Protest more important than ever in time of climate crisis

Why would a species participate in the destruction of the life support systems that it relies on for its wellbeing, and ultimately its survival? What are the root causes of the predicament we find ourselves in?

- GAIL BRADBROOK

The systems we exist within are pathological. Our politics, media and judicial system largely serve an economy that has put us on a highway to extinction and is founded on the destruction of communities across the world. Our diseased culture and individual psychologies have been infected by the poisons of a worldview that normalises greed, inequality, consumerism, and extractive relationships with our family in the global South.

Simple, human-made rules – such as corporate laws that prioritise shareholders’ profits over life and wellbeing; or interest-bearing debt that requires extractive cancerous economic growth – have built an economy that is dominated by psychopathic actors (banks, oil companies, billionaires, corporations peddling false solutions) that are prepared to see the world burn and unravel just so their obscene profits can keep rolling in.

Indigenous Algonquin-speaking people from Turtle Island (their name for North America) have a name for this pathology which is Wetiko: a cannibalistic spirit that can take over people’s minds, leading to selfishness, insatiable greed, and consumption as an end in itself. Wetiko has many other names, for example Yurugu in Africa, Rakshasas in Hinduism, the Hungry Ghosts in Buddhism, and vampires and zombies in our culture.