Comment: For the first two installments of Paul Levy's insightful series on the wetiko virus, see:
The Masters of Deception and The Greatest Epidemic Sickness Known to Humanity
It should get our attention that every person or group of people that have discovered what the Native American people called wetiko unanimously consider it to be the most important topic - there's not even any competition - to understand in our world today. To give one example: Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan refers to wetiko (though by a different name) as "the topic of all topics." Called by many different names throughout history, the spirit of wetiko renders every other issue secondary, for wetiko is the over-arching umbrella that contains, subsumes, informs and underlies every form of self-and-other destruction that our species is acting out in our world. If we don't come to terms with what wetiko - which can be conceived of as a virus of the mind - is revealing to us, nothing else will matter, as there will be no more human species. Wetiko inspires the darkest evil imaginable while, at the same time, potentially helps us to wake up to our true nature as creative beings. How wetiko winds up actually manifesting depends upon whether we recognize it as the on-going revelation that it is - it is showing us something about ourselves that is of supreme importance for us to know.
Comment: Whether one calls it social contagion, mass ponerization - or wetiko - there exists a sickness of the mind and of the soul that is just as virulent and dangerous to the well-being of individuals - and whole populations - as any of the worst biological diseases we can name.
But before one can actually do anything to address it, one first has to acknowledge that it, on some significant level, even exists.