This incredible "Quote of the Day" post comes from an
interview in the Toronto Standard with Dr. Gabor Maté, Nazi genocide survivor and bestselling author of
Toxic Culture: How Materialistic Society Makes Us Ill.
Maté: People have a need for meaning and for belonging. But this society
defines the value of a human being by how much they can either produce
or consume. For all our talk about human values, we don’t really value
humans for who they are. We value them for what they either give or
purchase.
In other cultures, elders are considered to be people
with wisdom, with experience, with a contribution to make. In our
society, we don’t talk about elders, we talk about ‘the elderly’ – in
other words, we define them by their age. And once they’re no longer
either producers or consumers, they lose their value. We know that the
more isolated people are, the more likely they are to get sick and the
more likely they are to die of their illness. This is a society that
isolates people.
TS: Is there a way to be “in this world, but not of it," so to speak?
Maté: The only way to live healthy in this culture is to be in it but not of
it. And that means being able to see through a value structure that has
materialism as its highest goal. By materialism, I mean that the
control and possession of material goods are seen as the greatest
obsessions. And the people that are seen as the highest achievers are
the ones who acquire and wield more material control than other people
do. To buy into that is to limit our human capacity, and therefore, to
limit human health.
TS: How can a person break through that?
Maté: Does
the person see the connection between their lack of joy or their
depression or their mental illness or their alienation from work or life
or nature – do they see it as a problem? If they don’t see it as a
problem, then there’s no point of giving any type of advice.
More
people are questioning; are we heading in the right direction? Do we
hold the right set of values? Is it serving our physical and mental
health? Is it serving our spiritual health? And by the way, that’s one
of the failures of the medical system - is that it considers people only
in physical terms. The fact that
people have emotional needs is kind of recognized but the relationship
of that to illness is not recognized. And the fact that we have
spiritual needs? We don’t even talk about that.
TS: Why do you think that is?
Maté: Because
the essence of capitalism is to reduce things to commodities. Or to
reduce people to things that consume commodities. Everything else is
secondary. So we have a lot of religion but very little spirituality.
