"A sense of deficient emptiness pervades our entire culture"

Above is an interview from a podcast entitled The One You Feed -- episode number 249, published on October 16, 2018.

Beginning at approximately 0:29:30 into this interview, the host of the podcast, Eric Zimmer, asks his guest, Dr. Gabor Mate, to discuss a quotation from Dr. Mate's bestselling book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. This quotation can be found on page 39 of the 2010 New American Edition of that book.

I have listened to many interviews with Dr. Mate since discovering his work and I believe the following exchange contains an excellent articulation by Dr. Mate of some of the extremely powerful truths he has learned (truths which can be seen to be articulated in the world's ancient myths as well):

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ERIC ZIMMER: I'm going to read something else that you wrote, and then maybe let you take it from there. You say: 

"A sense of deficient emptiness pervades our entire culture. The drug addict is more painfully conscious of this void than most people, and has limited means of escaping it. The rest of us find other ways of suppressing our fear of emptiness, or of distracting ourselves from it." 

So, what's happening in our culture that you think is breeding this dysfunction? 

DR. GABOR MATE: Well, if you permit me to be self-referential here, I'd like you to make your way over to another book I wrote, called Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. So one of the things we point out in that book -- in fact what we do point out in that book, is that children have this primary need to attach to a parent -- to attach to nurturing adults. That's just a need of all mammals -- and birds for that matter. Without that, the child doesn't survive.  

So as long as the culture provides an environment in which children are related to nurturing adults, especially in a village or a clan or a community setting -- that child is very secure. One of the things that our culture has done is it has broken up the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood.  

And, it has also put tremendous stress on the nuclear family, so that the parents don't see their kids most of the day. And very often, of course, children come from broken families, where there's not even two parents.  

Children have to attach to somebody. They cannot handle life without being connected to somebody. And who do they attach to? Who do they connect to? They connect to the peer group. 

So now you have this phenomenon of peer attachment, where children are now getting their modeling and their values and their mentoring and their emotional nurturing -- such as it is -- not from adults in their life anymore, but from other children.  

And of course, immature creatures cannot lead one another to maturity. So this has all kinds of negative consequences. 

So, any parent who's bringing up kids -- adolescent, at any age or below, that's just a book that I think it's important to read. And it's not my work, actually, it's the work of a psychologist friend of mine, a brilliant man named Gordon Neufeld. I did the writing with him. But one of the things that happens in our culture is the breakup of family, and community, and clan. And that leaves children without the proper modeling, mentoring, and cultural guidance. 

ERIC ZIMMER: Talk about a depressed mother, for example -- you know, postpartum depression or whatever -- you make the point that in the past, when there was more, as you said, clan or village or bigger family, there would be other people to help pick up that slack, so to speak. There would be other people to help give the child maybe what they weren't able to get in that period with the mother. But in the culture we live in, sometimes that's the only person. 

DR. GABOR MATE: It goes beyond that. First of all, we know that post-partum depression in the mother is associated with an increased risk of behavior problems: ADHD, and a whole lot of other things that predispose to addiction, in the child. But it goes beyond that -- because, in a society where there's proper support for mothers, you don't have the risk of postpartum depression!  

Post-partum depression is not an automatic biological thing that happens to women: it happens in a context. And the context is lack of emotional support. And I can tell you that as a husband whose wife had a post-partum depression -- and, at a time when I was a workaholic doctor who was not available to support her. And that had an impact on our children.  

And so, even the risk of post-partum depression -- and the rates of which is going higher and higher in our culture -- has to do with cultural factors. And the book I'm working on -- and I don't have a working title for it yet, but the general theme is "Toxic Culture," and what I mean by that is that: a culture is the context in which we live -- the social, emotional, relational interactions that we have, the work that we do, the entertainment that we pursue, the practices that we engage in -- that's broadly speaking what it means to have a culture.  

There's another meaning for the word "culture," and that's simply a laboratory broth in which you rear or you nature micro-organisms. And what would you call a laboratory culture in which many of the micro-organisms were sick? You would call it a toxic culture! 

I'm suggesting that our culture, if you look at the rates of disease: sixty percent of American adults are at least on one medication or another? This is in the richest and the most medically-advanced society in the history of the world? Well, what's going on? What's going on is that the culture that we live in, and in a whole lot of ways, some of which we've talked about, others of which I'm writing about, actually undermines people's health.  

And so that, when we look at individual disease, individual addiction, whether we're looking at mental health issues, childhood development issues like ADHD, or so-called oppositional-defiant disorder, or depression, anxiety: whether we're looking at cancer, auto-immune disease -- we're actually looking at the impact of the culture on the individual. Because you cannot separate the individual from the environment, and you cannot separate the mind from the body.

And so when people are living in a stressed culture, they have stressed minds. And stressed minds result in stressed bodies.  

ERIC ZIMMER: In the book that you're working on, and in the research that you do, do you have recommendations for those of us who live within that culture today, or how we can be more immune to it, or how we can avoid some of the more toxic parts of the culture?   

DR. GABOR MATE: The first point of course is to recognize the culture that we're living in: to see it, not to absorb it, uncritically, but to see in what ways it actually undermines human needs. As much as it has provided, and as creative and as economically dynamic and excitedly advanced as this culture has been -- at the same time, it significantly ignores, and even insults, some deep human needs. So we have to recognize that, and not buy into it.  

Now the various books that I've written, whether it's on ADHD, or stress and physical health -- cancer, autoimmune disease -- there's recommendations in each of them. And the new book will be more focused on, yes, what we can actually do. Because obviously, just because I publish a book, or anybody publishes a book, that's not going to change the culture. So we're going to have to live with this for a long time -- certainly in my lifetime.  

But the more aware we are, the more we set up conscious practices in our lives that do not "feed the bad wolf," if I can go back to your analogy, now in a positive sense -- the more mindfully aware we are, the more we recognize that our value and our worth as human beings is not dependent on what other people think of us, is not dependent on how good we look, is not dependent on what we own or what we can do -- the more we can actually respect and honor our own value, the more immune we are to the blandishments of a culture that for the most part would have us believe that our value depends on externals. 

And of course, what is addiction, but a desperate way to fill in from the outside that emptiness that you mentioned that we experience from within! 

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I have added bold typeface to the points Dr. Mate is making at the end of the quoted passage, regarding the extreme pressure we feel from "a culture that for the most part would have us believe that our value depends on externals," leading to a desperate attempt to try and "fill from the outside that emptiness" which in fact cannot be filled by chasing after external things or external approval.

Compare what Dr. Mate is saying in the above selected section of the interview, particularly in the final passage about our dysfunctional culture's message that our value depends on externals, leading to a desperate attempt to try to fill in our emptiness from the outside, with the ancient teaching that Dr. Peter Kingsley traces in his essential book In the Dark Places of Wisdom (1999).

Here is a previous post, from 2015, discussing that book, and containing several powerful quotations from Dr. Kingsley's book, including parts of the following vital passages:

• "What isn't there, in front of our eyes, is usually more real than what is. We can see that at every level of existence. Even when we're finally where we want to be -- with the person we love, with the things we struggled for -- our eyes are still on the horizon. They're still on where to go next, what to do next, what we want the person we love to do and be. If we just stay where we are in the present moment, seeing what we're seeing and hearing what we're hearing and forgetting everything else, we feel we're about to die; and our mind tortures us until we think of something else to live for. We have to keep finding a way away from where we are, into what we imagine is the future" (33).

• "And there's a great secret: we all have that vast missingness deep inside us. The only difference between us and the mystics is that they learn to face what we find ways of running away from. That's the reason why mysticism has been pushed to the periphery of our culture: because the more we feel that nothingness inside us, the more we feel the need to fill the void. So we try to substitute this and that, but nothing lasts. We keep wanting something else, needing some other need to keep us going -- until we come to the point of our death and find ourselves still wanting the thousand substitutes we're no longer able to have. Western culture is a past master of the art of substitution. It offers and never delivers because it can't. It has lost the power even to know what needs to be delivered, so it offers substitutes instead. What's most important is missing, and dazzling in its absence. And what we're offered is often just a substitute for something far finer that once used to exist, or still does exist, but has nothing in common with it except the name. Even religion and spirituality and humanity's highest aspirations become wonderful substitutes" (34 - 35).

• "Always we want to learn from outside, from absorbing other people's knowledge. It's safer that way. The trouble is that it's always other people's knowledge. We already have everything we need to know, in the darkness inside ourselves. The longing is what turns us inside out until we find the sun and the moon and the stars inside" (67).

The world's ancient myths, preserved in cultures around the globe, on every inhabited continent and island, point us towards the recovery of that "missingness," which cannot be "filled in from the outside," no matter how wonderful the external substitute.

Tragically, even the ancient texts which point us towards the truth that, as Peter Kingsley says, "We already have everything we need to know, in the darkness inside ourselves," have for centuries been twisted to the point that they are often presented as though teaching the very opposite message -- that we need to pursue something or someone or some spirituality outside of ourselves.

When we are told that the stories in the Bible, for example, are supposedly about literal figures from ancient terrestrial history, this approach (almost by definition) externalizes the message of those ancient texts, as if they are about someone outside of us, someone separate from us, someone we must pursue outside of ourselves.

But this is exactly the way in which we are offered a substitute -- a substitute for what we are actually missing, and a substitute for what the world's ancient wisdom is actually pointing us towards recovering.

As Dr. Gabor Mate declares in the passage highlighted in bold at the end of the extended quotation cited above: "our value and our worth as human beings is not dependent on what other people think of us, is not dependent on how good we look, is not dependent on what we own, or what we can do."

We already have intrinsic value, without having to do anything, or be anyone other than who we are. And we already have access to everything we need -- as Peter Kingsley puts it: "in the darkness inside ourselves."


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top image: Wikimedia commons (link).