Archive for category: #Sensuousness #Feeling #Suffering #Emotion

Umwelt: The Hidden Sensory World of Animals

Ira

Mon, 10/31/2022 – 02:24

The anger and sadness in culture seems to reflect people’s growing disappointment with their lives.

For many years, Achut Deng’s survival required her to focus, not on the multiple tragedies and near-death experiences that she had endured before reaching the age of 10, but on the safety and stability that she was precariously striving toward. So when she had children of her own, eventually building a middle-class life in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, she decided to protect their innocence—an innocence she herself was never afforded—and keep her story to herself. Or, at least, she tried.

Mere days after Deng brought her eldest son home from the hospital in 2007, her past began tearing through the facade she had built. Lying in bed with the baby one night, she pulled a blanket over herself and the boy. As if dropped into a slingshot, she flew back to the moment when her grandmother Koko was killed protecting her; Koko had used her own body, wrapped in an embroidered Sudanese sheet called a milaya, to shield Deng from a spray of bullets barraging the hut where they were hiding. Deng told her doctor about the flashback, and he diagnosed her with PTSD and postpartum depression. After that, she stayed silent about the experience, and the flashbacks that followed.

Soon, it was the children themselves—Deng’s family grew to include a second and a third son—who tested the boundaries of what she was willing to share. Until recently, she had only told them that she’d grown up in Sudan and come to the United States as a refugee. One afternoon, after she and her eldest, who was 11 at the time, watched a Minions movie together, he brought up a film he had seen in school that depicted malnourished children in Africa, and asked, “Mom, was that real?”

“I didn’t think they were ready to know,” Deng told me in a recent interview. “I felt like, What good is it going to do to them? I wasn’t thinking of anything positive.”

“The truth is,” she added, “I haven’t seen those videos, but for all I know, I could be one of the children in them. That was literally me.”

Deng is now in the midst of a dramatic about-face in parenting style following yet another near-death experience, this time with the coronavirus—which made her realize she could die before her children knew who she was. She had made sure that their childhoods were comfortable and devoid of hardship. But in concealing her early experiences, she realized, she had been giving her boys the false impression that life—even a stable one—can exist without suffering.

[Read: How parents can help shield kids from a hurricane’s trauma]

Her new memoir for young readers, Don’t Look Back, was written with her boys in mind, but she also wanted to offer other young people the vital lesson that extreme hardship can be the source of great resilience, and something from which it is possible to move on. The book spans her personal history from age 6 to 25, a decade after she arrived in the United States. It begins with Deng’s vivid memories of her youth on a family farm in what is now South Sudan, surrounded by loving, mostly female relatives. Many of the men, including her father, had been required to join the army before she was born and fight in the second Sudanese civil war; most never returned home once they were conscripted.

As Deng grew up and the fighting continued, younger and younger relatives were called to take up arms, including her 7-year-old uncle. Her perspective as a narrator evolves in the book as she ages, but her observations are astute even in her earlier years. In gripping scenes packed with the kind of granular detail to which a child would be especially attuned, she recounts the two largest ethnic groups in South Sudan, Dinka and Nuer—which had previously been allied—turning against each other. Soon, almost everyone Deng knew had left to fight, been killed, or gone missing. “My legs were too small and my strides too short. I tripped over exposed roots and thick clumps of grass,” she recalls of the night when she, her grandmother, and their neighbors first fled their homes following a violent ambush. Racing through a forest full of dangerous predators, she overhears a dog barking to protect its owner from the approaching rebel forces. Deng’s mind wanders to her own dog, Panyliap, who she silently prays is safe at home waiting for her. Then two gunshots ring out, and the stranger’s dog goes silent. Fearing the worst, she pleads to herself, “Please bark … please bark.”

Effectively orphaned at the age of 6, Deng was taken in by Adual, her mother’s best friend, a widow without any children and one of the book’s most memorable characters. Adual often carried Deng during a thousand-mile journey on foot to what was the largest refugee camp in the world, located in the Kenyan town of Kakuma (Swahili for “nowhere”). She made shoes for Deng out of wood and leaves to protect her tiny, blistered feet; she lanced boils on Deng’s body caused by guinea worms, whose larvae she ingested through the puddle water they sometimes had to drink. In Kakuma, where food was scarce, Adual skipped meals so that Deng and other children could have more to eat.

I first heard Deng’s story while reporting on how the coronavirus pandemic was affecting immigrants. When I learned that Smithfield, the South Dakota meat plant where she worked, had the largest single-source outbreak in the country, I asked the head of the union there to connect me with sick workers. He told me about a single mother of three sons who had nearly died from the virus.

True to her mostly private inclinations, during our first interview, Deng walked me through her experience with COVID-19, only occasionally sprinkling in details that piqued my interest in her backstory. She mentioned that her wages at Smithfield helped support nine family members living in three different countries, and that at her sickest point, when she felt like she had a boulder on her chest that allowed in only the shallowest of breaths, she’d planted herself on the living-room couch, refusing to fall asleep because she feared she wouldn’t wake up. She was not going to let her children grow up as orphans the way that she had, she told me. Two engrossing interviews that were each more than three hours long yielded an article and a podcast that combined Deng’s pandemic experience with a truncated version of her immigration story.

During the course of my reporting, Deng confided in me that for some time, she had privately wondered if her story might inspire other people going through difficult times. The answer came when Joy Peskin, the executive editorial editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers, reached out about commissioning a memoir from Deng that would expand on her youth even further. Initially, Deng was torn about the offer. She thought that single parents would benefit most from her story, based on the many who had told her, in response to my coverage, that they considered her a role model. But Peskin sold Deng on the idea of, at least in her first book, speaking directly to readers of the same age she was when her life was first upended.

[Read: Separating kids from their families can permanently damage their brains]

The book was co-written by Keely Hutton, the author of Soldier Boy and Secret Soldiers, two books about children and conflict set amid the Ugandan Civil War and in Europe during World War I. When the collaboration began, Deng was working overnight shifts at the meat plant, so she and Hutton mapped out a strict schedule, aiming to draft one chapter a week. Deng would get off work at around three in the morning; go home to nap for a couple of hours; take her youngest son, Mayom, to school (the others were old enough to take themselves); and then sleep a bit more. Then she and Hutton would work on the book until it was time for Deng to return to Smithfield. On Mondays and Tuesdays, Deng would write down what she remembered for that particular chapter—“stream of consciousness, no punctuation,” she told me. On Tuesdays, Deng and Hutton would speak on the phone for hours, filling in missing details and establishing a structure. On Wednesdays, Hutton would write and then send Deng a draft, which she would read to her sons, now 15, 14, and 8, at the dinner table on Sundays. “I knew I had very strong boys on my hands” based on their early reactions, Deng recalled. The boys were shocked, occasionally to the point of tears—but they weren’t shaken in the way she had expected, or to a degree that concerned her.

On a video call during a rare night off from basketball practice, the boys told me that hearing their mother’s story made them admire her more. It also helped them understand some of Deng’s tics, such as her obsessive stocking of the refrigerator, to the point that food was often spoiling. They assured her that they had never gone to bed hungry, as Deng had during childhood, and that she could cut back a bit.

Though Deng’s story sometimes feels impossibly painful to take in, she also recounts how, as a child, she conjured the strength to persevere through malaria, a near-fatal snake bite, and exhaustion that made her want to stop walking even if it meant she would die. The story is also flecked with Deng’s sense of humor—there is her first ride down an escalator, straddling three steps and begging for God’s mercy, and an early trip to an American grocery store, where she and a friend discover, to their bewilderment, a special section for food prepared just for dogs.

The book may also offer young readers an introduction to the mass migrations under way now: the millions of Ukrainians who have fled invading Russian forces this year, the exodus of Venezuelans escaping political turmoil and a severe financial crisis. These incidents will affect the displaced for the rest of their life—even those who, like Deng, hope to build anew. In a scene reminiscent of reunifications between children and parents separated at the southern border during the Trump administration, Deng watches, confused, as a young friend’s body goes rigid and her face remains expressionless when she finds her mother again after years of forced separation. Only later does Deng come to understand that her friend was so traumatized by the separation from her mother that she went into shock and was initially unable to process her emotions when they were finally reunited.

At a time when many parents are debating if and how to share the seemingly ceaseless and overwhelming bad news of the day with their children, Don’t Look Back reminds us why stories about confronting extreme human challenges can have a profoundly positive and even lifesaving impact. This was true even for Deng herself during her hardest moments. “It is my hope that just as I drew strength and faith from Koko, Adual, and every person who helped carry me, my story will help carry you,” Deng writes in the acknowledgments. “I pray it provides you some light when the nights are too long, and the darkness is too heavy. You are strong. Don’t let go. Never forget who you are.”

The doomsday tone that is prevalent in today’s pop music follows a shift in Gen Z’s perception of a climate-changed future. | Redferns

Gen Z is channeling climate anxiety and anger into music.

All summer, 24-year-old Augusta Senenssie had Billie Eilish’s song “Overheated” stuck in her head. In June 2022, Eilish hosted a series of climate talks in London by the same name, alongside her UK tour dates. In July and August, the UK faced a series of heat waves, breaking records for the hottest temperatures ever recorded in the country. Senenssie walked around her sweltering London neighborhood with searing music in her ears. Another of her favorites, “Fire on the Mountain” by Asa, portends doom with lyrics like “One day, the river will overflow / And there’ll be nowhere for us to go /And we will run, run / Wishing we had put out the fire, oh.”

As a youth council member of the climate action organization Earth Uprising, Senenssie is closer to the levers of climate power than most of her peers. Her activism has brought her to United Nations conferences on climate change and youth. But that doesn’t necessarily make her more optimistic. “You have people say loads of congratulatory things, and have you go and speak at all of these important summits, but your work has no binding impact on what’s being decided at the high levels that affects everyone,” she said.

Senenssie is not alone in her anger. That doomer tone you’re sensing in the internet ether — where young people are posting memes about this was not only the hottest summer of our lives but also the coldest summer of the rest of our lives — follows a shift in Gen Z’s perception of a climate-changed future. This sentiment slips into the memes they make, the way they relate to their peers and families, and even the music they listen to. TikToks set to Pinegrove’s “Orange,” a song about California’s devastating 2020 wildfire summer, show young fans crying on camera above comments like “doomed species in its death throes” and “I’m giving up.” Like listening to devastating breakup songs after you’ve been dumped, young people are bingeing music about the end of the world to wallow in their climate despair.

To Gen Z, the future doesn’t look bright, but it does look hot

The first Gen Zers came of age alongside the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report that detailed the disastrous impacts of a projected 1.5°C global temperature rise. That summer was filled with headlines about humanity having only 12 years left before certain catastrophe, and Gen Z became convinced that their futures were over before they even started.

“This generation feels like they’re facing an unprecedented threat … like, we’re not gonna get through this. This is forever,” said environmental studies professor Sarah Jaquette Ray. In her book A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, Ray describes asking her class to visualize a positive future where climate change had been successfully mitigated. She found that these students were unable to envision a future of any kind — their anxiety cut off their ability to see themselves living into adulthood.

“I used to listen to a lot of pop-punk music that was all about how it might get better when you grow up. Now it’s like I’m older, and it’s absolutely terrifying and I’m not having a great time,” says Kelsie Herzog, a 25-year-old TikTok creator who makes playlists and gives music recommendations to her 130,000 followers. Her tastes have changed to favor music that captures her anger and fear. One song she has on heavy rotation is “Colony Collapse” by Snag, with lyrics like “The more that I learn, the more I believe the earth is a corpse laid at our feet.”

A 2021 survey in The Lancet showed that 56 percent of people ages 16 to 25 believe “humanity is doomed,” and 75 percent describe the future as “frightening,” highlighting a generational divide in outlook on climate change. Senenssie describes a “patriarchal arrogance” that she encounters as being the fuel to her climate grief. She feels like adults whose daily lives aren’t yet affected by climate change are quick to minimize her fears.

Older generations tend to compare climate change to other threats like economic recessions and wars, Ray confirms. “There’s that kind of battle over whose existential threats were worse.” Older generations who have overcome their own challenges believe Gen Z’s anxieties will be healed with time. But seeing no evidence that an end to climate change is in sight, young people feel dismissed, and seek validation for their fears elsewhere.

Listening to music feels like being heard

That’s why, post-IPCC special report, releases that describe the world ending in floods, droughts, and fires, like Hozier’s Wasteland, Baby!, Childish Gambino’s “Feels Like Summer,” and Soccer Mommy’s “newdemo” are making such an impact with the under-25 set — these millennial songwriters can relate to their generational frustrations and fears.

Tamara Lindeman, 37, of the folk band the Weather Station, describes her lyrics as an attempt to process her own emotions around climate change. “There’s this term ‘soft denial.’ You know, but you act like you don’t know. I was in that place for a few years, just avoiding the topic in my mind, avoiding the topic in the news, and then it just hit me all over again,” Lindeman said. She went on to write lyrics like “I’m pretty tired of this bait-and-switch / I don’t wanna have to smile when I open my gift, and there’s nothing inside it,” which speak to Gen Z’s frustration with older generations who minimize their concerns about the future.

“With other things that you might be afraid of, you might be able to do research and you might be able to lessen your fear.” she said. “With climate, when you do research it, it expands [your fear]. I think what’s important about this issue is fear and grief is an appropriate and accurate response.” Her music reflects that climate anxiety isn’t an emotion to solve or get over. Like her fans, Lindeman experiences it thrumming in the background of her everyday life.

But apocalypse music isn’t some cesspool of anguish from which listeners can never escape. Once fans find validation for their feelings, they look around and find a bunch of other people feeling the same way. “I have this huge community of people that like the same music as me. We can all relate to the lyrics, be sad and angsty and all that stuff. Weird as it sounds, it feels kind of comforting,” says Herzog. Think about the role that music fandom plays in identity formation and community-building in adolescence — the people who listen to your favorite band are the only ones who really get you. Then imagine that, unlike your parents or classmates, the person next to you at the concert takes your deepest fears seriously.

“Say somebody was experiencing anxiety, got involved in the community, found their people, and then got involved in some climate actions,” said Ray. “It wasn’t the actions that they did that alleviated the anxiety. … The antidote to our feelings is the same antidote to the climate crisis, which is community.” The oft-memed idea that individual actions don’t matter in the face of corporate inaction can leave young people feeling powerless, no matter how many car rides or fast-fashion hauls they forgo. But building the kinds of relationships they’ll need for climate resiliency seems much more within reach.

Once young people have an outlet for their grief, it can start to transform. Bartees Strange funneled his own anxiety into his work at a climate advocacy nonprofit for more than five years. Then, disillusioned and burned out, the 33-year-old songwriter quit his job in 2020 to release his debut album Live Forever. He described his frustration with white colleagues for whom climate change was their first personal experience of injustice. “My life has always been impacted by a third party since forever, so I’m watching people in the climate movement go through emotions that I went through as an 8-year-old,” he said. “But when you live through it and you’re able to celebrate, and you process it in a way where you can uplift other people, then grief can become fuel for beautiful things.”

Strange’s music, like Lindeman’s, starts with grief, but songs like “Mulholland Drive” take listeners on a cycle of death and rebirth with lyrics like “I don’t believe in the bullshit of wondering when we die / I’ve seen the ending, it’s all in your face and your eyes / I’ve seen how we die, I know how to lose.”

For young fans feeling like they’re watching the end of the world, Strange offers up the possibility that letting go of one idea of the future makes room for a new one to begin. He hints at what Ray calls the “radical imagination” needed to see a future that lies just beyond certain doom. That imagination is crucial for finding climate solutions, but the trick is that it can’t be accessed by trying to bypass climate emotions with dismissal or detachment.

For Senenssie, that future looks like resisting the pull to pessimism that only wealthy countries can afford. While those least responsible for the climate crisis are already feeling its worst effects, she reminds me, young people in the Global South do not have the luxury of giving in. And listening to music from artists around the world is one way of maintaining her connection to the global climate movement. “The emotions can be sort of overwhelming,” says Senenssie. “But I think of the beauty of the fact that in this movement and in this space together, we feel so deeply, and we’re so interconnected.”

How does objective reality emerge from the palette of possibilities supplied by quantum mechanics? That question — the deepest and most vexed issue posed by the theory — is still the subject of arguments a century old. Possible explanations for how observations of the world yield definite, “classical” results, drawing on different interpretations of what quantum mechanics means…

Source

Insider Brief: Scientists from Trinity College Dublin claim our brains could use quantum computation. The discovery —published in the Journal of Physics Communications —  comes after they adapted an idea developed to prove the existence of quantum gravity to explore the human brain and its workings. If the team’s results can be confirmed, they would enhance […]

If you’re feeling anxious about climate change, the common wisdom goes, there’s an antidote: Take action. Maybe you can alleviate your worries by doing something positive, like going to a protest, becoming an advocate for mass transit, or trying to get an environmental champion elected.

New research reveals that these anxieties are not just Western concerns — they’re common among young people on nearly every continent — but that the ability to do something about them depends on where you live. “The question is whether you have the opportunity or not to engage in those behaviors,” said Charles Ogunbode, a psychologist at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.

The study, recently published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, takes the broadest look yet at climate anxiety around the globe. Ogunbode and researchers all over the world surveyed more than 10,000 university students in 32 countries, asking how climate change made them feel. They found that it was hurting people’s mental health virtually everywhere, from Brazil to Uganda, Portugal to the Philippines. 

Almost half of the young people surveyed said they were “very” or “extremely” worried about climate change. Nearly a quarter felt “terrified,” and even more felt either “very” or “extremely” anxious. Previous research has suggested that climate anxiety is widespread: Last year, a survey in 11 countries around the world found that 45 percent of teens and young adults said that climate anxiety was affecting their daily lives and ability to function.

“Climate anxiety” has become a catch-all for how worries about our overheating planet affect people’s mental health. Experts say that feeling grief, fear, and anxiety is a logical response to the catastrophic situation. But some researchers have argued that the phrase “climate anxiety” is ambiguous — a buzzword, not a clinical diagnosis — and that it tends to resonate more with white and wealthy people than those experiencing the most severe effects of climate disasters. 

While the study didn’t look at how people respond to the phrase itself, the results show that it’s not just those in wealthier countries like the United States who are wrestling with tough emotions as a result of climate change. Ogunbode thinks developing countries should play a bigger part in the conversation, since the link between emotions and mental health is “just as strong” as it is in rich countries.

“We very rarely find anyone talking about how people in Ghana or the Philippines feel about climate change,” he said. “It’s almost like, ‘Look, as long as we can provide the basic stuff — people can eat, they have a place to sleep, they have water — that’s it. That’s fine.’”

The new study found that across the board, people’s concerns about climate change motivated them to want to take action. But anxiety played a role in motivating people to adopt environmentally-friendly behaviors, especially in richer, more individualistic countries — places where people are more likely to fly carbon-guzzling planes or drive large cars for small trips.

The most apparent barriers to direct action were political. It’s not as easy to protest climate change in a country that doesn’t protect the right to free speech or demonstrations. People worrying about the climate were more likely to engage in demonstrations in just under half of the countries studied, most of them in Europe. The connection was the strongest in Finland, one of the world’s most democratic countries, and the weakest in China, among the world’s least.

In three-quarters of the countries studied, climate anxiety appears to lead to eco-friendly behaviors — avoiding food waste, for instance, or walking and biking instead of driving. The exceptions were Egypt, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan, and Tanzania.

In some places, people don’t have access to much information about what kind of actions are effective, Ogunbode said. Looking at open-ended responses to the survey, people in countries like the Philippines and Malaysia indicated that the survey questions themselves — about saving energy and reducing waste — had provided them with new information, Ogunbode said. “I got the sense that a lot of people only realized when they were reading through the questions, ‘Oh, maybe there’s something I can be doing.’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Study: Climate anxiety is spreading all over the planet on Oct 17, 2022.

World-renowned physician Gabor Maté’s new book examines the profound physical and psychological harms of “normal” capitalist society, which makes a small minority very well-off while sowing illness and despair on a vast scale.

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Gabor Mate, the renowned Vancouver doctor in Toronto, 2009. (Steve Russell / Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Dr Gabor Maté is a world-renowned author and physician, best known for his work on trauma, addiction, and childhood development. His books bring together science, myth, case studies, and his own personal history — from his beginnings in Nazi-occupied Budapest to his participation in the radical student movements of the 1960s to his experience working with drug addiction and mental illness in Vancouver’s most distressed communities. Gabor’s perspective on medicine is dialectical and holistic, emphasizing the social as much as the individual when considering disease and dysfunction.

His latest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, is cowritten with his son Daniel Maté, a musical theater playwright based in New York City. In it the Matés examine the profound physical and psychological harms of “normal” capitalist society, shattering the myths of a system that makes a small minority very well-off while sowing illness and despair on a vast scale.

In this interview, Gabor and Daniel speak with American psychotherapist Chandler Dandridge about their new book, capitalism’s ability to absorb challenges and resist change, the trauma of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 defeat, the genius of Michael Brooks, and finding ways to bridge the gap between the spiritual and the political.

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Chandler Dandridge

Your book explicitly identifies capitalism as the source of the “toxic culture” referenced in the book’s subtitle. What myths of capitalism contribute to this toxic culture?

Gabor Maté

Well, first of all the myth of freedom. People believe they’re living in a free society but in fact they have very little actual authority over their lives. Authority is exercised in significant areas by a small elite, which Marx would have called the ruling class. That’s true when it comes to the control of information, and obviously to the economy. The decisions that affect people’s lives are all made not for their own benefit but for the purpose of profit. And they are made by very few people under the guise of what’s called a free society.

The decisions that affect people’s lives are all made not for their own benefit but for the purpose of profit.

The second myth is capitalism’s essential assumption about human nature — that we are fundamentally selfish, individualistic, aggressive, and competitive. It’s false. It goes quite contrary to what we know about human evolution and genuine human needs.

Then there’s the impact of racism, which capitalism has done so much to invent. And I don’t mean a conspiracy here — it happened largely organically. The more you can divide people, the more people see other people as their enemies, the less they can see who’s actually pulling the strings. So that for the white American working class to believe about immigrants and blacks, “If only they weren’t so uppity, if they only weren’t so demanding, we wouldn’t be threatened.” It’s a myth. But it’s a very helpful myth from the perspective of diverting people’s attention from the real source of the problems.

Daniel Maté

The birth of race theory coincides with colonialism and plunder of foreign lands. If you’re the British Empire — or the Dutch or the Spanish or the French — and you want to rationalize and justify a system whose entire mode of operation is to travel the seven seas and pillage, kill, rape, plunder and extract, it’s helpful to have a view of other people as subordinate to you genetically, spiritually, and morally. So the system invents ideology to underwrite its own chosen commitments and activities, and then normalizes that ideology.

Consuming is not the same as nourishing or feeding. And ballooning outward growth is not the same thing as developing in a healthy way.

In addition to what my dad said, I think there are attendant sub-myths of capitalism, including some of the core concepts that are just taken as given in any economics course or New York Times op-ed. Growth, consumption — think about these words. Growth is the aim. And what does growth mean? Growth means a mushrooming proliferation of a certain economic metric called the GDP. And what’s that connected to? Consumption, which is just people buying stuff and then consuming stuff. But consuming is not the same as nourishing or feeding. And ballooning outward growth is not the same thing as developing in a healthy way. These sort of distortions of possibly healthy ideas become the ideological tenets of a system that’s bent on its own perpetuation.

Chandler Dandridge

You all mention a couple of times in the book that myths can serve a healthy purpose. What might that look like?

Daniel Maté

I think we have to understand myth in the old sense of the word. The way we use myth in the title is the way most people in this society use the word myth: to mean fabrication, falsehood, old wives’ tale, or urban legend. But legends and myths have been a bedrock of the human experience and part of the way we’ve made meaning out of a very complicated, chaotic world ever since we arrived on the scene. We’re mythmaking machines, and it has had a very positive effect on many cultures.

If you look at the way this book is trying to encourage people to think about things like health and illness, it is presenting it in a more mythic framework, in that everything has meaning. There’s metaphor in everything. Everything is connected. Everything is for some kind of purpose. Everything is tied to some kind of journey that the soul is on — trying to reunite itself with itself, to come out of illusion into clarity. All of these things are mythic archetypes.

And if you look at any of the people in the book whose healing stories are told, they found some mythic connection between them and the natural world, between their earliest wounds and their deepest gifts. You could put any of these in a well-written Hollywood movie or a great novel, and they’d be very compelling. So I think it’s not a coincidence that toward the end of the book we remind people that myth has its place.

Chandler Dandridge

In the book, you write about Gabor’s medical training, which insisted on viewing illness as a strictly individual phenomenon. What would medical training look like under a new, more collective social system?

Gabor Maté

First of all it would teach the science, which is not even vaguely controversial, in regards to mind-body unity. It would stop separating people’s emotional lives from their physiology. And teach that emotional life and physiology are affected by external circumstances, such that it’s futile and foolish to speak of the individual organism as an isolated entity. In other words, imagine if we actually followed the science for a change rather than just following prejudice or entrenched habit or—

Daniel Maté

Ideology.

Gabor Maté

Or ideology. The second thing it would do is actually train doctors to take care of their own traumas and stresses rather than to ignore them, rather than to suck it up and to keep going in order to get ahead in the system. And then, of course, there’d be trauma education to the extent that the science demands it, which is a high degree of necessity. We would teach doctors about trauma. Not that they all need to be trauma specialists, but they should all be aware of it.

And then, of course, the question becomes: How do we organize health care? Do we organize it on a piecework basis so that every patient is like a widget that you turn out in as short a time as possible? Is that the kind of medical system we want? Any medical system predicated on profit is going to demand a certain kind of practice from its participants, from the people that serve it. Any research system that is largely fueled by the profits of the pharmaceutical companies will churn out certain kinds of information and ignore other subjects. A new system would require a vast change in approach. Not to mention there’d be far more attention paid to the sense of agency and participation of the patient themselves, and far more listening to their experience.

Daniel Maté

All kinds of luminaries throughout the years have made observations, whether intuitively or based on evidence and observation and some hard research, that point to the mind-body unity, the link between emotions and health, the link between biography and biology. These figures include William Osler in Canada in the nineteenth century, Soma Weiss who was a Harvard researcher in the early twentieth century. But it all just went down the medical memory hole.

There are certain human needs that are not negotiable. We can’t negotiate them away. We can give up on them, but then we suffer when we do.

How would [Noam] Chomsky explain that? Well, there’s an ideological apparatus that filters out certain kinds of evidence that don’t fit the system. And so the antidote, as Chomsky recommended — you can tell I’m excited to be speaking to Jacobin — is a course of intellectual self-defense.

I think what this book in some ways is advocating is for patients to marshal their own resources and go into the system knowing what the system’s good for and what the system’s not so good for. Insist as much as you can on having that agency. Be aware that your doctor may not know to ask certain questions. Be hip to the tricks of a system that actually has been concertedly, assiduously, and at this point almost deliberately ignoring very solid evidence that points in a more mind-body, holistic direction for a long time.

Chandler Dandridge

That makes me think of the bit in the book where you talk about healing as a return to wholeness — a kind of self-retrieval, not self-improvement. I’m wondering what that looks like in a personal context, but also a political one.

Gabor Maté

You know, a lot of Aboriginal peoples talk about soul retrieval. It’s like we lose our souls at some point and we have to try to get them back. Well, that’s what I see as the journey toward wholeness. In a personal sense it means being in touch with one’s body and one’s feelings, and not ignoring them for the sake of being accepted or approved of by others.

In a social sense we have really lost the way. There are certain human needs that are not negotiable. We can’t negotiate them away. We can give up on them, but then we suffer when we do. When they’re not met, there’s going to be suffering and ill health in every sense of the word. They include having a purpose in life, having agency and authority in one’s own life, and being connected to other people. Meeting all of these needs is required for full health, full wholeness. On a social level, that means that all the institutions and political structures and ideologies that undermine those qualities need to be either jettisoned or transformed.

Daniel Maté

Alongside that, there’s the need to be woke in the original and I think more useful sense of the word, as in aware of the ways that those systems will present simulacra of those needs in place of the real ones and sell them to us. Name any human need that’s genuine and nourishing — agency, connection, contact, fulfillment, happiness, aliveness — and the system we’re living under has a Soylent Green version of it.

If you actually look around the culture at people acting out in various ways, everyone’s just coping. Everyone’s just trying to find some sense of agency, pride, belonging, tribe — these things that in a sane society, in a healthy world, we would actually all have access to in a sustainable way that doesn’t pit us against each other.

Soul retrieval is a collective process. One aspect would be to look around and see how hungry everyone is for it and to get with the program. As we say in the book, healing naturally wants to happen. Human beings are naturally trying to get back to some kind of spiritual homeostasis, and a physical one too. We just have to recognize the signs and recognize the opportunities when they come.

Everyone’s just trying to find some sense of agency, pride, belonging, tribe — these things that in a sane society, in a healthy world, we would actually all have access to in a sustainable way that doesn’t pit us against each other.

For a lot of us, the Bernie campaign, especially the last one, held out a vision of a future where these needs are actually provided for — or at least not actively frustrated by the system. What happened happened, and there are plenty of ways to analyze that. But it was amazing to just look around and see how hungry everybody is for it, and see what it would be like to not contribute to the further division and polarization which just pits us against each other to the system’s profit.

Chandler Dandridge

I want to stay with the Bernie campaign for a minute. Was Bernie’s 2020 campaign defeat traumatic? And how should the Left internalize that trauma to heal from it?

Gabor Maté

Nothing in itself is traumatic. It depends on who it happens to and how they process it. So for some people the demise of the Bernie effort in 2020 could have left them more despairing and constricted, with less sense of agency and possibility — in which case you might say that’s a sort of political trauma. For others, it could have just been instructive about what works and what doesn’t work, and how to move forward by absorbing some of the lessons of that particular setback. Whether it was traumatic or not depends on who’s experiencing it and how they process it.

Daniel Maté

As someone who is much more plugged in to the terminally online left than my dad is, what I have observed is that functionally, collectively, it has been extremely traumatic — and I’m not just talking about individuals, but to the sense of a cohesive, emergent, democratic socialist left with a positive vision. And it almost happened immediately. When it all collapsed, there was a moment of grief and then everyone scrambled for their corners. And you see it in the fracturing of alliances between various media figures, podcasters, YouTube hosts. I mean, in a sense it’s so silly and superficial, but it’s become very rancorous.

People don’t speak to each other anymore. Everyone has now re-siloed themselves in various corners and everyone has their own brand. That sense of a unifying, organizing thread and a vision that everyone could coalesce around has receded. Which doesn’t mean it can never come back, but I do think it’s fractured. The defeat exposed the existing fault lines and exacerbated them. So what’s going to be needed is for some kind of healing to happen, and people to get off it and get back to something positive, because it’s just sad to see how much energy goes into smearing, slandering, and smashing like buttons.

Gabor Maté

As for me personally, it wasn’t traumatic because it was only what I expected. I don’t expect capitalism to allow anybody to vote it out of existence. Nor did Bernie Sanders even come close to threatening to do so. But he was enough of a threat that it was inevitable that within the structures of what are called democratic politics — not just Democratic in a big D sense, but in a broader sense — he was going to be marginalized. He was not going to win. I mean, that’s just obvious. And anybody who was disappointed simply was living in a dream world as far as I’m concerned.

Chandler Dandridge

The folly of youth?

Daniel Maté

He did tell me so. He did tell me so.

Chandler Dandridge

You cite Greta Thunberg as a source of inspiration in the book. Do you think the politics of the younger generation, growing up in the chaotic first two decades of this century, offer some hope for the future?

Gabor Maté

Look, when I was a student radical in the ’60s, the older progressives were saying that we were the hope for the future. There’s always a tendency to look at the younger generation as somehow they’re the ones who are going to do it. It’s not that simple. You don’t hear much about Greta Thunberg anymore, you know?

Chandler Dandridge

No, you don’t.

Gabor Maté

You don’t. And Greta Thunberg was not the first. I quote in the book Severn Cullis-Suzuki whose name you probably don’t even know. But she made a speech in the 1992 UN climate conference in South America. She was twelve years old, bright, articulate, hyperarticulate, very emotionally present, but also very passionate. And she spoke almost exactly in the same words that Greta speaks in now about climate change. And she made a big international sensation as young, attractive, and articulate women will always do. Where’s that today? Nowhere.

We cannot by ourselves turn the wheel of history. We can contribute. And what I’m hoping people will get from the book is the awareness that it’s not only possible to contribute, but it’s also the best thing anybody can do.

This system has the capacity to absorb and to withstand these challenges. So, no, I don’t think it’s a matter of generations. I think it’s a matter of social transformation on a broad scale, a process in which the younger generation will play a role. But I don’t think we can do this willfully. You don’t transform the system just because you decide to. Systemic transformations happen. They’re a historical movement of their own. The challenge is: at whatever stage we are at, what are we going to do? Are we going to act, and are we going to persist? We cannot by ourselves turn the wheel of history. That’s beyond the will of any particular generation or any particular group. We can contribute. And what I’m hoping people will get from the book is the awareness that it’s not only possible to contribute, but it’s also the best thing anybody can do. The rest of it is not necessarily in our hands.

Daniel Maté

I might add two things. Number one, one of the facets of the toxicity of our culture is the way generations are split and alienated from each other. No healthy culture would have such generation gaps where one generation can’t speak the language of the next one, and where we’re presumed to have nothing to learn from each other in either direction. Elders used to be the key wisdom transmission and cultural transmission device. Now we don’t have elders, we have the elderly. Pushing against intergenerational alienation is a key part of bringing the world back together. You see it in healthy political movements. The old guard and the new guard have something to say to each other.

The other thing I’d add is that even though I agree with my dad that some romantic notion that the young will save us is misguided, I do think that each generation born in a particular time has certain gifts they can bring. They have certain unique challenges, too. But this generation? I mean, I’m Gen X, I thought we were jaded. This generation coming of age now is under no illusions that somehow they’re going to inherit a world that’s more prosperous than that of their parents. And that disillusionment as a default posture could also be a superpower. They could use their lived experience to hone a kind of jaundiced view of propaganda and supposed normalcy, which could help them build. However, there’s also the risk of paralysis, nihilism, despair, resignation, and hedonism, and all of the escapes from the pain of that. There are gifts and opportunities in every moment, and also real dangers. I don’t think the dangers have ever been higher.

Chandler Dandridge

I was thrilled to see you quote the late, great left-wing commentator and regular Jacobin contributor Michael Brooks in the book while writing about bridging the spiritual with the political. Could you talk about what Michael meant to you?

Daniel Maté

I met Michael Brooks at a Harvard event and he was so warm and friendly. Watching his show, you really got a sense of heart purpose. There’s a lot of YouTube shows of people being smart or being funny or being right about stuff. But with Michael there was a kind of heart emanation in terms of why he was doing what he was doing.

He was not a pie-in-the-sky guy. He could break down the toxicities in the system like no one else. He had a great analytical mind. But there was a positive energy to him that I think exemplified what in the Jewish tradition is called tikkun olam, to repair the world, as a kind of calling, a reason to do politics or political media.

When he died, I really felt it. So many of us really felt it. Like a real bright light had gone out, because the default is to be jaded and to not be openhearted like that. And so when I heard Lisha, his sister, quote him I just was like, well, that’s what it’s all about. The fact that it came from a political media guy — I mean it could have come from Thich Nhat Hanh. Michael Brooks was someone who I think showed us that those two spheres are best intimately overlapped, not kept separate. The inner and the outer.

Chandler Dandridge

As a psychotherapist I am deeply interested in reconciling the self with the social. Gabor, you write very personally about your own healing in this book. How has your own healing enhanced your political life? Is this dialectic important?

Gabor Maté

On the Left it’s very important. My political views really haven’t changed much since I was a student radical in the ’60s. I’ve become more sophisticated and nuanced, perhaps, but the old broad outlines of how I see the system haven’t changed. What I didn’t like then, I don’t like now, the Vietnam War being the previous iteration of Afghanistan or Iraq or Gaza or any number of atrocities. But the emotional fervor I put into it, which I always thought was justified by the cause, in fact came from unresolved rage in myself that had nothing to do with politics. It had to do with unresolved trauma. And to the extent that this rage and hostility infused my speaking, it made my speaking all the less effective when it came to trying to convince anybody who didn’t already see my way.

Both the Left and the Right have got these traumatic imprints that they enact. The Right very often consists of abused people who identify with power so they’ll never be hurt again. That’s basically it. You know, like a [Donald] Trump. Big Daddy will protect me so that I’ll never be hurt again, like I was hurt by my real daddy. And they hate vulnerability. They attack vulnerable people because they hate their own vulnerability. So that’s the thumbnail traumatic imprint of people on the Right very often.

People on the Left, on the other hand, also suffered in their childhoods, and they take that anger that’s not resolved in them and they project it into the politics, which makes them not very tolerant and much less effective. When they talk to people who just don’t see it their way, who are not aware or maybe more ignorant, or not in touch with the real issues, there’s a tendency to speak in a very hostile and very demeaning way. That’s unresolved trauma on the part of the people coming from the Left, as it was in my case. Self work, particularly for people who want to make a difference, is really important. To the degree that people don’t do it, they might attract some followers with a certain degree of charisma, but they will not convince anybody that doesn’t already see it their way.

Daniel Maté

And let’s not let the center off the hook, because they’re damaged as hell, too. They’re the kids who just want mommy and daddy to get along. Don’t rock the boat. There’s a whole layer of trauma that you can see in so-called centrism these days that can be very blind to the genuine complaints and grievances of either side.

Gabor Maté

I don’t know what the hell center means anymore, but the fact is, a lot of people are in denial of reality. And the propensity to deny reality comes from painful experience.

Chandler Dandridge

Well, I want to thank you all and wish you the best. And Gabor, I can tell you, as a psychotherapist, that your book on addiction completely changed the clinical game for addiction treatment. I hope that this book does the same on a wider cultural scale.

Gabor Maté

Thank you. Listen, can I ask you a question?

Chandler Dandridge

Yeah, what’s up?

Gabor Maté

And I’ve always asked this. Did you like this book as a read?

Chandler Dandridge

Of course, Gabor. It’s a great read.

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Alfred Adler was ahead of his time in centering what he called “social interest” in his psychological theories. His approach sought to combat shame and alienation and encourage concern for the common good — a psychological application of his socialist values.

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Austrian physician and psychotherapist Alfred Adler (1870–1937) emphasized the importance of social interest for the healthy individual. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

It’s a sunny spring day in 1909 at the Stadtpark in Vienna. Leon Trotsky, fresh off another jailbreak, kicks a soccer ball toward his kids and waves back at his wife, who’s sprawled beneath a maple tree on a picnic blanket with another couple. Trotsky waltzes over and chats with his friend, one of the most renowned psychoanalysts in all of Vienna. No, not Sigmund Freud — the man with Trotsky would actually be expelled from Freud’s inner circle two years later. But while he’s less remembered today, he remained highly influential on an international scale for decades, his ideas taking center stage during the city’s interwar socialist period known as Red Vienna. This man was Alfred Adler.

Adler’s break with Freud in 1911 was a long time coming. He had joined Freud’s famous Wednesday Psychological Society at its inception in 1902, but over the course of the next decade, the two men’s thought diverged. Adler had entered the group already a socialist, and his political views shaped his psychological thought. Freud, meanwhile, preferred to keep politics out of the clinic. Because of Adler’s early involvement in the group and his widely recognized clinical skill, he felt empowered to challenge Freud. But Freud found the challenge increasingly frustrating, and eventually the group dynamic became untenable.

Adler entered the Viennese stage in 1898, with his first professional publication at the age of twenty-eight. His Health Book for the Tailor Trade aimed “to describe the connection between the economic condition of a trade and its disease, and the dangers for public health of a lowered standard of living.” Adler outlined the diseases common to Viennese tailors, their etiologies, their psychological impacts, and the potential of various reforms to improve workers’ lives. He examined how industrialization had changed the tailor trade and argued in favor of robust government regulation to improve conditions and rights for workers. At the start of his career, Adler was already emphasizing the social aspect of disease and advocating for a more preventative type of medicine, both biologically and socially.

This would become the basis of Freud and Adler’s conflict. Freud found Adler’s emphasis on the way social forces shape the psyche unconvincing and regressive. Adler first articulated his idea somewhat crudely by way of what he initially called the “aggression drive,” a socially situated drive that, in his view, was totally separate from Freud’s famous “sexual drive,” or libido. Freud initially tolerated this variant view, but within a few years began to openly reject Adler’s thinking in the group and insist upon the primacy of the sexual drive. Later, after living through the horrors of World War I, Freud would develop his concept of the “death drive,” a drive altogether separate from libido and strikingly similar to Alfred Adler’s initial conception of the aggression drive.

After his exile from Freud’s group, Adler found intellectual freedom. Though the two regarded each other bitterly, talking a bit of smack at every opportunity, they mostly stayed out of each other’s way. During the First World War, Adler was drafted as an army physician and worked psychiatrically in Austrian military hospitals, an experience that left its mark on the man. He would later talk about the guilt he felt in treating his patients with such care, only for them to be sent back out for slaughter.

The Adlerian clinician seeks to help patients move toward more adaptive social interest in order to alleviate their symptoms and improve their conditions.

The experience of World War I inspired Adler’s most enduring concept: Gemeinschaftsgefühl. An inelegant though good-enough English translation might be “a community of equals creating and maintaining feelings of social interest,” often shortened to just “social interest” in Adlerian circles. Adler started to view social interest as an inherent psychological trait and one that could be measured in the individual. In fact, Adler believed that most psychopathology was rooted in a maladaptive sense of social interest. To what degree do we care about our fellows? About the common good? Indeed, the Adlerian clinician seeks to help patients move toward more adaptive social interest in order to alleviate their symptoms and improve their conditions.

This idea has persisted, though not necessarily in Adler’s precise terms. From Adler’s student Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” to work on the psychological benefits of altruistic action, to research showing how reward chemicals like dopamine and oxytocin are released during socialization, Adler was ahead of his time in promoting social interest. His focus on collective well-being was deeply informed by his socialist politics. In one of his more poetic moments, he claimed, “Socialism is deeply rooted in community feeling. It is the original sound of humanity.”

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The Gospel of Gemeinschaftsgefühl

After the war, Adler’s influence spread across Vienna. He had a thriving practice where he saw patients and taught courses at institutes, lecturing to both professionals and the general public. He worked toward educational reform while serving as the vice chairperson of the Workers’ Committee of Vienna’s First District. He also started his own psychological society that met on Mondays. Where Freud’s Wednesday group was becoming increasingly exclusive, Adler’s maintained the egalitarian spirit that drove his work: all were welcome to attend. “The door was left wide open,” as one student put it.

Between the world wars, Vienna came under the leadership of socialists, a period known as Red Vienna. During this time, Adler’s attention turned toward the youth. He observed their demoralization after the war, and embarked on a venture to connect psychological clinicians to Viennese schools and set up “child guidance clinics” around the city. Adler trained students, teachers, and parents in his developing psychology, proselytizing his ideas about social interest. The effort was monumental: Adler’s contribution can accurately be said to have created a new educational milieu and shared emotional understanding among Viennese youth, educators, and parents. One of the many tragedies of the Third Reich would be the annihilation of this effort.

Adler started to gain international recognition for his progressive work, especially around child development, marriage, gender equality, and a host of other issues all infused with Gemeinschaftsgefühl. In the late ’20s, he began traveling to the United States to spread the message, and picked up a teaching post at the New School. His American sojourns produced a popular book called Understanding Human Nature, which catapulted Adler to prominence in both the American public and academic circles. While in America, Adler became less overtly political, but his psychological perspective maintained its characteristic egalitarianism and consideration for economic and social conditions.

The less socially conservative American audience greeted his contributions with enthusiasm, especially his lectures on the gendered power dynamics in marriages. Adler toured across the country and would go on to influence Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck, Harry Stack Sullivan, and most other major mid-century American psychologists. Adler’s influence on American popular psychology was profound: one need look no further than the contemporaneous emergence of Alcoholics Anonymous and its primary philosophical principle — that by helping another alcoholic, you are actually helping yourself — to see Gemeinschaftsgefühl weaving itself into the fabric of American culture. While the United States in the interwar period was no Red Vienna, Adler’s ideas matched the political mood here as well, particularly as the New Deal fostered a more inspired imagination of the prospects for social interest among the American public.

In 1929, Adler decided to move to New York City to begin teaching at Columbia University’s medical school and to run a child guidance clinic at the university six days a week. His wife, Raissa, intended to come later, preferring to stay in Europe to continue her revolutionary work, which at that point primarily consisted of assisting their dear friend Trotsky in trying to topple Joseph Stalin. (Raissa was a committed Trotskyist, and her politics no doubt served as the foundation for much of Adler’s political thought.) Adler’s association with Columbia was short-lived, and his 1930 exit is shrouded in mystery. What is known is that when Adler’s name was put up for a permanent position, it was quickly denied by the loyal Freudian psychoanalysts populating the Columbia University medical faculty.

Many psychological studies have since found that shame increases disconnection, alienation, and isolation.

Nevertheless, Adler continued to popularize his ideas, mostly by touring and lecturing. He kept himself busy promoting his theories on the ground, his published works consisting of little more than patched-together lecture notes. In fact, one reason Adler’s afterlife has suffered is because his writings are not very good. His early German work has not been properly translated into English, and his English work is second-rate. Where Freud wrote with great care and skill, Adler phoned it in, at times just passing his notes to students to compile into something digestible. In a great irony, his active promotion of his ideas from the lectern and in the clinic made him wildly influential during his lifetime, while his neglect of published works has caused that influence to go unrecognized.

Adler died suddenly in Scotland in 1937. He had just completed a lecture and written a letter to Raissa, now living in New York, announcing his intention to travel on to Russia in an effort to locate their missing daughter, the sole Adler still in Europe. Their daughter’s disappearance was weighing heavily on the sixty-seven-year-old Alfred, and he suspected the worst, considering the family ties to Trotsky. In 1942, a friend of the family and great admirer of Adler, one Albert Einstein, would deliver the news to Raissa that their daughter had died in a Siberian prison camp.

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Solidarity Versus Shame

Even beyond his concept of social interest, Adler’s thought offers us useful concepts today as we continue to move toward a more emancipatory future.

Perhaps his most famous contribution to the field of psychology is the idea of “compensation.” Adler posited that when a person experiences some deficit in their being, whether natural or imagined, they will then compensate in other ways for that perceived inferiority. Compensation is often healthy: Adler was quick to cite a study done in a German art school showing that a majority of the art students claimed a congenital optical abnormality. When our experience of coping with this inferiority becomes maladaptive, we develop a neurotic complex — hence the now popular concept of overcompensation.

Adler believed that most neuroses stemmed from leftover feelings of inferiority from childhood. As children develop, they begin to recognize their natural inferiority to their caretakers — physically, socially, and emotionally. When not properly cared for, encouraged, or empowered toward healthy compensation, these feelings of inferiority can begin to take a different shape and send them into maladaptive behaviors and away from social interest. Adler believed that the effects of this process carried into adulthood. In today’s terms, we would call this feeling of characterological inferiority “shame.” Many psychological studies have since borne out Adler’s theory, finding that shame increases disconnection, alienation, and isolation.

These ideas can help us understand the psychological factors at play in the current political climate, where overcompensatory personalities dominate and social interest is in short supply. They are also instructive for the Left as we conceptualize how to pursue our project of repairing that sense of investment in the well-being of society. Moments of perceived inferiority will inevitably arise in both the individual and collective experience; comparison is part and parcel of human existence. But it is how we compensate for those perceived inferiorities, how we find nuance and maintain mutuality in dealing with these dynamics, that makes all the difference. We can choose overcompensatory status jockeying and corrosive individualism, or we can choose solidarity.

Adler came to his emphasis on the social while working psychotherapeutically within the working class, championing gender equality, and surrounding himself with people devoted to social transformation through political action. When Vienna turned red, Adler was in the trenches. He walked the dialectical line between emphasizing the individual and society, seeking to empower individual people in order to encourage collective feeling. Adler knew that Freud’s initial neglect of the social was not going to suffice to get to the root of the tailor worker’s issue or the oppressed wife’s woes. He started from a belief in equality among people, and trusted that the answer to our problems lay in each other.

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