Kimberly Steele

The frozen, pristine fastnesses of the North American Arctic are no place for the coddled and the comfortable. If it isn’t the howling, icy winter wind or the fifty below temperatures that drive soft city dwellers back to their climate controlled paradises, it is the demoralizing 23 hour winter nights. Now imagine such a land before the advent of electricity. Imagine trying to survive solely off of seal blood and whale meat while depending on your own skills and wits to build a snow shelter adequate enough to keep you and your family alive in a hut made of snow… yeah, me neither.

The Wendigo comes to us from North American Indian/Native American legend. Some say it is from Algonquian legend, but the Wendigo shows up in Inuu (Inuits call it the Angiak), Ojibwe, Cree, and Naskapi folklore as well. It’s not difficult to put together why the people who lived in and around the Arctic came up with the idea of a terrifying monster who stalks fragile winter settlements in the dead of winter, looking to pick off humans for their meat. The Wendigo is a hard American winter personified. It is psychopathic, sociopathic, and ruthless. It is no stranger to famine and it will do whatever it takes to assuage its own ravenous appetite. The creature comes into being when a greedy, selfish individual splits off from his or her community and goes on a cannibalistic bender. After eating anyone unfortunate enough to accompany her on the journey into isolation, the newly-formed Wendigo develops an insatiable craving for more human flesh. The more it eats, the thinner it becomes. The Wendigo can only be defeated when a shaman kills it. Anyone else who gets too close will be turned into the same sort of zombie-like automaton.

I don’t need to remind readers of how ubiquitous zombies have become in entertainment. Zombies abound in film, television, and literature. Resident Evil had five sequels. There are more than 20 Resident Evil games. Zombies are so popular, they show up in franchises that aren’t supposed to have anything to do with zombies, such as Game of Thrones. You’d almost suppose we had ravenous, cannibalistic shadows we were trying to project as a culture…

We live in Addiction Culture. Everybody is addicted to something. I am one of those rare birds who does not get addicted easily. That said, in college I smoked anywhere from one to ten cigarettes a day and had a weird thing for Nutella for a few months. The cigarette and Nutella addictions did not last but I still drink two large mugs of strong black tea every morning with no plans to quit.

Every female friend I have ever had was either addicted to starving, purging, stuffing, or all three. As a teen, I watched my friend starve herself to the tune of 700 calories per day, a behavior that was smiled upon by the teacher of our sadistic Aerobics Slimnastics class. Women my age have warped relationships with food. Men, on the other hand, routinely suffer from etheric starvation — this is where the desperation of incels comes from. I put out a great deal of excess etheric energy and always have, whether I’ve liked it or not, and that is why I have often been stalked by creepy, incel types despite the clear message that I am happily married. Addiction is par for the course in Addiction Culture. To be a non-addictive personality is to be an oddball. To say: “I have never been addicted to alcohol or any form of non-prescription or prescription drugs” is the mark of the unicorn. I am not eaten alive by any self-destructive urge. I have never had a desire to ruin myself in the pursuit of a mind-altering substance. I am a modern freak.

Our culture is so full of Wendigos, we would hardly recognize one if it saddled up next to us on the street.

On a large scale, one of our collective Wendigos is our civilization’s doomed addiction to cheaply available petroleum. We have had every opportunity and incentive to back away from petroleum addiction, and as a race, we have chosen to build Costcos and spaceships to Mars instead. The more oil we consume, the hungrier we get, and meanwhile, we create the barren wastes depicted in Wall-E. Our entire food system is essentially a clever way of consuming petroleum-fertilized corn. Our diets became meat heavy over the last hundred years for a reason — how better to consume massive amounts of corn than to feed it to cows and chickens, concentrating it in their flesh? The inevitable result was a Wendigo and the irony of fat people technically starving to death because of the junky and devitalized nature of their GMO corny diets.

The Left has created a Wendigo in its addiction to controlling people. Donald Trump or his random populist leader counterpart can be thrust forward as a boogeyman, but the background of insatiable craving for power lurks obviously in the background. The Left, now suffering the final, acute stages of demonic possession, has taken to looting, burning, vandalizing, and murdering both its opposition and its own. A marauding set of zombies could not do a better job.

In middle and upper middle class neighborhoods, the Wendigo pops up in shows of ostentation. Think of the senseless waste of resources it takes to maintain a lush, green lawn in a summer drought. Where is the sanity in maintaining a lawn? Sure, it’s better than this, but it’s still not sane. In the neighborhood behind the building where I work, there is a newly constructed McMansion style house with a three car garage. It's a place and a neighborhood built for a class in complete denial that Progress is dead. It is one of many. The conformists who live lives of quiet desperation in these tacky structures (hilariously roasted by McMansion Hell) haven’t the faintest clue they’re being ridden.

In the city of Seattle, a slightly different Wendigo rides the backs of BLM would be Marxists — the kind perpetuated by a shrinking pool of resources. In Seattle, only those making seven figure incomes can afford a three bedroom house. Hatred and entitlement has become BLM’s Wendigo as they march through a seven figure income neighborhood, boldly declaring it as their land unfairly taken away by gentrification. Never mind that Japanese Americans crowded the Central District before World War II came and they were sent to internment camps. Never mind the time before that, when Jewish people proliferated in that Seattle neighborhood. Black Lives are the only lives that Matter, and anyone who doesn’t wish to kiss the feet of a group of people solely based on their arbitrarily chosen ethnicity be damned. To their credit, the BLMers have a legitimate point: it isn’t fair that a handful of rich, out of touch white and Asian people cower and shudder in their 1.5 million dollar condominiums while everyone else who doesn’t have an Amazon/Google job worries how many paychecks they are from living out of their car. The prosperity hoarders with their slick careers and their posh condos are also eaten by Wendigo; BLM isn’t technically wrong to criticize their cushy lifestyles. Nevertheless, marching through the streets while demanding 800K in reparations per black person along with a free 1.5 million formerly white/Asian owned condo is an entitlement Wendigo. It’s the voice that wheedles, “If only I won the Lotto…” meaning “If only I could force the Universe to give me money I did not earn, I’d finally be happy”. Though some well-adjusted people win the Lotto and stay that way, the other type is far more common, and the reason is that it is a Wendigo. You don’t make it go away by feeding it.

Celebrities and other people with lots of money are classic Wendigo victims. How many times have we heard of the disgraced celeb: wealthy, good looking, smart, married to someone fabulous, blessed with adorable children, yet there they were on a plane to Pedophile Orgy Island with Jeffrey Epstein? All the King’s perks and all the King’s privileges could not keep them from flocking to a stable of captured children. Instead of doing the right thing and either NOT GOING or implicating the pedophiles, they gleefully participated in the abuse, never thinking they might face consequences for their behavior. Celebrities are the hungriest of all.

Once a celebrity gets old, they chase the one thing they cannot buy on a silver platter: youth. Money, comfort, adoration, awards, and admiration is not enough. Celebrities would be forever young. Plastic surgery almost makes eternal youth seem possible until you look closely at the overinflated cheeks and the too-tight-to-close eyelids. There is also the problem of looking wet behind the ears when you haven't menstruated for fifteen years. At some point, a 62 year old who sorta kinda looks 27 is a curiosity to be pitied. The drive to look that way is a Wendigo of diminishing returns.

Anorexia, as I mentioned earlier, is a classic form of Wendigo. In her memoir of anorexia and recovery, Appetites, Caroline Knapp put it this way:

Food, over time, became a terrible, powerful symbol — of how much I wanted on the one hand and how certain I was that I’d never get enough on the other — and my denial of food thus became the most masterful solution. I’m so hungry, I’ll never get fed.

The Wendigo isn’t starvation so much as it is the fear of starvation. The Wendigo is a catabolic collapse into fear of deprivation. Over time, fear putrefies into self-destructive insanity and devolution.

Pornography addiction is a classic Wendigo. The porn addict starts off innocently enough and is soon roped into a dark hell populated by both corporeal and non-corporeal demons. Like any good Wendigo, the porn addict becomes increasingly isolated and every relationship he touches turns to excrement because of porn.

I realize how hopeless this all sounds. In my next article, I’m going to talk about the process of defeating the Wendigo. Please stay tuned — the Wendigo is a terrifying and voracious beast, but you don’t need to be a Algonquian shaman to get the better of him!