Dr Gabor Maté - Why Capitalism Makes Us Sick

Post Reply New Topic

I think he's right. It reminds me of Waking Up #146 where Sam Harris interviewed Douglas Rushkoff on the digital economies, they talked about the problems inherent in capitalism right now (especially from the media perspective) and it seemed like the clearest issue was growth vs. flow model - ie. that coop companies were delivering much higher qualities whereas publicly traded companies have this habit, I've noticed all too often, of wringing out every last drop for the board of directors, cannibalizing other people's research and development instead of doing their own, and what you have is this titanic holding companies that quite often get so separated from what they're doing and so month-to-month oriented by the influence of the investors that they blow up and the remains get scraped up by venture capitalists.

What Gabor's talking about more are the social consequences of this system. Also, I think he might quite possibly be right that the acceleration of this system beyond reason has had a lot to do with the way things are becoming socially.

I'd add 24:30 to the end is phenomenally brutal - and again, quite probably accurate.

Just another lefty academic. How very original. Former student radical. Believer in traditional medicines. Oh dear.

A couple thoughts on that:
1) You don't have to interface with it, listen to it, or get an informed opinion of it - that's your choice.
2) If you choose not to do any of the above I don't have any obligation, or even particularly good reason, to take your response seriously. You have the right to make that response, I have the right to ignore it.

The only thing I might add that I forgot to above - Communism was the cause of over 100 million deaths across eastern Europe and Asia in the early 20th century. Anyone whose read or listened to Gulag Archipelago has no reason to have any respect for it whatsoever, it's a horror show of stupidity, incompetence, kleptomania, and barbarism.

I'd also add - that's not what's on the plate for this conversation, nor is socialism. At the very worst we may eventually need UBI if we completely strip the capacity for 20% and upward of our country to have their financial needs taken care of by work but that's also a slightly different concept than having massive government bureaucracies telling people how to live, as a means to settling their own finances, and further mucking things up.

I see what you're saying, but there really is only control by government (Communism-Fascism-Socialism, which are really the same thing) and actual freedom, which is capitalism.

There are other games to be played within capitalism though, and I think Douglas Rushkoff might have partially nailed down what Bret and Eric Weinstein called 'Game B', ie. a game that's game-theorhetically sound and leads to better outcomes. That would be increasing numbers of companies becoming employee owned, ie. mini-democracies or republics (the republic idea might be better - ie. keep the 'raid on the treasury' or the spurious at bay), and establishing models that maximize both work-place experience and revenue.

Obviously there are multinational markets that can't do this at the present time, especially companies that have to deal with foreign raw materials or need multi-million dollar machinery to operate who'd have a very difficult time getting off the ground, but I think this would be a very smart shift because the game wouldn't be to accelerate capitalism right off the rails and have it collapse.

Bret Weinstein does a great job in some of his lectures talking about tragedy of the commons, problems that you have with one particularly ruthless company being able to create a gravity well that it's competitors either have to fall into or go out of business, and we need a system that's much more resilient to bad-actors and in some ways makes wholesome and long-viewed incentives much more dominant than short-term and ruthless incentives.

"Capitalism Makes Us Sick" is analogous to saying "FREEDOM makes us sick".

The FREEDOM to eat a BIG MAC everyday and die at age 40.

The FREEDOM to get lung cancer from cigarettes, or be a "burn out" dope smoker.

The FREEDOM to drop out of society, be a bum, and waste away on the side of street.

The FREEDOM to do high-risk activities.

The FREEDOM to LIVE THE WAY YOU WANT TO LIVE.

Knee-jerk response to title. Next...

No, I listened to the entire video.

However, yeah, I could tell what he was going to say.

Socialists have a typical mindset:
1. people are morons who make wrong choices but bear no personal responsibility
2. government needs to take care of them
3. government needs to limit their freedoms

First, he appears to think everything is the system's fault, and never the individual (no personal responsibility).
That is because he thinks people are morons.They aren't responsible for their actions because they're morons.

Secondly, he mentions many positives of FREEDOM, and tries to dismiss them. "I use to work a lot .. and that was bad for my family" ... well that's called FREEDOM to work or not to work. That's a positive.

Lastly, he says people are saying how great America is, and he doesn't get it. How can he not know that people think America is great because of FREEDOM? At the very least, he should address FREEDOM in his speech.

Where did he say any of those things in the video?

My takeaway was - institutions become runaway structures relatively quick, especially if a culture is unraveling of its own dynamics, and a lot of the problems we have today are from runaway institutions. If you didn't watch the video you may at least want to click on the last three minutes - he comments on the drug war around 24:30, everything before that point are the harms done by terrible policies on various fronts that don't work and then, add to that, if someone keeps to the same track on a project that doesn't work it may be that it indeed does 'work', just not for the people it's advertised to work for nor the purpose publicly advertised.


In the video he talked about employers running their employees health into the ground, in his time as a therapist seeing that most of his clients who he saw for drug addiction were victims of child abuse, his book on addiction is that pain and mangled lives is what leads to addiction whereas most people encountering drugs and walking away from them show the lie that the substances in and of themselves are the addictive part. He made the argument that many of the people on the street for addictions, that the criminal justice system rounds up, are many of the same people who are broken by abuse by pedophiles and the like.

The thing he's arguing for - from a public health perspective - is that the causes for something like 50 percent of adults in some areas having chronic health problems ties back to causes that can be traced and that it's not a case where mind is separate from body is separate from environment but that it's a contiguous feedback loop.


Freedom to live on the streets or in a shelter you mean and leave your kids there as well?


It's great compared to communist tyranny, it's crap compared to what it's sold as. Considering what you're saying about freedom - we have the freedom to do better, forge a better version of capitalism, and forge better laws and policies. We should, and we also have a lot of mummies to get out of congress who can't think their way out of a paper bag unless someone's paying them an exorbitant amount of money for a cause.

If you're talking about his work with addicts and ayahuasca, that's not traditional medicine--it's new research into the effectiveness of certain psychedelics to break addictions that shows a lot of promise. Other "lefty academics" are doing research with psilocybin and intractable trauma and seeing a lot of promise as well. Another area of current research that's really interesting is with MDMA for autistic people, to increase their sociability. Are you afraid of new science?

Your comment indicates irrational fear rather than any real examination of the issues discussed in the video. Why comment if that's all you have to share?

Libertarian free will does not exist.

And?

Which freedoms? Most people (including yourself) believe society needs rules to function.

What's your point?

Free will / no free debate is irrelevant, because lack of free will doesn't mean a person is trapped into bad decision-making forever.

If you take drugs, you're responsible for taking drugs.

How does that get twisted to say Capitalism causes drug use?

It is a huge mistake to use "personal responsibility" as justification for political stances.

That still doesn't imply personal responsibility.

Can you tell me where in the video he made that claim? I might have missed it.