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May 11, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:28
2971 Horror, History and Heroin | Dr. Gabor Maté and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I'm thrilled to have kind of a hero of mine, Gabor Maté, a Canadian physician, and he specializes in the study and treatment of addiction, which arises out of his clinical experience in rough sections of Vancouver.
And the addicts that he worked there.
He also works on defining and treatment for attention deficit disorder.
And he's authored, I think, four books, Attention Deficit Disorder, Stress Development and Addiction.
And he writes regularly for a variety of Canadian newspapers and conducts seminars.
We'll put the link to his website, Dr.
Gabor Maté, below.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Pleasure to speak with you again.
There does seem to be, it's been about five years since we last talked, and there seems to be a change, kind of a sea change that's going on in the realm of addiction.
Less of a demonization, more of a curiosity as to its origins.
I would, of course, credit you to some degree with helping shift that conversation.
But for those who aren't aware of the etiology of addiction, what are the major components that you would really like people to understand when they consider things like legalization and treatment?
The mainstream view of addiction, the one that still dominates legal thinking, is that addiction is a choice that people make.
So if they're making a bad choice, they need to be punished.
And so, hence, we have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in jail in North America as a result of their relationship to drugs.
So that's still the dominant view when it comes to the social handling of addiction.
The medical view of addiction is that it's an inherited brain disease, that it's a primary disease of the brain that's largely determined by genetic factors.
Neither of those are true.
What's actually behind addiction is human suffering, and the addiction is not the primary problem.
When you actually talk to anybody who's addicted to anything, whether it be drugs or behaviors like sex or gambling or internet, you ask them, what does the addiction do for you?
What does it do in the short term?
They say, It distracts me from my suffering.
It relieves my pain.
It gives me more control over my life.
It makes me feel better.
In other words, the addiction is always an attempt to solve a problem.
So the addiction is not the primary problem, but the primary problem is it has to do with human suffering, emotional pain, alienation, a sense of emptiness, a sense of loss of meaning.
And when you look at where that comes from, that always comes from childhood experience.
And so in the case of the hardcore drug addicts that I worked with in Vancouver, downtown Eastside, every single one of them had been traumatized, abused, all the women sexually abused, without exception.
And so when you look at the Large-scale studies on addicted populations, what you see is tremendous suffering, and addiction is actually a person's attempt to soothe the suffering.
And that, of course, once you see that, that leads to that more compassionate view that you talked about, because why should we punish people for the fact that they suffered and they're trying to soothe their suffering?
I've sort of tried to analogize it myself that if I were in a wheelchair because my legs weren't functioning, but there was a pill that I could take that would allow me to walk.
I'm really just trying to return myself to normal functioning.
Would we say that I'm addicted to walking?
And I think the way that you've tried to explain, I think very successfully, explain the degree to which people are attempting to place into their systems that which earlier trauma has caused them to be deficient of, I think is a great way of understanding particularly endorphins and dopamine.
I wonder if you could go into the science behind that a little bit as well.
Well, I will, but before I do, your comment is very interesting because the words that you just spoke were uttered exactly verbatim by a mayor of Vancouver, Sam Sullivan, who actually was a quadriplegic, is a quadriplegic because he had a ski accident when he was a young man, and he said that if wheelchairs were illegal, he'd be breaking the law.
Yeah.
Which is exactly what he said.
And he's the one that helped to bring the supervised injection site and to humanize Vancouver's drug policies, even though he's quite conservative guy politically speaking.
But he made exactly the same analogy that you just raised.
Now, in terms of the brain, the human brain has these essential brain circuits that have to do with reward and motivation and pain relief.
And the substances in our brain that give us a sense of reward and pain relief are called the endorphins, which is another word for endogenous morphine-like substances.
In other words, we have an opiate system in our brains to help us feel better in life when we're suffering.
Similarly, there's a chemical called dopamine without which we are not motivated.
So if you take a little animal in the laboratory, like a rat, A mouse and you feed him some good food and he likes it.
But if you put the food on a few inches away from his nose, this has been done.
He will starve to death and won't eat because chemically they knocked out his dopamine system and without dopamine there's no incentive to do anything.
So our dopamine and our endorphin circuits in our brain develop under the interaction of the environment and The human brain develops in response to the environment, and when the circumstances aren't right, those circuits don't develop.
Now, the necessary condition for the development of these crucial brain circuits of pain relief, motivation, and actually love are nothing less than the presence of non-stressed, emotionally available, nurturing parenting caregivers.
So kids who don't experience those qualities in their early years are actually brain deprived of some of the essential chemicals necessary for life.
And these are the people that are prone to get addicted to substances that will give them that dopamine, that will give them those endorphins, which are the stimulant drugs and the opiate drugs.
In other words, the biology of addiction reflects the child's experience.
And if you look at the large scale studies on addicts, what you find is trauma after trauma after trauma.
And under conditions of trauma, those circuits just don't develop properly.
And it's a genuine tragedy, I think, that is the war on drugs, which is it seems to me at least to be an intersection of two Tragically sympathetic in terms of locking together addictions.
One, of course, is the addiction to self-medicate because of childhood trauma, but the other seems to be on the part of the persecutors an addiction to control, to bullying, to sadism, to a lack of empathy.
So it's almost like the family structure of parent and child abuse.
Moves into society as a whole with the police and the political system persecuting the former victims of child abuse who are trying to evade punishment just as they would as children.
Does that seem to fit your model?
Because you do talk quite a bit about how much there is an addiction to power that follows the same kind of ideology.
Well, if you actually look at who gets jailed, like in Canada, for example, The native Indian population, the First Nations population, they make up 3 or 4% of the Canadian census as a whole, but they make up 30% of the jail population.
And if you look at what's happened to them historically, these are the people that were deprived, their lands were stolen away from them, their spiritual ways were forbidden, and their children were taken away for 100 years and sexually and physically abused in residential schools.
As a result of which there's a lot of pain in those communities, as a result of which there's a lot of drug use.
And then we end up jailing them.
So that the jail population in North America, whether in Canada or the United States, is largely made up of abused children.
Now, the people that are inflicting that punishment on these people are very often human beings who We're very hurt themselves and the way I respond to the hurt is to try and get power over others so that they'll never be hurt again.
In other words, it's the power that they're seeking whether in the uniform of a policeman or the suit and tie of a politician is designed to protect them from being vulnerable ever again and And what they hate most is vulnerability.
That's why they keep attacking the most vulnerable people, because they can't stand looking at vulnerability.
So if you get politicians who deprive people of social services, who take away support for the most vulnerable families, and who keep insisting on punishing the so-called junkie, these are the people that are afraid of their own vulnerability, and they try to defend against that by wielding power.
And so the one is the other side of the coin, actually.
And by the way, all of us are prone to the same dynamics.
So when we talk about drug addicts, I mean, I define addiction as any behavior that is characterized by craving, temporary relief, temporary pleasure, and long-term negative consequences.
And we continue in them despite the negative consequences.
Now, I didn't say anything about drugs.
I said any behavior.
So how many of us are familiar with having behaviors that give us temporary relief but hurt us in the long term and we continue it?
So how different are we from the drug addict?
The only difference is that they're using a substance.
Whereas we go shopping, or we stop ourselves with food, or we start the internet, or we gamble, or we are addicted to work.
Without which we don't feel complete or adequate.
And the only difference is that we have a so-called respectable addiction.
For some reason, we decided that our addictions are respectable and theirs are not, which is just another way of us feeling better about ourselves by having somebody to condemn and to judge.
And so that's a big part of the one drugs as well, is this belief that there's the addicts over there and the rest of us normal good people over here, where in fact It's really funny when you think about it.
It's tragic, but it's funny.
The politicians say to the drug addict, how can you inject harmful stuff into yourself?
But what are we doing to the earth?
We're injecting all kinds of harmful stuff into the very air that we breathe.
Tens of thousands of Canadians die of air pollution every year.
Tens of thousands of Canadians die of air pollution every year.
Now, which is the worst addiction?
To profit or to heroin?
Which kills more people?
So it's a very arbitrary and self-deluding distinction that we make.
Well, and of course, in particular, things like, I mean, you're a father, I'm a father, the national debt that has been piled up throughout the West to try to sustain a standard of living that the world can't sustain ecologically is another kind of addiction that politicians are largely responsible for because they're just failing to say to people what the limitations are.
And these delusions of grandeur seem to be about as addictive as any biochemical substance you could put in your body.
Well, a lot more addictive, actually, and a lot more damaging when it comes to the overall impact.
Not to mention the fact that if you actually ask the question, which drug is more harmful, alcohol, cigarettes, or heroin, there's no comparison.
Cigarettes and alcohol are far more damaging in terms of human health.
You can't even speak to them on the same page.
If you take a hundred people who are heroin addicts, if you give them their heroin legally, As you give them their cigarettes or their alcohol, out of that hundred, who's going to be more sick at the end of 15, 20 years?
There's no comparison.
There were many more deaths in the cigarette and alcohol group than in the heroin group.
Now, I'm not advocating for heroin use.
I'm just talking about the arbitrary nature of our decision-making around what constitutes acceptable and non-acceptable addiction.
I've also sort of been curious the degree to which mind-altering substances that can help people achieve different perspectives.
This is kind of an abstract question, but I know you've had some interest in this topic as well.
To what degree do you think that mind-altering substances can help illuminate people, can help expand consciousness, which does challenge a lot of the mental structures that we inhabit, which support particular forms of hierarchical power?
Well, the key is in your phrasing, mind-altering, because human beings have used mind-altering substances for thousands of years.
It's a question of what was the intention and the context by which and in which those substances were used.
So, for example, right now, here in Canada, there's a study with ecstasy, the technical acronym for which is MDMA. And MDMA is being used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a condition that's very debilitating and it's very intractable to treatment.
And MDMA is having great results in having people traumatized, overcoming their trauma.
Now, it's a mind-watering substance, but it's not used to intoxicate anybody.
It's not used to shoot anything.
It's used to actually open up the mind.
So that people can really deeply, under the guidance of a psychotherapist, deeply experience what's in their minds and bring it to the surface so they can look at it and deal with it.
It's having great success in the States and in Canada.
So the question of mind-altering substances is, what's the intention behind the use?
For example, take tobacco.
The Native Indians in the United States and Canada have used tobacco for centuries as a ceremonial And I myself have participated in sweat lodges and tobacco ceremonies, which are designed to open up your mind and to help you be more free and more aware.
At the same time, you can use cigarettes to soothe the pain and to make yourself less aware.
So it's a question of what is the intention and what is the context?
So if the intention is to open up the mind to a higher level of awareness, that's one way of altering the mind.
If the intention is to upturn the mind and to kind of go blotto because you don't want to feel the pain that's there, that's the addictive use.
So it's not a question of mind-altering or not mind-altering, it's a question of what is the intention behind the mind-altering behavior.
And some of those substances can be used to elevate our level of consciousness and some can be used and mostly are used to suppress our level of consciousness.
The second use is the addictive use.
The addict uses the drugs because they don't want to be aware.
They don't want to feel the pain.
You know, it's like Keith Richards said in his book, Life, his autobiography.
He's talking about his heroin addiction.
He said, the contortions we go through just not to be ourselves for a few hours.
So addiction is always about an escape.
It's an escape from reality.
And from one's own mind.
I think as you'd mentioned there, quoting another psychiatrist, that people are afraid of death of other people and of their own minds.
And I also wonder, I've heard the phrase said that mental anguish in general or psychological dysfunction is around the avoidance of legitimate suffering.
And I wonder the degree to which You know, when you go to have surgery, you're expected to receive anesthetic.
When you go to get a tooth drilled, you're expected to receive Novocaine.
And nobody has any problem with that.
In fact, we would think that somebody who would reject those things might be kind of masochistic.
But when it comes to emotional pain, childhood pain, psychological pain, there seems to be a very staunch unwillingness to give people the sympathy for the suffering they experience maybe because it's not visible I mean it's sort of visible over time in the trauma the body receives due to addiction but I wonder the degree to which In a sense,
sympathy is a drug that is craved, and because it's not provided in society, because of maybe people avoiding their own childhood pain or maybe a fear of guilt that they knew a child who was being abused and didn't do anything about it, but this staunch refusal to share genuine, compassionate, deep, empathetic sympathy with the victims of child abuse, I wonder the degree to which, if that were present in society, these other methods of self-medication would fall away.
Well, I think that's a key question that you're raising.
By the way, I hope that rejecting dental freezing is not a sign of masochism because I generally refuse to get my teeth frozen when they work on me.
I hate that numb feeling.
I probably have the pain.
Oh, okay.
Well, let's say surgery then.
I don't say I particularly enjoy it, but I'd rather not be numb.
But, yeah, you know, if it was a root canal, I wouldn't refuse the anesthetic.
Well, what you're touching upon is key.
See, as the Buddha pointed out, life brings suffering.
You know, it's just the nature of life.
I mean, you know, life brings joy, but it also brings suffering.
Now, why is it that people can't handle the suffering?
Well, here's what happens.
An infant can't handle suffering.
Like, an infant has no capacity.
An infant does not know that pain comes and goes, that sadness comes and goes.
To the infant, every moment is eternal.
For the infant to be able to endure suffering, and the infant can endure suffering, but he or she has to be helped by an adult who can attune to the infant's suffering and say, yeah, it's hurting right now.
Oh, it hurts.
But you know what, kid?
It'll pass, and I'll just hold you.
Now, when we get that kind of holding, that allows us to learn that, yes, life brings pain, But pain is something we can go through.
Very few people get that kind of holding in our society because parents are so stressed and so distracted and so caught up in their own problems.
A result of which even kids who are not traumatized per se don't get that confidence that they can handle suffering.
As a result of which, we built up a whole society that's designed to distract us from suffering by television, by movies, by junk foods, by everything possible under the sun.
And the ones who suffer the most, they're the ones that then turn to substances to kill the pain.
Because we don't know how to handle our own pain, We're not comfortable with the pain of others.
So we have no sympathy for people who've suffered because we're afraid of our own pain.
So we don't want to look at theirs.
You're quite right.
If in our society there was more understanding that people, when they're suffering, they're in pain, they need to be held, like they weren't held as kids, but what if society could hold them?
What if teachers could give them the attention?
What if doctors could?
What if psychologists could?
What if we could give that kind of attention to each other?
That when somebody is going through pain, we're not just trying to talk them out of it, or tell them it doesn't matter, or to close our eyes, but actually, yeah, you're going through something difficult right now, and I'm here for you.
If we could give that to people, then they wouldn't need to turn to substances.
But that's not what they get.
What they actually get What they get is punishment and what they get is judgment and what they get is ostracization and condemnation which only doubles and triples and quadruples the pain that they already have.
So what's lacking in our society is a container for human suffering.
And I certainly get that that's a lot to do with the work that you do, which is to try and open people's hearts to the suffering that is underneath what we call the dysfunction.
And I wonder the degree to which your capacity for empathy has developed.
I mean, as you've talked about before, and if you'd like to relate that again, I'm sure it would be very interesting to the listeners.
You were born into a desperately dysfunctional and brutal phase in history, Hungary, I think, 1944, during the increasing persecution of the Jews.
So you could have had just about every excuse under the sun to end up as a significantly dysfunctional, non-empathetic person.
And I know that with your addiction to classical CDs that there has been some dysfunction, but...
What do you think is the methodology, if it could be abstracted in that kind of way, what do you think is the methodology for growing empathy despite a difficult beginning?
Because I think most people are going to need to figure that out if we're going to turn this around.
Well, first of all, if you talk about the Jewish suffering in Second World War, I How should I say this?
I have a lot of pain about how that's turned out.
Because one way it's turned out is in the oppression of the Palestinians.
In other words, the suffering of Jews in Eastern Europe didn't necessarily lead to a whole lot of compassion and awareness.
It can also lead to the opposite, which is We're going to be powerful and invulnerable and it doesn't matter who we kill and who we oppress as long as we're safe, which is what we've talked about before.
So there's basically two responses to suffering.
One of them is to become hardened and invulnerable and then you're going to inflict suffering on others.
The other is to work it through somehow and decide not to inflict it on others.
I can't say that I've been totally successful in the second endeavor.
I mean, you're not going to always find me compassionate and present and humane.
You know, you can find me sometimes very tight and critical and so on.
So, it's an ongoing work.
But I think the key is, are you willing to accept and work through your own suffering?
Not to reject it, but to accept it.
That's essentially what all the spiritual teachers do, you know, like Buddha.
He says there's suffering, but we can hold our suffering.
We can actually be with it.
We don't have to be controlled by it.
And what does Jesus say?
It's the same thing.
It's all about, you know, don't judge lest ye be judged.
For the judgments that you visit on other people are visited upon you.
So it's all about working through your own suffering.
So that's what it takes.
And that's a lifetime endeavor.
And so I'm no longer know.
What was the original question?
Well, is there You know, I always veer between, you know, there's a way to do it, which is kind of like deterministic.
Like if you just say to people, this is what you should do, then they'll go and do it.
Because I still respect and believe, of course, and ultimately we do have choices.
But our choices are influenced by the costs and benefits.
And I think that people don't really understand the degree to which...
There's a benefit to confronting your own suffering.
It's not escaped me, as it's not escaped, as it's been accepted by a lot of people, that in most religious worldviews, there is paradise on the other side of death.
There is a nirvana or heaven on the other side of death.
And certainly my experience in going through therapy for many years was that there is a kind of death of an old self.
And then there's a rebirth, you know, the chrysalis sort of phenomenon.
And I think that people don't really see what is on the other side of confronting one's own suffering.
And I think that that vision, which is kind of pushed forward after death, is not held as something that people can achieve in their own lives and the benefits of it.
And I think if we can get people to understand more the benefits of this sort of self-confrontation, even though it may challenge your relationships, even though it may challenge your relationships with yourself and your deity and your country and your culture, that it is well worth doing.
So I wonder the degree to which people might choose more this commitment to empathy and to self-knowledge.
Which has been commanded since Socrates, the first commanded, is know thyself.
If they knew the benefits more, which don't seem to be communicated very well.
I think that you do a great job of communicating in your work.
I hope to do my own little bit that way as well.
But I wonder if people could get more compassion or do the self-confrontation that leads to compassion more if they were aware of what's on the other side, which isn't the barrier of death, but rather just a kind of spiritual rebirth.
I don't know if that question makes any sense, but that's sort of what's on my mind.
It makes a whole lot of sense.
And when you actually look at the spiritual teachers, Buddha didn't talk about nirvana as happening after the death.
Nirvana actually means the extinction of the egoic attachments.
It's right here in the present.
It's not some heaven that you go to.
It's a state of mental transformation that you undergo right now.
And Jesus, when he talked about the kingdom of heaven, What did he say?
He didn't say it was after death.
He said it's within.
It's within.
So the great spiritual teachers, they never talked about some promise after our physical demise.
They talked about what's available to you right now.
And you mentioned rebirth.
What Jesus talks about, unless a man is reborn, he can't enter the kingdom of heaven.
And that rebirth has to do precisely with the, as far as I understand it, with the letting go of the carefully constructed and very tight and very fear-based ego that we all develop as a result of what happens to us in childhood.
And so working that through leads to tremendous liberation.
Now, I'm not putting myself out as some kind of an enlightened being, but I can tell you, I'm much freer than I used to be 30 years ago.
And I hope we fear yet before I leave this earth.
You know?
And it's an ongoing process.
And one sees that liberation when people work through their addictions, when they deal with the impact of it, when they actually deal with the pain underneath it, they feel reborn.
They feel liberated.
And they actually feel joy.
And so that it's difficult to convey that because so much of our society is actually designed, as I said earlier, To help people escape from their immediate discomfort.
Rather than saying, here's how you confront your discomfort, and here's how you transcend it.
Here's how you transform it.
We're actually saying, just buy this, or do this, or get that relationship, or be with that guy, or be with that woman, or attain this position, or look this way, or eat this, or eat that.
And then you don't want to feel your discomfort.
We live in a society where the economy is based on helping people escape.
In fact, if you look at the advertisements, they're all about escaping.
The reality of most people is that when they get into a car, they're stuck in traffic in some big city.
What do you see in the car ads?
People in mountains and beautiful scenery.
They're the only ones on the road, you know.
It's all about escape.
It's never about dealing with what it actually is.
Right.
Right.
Now, you've mentioned in some of your talks about obesity, which is becoming, I just went to Florida, where, you know, you can see this sort of all around.
Yeah.
I wonder if we could talk a little bit about what is happening to people's weight in the world, which of course has a whole other host of environmental ill effects, and not just personally, but of course across the ecology as a whole of a consumption of food.
And it is so addictive because I think 75% of the landfill in America is consumed by food that people have just thrown out.
And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the physiology and psychology of a food addiction, because I think that strikes, obviously, statistically, it strikes a lot more people than something like heroin.
Well, it's extraordinary that you should mention that, because just last night I gave a talk on that subject here in Vancouver.
So I did research it, so you couldn't have asked it at a better time.
So yeah, a huge percentage of the population And it's increasing all the time.
And not only is that problem in North America, it's actually spreading around the world.
So Mexico now leads the world in obesity.
Mexico!
And it's become a huge problem in China.
It's become a real epidemic in China.
Now, of course, the easy answer is that it's the Lack of exercise, which is true, and the consumption of junk foods, which is also true.
And the food companies, this has been shown now, very deliberately, with laboratory precision, try to ascertain which combination of sugar, salt, and fat will most likely trigger the release of the reward chemicals in your brain.
In other words, how do we get you addicted to this stuff?
So there's a very deliberate push to get people addicted.
But that's not what creates the problem.
That just exploits the problem.
What creates the problem is that eating, which is meant to be fundamentally for nutrition, has become a way of self-soothing.
So that people eat to self-soothe.
I don't have a weight problem, but I work at not having a weight problem.
But I know that when I'm stressed and tired, that's when I'm most likely to overeat.
And so what we don't have is an obesity epidemic.
What we have is a stress epidemic.
And because the junk foods particularly release reward chemicals in the brain that temporarily talk about mind-altering substances, junk foods are mind-altering substances.
And we're desperate for that mind alteration.
Now, if you look at the studies on obesity, you live in Ontario, there's the famous case of Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, the former mayor of Toronto, guy with cocaine addiction, guy with cancer just recently, and he's been laughed at for years for his overweight status.
If you actually look at people who are overweight, they're traumatized kids.
The studies are clear.
That the people who are most prone to be overweight are people that were actually traumatized and abused as children, which I'm sure Rob Ford was.
So that the eating becomes just another form of self-soothing.
It's no different from drug addiction or anything else.
What we do in our society is we laugh at these people.
So all the fat jokes are made at the expense of people that were traumatized as kids.
And this isn't my personal point of view.
This is what the large-scale epidemiological studies show.
So that the more trauma you experience as a child, the greater the risk of obesity.
And I've often thought, I don't know if there's any studies out there, but the obesity as a shield against others, and in particular a shield against sexuality, has always struck me as something that seems correlated.
Because, of course, people who are obese have a kind of excuse to not get involved in sexual relationships, which may have been, of course, if they're abused as children sexually, may have a component there as well.
Well, again, you are quoting...
I'm looking at my computer right now to find a very quote that absolutely shows what you just said, and I'm not going to find it right now, but there's an American physician called Dr.
Vincent Felitti, and Felitti is an internal specialist who studied obesity, and he said precisely that obesity is a self-protection against sexuality.
Yeah.
Well, good.
Good to be in good company, I guess.
No, you're in very good company.
And he's the one that then initiated the studies that showed the relationship between sexual abuse and adult obesity.
Right.
And I think...
Let me just do a tiny rant here, and I'll let you have the last word.
Because when I think of addiction, I try not to think so much of individuals, but of a larger societal thing.
I mean, you know, my...
background is in history and philosophy so i i'm a big picture of big trends kind of guy and as i've been saying through this conversation uh and we passed like over 100 million downloads so i hope it's getting the word out there but as i've said in this conversation for many years we as a society as a collective if we look at us as a sort of a social organism that medieval way of looking at it's a social organism we are on an unsustainable path you
You know, we're riddled with debt, with inflation, with unsustainable institutions, with unsustainable infrastructure.
And we have all of the characteristics of addiction, not just in an individual, but as a society as a whole, as you say, environmental predation and debt and so on.
And it's always struck me that people tend to double down on addiction when they can't look up and say, this is unsustainable.
Because when you look down the tunnel of time at the unsustainability of one's actions, I think that is what changes the reward and punishment structure, so to speak.
You say, well, in the long run, this is going to end really badly for me, and hopefully that's enough of a wake-up call.
And it seems to me as a society as a whole, we're simply not having the necessary conversations about the unsustainability of Of our current way of being as a whole, not as individuals.
But we're all kind of engaged in this avoidance.
You look at political campaigns.
Nobody talks about any fundamental changes necessary to make our society sustainable.
And there is this massive avoidance on a social level as a whole.
And I don't know the degree to which it bounces back and forth between the individual and society as a whole, but I think particularly in America, you know, which has sort of the markers of a great dying imperialistic empire, whether or not people know this deep down, that it's completely unsustainable, and the avoidance of that can also drive personal addictions.
Well, again, you're talking my language.
I'm writing my next book, and the title of which is called, are you still there?
Yeah.
Because I just lost your picture.
Yeah.
The title of my next book is Toxic Culture.
And there's an American writer called Tom Hartman who wrote a book called The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.
And what he's talking about is that carbon, which is stored in the earth in the form of coal and oil, actually reflects ancient sunlight, the effect of sunlight on the earth.
And so a lot of carbon has been stored up And we're quickly using it up.
And we're using up the sunlight, the ancient sunlight, the carbon and the oil, in order to sustain a lifestyle that the Earth cannot sustain, except by using up finite resources.
So this is going to end at some point.
And we're in the last hours of that ancient sunlight, he said.
We don't have much time left.
And Hartman says that a toxin can be nourishing or could be toxic.
A culture can be nourishing or can be toxic.
My book is called Toxic Culture.
I think we live in a toxic culture.
The way of life is predicated on an unsustainable premise.
We're addicted.
In other words, we keep behaving in ways that are long-term negative consequences and we can't give it up.
That's the culture that we live in.
Of course, that translates into both social policy and social life and on the individual level.
We condemn it on an individual level, and we celebrate it on a social level.
Because we keep saying, we keep talking about the gross domestic product.
The more we use up, the happier we are, you know, we think.
Actually, we're not happier at all.
In fact, the measures of happiness have got very little to do with the GDP. But this is what we celebrate, and this is what politicians always promise us.
So that there's a real contradiction between The cultural level, in some cases, is what characterizes our life as a society.
And that creates a lot of suffering.
We're creating a lot of suffering for ourselves, not just in the future, but we're creating it right now.
And if you actually look at the preponderance of mental illness, the kids that are being diagnosed with all kinds of conditions, all the kids that are being medicated now for all kinds of things that didn't used to even exist, let alone demand pharmacological intervention, We talked about the stress levels, the chronic illness, the dementia levels that are arising.
I mean, something's driving all that.
And that has to do with the way we live.
And we're losing, I think, an essential aspect of what really is civilization, which is the ability to converse.
I mean, it's a cliche by now that when you go to a restaurant, the majority of kids you see are not conversing with each other or their parents, but, you know, screen cameras Glazed eyes are diminishing our capacity to negotiate and I think that that empathy and Humanity and civilization are predicated on exchanges of the spoken word You know the first civilized person was the first person to suggest a debate rather than a sword fight and I think that as a civilization as a whole we're kind of losing Our capacity to negotiate,
which is the only way that you can civilly resolve disputes within a society.
And now everyone's running to the state.
Oh, let's pass a law.
Well, I don't like drugs or I don't like this.
Let's just pass a law rather than having the marketplace of ideas and negotiate.
I think people are really losing that.
When I was younger and in college, I was in the debate team.
And, you know, I can't find, you know, confident debaters now in my show sometimes to save my life.
I think that language and our capacity to converse with each other and negotiate with each other, which should start very early and doesn't happen in daycares and doesn't happen often unless parents are home with their kids talking and negotiating on an ongoing basis.
I think the death of civilized discourse is in some ways also true.
Focusing our attentions on these distractions because it tends to be self-reinforcing the less you talk the less good you are at talking and therefore the more you're going to be drawn to other forms of self-stimulation well statistically the average kid has got about 50% of the vocabulary of a young person 50 60 years ago and and I'll be In preparation to writing my next book, Toxic Culture, I'll be talking to a psychologist in Washington, D.C. who talks about empathy deficit disorder.
Now look at a phenomenon such as occurred last week in Florida.
I don't know if you read about it, but it was daytime.
It was the school break for university students.
So they congregated in Fort Lauderdale and elsewhere in Florida.
In wide public daylight on a beach, there was a rape going on with people standing around watching and cheering and taking videos and nobody.
And this woman was apparently drugged.
She was totally out of it.
And nobody steps in to do anything.
Now, that's unbelievable.
That there wouldn't be one person who says, stop it.
This is inhumane.
No.
Not only is it being watched, it's being videoed.
As a result of that video, the perpetrators are now being charged with rape.
If we don't see it in moral terms, if we just ask what's happened, then something's happened to our young people that has deprived them of empathy and has deprived them of courage.
Either they have empathy, either they have no empathy or they have no courage, one or the other.
You know, and that's not their fault.
That somehow reflects the culture of disconnection in which they've grown up.
And it's that disconnection that, again, when your parents couldn't hold you when you were suffering, then you harden yourself.
It's a way of not feeling your suffering.
And that hardening is what shows up on that beach.
Where people are no longer feeling the pain of that person being violated.
And the humiliation and the shame.
And so, That's the culture that we live in and that has everything to do with addiction because all these ways that we then soothe or try not to feel.
The addict is only a person who's trying not to feel something that's too painful for them.
Well, we have a whole society that's addicted to not feeling anything.
How else could you watch a rape and not feel anything and not be moved to intervene?
So something's happened to you, you the observer.
Who can witness this without intervention?
And that speaks to the nature of the toxicity of the culture that we live in.
And interrupting that cycle, I mean, we can imagine that these people who observed this phenomenon, videoed and cheered it, what they're going to be like themselves as parents, it's so challenging to break this kind of cycle.
And these momentary gratifications can have multi-generational effects.
I think a study came out recently that pointed out that trauma can change genetics over two or three generations.
And it continues to be, you know, short-term gain, so to speak, but the long-term pain can be multi-generational, which is the challenge that I think we're facing now.
Well, absolutely.
For example, if you look at when people are traumatized, their stress hormone levels are higher, their cortisol levels are higher.
So people traumatized early in life, they'll have high cortisol levels even later in life, which makes them more prone, by the way, to depression and addiction and autoimmune disease and cancer.
Now, if you look at the cortisol levels of the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, they're still elevated.
Trauma is passed on from a generation to the next, not genetically, but biologically.
And if you understand that, trauma can take two forms.
There's the overt trauma of abuse and neglect and beating and watching your parents hit each other and so on.
But there's the other kind of trauma, which is what I talked about earlier, which is the trauma of not being held, not being emotionally contained the way it needed to be.
We're actually looking at a traumagenic society.
Because parents are no longer capable.
They no longer have the time.
They no longer have the attention span.
And so often do you see a parent walking, pushing a tram, a baby buggy in the street.
And what's the parent doing?
The parent is playing with the internet or playing with its cell phone or actually talking.
What message does the child get?
Does that parent imagine if she thinks about it?
That that infant does not feel her absence?
And then what kind of parent will that infant be?
And Fisher-Price now has a holder for an iPad for one-year-olds.
And these kids are being addicted to the screens.
And then, as you say, they no longer have the language to converse.
And the fact that you and I... You see, this conversation that you and I are having, which I very much appreciate, by the way, But this conversation that you and I are having, you could imagine 50 years ago, this kind of conversation was actually held on public television.
Right, right.
But now on television, you get the eight-second sound bite.
You're lucky if you get eight seconds.
I couldn't express these ideas in any kind of public television program, let alone the commercial television program.
There's no space for it.
There's not the attention span for it.
And the reason you're getting all these downloads is It's because it's a lie that people aren't interested.
It's a lie that people don't want deeper information.
It's a lie.
It's something we can convince ourselves of because it suits the commercial ethos.
But in reality, people are desperately hungry for real contact and real information and real conversation.
At least many people are.
Oh, no, I get that.
I mean, in this show, I do Six or seven hours of call-in shows a week, and we're booked out for months, and people want to talk about important stuff.
We're thirsty for it.
Now, I'm very excited that there's a new book coming out.
I've been waiting, so I'm very glad that you're working on that.
Do you have a time frame for when the book's going to be available?
Well, I finally promised to finish it by next March.
It'll be out in the fall of 2017.
And by the way, I'm writing it with a world-renowned trauma expert called Peter Levine.
And it'll be about toxic culture, trauma, illness and healing in a materialistic world.
That's the title.
I think it sounds perfectly gripping.
And so I really, really appreciate your time.
People can go to Dr.
Gabor Mate, G-A-B-O-R-M-A-T. Don't worry about the accent, just M-A-T-E. You'll get there.
And the first thing you can do, of course, is watch the great TEDx talk that you have on the homepage.
But you can, of course, see Dr.
Mate and attend his workshops, which are on the website.
So As always, I really, really appreciate the conversation.
I incredibly thank you from the bottom of my heart for the work that you do and the humanity you bring to these people who are suffering and the degree to which we can pry apart the ancient sadists from the ancient victims, I think, is the degree to which the true sunlight of civilization can enter into these relationships.
Well, it's a real pleasure to speak with you.
When we're finished officially talking, there's something I want to run past you.
Absolutely.
Okay.
All right.
So thank you everyone so much.
Please check out drgabbermette.com and we appreciate your time.
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