.
[iv] Duhm, Dieter. Angst Im Kapitalismus: Zweiter Versuch Der Gesellschaftlichen Begründung Zwischenmenschlicher Angst in Der Kapitalistischen Warengesellschaft. Lampertheim: Kübler, 1975. Print.
Very interesting and I would agree with all of it
Please note, “wetiko” is a Cree word (with cognates in related languages: “winding” in Ojibway, “wintiko” in Powhatan).
The First Nations of North America are at least 5-10,000 years more culturally and linguistically diverse from each other than the cultures and languages of Europe. Saying the “First Nations tribes from North America coined a term for x” is like saying “Europeans have a word for x,” as though there was only one language in all of Europe.
An important first step in addressing the wetiko of colonialism (and its attendant psychosis) is in taking the time to know the correct names for the original people and territories in colonized spaces.
Here are a couple links for people who’d like to educate themselves further on being an ally:
http://www.lynngehl.com/uploads/5/0/0/4/5004954/ally_bill_of_responsibilities_poster.pdf
http://apihtawikosisan.com/aboriginal-issue-primers/
People would be better off if they worked and lived in their neighborhoods. When people commute so that they have better pay and more square footage, they don’t really care about the city where they work, and don’t have proper time to get to know the people who live around them. I walk to work. I walk to the grocery stores/food markets. No, I do not have a big place. No, I do not need a ride when you pull over. Thanks.
I agree for the most part, with the exception of singling out capitalism. I grew up under socialism, but the same methodology of fear and forcible conformity to the norm was the reigning paradigm in the USSR. The “common good” was proclaimed as the ultimate measure and it justified horrendous individual suffering and repressions.
I do believe that identifying fear as the basic factor in creating the distortion is right. However, there was more fear under soviet style “socialism” than I ever encountered in the “capitalist” US.
Perhaps it is a general culture of violence? punitive, rather than restorative justice? disconnection from the natural cycles of life…
Very interesting Yelena. Thanks for commenting. nancy roof
I live in the SF Bay Area, and in the circles I travel, these notions are widely understood, so my question is how do we shift and move forward, what does it look like?
I also believe there is some importance to the often violent splintering of original and traditional cultures around the world. One way to see it is as an expression of our compelling desire for individuation, which we cannot escape, though it doesn’t have to lead us down this insane and brutal path. We have, at least some of us, “freed” ourselves from the restrictions of our birth circumstances, and we have “rights” that protect that freedom and opportunity for self determination. Now we must face each other as individuals, and as individuals come together to repair the vast damage and figure out how to live together.
Before I became part of a world here of burners and shamans, occupiers, permaculturists , witches and decolonizers, I came here in 1994 from NYC to join up with the Hate Man, a street philosopher in Berkeley who, inspired by Martin Buber and Marshall McLuhan, among others, developed a practice that encourages everything, especially conflict and negativity, to be dealt with in a way that is both fully honest and “caring,” equanimical. The commitment it takes to invest every interaction with that level of intention and integrity can be overwhelming. But it was, to me, the most brazen attempt to unite the spiritual wisdom we need to continue as a species with the acceptance of the reality and imperative of individuality.
Daniel Sheehan’s recent lectures including offer plenty of insights, and real examples that are seldom spoken. Including the great chautauqua of the 1870’s thru the early 1900’s. An antidote to the robber barons of those times. At one point all the social studies teachers of the country were invited to come and participate. And overwhelming numbers did. Nurturing plenty of better dreams that helped nurture the new 20th century.
Daniel Sheehan 2016: Rulers of the Realm 18 lectures are here
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVza7sesLJh5ZR8exn0lKoCjC3ayShvdd
There are more at
http://www.romeroinstitute.org/
pleasing feeling this…. would like to learn more… please advise as time progresses and posts available~thankU
If any one has the resourses and vision to srart a similar social experiment of intentional community in Australia please bring it on …..
Capitalism is like monotheistic religions, which offers heaven elsewhere and hell now (carrot and stick). Christianity suffered under the Romans though, even though it was polytheistic. This is because at base the problem is about masculinity and feminism. In medieval times would Christian Europe accept homosexuality and equality for women? No, no more than Islam does now, especially ISIS. So what has happened in European culture, to alter this? Simply the sex of our culture has softened into a more feminine ideal. Kingdoms are more masculine (mono-cultures) as empires are more feminine (cosmopolitan). You don’t need to start an artificial movement based on the feminine culture of native America. All you have to do is wait until your culture matures into a more feminine one (Islam’s medieval culture was an empire in this sense as it has now reverted to a masculine kingdom under the extremists).
We need this worldwide. Any guidance on spreading the message in the communities we live in? I just moved to St.Thomas USVI and feel a profound need for your message here
Interesting article thank you for writing it!
I agree completely about “fear” being the invisible leash of control and applaud the efforts done so far to test new ways of living.
The biggest hurdle is deprogramming from our current “wetiko” and I fear the idealism to change this will lead to disappointment. Idealism usually gets us nowhere. Working with pragmatism and optimism even with our current flawed state of collective consciousness will likely lead to better and longer lasting change.
Alternatively a global reset via financial collapse, massive climate change, or perhaps another world war is likely the best chance we have at taking this idealism and putting it into practice.
Perhaps there’s value in something like The Venus Project’s “Resource Based Economy”. This along with leveraging public Blockchain technology to help create a mostly immutable ledger to keep track of bare necessities such as resource collection / division and job assignment could help us move forward as a species without capitalism or communism. Sure this errs on the side socialism but if you take money out of the equation would socialism be such a bad thing?
Very good.
Pure Enlightenment, Truth and Enthymisis! THANK YOU!
Paul Hawken wrote Blessed Unrest almost ten years ago to suggest the then-revolutionary idea that peace and environment could find common ground among indigenous people. The connection you forge in this article between Amazon and Standing Rock is like a case study for that idea. IAnd can find more compassion in my heart for the capitalists and imperialists in light of the insight that fear is at once the cause and the effect of wetiko.
I agree, it seems most of this traits come from necessity, wich in turn are made more important by social pressure.
Agression, violent behaviour, greed, etc even though are part of human nature are not that common, as it does seem that they become more important in periods of relative stability and this periods also seem to make them even more important for social structures, similar to what happend to capitalism, however in chaotic periods the opposite seems to be true, except for agression, but positive traits ecome more relevant.
Thank you Martin, for a beautifully written article. I have been thinking about many of the same concepts and I certainly appreciate the historical perspective and the work that you are doing to make a change. I feel that many of the issues we face with addiction and poverty are related to isolation. I am grateful for your work.
I am a neurologist in Ohio and the director of a nonprofit, Earth Angel Farm (EAF). EAF supports positive wellness initiatives to improve the lives of those living with physical and developmental disabilities and the environment.
I can’t find any credits for the images in this article. Could the author or the editorial team provide some if possible, I’d love to know the source of some of these images, particularly the large image at the top. Thanks very much. xx
Stephen, You will have to write to the author to find the credits for the images. He can be contacted at Tamera in Portugal. I don’t have further information right now.
The illustrations are mine. I replied to Stephen directly. Thank you.
Hello Stephen – Actually, I illustrated this story. The visuals are public domain ephemera, mainly from Wikimedia. You can right-click each image and select ‘search google for this image’ to find out more. Thanks.
I often think didn’t the native leaders also lavish them self s in gold and unusual thing? Wasn’t there a type of social structure in the native American culture too?. Didn’t native American have wars against other native American? Though the culture was different I believe it boils down to the same thing power
Very interesting and….appealing to me.
What I know relative to this kind of ”living together” is what I got from this site: We need each other. http://timefortribe.com/about/vision-core-communities/.
I also like the vision of Charles Eisenstein author of Sacred Economics & The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.
A glimpse here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EEZkQv25uEs#!
Know I got to know another very interesting site here !
Enjoy and Dream ! (and take action: think global, live local)
Didn’t dream at all, just complained about Capitalism.