Printed in the Fall 2014 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "From the Editor's Desk" Quest 102.4 (Fall 2014): pg. 122.
Sometimes it seems to me that there is a sort of membrane surrounding the human mind. This membrane makes us see the world in a distorted way. It leads us to view ourselves as isolated and fragmented beings and to view others as competitors, enemies, or possibly victims. We feel as if we exist only to take advantage or to be taken advantage of.
Paul Levy's disturbing article on page 146 of this issue gives a name to this psychic membrane: wetiko. The word "wetiko," taken from a Native American language, may sound funny to you. What is wetiko? It is a pathological need for excess, for selfish gratification. It is (to use Levy's metaphor) a kind of psychic virus that makes people indifferent to, and contemptuous of, the feelings and needs of their fellow humans. Because it is so persuasive, it often goes unnoticed.
The most ambitious literary treatment of this theme appears in Doris Lessing's 1979 novel Shikasta, which is half science fiction tale and half fable.
In this novel, beings from a benevolent world in the system of the star Canopus create a colony of creatures on a small planet, which they name "Rohanda" or "the fruitful." For ages the beings on this planet live in harmony, sustained by benign "astral currents" transmitted from Canopus. But an unforeseen cosmic realignment breaks the connection between Canopus and Rohanda, leading to a deficit of the "substance-of-we-feeling" in Rohanda's inhabitants. They become subject to a degenerative disease that makes individuals put themselves ahead of others. The result is war and destruction. The Canopeans try to fix things, but their attempts are thwarted by the influence of another, evil planet. Eventually the Canopeans change the name of Rohanda: they call it "Shikasta," meaning "the broken." Only after a holocaust that wipes out almost all of the human race are the few survivors able to start fresh.
Lessing makes it clear that the history of Shikasta is the history of humanity from the start of recorded time. The madness reaches its climax in the twentieth century, and the final holocaust is a third World War that, she suggests, is coming in the near future.
I remember the effect this book had on me the first time I read it. Not only did it sound plausible, but for a day or so I found it impossible to believe that the situation of the human race had come about in any other way.
So you can call it wetiko, or you can call it a deficit of "the substance-of-we-feeling," or you can give it any of its other innumerable names: the yetzer ha-ra ("the evil impulse") of the Kabbalists, the ego as understood by some Eastern traditions, or even the Devil, if you can set aside the Halloween character that conventional Christianity has made of him. Whatever you want to call this psychic disease, and however it originated, the problems that face us today will not be resolved until it is cured.
Most people may agree with what I have said so far. But somehow it is always the others, always them, who are at fault. The world would be a lovely and peaceful and wonderful place if not for them. On this everyone is in accord. They only differ about who these them are.
In the United States today, there are several large blocks of people who are united by their hatred of particular versions of them. This hatred is enormously useful, although not to the people who possess it. It's useful to any number of powerful interests who manipulate the hatred of them.
You could stop here and direct your wrath against these powerful interests. Many do. But then you just have another version of them.
"If only it were all so simple!" wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
You can easily see wetiko, the absence of we-feeling, in them. It is a much trickier project to see it in yourself and to root it out. But there is no alternative. Let me turn again to Doris Lessing: "To outwit their enemies, Shikastans must love each other, help each other, and never take each other's goods or substance."
People long for the End Times. Admittedly it's tempting to believe that a supernatural savior will appear in the skies, reward the good, punish the evil, and bring the scales of justice into balance. But more and more we are coming to understand that that is a hopeless fantasy and that if we are to have any saviors, they will have to be ourselves. It is a sobering realization—but also a thrilling one.
Richard Smoley