‘I am when you aren’t’

Conquistador mindset among us

The African aphorism, ubuntu, can be translated as “I am because we are.” There is no me without you, there is no me without us.

From a neuroscience perspective, this is an accurate understanding of how we become human. Together.

Ubuntu has gone missing in the dominant colonizing-corporate-capitalist culture which emphasizes individualism and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps—a culture that developed in the last few centuries and very heartily so in the USA.

Native Peoples first noticed something odd when the conquistadors, explorers and settler-colonists showed up to take over their lands. At first encounter, Natives typically welcomed them, with mindsets of partnership and respect. But the invaders had something else in mind. They were caught in a mindset of ‘God’s-gifts-are-for-us-not-you.’ They were eager to grab and control anything they encountered. Novelist Daniel Quinn calls such actors “Takers” (versus nomadic foragers “Leavers,” who collaborate with the rest of the ecological community).

All over the world, Native Peoples were astounded by the denseness of most European (and later, American) settler-colonizers. They were imperceptive, ‘seeing with only one eye,’ emotionally absent, caught in some mental dream guiding their behavior. According to witnesses of the Spanish invasion of the ‘New World,’ Columbus and his ilk could enter a flow of destructive behavior on a whim, slicing babies and stringing up Natives. They left a path of destruction and trauma in their wake.

Jack Forbes, following Native American tradition, described Columbus and his mates as infected with the wétiko (or wendigo) virus, a parasite of the mind that leads to cannibalizing Life.

The wétiko virus walks among us, visible among those who feel they never have enough.

We know now how damage is done to a child when they are mistreated early on. If their evolved nest is highly degraded, they develop a sense of scarcity, carried forward embedded in the psyche. If they survive early toxic stress and lack healing, they can become lost to addictions or ghostly conformity to a dominator culture. Dominator culture stresses out everyone, generating feelings of insecurity and anger that the culture then rationalizes with stories of blame towards others –e.g., women, members of different groups, outsiders, even Nature. Resentment and extermination practices towards those entities are justified.

The conquistador mindset of domination seems to be rising with greater strength today. The wétiko virus has flared up, especially among the ultrarich. It is most visible today in the USA where grabby, insecure idealogues and billionaires have cowered the politicians they feed. These people display an inability to relationally attune to others who are different from their preferred group, unable to imagine holistic communal futures.

Like the conquistadors, they carry an anti-ubuntu orientation:

I am when you aren’t. I am entitled to eliminate you from the circle of concern.

Nestedness has gone missing.

In species-normal communities, early life nestedness fosters a sense of kinship connection to All, to Earth’s entities, to the universe. One learns to live cooperatively within a dynamic flowing landscape. This sense is deepened with vision quests in adolescence and the maintenance of holistic connection through regular ceremony. Kinship ecological consciousness and knowhow are maintained through traditional practices of respect and attunement, keeping greed and wétiko at bay.

Find out more about deep nestedness in this paper or in this book:

Find out more about the kinship worldview and read the book:

References

De las Casas, B. (1552). A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.

Forbes, J.D. (2008). Columbus and other cannibals: The wétiko disease of exploitation, imperialism, and terrorism, rev ed. New York: Seven Stories Press.

Fromm, E. (1973). The anatomy of human destructiveness. New York: Henry Holt.

Harrington, B. (2024). Offshore: Stealth wealth and the new colonialism. W.W. Norton.

Katz, R. (2017). Indigenous healing psychology: Honoring the wisdom of the First Peoples. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press.

Katz, R., Biesele, M., & St. Denis, V. (1997). Healing makes our hearts happy: Spirituality & cultural transformation among the Kalahari Ju/’huansi. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions.

Narvaez, D. (2014). Neurobiology and the development of human morality: Evolution, culture and wisdom. New York: Norton.

Narvaez, D., Four Arrows, Halton, E., Collier, B., Enderle, G. (Eds.) (2019). Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First Nation Know-how for Global Flourishing. New York: Peter Lang.

Sale, K. (1990) The conquest of paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy. New York, NY: Penguin Plume.

Turner, F. (1994). Beyond geography: The Western spirit against the wilderness. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Quinn, D. (1992). Ishmael. New York: Bantam.