Name: Dr. Gabor Maté is Worried About How Toxic Our Culture is Becoming
Uploaded: 2025-03-18T18:12:46.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dr. Gabor Maté is Worried About How Toxic Our Culture is Becoming' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-03-18. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dr. Gabor Maté is Worried About How Toxic Our Culture is Becoming' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-03-18. Transcript available.

And it's just where our society is too.
We've gone so far down this road and it's just like,
how do we, yeah, back in the day,
it seemed like if you were like, maybe this is crazy,
but if you were like just a small group around a campfire,
you could see if somebody was hurting you.
There was, everything was right there.
You couldn't hide anything.
- Not only that, you know what you would do?
You'd do ceremonies, healing rituals.
- Yeah.
- You would drum, you would dance,
you would chant, you would shake a stick.
It'd be communal.
A friend of mine who I quote in the book,
he's a part Lakota physician and psychiatrist.
His name is Luis Malmadrona.
And he said in the Lakota tradition,
when somebody gets sick, the community says, thank you.
Your illness represents some imbalance in our community.
- Wow.
- You're like the canary in the mind.
So your healing is our healing.
We're gonna do this together.
Now that makes so much sense.
- Yeah.
- Both scientifically and emotionally, we don't do that.
We sort of isolate the individual,
and then we separate the mind from the body.
So we say it's just a brain problem.
No, it isn't.
It's a life problem.
And that life is lived in an environment,
in a multi-generational family, in a certain culture.
Let's look at the whole thing.
That's all.
Do you think we can start to head more in that direction?
Or how do you think this changes?
Because we are pretty far down the well here.
- I think--
- 'Cause sometimes, you even said roar.
Like, sometimes I feel like our whole planet
just wants to fucking roar, you know?
It's like, it just like, I feel like everybody just wants
to go in the yard and just scream at the sky.
It's like, I don't know.
But it feels like there's just something trapped in us
that is, does that make any sense, man?
- Oh yeah.
And it's had some cultural expression as well.
What was that movie where somebody yells,
I'm fed up and I can't take it anymore.
And he starts yelling, I'm--
- Oh, "Falling Down," Michael Douglas?
- Is that it was?
I don't know which movie it was,
but it was somebody just starts yelling,
I'm fed up and I can't take it anymore.
And everybody starts yelling, I'm fed up,
I can't take it anymore.
You know, I think there's a deep sense
of frustration in this culture.
- I'm mad as hell
and I'm not gonna be able to take this anymore.
- Yeah, it's Network.
- How are we, oh yeah, Network.
- Yeah, yeah. - That's a great movie.
If you've never seen it, it's a great movie.
- I'm mad as hell and I'm with it, no.
That was decades ago.
I think the level of frustration in our society has increased.
Why are people frustrated?
'Cause their needs aren't being met.
- Yeah.
- And that scream, look,
I travel all over the world.
I just came back from a three week, six country tour of Europe.
I talked to 12,000 people.
That sense of frustration,
that sense of longing that we talked about.
It's so universal these days.
- It is.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, is it?
'Cause that's what it feels like this.
Are other people feeling this?
That's what I wonder a lot.
Are other people feeling this same way?
- Well, some people are not, because they escape, and this society is
absolutely brilliant at creating escapes through mass media, mass sports,
consumption, and so on.
But I'll say something here, and this is particularly true of comedians I have
found.
Some people are just born more sensitive.
- That's a great point too, and I have to take that into account.
We all do.
- And more sensitive means sensitive is from the Latin word sincere to feel.
Now some people are genetically born more sensitive.
They feel more.
That means when things go wrong, they feel it more than the others.
So the same thing can happen externally to different people, but if one of them
is more sensitive, they're going to feel it all the more.
So it's especially the highly sensitive people who are feeling that scream that
you talk about.
- Yeah, that's a great point that it, uh, yeah, yeah, that's what it's just
like, I just feel like we've just gone so far off the path of.
But if I can say something, your sense that we've gone off the path, what in
you knows that?
Like what part of me you mean?
- What in you, who in you knows that we've gone off the path?
It's the part that hasn't gone off the path.
It's the part that actually sees so that I mean, I don't want to create too
much doom and gloom here.
- No.
- There is this self here.
There's this trueness here that's never been damaged, never been destroyed.
There's nobody's damage goes that way.
It's always in here.
It's a question of, can we connect with it?
- Right.
- You know, and that, yeah.
How do we get back to connecting with that sort of thing?
Because our society, our culture is not going to do it for us.
It doesn't feel like we might have to start with it as individuals.
Does that make sense?
- We do begin as individuals, but you've probably realized, I mean, just for
example,
in your AA group, there's a community there.
- Right.
- Who have a lot of shared experiences and who are very vulnerably open and
sharing their experiences.
And that's a source of support.
When you share about yourself, that's a source of support to others.
When they share about themselves, that's support for you.
So that ultimately, no, we don't have to do it by ourselves.
It begins as an individual process, but pretty soon you find that we're not
alone.
- Yeah.
Do you think we can get out of this toxic culture?
Do you feel like there's a way out of where we are?
Or do you feel like that humanity is just...
- I believe in human beings.
- That's a great statement.
I do too.
- You know, I believe that there's an essential goodness there.
A desire to connect, a desire to belong, a desire to celebrate life.
You know, I think we're endowed with those capacities.
And as difficult as things may look, and especially these days with these
terrible wars going on
and the suffering that we've talked about, I still believe that there's so many
examples.
Everywhere I go, I meet such good people.
People are trying to make a difference.
People are trying to do their little bit or their big bit to reduce the
suffering in the world,
to speak the truth, to offer some love, compassion to the world.
I really do believe in humans.
Now, we have the potential to be monsters.
We have the potential to be angels.
But that good side never totally disappears.
Some people, it's covered over so much that they might never get in touch with
it.
Most people, I think, are quite capable of getting there once they decide that
they want to.
- Yeah, I think...
What scares me, I think, is that...
In order to be a human being, we have to have the present moment, right?
We have to be able to still have the ability to reflect and recognize and think.
And our society or our culture has created a lot where we're...
So many distractions.
So that if we never even take the time, if we can be distracted enough
from being able to really think or feel...
- Yeah.
- Feel, really, probably, starting with feeling.
- Yeah.
- Then...
Then we'll be trapped forever, in a way.
- Well...
- Does that make sense at all?
- It's interesting how you say all these really insightful things,
then you keep asking me if it makes sense or not.
- I'm sorry.
- Don't apologize.
- I can't think and talk sometimes at the same time.
I can't feel and speak at the same...
It's just...
- No, but I'm just telling you that...
- Yeah.
- I'm not criticizing...
I'm not...
I'm just noticing something.
- Yeah.
I don't feel like you are appreciated, thanks.
- Yeah.
So here's the thing.
We're born as feeling creatures.
- Right.
- We feel before we think.
- Yes.
- The feeling apparatus is present in us before we're even born.
The thinking apparatus doesn't start developing until much later on.
- That's true.
- So that if there's a scaffolding of healthy feelings,
then our thinking will be aligned with reality.
But it's the feelings that we're feelings.
We're feeling creatures before we're thinking creatures.
- Got it.
- So what you said makes absolute sense from the...
Even from the evolutionary and physiological point of view.
Like animals feel, but they don't necessarily think.
In fact, they don't think.
- Some of them don't.
- But without thinking, without feeling, they wouldn't survive.
- Right.
- You know, and we think we can get by our own thinking.
We got it backwards.
- Yes.
Thank you.