Dr. Gabor Maté on Toxic Culture and the Path Back to the Self

Erik opened with the question that sits underneath most conversations about healing: you talk often about how culture shapes the individual and the environment that surrounds us. So how realistic is it, really, to fully transform or heal yourself while you're still living inside that same environment, while the world around you stays the same?

Maté called it a foundational question and said it points directly at the book he was writing, titled Toxic Culture. His claim is exactly what Erik described. We live inside a culture that works against human beings. It splits people apart, it leans on isolation, it cuts people off from themselves, from nature, from their own work, and from each other. Every one of those breaks is a source of sickness.

The same culture, he said, keeps telling us that our worth comes from what we own, what we achieve, what we manage to acquire, how we look. The message is that we carry no real value simply as people. That makes the work of transformation hard. Getting grounded and reconnecting with yourself runs against everything the culture pipes into our living rooms through the television and the internet.

The hopeful part, in his telling, is that the deep connection to the self that nearly all of us lose somewhere in childhood is still there, still reachable. And there isn't one road to it. The road might run through psychotherapy. It might run through spiritual practice, mindfulness, meditation, yoga. It might come through the body: somatic experiencing, bodywork of many kinds. It might come from going back to nature, or from deliberately building community. Over the past several years he had also started working with psychedelics, which he described as a way for people to slip past the conditioned mind and drop into a deeper contact with themselves and with other layers of reality. There are, he said, many, many ways in. The first step is simpler and stranger than any of them: to see that we are not who we think we are, and that our suffering comes precisely from mistaking ourselves for somebody else.

Erik followed up on the new book. Some readers, he said, might wonder when this sense of separation actually took hold across the global culture. Is it baked into the West, or the East? Where did it come from?

As far as anyone can tell, Maté answered, it likely started with the rise of states and civilization, roughly ten thousand years ago. It has been woven through human civilization ever since. The moment we broke away from nature, we lost the connection to ourselves.

Under capitalism, and in what he suspects is its late and most poisonous stage, the process has sped up enormously. The grip of a small number of people has become visible to anyone willing to look, along with the hunger for power and the pressure people are carrying. The dismantling of older structures like the family and the community, he said, has turned from the exception into the rule.