Dr. Gabor Maté on Having Sympathy for Trump and Healing an Insane Society

We could look at it as a bunch of crazies incited by a grandiose and opportunistic and ruthless president. That's only one way to look at it, and of course there's some truth in that. But we could also look at it much more systemically and we can say that a highly traumatized individual — and Trump is a highly traumatized individual, which is documented, it's not controversial, I've been saying it for years but it's been documented since he was elected — became the president of the wealthiest and financially, economically, and militarily the most powerful nation on earth. What does that say about that system, that such a highly traumatized person could be elevated to the highest position?

And furthermore, we could dismiss the demonstrators or the invaders of the Capitol, however you want to describe them, as thugs or as right-wing lunatics or as hostile anti-democratic individuals. We could do that, or we could actually ask: where did they come from? Where did their rage come from? Where did their denial of reality come from? Where did their willingness to follow such a traumatized and patently, transparently dishonest person — where did their gut feelings that they actually believe this guy come from? Trump didn't create any of that. He may have exploited it, he may have provided some incitement, but he didn't create these people. There's something about the society in which we live that creates a lot of people who are in denial of reality. And before we point fingers at others, we're in denial of reality in so many ways.

As a physician, I've been fascinated with the source of these sorts of things. Now the medical profession basically divides a number of things. It divides the mind from the body. So when you have a physical illness, that's just a biological problem. You got cancer of the liver, that's a biological problem. Cancer of the lung, it's a biological problem. Autoimmune disease, it's a biological problem. And the solutions are biological. What we don't consider is that maybe those illnesses reflect something about the lives of those people, and the lives of those people don't occur in isolation from their current context.

So Western medicine, for all its incredible achievements, for the most part separates the mind from the body. And I'm telling you, a lot of illnesses are based on people's denial of reality. That may sound like an outlandishly radical and perhaps even laughable statement, and I don't know if I have the chance to prove it to you tonight, but that's my view — that a lot of illness is based on emotionally repressing pains and realities that we haven't been able to face, and that repression of our emotions actually has an impact on our physiology and our immune system. Now there's lots of evidence for that. I'm not just talking about personal impressions and intuitions, I'm talking about a lot of science. But Western medicine kind of excludes that science from its awareness. So we separate the mind from the body, and then we separate the individual from the environment.

Now look at the COVID situation right now. And by the way, there's an article in the New Yorker, most recent edition — the United States makes up four percent of the world's population, twenty percent of the deaths from COVID happened in the US. Now how do you explain that? The richest, most scientifically advanced country in the world has got four percent of the world's population, twenty percent of the world's COVID deaths. It surely means that there's something about the system that's creating these problems.

Now if you look at it more specifically, we know that the people most prone to succumb to COVID are the ones with frequent pre-existing conditions and the ones who are more stressed. And those happen to be, in the United States — not exclusively but saliently — people of color, people of minorities. So we say we're all in this together, but are we all in it together? Do I, as an identified Caucasian male, middle class, face the same risk as a poor immigrant, often a person of color, poorly paid, without insurance, a healthcare worker working in a long-term care facility? And these are the people that get sick. In other words, illness — whether we're talking about mental illness or physical illness — isn't simply a manifestation of an individual biological physiological entity. It also has to do with social context. And that's the other thing that Western medicine does, for the most part in practice, is to separate the individual from the environment.

So let me tell you something, a little bit of science here. Some of you may have heard about something called telomeres. T-E-L-O-M-E-R-E-S. Telomeres are DNA structures at the end of chromosomes, and they've been likened to the caps at the end of shoelaces, the job of which is to hold the threads together so the shoelace doesn't unravel. So the job of telomeres at the end of our chromosomes is similarly to keep the chromosomes healthy from unraveling. When you're younger the telomeres are long, and with age they shorten, and as they shorten the risk of disease goes up. But what also shortens telomeres is stress.

So they looked at the telomere lengths of Black women in the US compared with Caucasian women. The telomeres of Black women were about seven or eight years shorter than white women. That's a biological problem, but it's a biological problem created by racism and living in a society of inequality. So what I'm saying is that you can't separate the individual from the environment and you can't separate the mind from the body. It's all one.

And so therefore, when we look at illness — whether it's mental illness or physical illness, or what we call mental illness or physical illness — we're not just looking at individual biological units, we're looking at a whole society. So if you look at something like autoimmune disease, which is diseases in which the immune system attacks the body, like rheumatoid arthritis — the immune system actually mounts an assault on the host body. It's as if the American army attacked America, or the Canadian army invaded Canada and killed people. That's what the immune system does in autoimmune disease. Autoimmune diseases include multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, chronic fatigue, probably fibromyalgia, bowel disease, bowel inflammations, and so on.

Now it so happens that about 70 to 80 percent of the people with autoimmune diseases are women, and not surprisingly, most severely affected are women of color and women of minorities. Let me tell you another fact. A particular illness, multiple sclerosis — we don't know what causes it. The heck we don't. We just don't look at the causes. Lots of evidence that the more childhood stress and trauma, the greater the risk of multiple sclerosis. I could cite you about 50 studies, but I'm going to tell you an interesting fact.

In the 1930s, the ratio of men and women with multiple sclerosis was about one to one, or close to one to one. You know what it is now? Three and a half women to every man. Now what does that tell us? It tells us it can't be a genetic problem, because genes don't change in the population over 70 years or 80 years. It can't be a problem of climate or diet, because that hasn't changed more for one gender than any other. What is it? I'm suggesting there's something going on in society, and that something is stress. Now I'm not going to go into my explanation as to why women are more stressed now than they used to be, but I can if somebody wants to ask me.

But again, what I'm talking about is, as soon as we see something like that, or as soon as we see that the rate of a condition like ADHD — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — is going up and up and up, or autism is going up and up and up, we know that we're not dealing with a genetic problem, because genes don't change over 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 200 years. There's got to be something in the environment.

So when I talk about an insane culture — first of all, what I mean by "the myth of normal" — what I mean by that is that we tend to make the identified sick individual abnormal. There's an abnormality about them. They're the abnormal ones. The people with depression or psychosis or ADHD or autism or a physical illness — they're abnormal. That's one way to look at it. But the other way to look at it is that the abnormality is in a society that generates these illnesses, and that these illnesses or these conditions are normal responses to abnormal circumstances.

We talk about PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder. There's a "disorder" right there, there's something wrong with that person. Really? Or is it the fact that people who develop the symptoms of what we call PTSD are having normal responses to abnormal stresses in their lives, beginning in childhood and then continuing into adulthood? So where's the abnormality — in the individual or in the system?

Now if you look at what is abnormal about this society — when I say abnormal, where it doesn't meet human needs — like, here we have the richest, again most scientifically advanced, technologically unparalleled culture, and it's in shambles. Well, what's going on?

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In that song that some of you heard before we began the session, Kat asked me what song do I like to walk on stage to. And not that I walk on stage with songs, but at all my retreats, all the workshops I give, I open with this song. And the song is "In Your Mind" by Johnny Cash, written by his daughter Rosanne Cash, actually. And he says: one foot on Jacob's ladder, another in the fire, it all goes down in your mind.

Now, Jacob's ladder — if you know your Old Testament — was the original stairway to heaven, a few thousand years before Led Zeppelin. There was a stairway to heaven: Jacob's ladder. One foot in the fire, which is of course a reference to hell. And whether you're ascending to heaven or whether you're descending to hell, it all goes down in your mind. It has to do with how you see the world and how you understand the world.

And the Buddha said that 2,500 years ago. He said basically that with our minds we create the world. Now if I believe that the world is a hostile place, where your friends want to steal your house and your wife — and these are your friends, not your enemies — and where it's dog-eat-dog and everybody's against you, if that's what I believe, I live in a different world than somebody who thinks that the world is basically benign, that there's problems but there's also love and support and possibility. Those two people live in different worlds.

The first person, who said that the world is a hostile place, a dark world where your friends want your wife and your friends want your house — that man is currently the president of the United States. He said that in so many words. And he wasn't crazy to say so, because what he's picturing is his childhood experience in a highly traumatizing, dangerous home.

So while the Buddha said that with our minds we create the world, what the Buddha didn't say — and that's modern psychology — is that before we create the world with our minds, the world creates our minds, and that happens pretty early in childhood. When I talk about an insane culture, I'm talking about a culture that for the most part creates a negative and dangerous and distorted view of the world for many children, and that's a source of a lot of illness and a lot of mental dysfunction.

Now why is that? Well, you have to look at human evolution. See, there's this idea, this belief, that human nature is hostile and aggressive and selfish. When somebody does something selfish, what do we say? Oh, that's just human nature. When somebody does something beautiful and generous, we never say that's just human nature. But it is human nature, because human beings evolved in a communal context.

For most of our existence, before there was Homo sapiens — our particular species came on the scene about 150,000 years ago — but for hundreds of thousands of years before then there were human beings of other species, and before then there were humanoid species, and before that there were other mammals, all of which could only survive if they could care for each other. And human beings, specifically in groups — even our own species, up until about 150,000 years ago, for the full part — lived in small-band hunter-gatherer groups where there was no survival without cooperation. Children were surrounded by loving adults. They didn't go off to preschool. You didn't send the baby to sleep in their own separate cave. You didn't give them sleep training so that the parents would sleep at night. You held the babies, you carried them everywhere, and children were surrounded by supporting adults — not just their parents in an isolated home. That's what we're biologically and psychologically created for.

With civilization, those conditions were destroyed. So the more civilized we become, the further away from our own nature we have traveled. And that's the insanity of our culture — that it entrenches and celebrates and makes normal the abnormality of childrearing and the abnormality of human relationships.

Because we have certain needs. What's it like for you when you walk into a grocery store to buy a pack of chewing gum, and you say hi to the clerk — I'm talking before COVID days, when you could still see people smile — and you say hi, how are you, and they gave you a sullen look and they grunt and they shove the product at you? What do you feel? You feel like you've been assaulted. Why? Because our nervous system has got a neural expectation of being met, of being connected with, because that's our nature.

Well, what about a society where people are for the most part told that they have to compete with everybody else to make it? Where the people that are the most acquisitive and the most aggressive are the celebrated successes that we're all supposed to emulate? Where inequality is built into the system and it's getting worse every day? Where there's a gender hierarchy, where there's misogyny as part of the culture? Where many people have to pursue employment that has no meaning for them whatsoever except as a way of bringing some dollars home, but the work itself provides no satisfaction, no meaning — in fact is often very, very stressful? Where we elect as our leaders people that we expect to lie to us? Nobody bats an eye when a politician lies. Would you have friends that lie to you all the time? But these are the people that we elect over and over and over again, of any party.

I'm speaking in generalities, but these generalities are by and large true. And where our minds are filled with suspicion and selfish concerns, where a sense of unity is under assault or not even recognized — it all goes down in your mind. And if it's going to change, if you want to stop going to hell, if you want to put your foot on that ladder, that stairway to heaven, we're going to have to change our minds and look at the whole scene and the whole structure and the whole system with fresh eyes, without illusions.

Now I'm going to come to a close very soon, but in that song Johnny Cash says, "somebody said, what is truth?" Now I wonder if anybody knows what that reference is to. It's actually a reference to the New Testament, where Jesus — who represents human love and wisdom and presence and being, which is really our divinity — is brought before Pontius Pilate. And Pilate is the Roman procurator of Judea, the governor of what is now Palestine-Israel, then called Judea. And in the Bible story, Pontius Pilate interrogates Jesus and asks him, well, what are you doing, or who are you? And Jesus says something like, I'm here to speak the truth. And Pontius Pilate says, "What is truth?" That's what Johnny Cash is quoting.

Pontius Pilate asked that question. Jesus does not answer him. Why not? Because Pontius Pilate represents the dry, calculating, power-hungry intellect, and Jesus's truth is all about the heart and it's all about depth and wisdom. Our society has elevated the dry technological intellect to the highest possible echelons and completely forgotten about the heart. And there's no wisdom up here — there's knowledge up here, but there's no wisdom. The wisdom has to be based on the connection between the heart and the gut and the mind.

By the way, these are biological connections. The heart has a brain. The gut has a brain. And those are connected to the brain up here. We work from here up. We need to deepen ourselves — connect the heart brain to the cerebral brain and the gut brain to both of those. And the insanity of our society is that we separate all that, for all kinds of political and economic reasons. But we separate them all. That's why it's an insane culture, and that's why it makes people sick.

Now that was a very quick and small encapsulation of something I could talk about at length for days, but I'll stop it here and let's see where the conversation goes from here. Thank you for listening.

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