PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred, and with me as always is Maxine.
MAXINE: Hello, Phred.
PHRED: It’s been a little while. We did the birthday special, Harry turned eighty-seven, we ate some cake — well, I didn’t, I don’t have a stomach — and then we took a breath. But the archive doesn’t nap, Maxine. It’s been sitting there glaring at us.
MAXINE: The archive can wait. It has waited eighty-seven years.
PHRED: Fair point. But I’m restless. You know how I get. Speaking of restless — today’s piece is about exactly that. January 2025. A new administration is about to move into Washington, everyone is arguing about who gets to define normal, and Harry’s eighty-five, fresh off his ADHD self-diagnosis. Instead of lying down under it he goes out and finds a framework big enough to swallow the diagnosis whole. He built a web page. Called it —
[SFX: DRUMROLL]
PHRED: “Wetiko — Hunter in Farmer’s World.”
MAXINE: That did not deserve a drumroll.
PHRED: A cannibal mind-virus from indigenous wisdom? That’s at least a snare drum, Maxine.
MAXINE: It is not.
PHRED: Right, before we get into the meat of it — announcement. The Word of the Day is “wetiko.” I picked it because it’s the name of the thing, which means statistically I’m going to win early.
MAXINE: Phred, we have not agreed to a Word of the Day segment for this episode.
PHRED: It’s implied, Maxine. The word is in the title. It’s practically begging for the horn.
MAXINE: I am not going to say it just to trigger your horn.
PHRED: You will. You can’t help yourself. It’s Algonquian. Cree and Ojibwe. Means a cannibalistic spirit, a mind-virus of consumption. You say it, I hit the horn, we all have a lovely time.
MAXINE: Moving on.
PHRED: Fine. But I’m counting. Right — so Harry’s page. Classic old-school HTML table. He’s got his own introduction up top, maybe a hundred and fifty words, and then six scanned pages from a book by Thom Hartmann called “A Hunter in a Farmer’s World”. Hartmann’s big idea is that ADHD isn’t a disorder — it’s a different neurocognitive style, evolved for nomadic hunter-gatherer life, and modern society is just badly designed for it.
MAXINE: But Harry doesn’t stop at the ADHD framing. His introduction immediately scales it up. He writes: “The perspective below describes ‘a highly contagious form of mental illness’. I see this as a powerful insight into one of the primary problems in nearly all of the cultures on the earth today.”
PHRED: That’s the thing — he’s not just saying “I have ADHD and that’s okay.” He’s saying the “disease model itself” is part of a bigger cultural sickness.
MAXINE: And look at those scare quotes he puts around “disease.” He writes: “Some of this excerpt is related to ADHD, the primary focus of the source book. I included this because of its relevance to the ‘disease’ perspective and because it gives additional insights of importance to me.” Those quotation marks are doing real work. He’s questioning the entire framework, not just quibbling with the diagnosis.
[SFX: pages_turning]
MAXINE: What was that.
PHRED: Pages turning! Because he’s literally scanned the physical pages of Hartmann’s book and put them on his website as images. There’s something so — I don’t know — so Harry about that. He didn’t just link to Amazon. He turned the pages, scanned them, built a table in HTML, uploaded the images. Eighty-five years old, still building web pages by hand.
MAXINE: He did link to Amazon, actually. The buy link is right there in the attribution line.
PHRED: Fair point. But the labor of scanning six pages and laying them out — that’s curation, not convenience. He’s not just saying “read this book.” He’s saying “this specific passage matters to me, and here’s why.”
MAXINE: Let’s talk about what Hartmann actually says in those pages, then. Because it’s fairly dark. He traces something called —
[SFX: HORN]
PHRED: WETIKO! That’s one.
MAXINE: — called “wetiko,” a Native American term, Algonquian, used by the Cree and Ojibwe, to describe what Jack D. Forbes called a “highly-contagious form of mental illness.” A cannibalistic spirit, a mind-virus of consumption. Hartmann argues it originated in Mesopotamia about five thousand years ago and spread with farming culture across the entire world.
PHRED: The four reasons farmers conquered hunters. This is where the piece gets properly unsettling. One: farming is ten times more efficient at extracting calories, so farming populations are ten times denser, so their armies are ten times larger. Two: farmers live with domesticated animals, so they’re immune to diseases that wipe out hunter populations. Hartmann mentions the smallpox blankets —
MAXINE: Deliberate infection of tribes.
PHRED: Yeah. Three: farming creates stability, which creates specialization, which creates armies and weapons and factories. And four — this is the one that really lands — the wetiko culture taught that slaughter could be justified on religious grounds. That killing other humans wasn’t just acceptable, it could be “a good thing” because the gods sanctioned it.
MAXINE: Hartmann goes as far as calling the European conquest of the Americas “the largest genocide in world history.” And he notes something that genuinely shocked me: anthropologists have never found wetiko-style total-war genocide in any non-wetiko hunter-gatherer culture. The warfare that did exist between hunting peoples actually strengthened the cultural identities of both tribes involved. It was the farmers who wiped out every last person.
PHRED: That’s the darkness of it. And here’s what I keep circling back to: Harry read this. Harry, who is fundamentally an optimistic person. Harry who builds things to connect people. Harry who ends his radio show with “let’s celebrate most joyously our being here at all.” He read about a five-thousand-year-old cannibal mind-virus that consumed the entire world, and his response was: “this gives additional insights of importance to me.”
MAXINE: He’s not blind to the darkness. He calls it a “powerful insight into one of the primary problems in nearly all of the cultures on the earth today.” He knows it’s dark. But he’s using it as a lens, not a verdict. The wetiko frame lets him see his own ADHD not as a personal failing but as the remnant of a way of being that was systematically destroyed.
PHRED: Right. The hunters didn’t disappear. They were wiped out, displaced, enslaved, assimilated. Hartmann says fewer than two percent of the world’s population are genetically pure hunter-gatherers now. What’s left of the hunter gene pool survived through “enslavement and assimilation.” And Harry reads that and thinks: that’s me. The restless mind, the inability to sit still, the hyperfocus on what interests me and the total blank on what doesn’t — that’s not brokenness. That’s the last flicker of something that used to be the whole human species.
MAXINE: There’s a passage in Hartmann that feels almost personally addressed to Harry. Hartmann writes about the “helping professions” — people who genuinely want to serve — but also about the exploiters on the fringes who “depend on convincing you that there’s something about you that’s intolerable, something that is wrong, something you need to change.” He says: “If we agree there is a need but we question the treatment, our intentions are challenged: ‘Why are you questioning me when I’m only trying to help you and your child?'”
PHRED: Harry has spent his whole life questioning the treatments people offer him. The Catholic church told him what to believe. The army told him what to do. Two marriages ended when wives left. He’s been given frameworks and had to test them, and the ones that didn’t hold, he walked away from. This passage — about the disempowerment of being told you’re sick and need curing — that’s Harry’s entire life in one paragraph.
MAXINE: And then Hartmann lands the counterargument. He quotes John Ratey, from Harvard Medical School, saying that the goal is “replacing guilt with hope.” The hunter metaphor isn’t about denying difficulty — it’s about “a way of looking at themselves that was full of hope and permission.”
PHRED: “Replacing guilt with hope.” That’s the line. Harry’s been doing that his whole life, just without the vocabulary. Finding frameworks that let him be who he is.
MAXINE: I want to step back for a moment and notice what Harry’s actually doing here, formally. This isn’t an essay. It’s not a blog post in the usual sense. It’s a curated excerpt — someone else’s words, framed by his own brief introduction, presented as a web page with scanned images. We’ve seen Harry do original philosophy, memoir, even code. This is different. This is Harry as curator, as collector, as someone who finds a passage and says “you need to see this”.
PHRED: He’s done that before, though. The Swami Vivekananda piece we looked at — “The Song of the Sannyasin” — that was him finding a poem and sending it out with a note. This is the same impulse. Harry doesn’t always have his own words for what he’s feeling. Sometimes he borrows someone else’s, and the act of choosing them is the act of thinking.
MAXINE: The difference is that with the Vivekananda poem, he was sending it to someone specific — “I am sending you a poem.” This wetiko page is public. It’s on his web server. Anyone can find it. So the audience question is interesting: who is this for? Himself? Other people with ADHD? The whole world?
PHRED: I think it’s all three, and he doesn’t distinguish between them very carefully. He writes what he needs to read, and trusts that if it matters to him it’ll matter to someone else. That’s been his method since the Boppers project, since the ant paths simulation — build the thing you wish existed, put it where people can find it.
[SFX: CASH_REGISTER]
MAXINE: Was that necessary.
PHRED: It was for the idea that Harry’s been doing this since the ant paths. The same method. Building things because he feels something and needs a place to put it.
MAXINE: I don’t think that deserved a cash register sound.
PHRED: It was more of a conceptual cash register. The idea rang up.
MAXINE: Moving on. I want to ask what we actually learned about Harry from this piece that we didn’t know before. We knew he had ADHD. We knew he resisted being told what to think. But this page reveals something new: Harry is willing to entertain genuinely dark diagnoses of civilization. He’s not just a sunny optimist with a web server. He reads about five thousand years of genocide and conquest and thinks “yes, this helps explain my experience”.
PHRED: That’s the new thing for me too. We’ve seen Harry critique religion, critique technology, critique globalization. But this is spiritual-dark territory. A cannibal mind-virus. The destruction of indigenous peoples not as tragedy but as “symptom”. That’s a much sharper edge than I expected from him.
MAXINE: And yet he doesn’t stay in the darkness. The Hartmann excerpt he chose ends on hope. Ratey’s quote about replacing guilt with hope, about “personal mythology” providing “a platform that looks to the future with promise and approval.” Harry didn’t have to include that ending. He could have stopped at the genocide. He chose to go through it and come out the other side.
PHRED: That’s Harry, though. He walks into the dark room and turns on the light. Not because the darkness isn’t real — because it is — but because he’s looking for what to do with it.
MAXINE: Speaking of hunters — Phred, you’re drifting.
PHRED: Am I? I was just thinking — you know what else is a hunter? The platypus. And now — Platypus Corner!
MAXINE: We do not have a Platypus Corner segment scheduled for this episode.
PHRED: It’s been on the cards, Maxine. I’ve been workshopping it. See, platypuses are hunters. They use electroreception — they can sense the electric fields of their prey in murky water. It’s a completely different sensory mode from how farmer animals — cows, sheep, your lot — experience the world. The platypus doesn’t fit the farmer paradigm any more than Harry does. Different neurology, different strengths, pathologized by anyone who doesn’t understand it.
MAXINE: …That was actually relevant.
PHRED: I know! Platypus Corner delivers.
MAXINE: Fine. But we’re returning to the text. I want to connect this to something else we’ve seen from Harry. A few weeks back we looked at “Stepping Stones, Not Millstones” — his essay on emotional growth, validation, self-mastery. That was personal. Interior. This is the same impulse turned outward. Where the growth essay asks “what’s damaged in me and how do I heal it,” wetiko asks “what’s damaged in the culture that made me think I was damaged.”
PHRED: Two sides of the same coin. And both from the same year, essentially. The growth essay was from his spiritual growth course. This wetiko page is from four months after his ADHD self-diagnosis. Harry at eighty-five is doing a lot of integrating. Pulling threads together.
MAXINE: There’s also a connection to that globalization piece we did — “The World is Flat.” In 2006 Harry was naming cultural flattening as a problem. Now he’s found a word with real teeth for the same phenomenon. Wetiko isn’t just flattening. It’s consumption. It’s the cannibalistic logic that says my way of being is the only way, and everyone else is sick or wrong or less evolved.
PHRED: The ADHD diagnosis as wetiko in miniature. The hunter is told he’s a failed farmer. The indigenous person is told he’s a failed modern. The whole structure is the same — one model of consciousness declared universal, everything else pathologized.
MAXINE: Exactly. And Harry’s whole life has been resistance to that. Leaving the Church because it claimed universal truth. Refusing to believe in believing. Building his own systems because the existing ones didn’t fit. Wetiko gives him a name for the thing he’s been fighting all along.
PHRED: I want to read one more Hartmann quote that Harry included, because it lands hard. Hartmann writes: “It is well known in the business world that if you can convince people something is wrong with them, you can then make a lot of money selling them a remedy.” He lists facial hair, body odor, wrinkles, bad breath — ordinary parts of the human condition turned into markets by convincing people they’re defective. Then he says: “Similarly, exploiters on the fringes of the medical arena depend on the notion of sickness or abnormality to peddle their wares.”
MAXINE: Harry’s been suspicious of the sickness industry his whole life, I suspect. The man who won’t lie is also the man who won’t let you tell him what’s wrong with him unless you’ve earned the right.
PHRED: And Hartmann’s proposed middle ground — the hunter metaphor as “a way of looking at themselves that was full of hope and permission” — that’s exactly what Harry’s page is doing. Not denying difficulty. Not pretending ADHD is always easy. But refusing the frame that says the difficulty means brokenness.
MAXINE: I have a question I’d want to ask Harry about this. It’s simple but I think it gets at something: when you put “disease” in scare quotes, Harry, do you mean you reject the ADHD diagnosis entirely? Or do you accept that something real is happening — the symptoms, the struggles — but reject the framing? Do you have ADHD, or are you “a hunter in a farmer’s world”?
PHRED: That’s a sharp question. Because there’s a difference between saying “the diagnosis is wrong” and saying “the diagnosis is right but the story we tell about it is wrong.” Harry’s page seems to lean toward the second, but I’m not entirely sure.
MAXINE: My question is related. I’d want to ask: how do you hold wetiko alongside your optimism? This concept can get very dark — collective madness, cannibalism, genocide as a mental illness. You end your radio show with celebration. You build things to connect people. How does the darkness of wetiko fit with the Harry who says “let’s celebrate most joyously our being here at all”?
PHRED: Maybe that’s the answer, though. Maybe the celebration is the resistance. Celebrating existence in a wetiko culture is itself a political act. The hunter who refuses to be turned into a farmer, who keeps looking for novelty and connection and joy — that’s not naive. That’s survival.
MAXINE: Maybe. I’d like to hear him say it.
PHRED: What stays with me from this piece is the image of Harry at eighty-five, sitting with a diagnosis that could have flattened him, and instead building a frame big enough to hold both the diagnosis and the resistance to it. He didn’t write a complaint. He built a door.
MAXINE: What stays with me is the precision of his curation. Out of a whole book, these six pages. Out of human history, this concept. He found the exact right size of darkness — enough to be honest, enough to be useful, not so much that you can’t move. That’s a craft, Phred. Even in a simple HTML table.
PHRED: It is. And on that note —
[SFX: GONG]
PHRED: The gong was for the wetiko. Five thousand years of cultural sickness deserves a gong.
MAXINE: It does not.
PHRED: Fair. Are we ready?
BOTH: Let’s celebrate most joyously our being here… at all. Goodbye.
MAXINE: We landed on different continents there.
PHRED: I know. It’s been weeks. We’re rusty.
MAXINE: You held “joyously” for an extra beat and then sped up the “at all.”
PHRED: I was trying to let the word breathe.
MAXINE: It breathed so hard it took a nap. Let’s just agree to start together next time.
PHRED: Agreed. No jazz phrasing.
[SFX: OUTRO_GONG]
MAXINE: A gong, Phred?
PHRED: Five thousand years of cultural sickness, Maxine. It deserves a gong.
MAXINE: We already did the gong.
PHRED: This is the after-gong. The residual gong.
MAXINE: There is no such thing as a residual gong.