1 00:00:01,157 --> 00:00:04,279 A bit about The Zeitgeist Movement for those who aren't aware: 2 00:00:04,419 --> 00:00:08,439 The Zeitgeist Movement, which we'll continue to refer to as TZM, 3 00:00:08,579 --> 00:00:12,041 is a sustainability advocacy organization 4 00:00:12,181 --> 00:00:15,720 which conducts community-based activism 5 00:00:15,860 --> 00:00:18,434 through a global network of chapters. 6 00:00:18,574 --> 00:00:22,062 We have 1100 chapters throughout the world. 7 00:00:23,820 --> 00:00:27,009 We propose that we as a species take a direct technical approach 8 00:00:27,149 --> 00:00:29,776 to resource and social management, as opposed to 9 00:00:29,916 --> 00:00:31,832 a monetary or political one. 10 00:00:31,972 --> 00:00:34,054 The train of thought presented by TZM 11 00:00:34,194 --> 00:00:37,182 is centered around the concept that we, as a species, 12 00:00:37,322 --> 00:00:40,004 can and should update the workings of a society 13 00:00:40,144 --> 00:00:43,283 to the most efficient, sustainable and proven methods 14 00:00:43,423 --> 00:00:46,119 that science and technology have to offer. 15 00:00:46,259 --> 00:00:49,620 In short, we can be summarized as a movement which advocates 16 00:00:49,760 --> 00:00:54,694 the application of the scientific method for social and environmental concern. 17 00:00:54,834 --> 00:00:59,023 Some background information, though I'm sure Dr. Maté needs no introduction: 18 00:00:59,163 --> 00:01:03,866 Dr. Maté ran a popular family practice in East Vancouver for two decades. 19 00:01:04,006 --> 00:01:07,976 For 7 years, he also served as medical coordinator of the palliative care unit 20 00:01:08,116 --> 00:01:11,930 at Vancouver hospital, caring for the terminally ill. 21 00:01:12,070 --> 00:01:17,260 More recently, he worked for 12 years in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside 22 00:01:17,400 --> 00:01:22,668 with patients suffering from drug addiction, mental illness and HIV. 23 00:01:24,101 --> 00:01:27,759 He's authored four books; the last two have become national 24 00:01:27,899 --> 00:01:32,806 and international best sellers, translated into 9 languages. 25 00:01:33,319 --> 00:01:36,212 (Dr. Maté) 20. - 20 different languages. 26 00:01:36,352 --> 00:01:38,314 [Laughs] 27 00:01:39,237 --> 00:01:42,914 A recurring theme throughout his work is the development of the psyche, 28 00:01:43,054 --> 00:01:45,948 mental and physical health and looking at 29 00:01:46,088 --> 00:01:48,307 neurological and psychological mechanisms 30 00:01:48,447 --> 00:01:52,003 which he connects with the need for social change. 31 00:01:52,451 --> 00:01:55,533 Dr. Maté was gracious enough to lend us his expertise 32 00:01:55,673 --> 00:01:58,392 and was featured in the latest of the Zeitgeist film series: 33 00:01:58,532 --> 00:02:00,219 Zeitgeist: Moving Forward. 34 00:02:00,359 --> 00:02:04,583 He put forth progressive ideas about what factors come into play 35 00:02:04,723 --> 00:02:07,020 when looking at the development of the human psyche 36 00:02:07,160 --> 00:02:10,438 in relation to its social and physical environment. 37 00:02:10,973 --> 00:02:14,112 We are honored to collaborate with Dr. Gabor Maté 38 00:02:14,252 --> 00:02:17,315 in this joint presentation based on a fairly simple question: 39 00:02:17,455 --> 00:02:21,582 what promotes positive mental health and what would a society 40 00:02:21,722 --> 00:02:26,205 that supports and fosters healthy and stable individuals look like? 41 00:02:26,345 --> 00:02:29,848 Without further ado, please welcome Dr. Maté. 42 00:02:30,286 --> 00:02:33,164 [Applause] 43 00:02:37,071 --> 00:02:40,350 First of all, thank you for coming out to be part of this conversation; 44 00:02:40,490 --> 00:02:43,269 thanks to The Zeitgeist Movement for inviting me. 45 00:02:43,409 --> 00:02:46,707 I need to clarify that I'm not a member of the movement 46 00:02:46,847 --> 00:02:49,562 (you might call me a friend) 47 00:02:49,834 --> 00:02:52,323 nor was I gracious enough to put this bit in the movie. 48 00:02:52,686 --> 00:02:55,605 I did not know I was participating when I was interviewed. 49 00:02:55,745 --> 00:02:58,057 I didn't even know there was such a movie, 50 00:02:58,429 --> 00:03:01,380 I was simply interviewed by somebody who thought my ideas were interesting enough 51 00:03:01,520 --> 00:03:04,466 and next thing I know, I'm in the Zeitgeist movie, 52 00:03:04,606 --> 00:03:07,381 so grace had nothing to do with it. 53 00:03:07,776 --> 00:03:12,744 I was happy with the film, particularly the part 54 00:03:13,377 --> 00:03:16,767 that has interviews with myself and a number of other people. 55 00:03:16,907 --> 00:03:21,344 We all put forward a perspective which is what I'll be presenting today, 56 00:03:21,484 --> 00:03:25,201 which is that human beings can't be separated from their environment, 57 00:03:25,341 --> 00:03:28,719 and in order to understand the human being, you must understand the environment. 58 00:03:28,859 --> 00:03:33,714 The implication is also that if we're going to be different human beings 59 00:03:33,854 --> 00:03:39,214 or foster different human beings, we have to look at the environment. 60 00:03:42,115 --> 00:03:47,478 The medical practice that I was trained in, the University of British Columbia, 61 00:03:49,135 --> 00:03:54,245 has a very Western ideology-infused medicine. 62 00:03:54,385 --> 00:03:58,462 Now, we think of medicine as a science, 63 00:03:58,602 --> 00:04:03,060 as a scientific practice, but it's as much ideological as it is anything else. 64 00:04:03,200 --> 00:04:06,430 What passes for science in our culture 65 00:04:06,570 --> 00:04:10,399 is a combination of scientific data 66 00:04:10,539 --> 00:04:13,217 but interpreted through an ideological lens, 67 00:04:14,162 --> 00:04:17,284 so we must never think of it as pure science. 68 00:04:17,631 --> 00:04:21,924 Unfortunately, it's not a conscious ideological lens, 69 00:04:22,064 --> 00:04:26,468 so that the practitioners are not aware that they have an ideology. 70 00:04:27,032 --> 00:04:30,616 They didn't choose that ideology, they simply grew up in it, 71 00:04:30,879 --> 00:04:34,142 they were trained in it, and they think 72 00:04:34,517 --> 00:04:38,325 that they're looking objectively at the world. 73 00:04:38,644 --> 00:04:41,684 But as the Buddha pointed out 2500 years ago: 74 00:04:41,824 --> 00:04:44,210 we create the world with our minds, 75 00:04:44,350 --> 00:04:47,672 so the kind of perspective that we have will shape what we see 76 00:04:47,812 --> 00:04:50,559 and that's absolutely true of science as well. 77 00:04:51,106 --> 00:04:56,281 What I'm interested in looking at is: before we create the world with our minds, 78 00:04:56,421 --> 00:04:58,711 how does the world create our minds? 79 00:04:58,851 --> 00:05:01,861 What kind of minds are we looking at the world with? 80 00:05:02,001 --> 00:05:05,092 That's the question that Western medicine doesn't ask very much. 81 00:05:05,834 --> 00:05:08,703 It makes two separations: 82 00:05:08,843 --> 00:05:11,483 it separates the mind from the body 83 00:05:12,031 --> 00:05:16,811 so that physical illnesses, or illnesses that are considered to be purely physical 84 00:05:16,951 --> 00:05:21,266 like rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, multiple sclerosis, 85 00:05:21,406 --> 00:05:24,932 any chronic health condition you care to name, 86 00:05:25,072 --> 00:05:28,776 is understood only in terms of the organs that it attacks, 87 00:05:29,264 --> 00:05:32,555 but not in terms of the relationship of the body 88 00:05:32,695 --> 00:05:36,716 to the person's psychological, spiritual and social life. 89 00:05:37,641 --> 00:05:40,794 That means if you go to a doctor with a flare up of rheumatoid arthritis, 90 00:05:40,934 --> 00:05:42,885 an inflammation of your joints, 91 00:05:43,025 --> 00:05:47,759 a disease in which the immune system actually attacks the body itself 92 00:05:47,899 --> 00:05:50,204 and therefore called 'auto-immune disease' 93 00:05:50,344 --> 00:05:53,876 (sort of like if the Canadian army attacked Canada, 94 00:05:54,592 --> 00:05:58,367 which under the current government is a total possibility in my opinion) 95 00:05:58,507 --> 00:06:01,852 that's what an auto-immune disease is: 96 00:06:01,992 --> 00:06:04,335 the immune system turns against yourself. 97 00:06:04,475 --> 00:06:09,015 We don't ask the question: why is the immune system in mutiny against the body? 98 00:06:09,155 --> 00:06:12,592 We simply give medications to suppress the symptoms. 99 00:06:12,732 --> 00:06:16,833 We deal with surface manifestations, but we don't look at causes 100 00:06:16,973 --> 00:06:21,603 because causes would imply a larger, more holistic look 101 00:06:21,850 --> 00:06:25,079 and fundamentally, as physicians, we throw up our hands and we say 102 00:06:25,219 --> 00:06:27,718 "We don't know what causes these things!" 103 00:06:27,858 --> 00:06:30,862 If you look at something like multiple sclerosis 104 00:06:31,002 --> 00:06:35,710 which is a degenerative disease of the nervous system, 105 00:06:35,850 --> 00:06:40,402 in the 1940s, the gender ratio of multiple sclerosis 106 00:06:40,542 --> 00:06:43,921 was a 1 to 1: for each man diagnosed, so was a woman. 107 00:06:44,061 --> 00:06:48,278 The gender ratio now is 3 or 4 women for every man 108 00:06:48,963 --> 00:06:53,070 and you cannot understand that on strictly physical grounds. 109 00:06:53,210 --> 00:06:55,409 If you think it's genetics, it won't cut it 110 00:06:55,549 --> 00:06:58,960 because genes don't change in a population over 70 years. 111 00:06:59,100 --> 00:07:01,147 If you think it's the diet or the climate, no, 112 00:07:01,287 --> 00:07:04,969 that hasn't changed more for one gender than the other either. 113 00:07:05,109 --> 00:07:08,804 So, there's something about gender in our society 114 00:07:08,944 --> 00:07:12,980 that certainly influences the onset and course of disease. 115 00:07:13,411 --> 00:07:16,331 In order to understand that, you'd have to look at something broader 116 00:07:16,471 --> 00:07:20,085 than just the body. So that mind/body separation 117 00:07:20,225 --> 00:07:23,307 doesn't work to explain either physical or mental illness. 118 00:07:23,447 --> 00:07:26,363 And by the way, my talk is not just about mental illness either, 119 00:07:26,503 --> 00:07:29,560 it's about illness in general. 120 00:07:30,753 --> 00:07:34,251 Then the second separation that we make is, we separate 121 00:07:34,391 --> 00:07:36,829 the human being, the individual, from the environment. 122 00:07:36,969 --> 00:07:40,383 We think that if cancer shows up in somebody, 123 00:07:40,523 --> 00:07:42,745 or if mental illness shows up in somebody, 124 00:07:42,885 --> 00:07:44,909 it's strictly [due to] individual factors 125 00:07:45,049 --> 00:07:48,782 such as, for example, the genetics, so it has to do with the genes, the DNA 126 00:07:48,922 --> 00:07:53,357 that you or I inherited from our parents, 127 00:07:56,458 --> 00:08:00,716 or perhaps is a result of lifestyle choices we make: 128 00:08:02,156 --> 00:08:07,866 if you smoke, which of course increases your risk of lung cancer, 129 00:08:08,006 --> 00:08:12,133 then you get lung cancer, that's because of a choice you individually made. 130 00:08:12,273 --> 00:08:15,707 These are individual perspectives on disease, 131 00:08:17,110 --> 00:08:19,609 which again, causes us to miss a lot of things. 132 00:08:19,749 --> 00:08:23,775 Let me give you three examples of a different approach, 133 00:08:24,031 --> 00:08:27,154 which has been called 'a bio-psychosocial approach' 134 00:08:27,294 --> 00:08:30,386 which means to say that the biology of an individual 135 00:08:30,526 --> 00:08:34,265 is inseparable from its psychological and social environment. 136 00:08:34,405 --> 00:08:38,109 It's the only scientific understanding that makes any sense at all 137 00:08:38,249 --> 00:08:41,865 and it's the only way through which we can comprehend 138 00:08:42,005 --> 00:08:44,590 who gets sick and why. 139 00:08:44,730 --> 00:08:47,145 Of course, if you look at it in a broad scale, 140 00:08:47,285 --> 00:08:51,353 social factors such as gender, race 141 00:08:51,493 --> 00:08:55,216 and economic position are far more influential 142 00:08:55,356 --> 00:08:59,717 in population health than individual factors, 143 00:09:00,562 --> 00:09:03,018 and that's because we're bio-psychosocial creatures. 144 00:09:03,158 --> 00:09:08,464 Therefore, biology can't be separated from the psychological and social environment. 145 00:09:08,604 --> 00:09:11,995 For example, it's not even controversial, 146 00:09:12,135 --> 00:09:14,228 a number of studies have shown it, 147 00:09:14,368 --> 00:09:17,504 that children whose parents are stressed 148 00:09:17,644 --> 00:09:22,318 are much more likely to have asthma than children whose parents are not stressed. 149 00:09:22,458 --> 00:09:26,315 In polluted areas, where the air quality itself 150 00:09:26,455 --> 00:09:28,711 and the irritants in the air 151 00:09:28,851 --> 00:09:32,508 cause the triggering of more asthmatic flare ups in people, 152 00:09:32,648 --> 00:09:37,366 it's still the children of stressed parents who are most likely to have asthma. 153 00:09:38,217 --> 00:09:42,516 If you go to the ordinary, western-trained physician 154 00:09:42,656 --> 00:09:45,422 with either yourself or your child having asthma, 155 00:09:45,562 --> 00:09:48,904 you'll be given the appropriate treatment 156 00:09:49,044 --> 00:09:52,614 which will reverse the narrowing of the airways that happens in asthma; 157 00:09:52,754 --> 00:09:56,414 it will suppress the inflammation that happens in asthma. 158 00:09:56,776 --> 00:10:01,288 Now, the inhalers, the medications you get in whatever form 159 00:10:01,428 --> 00:10:04,979 to achieve those affects, it's interesting to consider what they are. 160 00:10:05,119 --> 00:10:09,374 Because the inhaler that opens up the narrowed airways of the asthmatic 161 00:10:09,514 --> 00:10:11,818 is actually a copy of adrenaline. 162 00:10:11,958 --> 00:10:15,018 In fact, if you rushed to a hospital with a severe asthmatic episode 163 00:10:15,158 --> 00:10:17,780 you'd be given an injection of adrenaline. 164 00:10:17,920 --> 00:10:21,849 The inhaler that suppresses the inflammation 165 00:10:23,047 --> 00:10:25,052 (which is the other aspect of asthma, 166 00:10:25,192 --> 00:10:28,065 the swelling, etc. that needs to be suppressed 167 00:10:28,205 --> 00:10:32,725 which further clutters the airways) that inhaler, or that infusion 168 00:10:32,865 --> 00:10:36,864 that you'd get the hospital's emergency ward, is actually cortisol. 169 00:10:37,217 --> 00:10:41,407 If you look at what cortisol and adrenaline are, anybody know what they are? 170 00:10:41,547 --> 00:10:46,002 They're stress hormones. They're treating asthmatics with stress hormones. 171 00:10:46,142 --> 00:10:51,517 As a matter of fact, cortisol is the commonest medication used in all of medicine. 172 00:10:52,042 --> 00:10:56,175 It's used in conditions of the skin, of the lungs, of the joints, 173 00:10:56,315 --> 00:10:59,606 of the intestines and of the nervous system. 174 00:11:00,772 --> 00:11:05,512 It's a stress hormone. If you were threatened right now, 175 00:11:05,652 --> 00:11:08,957 your adrenal gland would put out adrenaline and cortisol 176 00:11:09,097 --> 00:11:12,422 which would allow you to fight back or to escape, 177 00:11:12,791 --> 00:11:16,198 but in the long term, those same hormones damage your health. 178 00:11:16,489 --> 00:11:20,272 So, acute stress is just how you survive a threat; 179 00:11:20,412 --> 00:11:23,422 chronic stress debilitates your immune system: 180 00:11:23,562 --> 00:11:26,093 heart disease, thinning of the bones, 181 00:11:26,233 --> 00:11:30,284 ulcers in the intestines and depression are the side-effects. 182 00:11:30,424 --> 00:11:34,003 Now, we give these stress hormones to the asthmatic child, 183 00:11:34,143 --> 00:11:36,609 but we never ask the question: 184 00:11:36,749 --> 00:11:39,759 we're treating something with stress hormones, 185 00:11:39,899 --> 00:11:43,722 is it possible that the condition is connected to stress somehow? 186 00:11:43,862 --> 00:11:48,127 That question is never asked. Now, the lung functioning 187 00:11:50,797 --> 00:11:53,157 of the children of stressed parents, 188 00:11:53,297 --> 00:11:56,781 why is the lung functioning affected by the parents' emotional states? 189 00:11:56,921 --> 00:11:59,921 Because the child's biology is actually 190 00:12:00,061 --> 00:12:04,615 shaped or influenced by the parents' emotional/psychological states, 191 00:12:05,196 --> 00:12:07,052 because it bio-psychosocial. 192 00:12:07,192 --> 00:12:09,959 You can't separate the emotions from the body 193 00:12:10,099 --> 00:12:13,890 and you can't separate the individual from the environment. 194 00:12:14,513 --> 00:12:18,363 In another study in Australia, they looked at 195 00:12:18,817 --> 00:12:21,937 500 women who'd had breast biopsies, 196 00:12:22,077 --> 00:12:25,287 lumps in their breasts, which needed to be biopsied for cancer 197 00:12:25,427 --> 00:12:27,761 to see if they're malignant. 198 00:12:27,901 --> 00:12:30,761 These biopsies 199 00:12:30,901 --> 00:12:33,530 were then done and before the results came back, 200 00:12:33,670 --> 00:12:37,715 the women underwent a psychological questionnaire, an interview. 201 00:12:37,855 --> 00:12:41,938 It turned out that if a woman has been emotionally isolated 202 00:12:42,078 --> 00:12:45,038 prior to the onset of that lump, that by itself 203 00:12:45,178 --> 00:12:48,376 had zero effect on that lump being cancerous. 204 00:12:48,516 --> 00:12:52,967 Similarly, if a woman had experienced a major stressful episode in her life, 205 00:12:53,107 --> 00:12:55,974 that by itself also had zero effect. 206 00:12:56,114 --> 00:13:00,616 So far so good. But if the woman had been emotionally isolated 207 00:13:00,756 --> 00:13:03,889 and stressed, the risk of that lump being cancerous 208 00:13:04,029 --> 00:13:06,944 was 9 times as great as the average. 209 00:13:07,776 --> 00:13:10,145 The researchers being left-brained, 210 00:13:10,285 --> 00:13:14,756 medically-trained, scientific-minded people, 211 00:13:14,896 --> 00:13:17,844 they had no way of understanding this. They were totally puzzled by this. 212 00:13:17,984 --> 00:13:20,725 They said "How does zero and zero add up to 9?" 213 00:13:20,865 --> 00:13:22,883 which is logical 214 00:13:23,446 --> 00:13:27,948 as a question, but it ignores the true nature of human beings. 215 00:13:28,842 --> 00:13:31,007 Because if you're stressed, 216 00:13:32,130 --> 00:13:36,047 then again these hormones are raging through your system. 217 00:13:37,536 --> 00:13:40,392 But if somebody comes along and says "Hey friend, 218 00:13:40,532 --> 00:13:43,405 I see that you're upset, how are you feeling?" puts a hand on your shoulder, 219 00:13:43,545 --> 00:13:46,939 what happens to you physiologically in a split second? 220 00:13:47,402 --> 00:13:49,999 You calm down, you take a deep breath. 221 00:13:50,139 --> 00:13:53,383 Your brain has more oxygen, you start thinking more clearly. 222 00:13:53,639 --> 00:13:57,757 The adrenaline levels and your blood pressure go down, your heart stops racing, 223 00:13:57,897 --> 00:14:03,179 the cortisol levels go down, so the immune system is no longer under siege. 224 00:14:03,909 --> 00:14:07,317 But if you're emotionally isolated and there's no one to relate to, 225 00:14:07,457 --> 00:14:11,647 then you'll be stewing on your own stress juices for months, 226 00:14:12,026 --> 00:14:14,995 suppressing the immune system, 227 00:14:15,135 --> 00:14:19,253 which of course means that that potential malignant transformation 228 00:14:19,393 --> 00:14:21,264 is not controlled. 229 00:14:21,404 --> 00:14:24,426 No wonder then, do women who are emotionally isolated 230 00:14:24,566 --> 00:14:30,201 and stressed are more likely to have breast cancer, significantly so. 231 00:14:30,341 --> 00:14:34,993 This also tells us that cancer is not the disease of an individual. 232 00:14:35,133 --> 00:14:37,587 It's a disease of an individual which manifests 233 00:14:37,727 --> 00:14:40,074 a lifelong set of relationships 234 00:14:40,214 --> 00:14:43,501 with the psychological and social environment. 235 00:14:43,864 --> 00:14:48,381 For all the hundreds of billions of dollars that they raise 236 00:14:50,183 --> 00:14:55,149 for cancer research, it's never going to amount to anything. 237 00:14:56,255 --> 00:14:58,527 At least, they'll have certain breakthroughs 238 00:14:58,667 --> 00:15:00,945 and they'll show these spectacular advances 239 00:15:01,085 --> 00:15:03,520 in the treatments of specific cancers, 240 00:15:03,660 --> 00:15:07,089 but overall our ability to understand cancer or to treat it 241 00:15:07,229 --> 00:15:11,938 has not really moved forward one iota in the last 40-50 years. 242 00:15:12,078 --> 00:15:17,868 Someone very astutely said "Trying to find the answer to cancer 243 00:15:18,008 --> 00:15:22,799 by studying the individual cell is like trying to understand the traffic jam 244 00:15:22,939 --> 00:15:25,754 by studying the internal combustion engine." 245 00:15:26,276 --> 00:15:29,002 In other words, to understand the cancer of the individual, 246 00:15:29,142 --> 00:15:31,576 you have to look at the much larger picture. 247 00:15:31,716 --> 00:15:35,258 That's just something we militantly refuse to do in Western medicine. 248 00:15:35,398 --> 00:15:38,045 Now, there are ideological reasons for that. 249 00:15:38,185 --> 00:15:41,477 Finally, at the end of life, amongst elderly couples 250 00:15:41,617 --> 00:15:44,646 when one of the is hospitalized, not surprisingly, 251 00:15:44,786 --> 00:15:48,272 the other one is much more likely to fall sick, according to studies. 252 00:15:48,412 --> 00:15:52,761 Why? Because the immune system of the one is actually modulated by 253 00:15:52,901 --> 00:15:56,074 the psychological relationship with the other, 254 00:15:56,214 --> 00:15:58,395 so that our attachment relationships 255 00:15:58,535 --> 00:16:02,787 have a huge formative influence on our physical and mental health. 256 00:16:02,927 --> 00:16:06,125 This means that if we're going to understand health, 257 00:16:06,265 --> 00:16:09,330 we can't do it by reference to the individual. 258 00:16:09,671 --> 00:16:12,394 Given these obvious scientific facts, 259 00:16:12,534 --> 00:16:17,173 and they're really so obvious that a 5-year-old could come up with them, 260 00:16:17,811 --> 00:16:21,365 why is it that we're so blind to it in this culture? 261 00:16:21,505 --> 00:16:23,462 That has to do with ideology, 262 00:16:23,602 --> 00:16:26,987 because the ideology of any particular culture 263 00:16:27,127 --> 00:16:29,142 does not evolve accidentally. 264 00:16:29,282 --> 00:16:34,388 It actually reflects the dominant interests 265 00:16:34,869 --> 00:16:37,460 of the groups 266 00:16:37,600 --> 00:16:41,098 that control or most benefit from that society. 267 00:16:41,595 --> 00:16:44,067 Now, the dominant ideology in this society, 268 00:16:44,207 --> 00:16:47,931 given that we live in a society that worships competition, 269 00:16:48,071 --> 00:16:51,947 that worships individual profit, that actually worships 270 00:16:52,087 --> 00:16:56,399 and considers to be its heroes those people like Donald Trump 271 00:16:56,539 --> 00:16:58,567 who are managing to exploit 272 00:16:58,707 --> 00:17:02,148 many others in order to amass wealth and power. 273 00:17:02,589 --> 00:17:05,280 In a society like that, 274 00:17:05,420 --> 00:17:07,836 we have to look at people as individuals 275 00:17:07,976 --> 00:17:12,944 rather than social creatures. Because if we admitted, 276 00:17:13,084 --> 00:17:16,698 acknowledged and fully got the implications of the reality 277 00:17:16,838 --> 00:17:21,342 that human beings are social creatures with social and psychological needs, 278 00:17:21,582 --> 00:17:24,087 we wouldn't be treating people the way we are. 279 00:17:24,227 --> 00:17:26,981 In order to treat people the way they are being treated 280 00:17:27,121 --> 00:17:31,857 we have to commodify the individual. So the individual himself or herself 281 00:17:32,104 --> 00:17:35,559 needs to become a commodity, which means that our value 282 00:17:35,699 --> 00:17:38,871 is simply based on what we produce 283 00:17:39,011 --> 00:17:41,978 or what we acquire, but not actually who we are. 284 00:17:42,118 --> 00:17:46,263 It's not based on just our very existence as human beings. 285 00:17:49,604 --> 00:17:54,047 There's this very popular book called 'Tuesdays with Morrie'. 286 00:17:54,187 --> 00:17:57,409 Are any of you familiar with it? Quite a few of you are. 287 00:17:57,922 --> 00:18:01,658 This is a man who develops a degenerative neurological illness 288 00:18:01,798 --> 00:18:04,570 called ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) 289 00:18:04,710 --> 00:18:09,677 in which the nervous system literally dries up and hardens. 290 00:18:09,817 --> 00:18:13,563 In the end you're rigid, immobile, paralyzed; you can't even breathe. 291 00:18:13,703 --> 00:18:17,834 You're completely withered mentally, it's like drowning in air, 292 00:18:17,974 --> 00:18:20,177 because you can't breathe at the end. 293 00:18:20,317 --> 00:18:25,756 This guy Morrie is a teacher who develops ALS, a true story 294 00:18:26,365 --> 00:18:29,171 and his student Mitch who writes the book 295 00:18:30,369 --> 00:18:34,472 begins to visit him. They start talking and Morrie is 296 00:18:35,733 --> 00:18:40,146 a bright guy, he has insights, 297 00:18:40,286 --> 00:18:42,754 and particularly, he's exploring his own death. 298 00:18:42,894 --> 00:18:45,751 They go through this conversation every week 299 00:18:46,056 --> 00:18:49,817 and finally the conservations become the subject of a book 300 00:18:49,957 --> 00:18:52,398 called 'Tuesdays with Morrie'. 301 00:18:52,538 --> 00:18:55,894 Here's this guy, 302 00:18:57,268 --> 00:19:00,459 Morrie, who decides to transmit his wisdom to the world. 303 00:19:00,599 --> 00:19:03,981 He says to Mitch "The reason I want to 304 00:19:04,121 --> 00:19:07,882 teach people about the dying process and pass on my wisdom 305 00:19:08,022 --> 00:19:12,677 is because I want to prove that dying people aren't useless." 306 00:19:13,390 --> 00:19:16,344 I want you to consider the assumption behind that. 307 00:19:16,484 --> 00:19:19,625 The assumption is that dying people may be useless 308 00:19:19,765 --> 00:19:21,824 because they're not contributing. 309 00:19:21,964 --> 00:19:26,594 A way that you attain value is to contribute, 310 00:19:26,966 --> 00:19:30,267 so who you are as a human being, in your very existence, 311 00:19:30,407 --> 00:19:34,424 is insufficient to give you value. You have to be producing something. 312 00:19:35,237 --> 00:19:39,943 That thinking is actually, in a very specific way 313 00:19:40,083 --> 00:19:44,556 (and I'm not going through the details of it) is what I think causes ALS. 314 00:19:45,319 --> 00:19:47,700 People are desperately trying to make themselves useful 315 00:19:47,840 --> 00:19:49,656 totally ignoring who they are. 316 00:19:49,796 --> 00:19:54,388 It's the foundation of most chronic illnesses in our society 317 00:19:54,528 --> 00:19:56,862 because of the mind/body entity. 318 00:19:57,322 --> 00:20:00,197 But, the very ideology that dying people are useless, 319 00:20:00,337 --> 00:20:02,353 or that anybody is useless, 320 00:20:02,493 --> 00:20:06,912 is a reflection of the capitalist idea 321 00:20:07,052 --> 00:20:09,868 that people are only useful when they produce. 322 00:20:12,417 --> 00:20:15,956 In the 1840s, a young Karl Marx 323 00:20:16,096 --> 00:20:18,559 talked about alienation. 324 00:20:18,699 --> 00:20:22,928 He said that human beings are alienated from themselves, 325 00:20:23,588 --> 00:20:27,193 from their true nature, from their essence, from their work 326 00:20:27,333 --> 00:20:30,565 because their work no longer reflects who they are; 327 00:20:30,705 --> 00:20:34,403 it reflects their use value. 328 00:20:35,163 --> 00:20:37,206 They are alienated from other people 329 00:20:37,346 --> 00:20:41,032 because, of course in a society that says it's all about individual competition 330 00:20:41,172 --> 00:20:45,368 and it's dog against dog, what we call social darwinism, 331 00:20:45,508 --> 00:20:47,796 you can't help but being alienated from other human beings 332 00:20:47,936 --> 00:20:50,523 and finally, we're alienated from nature. 333 00:20:50,663 --> 00:20:54,408 Just to what degree we're alienated from nature 334 00:20:54,548 --> 00:20:58,484 is tragically and painfully obvious to us in the 21st century. 335 00:20:58,624 --> 00:21:02,194 We're so alienated, that we're actually destroying it. 336 00:21:05,782 --> 00:21:10,487 It's in this kind of a context that we have to understand health. 337 00:21:11,068 --> 00:21:14,647 When you look at factors like social status, 338 00:21:15,001 --> 00:21:18,157 even if you have a heart attack, if you live 339 00:21:20,851 --> 00:21:23,457 in a higher economically, status area, 340 00:21:23,597 --> 00:21:28,287 your chances of surviving a heart attack are actually better. 341 00:21:29,582 --> 00:21:33,095 It's not even because the services are better, 342 00:21:33,727 --> 00:21:37,487 but simply because as a higher economic status person, 343 00:21:37,887 --> 00:21:42,347 you have more going for you, protecting you from death. 344 00:21:45,920 --> 00:21:48,972 In the British civil service there are the famous Whitehall Studies, 345 00:21:49,112 --> 00:21:51,594 where they looked at 346 00:21:51,734 --> 00:21:55,151 heart attack risk, or heart disease risk, 347 00:21:55,291 --> 00:21:58,369 in the civil service. 348 00:21:58,863 --> 00:22:02,950 The higher up you were in the civil service, the less the risk of heart attack. 349 00:22:03,090 --> 00:22:06,125 It's not just an economic factor 350 00:22:06,265 --> 00:22:10,983 because even on two different tiers, at the top and second tier 351 00:22:11,123 --> 00:22:15,231 where the income differences weren't all that great, 352 00:22:15,371 --> 00:22:19,510 the heart disease differences were significant 353 00:22:19,650 --> 00:22:23,141 simply because people at the top had less heart attacks. 354 00:22:23,758 --> 00:22:27,331 Position in the civil service was more of a predictor 355 00:22:27,471 --> 00:22:31,623 of heart disease risk than cholesterol and high blood pressure levels 356 00:22:31,763 --> 00:22:34,186 which are all the things you get paid attention to 357 00:22:34,326 --> 00:22:36,490 when you go to the doctor's office. 358 00:22:36,630 --> 00:22:39,846 So, social status is a significant determinant of health; 359 00:22:40,131 --> 00:22:42,227 gender obviously is. 360 00:22:42,367 --> 00:22:47,401 If you look at the statistics I gave you about multiple sclerosis, 361 00:22:47,541 --> 00:22:51,262 what's different? Why has the ratio changed? 362 00:22:51,402 --> 00:22:56,420 If you understand that multiple sclerosis is in fact a response to stress, 363 00:22:56,560 --> 00:22:58,475 which of course it is, 364 00:22:58,615 --> 00:23:01,395 although most physicians wouldn't see it that way 365 00:23:01,535 --> 00:23:04,739 (I talk about that in my book 'When the Body Says No'). 366 00:23:04,879 --> 00:23:07,592 If you look at women's situations, what has happened? 367 00:23:07,732 --> 00:23:12,275 Women in our society have always carried the burden 368 00:23:12,415 --> 00:23:16,076 of being the emotional supports for their men 369 00:23:16,216 --> 00:23:19,156 and for their families, so that hasn't changed; 370 00:23:19,296 --> 00:23:21,162 they're still doing that. 371 00:23:21,302 --> 00:23:24,706 They're the emotional absorbers of their environments 372 00:23:25,247 --> 00:23:29,202 which, by the way, would help to explain why 373 00:23:29,342 --> 00:23:31,498 married men live longer than unmarried men, 374 00:23:31,638 --> 00:23:34,960 but married women don't live longer than unmarried women. 375 00:23:37,200 --> 00:23:40,648 What has changed, is that since the Second World War, 376 00:23:40,788 --> 00:23:44,160 women have had to take on an economic role, 377 00:23:44,861 --> 00:23:48,896 and they're doing so in the context of less support. 378 00:23:49,327 --> 00:23:53,643 Because we used to live in clans, and tribes, and communities 379 00:23:53,783 --> 00:23:56,616 and extended families and neighborhoods 380 00:23:56,756 --> 00:24:00,182 and much more sense of social cohesion and contact, 381 00:24:00,322 --> 00:24:02,697 so that the depression of the 1930s, 382 00:24:02,837 --> 00:24:05,606 while it was economically, so far at least, 383 00:24:05,746 --> 00:24:09,290 more devastating than the current recession is, 384 00:24:10,119 --> 00:24:12,550 there was also more social cohesion. 385 00:24:12,690 --> 00:24:16,006 People supported each other much more, communally. 386 00:24:17,758 --> 00:24:19,951 So you have more stress and less support, 387 00:24:20,142 --> 00:24:23,893 naturally, if disease is stress related, which I'm convinced it is, 388 00:24:24,033 --> 00:24:27,484 you're going to get more disease. There's no other explanation for it. 389 00:24:27,624 --> 00:24:30,715 It's not simply an individual issue, 390 00:24:31,584 --> 00:24:35,793 it's also very much a gender issue in our society. 391 00:24:35,933 --> 00:24:38,570 Not that women are unique to that kind of stress, 392 00:24:38,867 --> 00:24:43,078 but they're the main recipients of it. 393 00:24:44,642 --> 00:24:46,773 Finally, of course, race: 394 00:24:46,913 --> 00:24:49,520 black American males have a significant increase 395 00:24:49,660 --> 00:24:52,480 in prostate cancer death risk over whites. 396 00:24:52,620 --> 00:24:55,671 Their biological relatives in Africa do not, 397 00:24:55,811 --> 00:24:58,323 so it's not a genetic issue. 398 00:24:58,830 --> 00:25:01,368 I think it has to do with racism, stress 399 00:25:01,508 --> 00:25:04,323 and being an African American in the United States. 400 00:25:04,883 --> 00:25:06,782 Needless to say that in Canada, 401 00:25:06,922 --> 00:25:09,150 we have the First Nations population, 402 00:25:09,290 --> 00:25:12,424 which 100 years ago had no diabetes, and 403 00:25:12,925 --> 00:25:16,097 150 years ago, no rheumatoid arthritis, 404 00:25:16,237 --> 00:25:19,930 and now they have the world's highest rates of those diseases in some areas. 405 00:25:20,070 --> 00:25:22,328 Now, that's not a genetic issue. 406 00:25:22,969 --> 00:25:25,854 That's not an individual issue. 407 00:25:25,994 --> 00:25:28,448 It's a question of looking at what happened socially, 408 00:25:28,588 --> 00:25:31,354 economically and culturally, 409 00:25:31,494 --> 00:25:36,599 and the abuse that they've undergone in this society, and continue to. 410 00:25:37,419 --> 00:25:39,656 Therefore, you can't explain disease, 411 00:25:39,796 --> 00:25:44,070 again, in isolation from a psychosocial environment. 412 00:25:46,363 --> 00:25:48,697 Beyond that, 413 00:25:48,837 --> 00:25:53,992 there's the evidence now, it's not even controversial, 414 00:25:55,025 --> 00:25:59,755 but most physicians and educators have never even heard about it 415 00:26:00,258 --> 00:26:02,989 which is an extraordinary statement. 416 00:26:03,815 --> 00:26:07,708 Actually, it's an extraordinary reflection 417 00:26:08,082 --> 00:26:11,518 of how ideological the medical practice is 418 00:26:11,658 --> 00:26:14,927 and how ideological everything is. 419 00:26:15,508 --> 00:26:19,951 We now have all this science that is beyond the shadow of any doubt whatsoever 420 00:26:20,288 --> 00:26:22,213 that shows that the human brain 421 00:26:22,353 --> 00:26:24,928 actually develops in interaction with the environment. 422 00:26:25,068 --> 00:26:29,454 The kind of brains we have reflects what is happening in the environment. 423 00:26:30,229 --> 00:26:34,115 And yet, if you look at the situation of children these days, 424 00:26:34,255 --> 00:26:37,221 you've gained a burgeoning diagnosis 425 00:26:37,556 --> 00:26:40,821 of ADHD, autism, 426 00:26:41,760 --> 00:26:47,218 oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, Tourette's, Asperger's, 427 00:26:47,904 --> 00:26:51,448 reactive attachment disorder, all these diagnoses, 428 00:26:52,824 --> 00:26:55,771 and more and more kids are being medicated. 429 00:26:55,911 --> 00:27:00,677 Sometimes they're being medicated with drugs that do them all kinds of harm, 430 00:27:00,817 --> 00:27:04,023 so much so that the British Columbia Children's Hospital 431 00:27:04,163 --> 00:27:07,183 recently assessed to establish a clinic just to treat kids 432 00:27:07,323 --> 00:27:11,115 for the side-effects of the anti-psychotic medications they're getting. 433 00:27:11,449 --> 00:27:13,542 They're getting these anti-psychotic medications 434 00:27:13,682 --> 00:27:17,359 not to control psychosis which they don't have, 435 00:27:17,499 --> 00:27:20,489 but to control their behavior. 436 00:27:21,056 --> 00:27:23,293 Because we don't understand that the child's behavior 437 00:27:23,433 --> 00:27:25,644 reflects his relationship to the environment, 438 00:27:25,784 --> 00:27:28,649 we just try and treat the kid's symptoms. 439 00:27:29,009 --> 00:27:31,268 The environment gets very stressed, 440 00:27:31,408 --> 00:27:33,567 kids' brains don't develop the way they should, 441 00:27:33,707 --> 00:27:35,744 they have poor impulse control 442 00:27:35,884 --> 00:27:39,216 and all kinds of emotional pain and confusion 443 00:27:39,356 --> 00:27:42,765 that they're acting out on their behaviors. And instead of changing the environment, 444 00:27:42,905 --> 00:27:46,392 or at least addressing the environment, we medicate the kid. 445 00:27:46,532 --> 00:27:50,412 In other words, we try and suppress the symptom, the surface manifestation 446 00:27:50,552 --> 00:27:53,587 of something that's completely psychosocial. 447 00:27:54,112 --> 00:27:57,525 The result is that kids are developing metabolic syndrome, diabetes 448 00:27:57,665 --> 00:28:00,484 and risk for heart disease, etc. as a result of these medications 449 00:28:00,624 --> 00:28:02,637 which have never been studied in kids. 450 00:28:02,777 --> 00:28:07,577 Nobody's ever studied the long term effects, but we're handing them out. 451 00:28:08,107 --> 00:28:11,457 Tens of thousands of kids in this country, hundreds of thousands in the States, 452 00:28:11,597 --> 00:28:13,926 and all because we don't get the relationship between the environment 453 00:28:14,066 --> 00:28:16,078 and the individual child. 454 00:28:16,218 --> 00:28:17,896 This is what we're seeing. 455 00:28:18,036 --> 00:28:20,983 Now, if you then turn to the question of: 456 00:28:22,615 --> 00:28:26,235 what promotes positive health? 457 00:28:26,607 --> 00:28:29,107 If you look at the literature on stress 458 00:28:29,247 --> 00:28:31,897 (and I'm saying that stress is the common factor 459 00:28:32,037 --> 00:28:35,096 whether it comes to physical or mental illness) 460 00:28:36,603 --> 00:28:40,301 if you actually look at the literature on childhood adversity, 461 00:28:40,441 --> 00:28:42,740 the more adverse circumstances that are present 462 00:28:42,880 --> 00:28:45,808 in a child's life in the early years, 463 00:28:46,061 --> 00:28:49,258 exponentially, the greater the risk of addictions 464 00:28:49,831 --> 00:28:53,910 the greater the risk of mental illness, of psychosis, 465 00:28:54,363 --> 00:28:58,299 of rheumatoid arthritis, of cancer, of obesity 466 00:28:58,439 --> 00:29:00,714 of all kinds of behavioral problems. 467 00:29:00,854 --> 00:29:04,364 Why? Because the early environment shapes the brain, 468 00:29:04,680 --> 00:29:07,640 and as Antonio Damasio, who is a leading neurologist, writes: 469 00:29:07,874 --> 00:29:10,084 "To understand in a satisfactory manner 470 00:29:10,224 --> 00:29:13,409 the brain that fabricates human mind and human behavior, 471 00:29:13,549 --> 00:29:17,647 it is necessary to take into account its social and cultural context." 472 00:29:19,052 --> 00:29:24,038 The very circuitry of the brain depends on 473 00:29:24,178 --> 00:29:27,919 the emotional and social environment for its development. 474 00:29:28,059 --> 00:29:32,733 When that is stressed, the child's brain doesn't develop the way it should, 475 00:29:32,873 --> 00:29:35,751 and that's why you see so many kids now being diagnosed. 476 00:29:35,891 --> 00:29:37,653 It's not an individual problem, 477 00:29:37,793 --> 00:29:40,140 but again, we don't get that as a society. 478 00:29:40,280 --> 00:29:42,899 Instead of looking at the larger picture 479 00:29:43,039 --> 00:29:46,687 of what conditions do kids actually need for health, 480 00:29:47,118 --> 00:29:49,396 we're just trying to deal with the symptoms. 481 00:29:49,693 --> 00:29:51,961 We mostly do that according to the lines 482 00:29:52,101 --> 00:29:55,811 dictated by medical economics, which is to say 483 00:29:55,951 --> 00:29:59,857 by the needs and profits of the pharmaceutical companies. 484 00:29:59,997 --> 00:30:02,895 Because there's lot's of money to be made on developing new drugs, 485 00:30:03,035 --> 00:30:06,192 there's no money to be made on researching stress on the family 486 00:30:06,332 --> 00:30:10,299 and how to alleviate it. That's not going to be profitable to anybody. 487 00:30:10,958 --> 00:30:12,939 It's not even that there's a conspiracy, 488 00:30:13,079 --> 00:30:15,982 not that they don't conspire, they do. 489 00:30:16,285 --> 00:30:19,486 When there's research that undermines their profits, 490 00:30:19,626 --> 00:30:21,234 they'll suppress it. 491 00:30:21,672 --> 00:30:24,904 They'll magnify or over emphasize research 492 00:30:25,044 --> 00:30:26,759 that will support their profits. 493 00:30:26,899 --> 00:30:29,640 It's not that they're above being conspiratorial, 494 00:30:29,780 --> 00:30:32,080 but fundamentally it doesn't take a conspiracy, 495 00:30:32,220 --> 00:30:34,598 it just takes the profit system. 496 00:30:35,045 --> 00:30:37,607 Then you've got a perfect melding 497 00:30:37,747 --> 00:30:42,085 of individualistic ideology and the profit motive, 498 00:30:42,225 --> 00:30:45,110 hence you're getting to medicate millions of kids. 499 00:30:45,758 --> 00:30:49,597 The number of prescriptions for stimulant medications for ADHD 500 00:30:49,737 --> 00:30:52,534 in this country, which I have myself, 501 00:30:54,032 --> 00:30:56,339 has gone up 43% in the last 5 years 502 00:30:56,479 --> 00:30:58,644 and nobody's looking at how to deal with 503 00:30:58,784 --> 00:31:02,556 the child's environment that actually shapes that brain 504 00:31:02,696 --> 00:31:04,822 that then manifests itself 505 00:31:04,962 --> 00:31:09,063 in poor attention skills, poor impulse control and hyperactivity. 506 00:31:09,332 --> 00:31:12,436 If you look at the literature on stress, 507 00:31:12,576 --> 00:31:16,556 the dominant stress factors affecting people are: 508 00:31:16,696 --> 00:31:18,833 uncertainty and lack of information 509 00:31:18,973 --> 00:31:23,065 (I want you to think about the position of the average citizen 510 00:31:23,788 --> 00:31:27,494 in this culture) uncertainty and lack of information 511 00:31:27,895 --> 00:31:30,492 for the most people don't have information, 512 00:31:30,632 --> 00:31:34,630 because information sources as we all know, are controlled by very few people. 513 00:31:35,014 --> 00:31:38,651 I grew up in communist Hungary 514 00:31:39,100 --> 00:31:42,860 under a very rigid and brutal dictatorship 515 00:31:43,326 --> 00:31:45,986 where the information flow was controlled, 516 00:31:46,126 --> 00:31:49,314 but the difference was: everybody knew it. 517 00:31:54,976 --> 00:31:58,362 There's a story that might be apocryphal or might be true 518 00:31:58,502 --> 00:32:00,548 and I wish I remembered where I read it. 519 00:32:00,688 --> 00:32:03,845 It's [a story] of some Russian journalists 520 00:32:03,985 --> 00:32:07,723 coming to England in the '50s or early '60s 521 00:32:09,052 --> 00:32:12,375 and they say "You have all this conformity 522 00:32:12,515 --> 00:32:15,590 and people buying into the official ideology! In our country, 523 00:32:15,730 --> 00:32:18,843 we have to have jails and we have to pull people's fingernails 524 00:32:18,983 --> 00:32:22,491 to achieve that kind of unanimity. How do you do it over here?" 525 00:32:22,631 --> 00:32:26,179 How they do it is through their control of the media 526 00:32:26,319 --> 00:32:30,549 and through the repetition of untruth as truth, 527 00:32:31,368 --> 00:32:33,844 and people buy into it. 528 00:32:33,984 --> 00:32:37,707 The propaganda system and the mind control system 529 00:32:37,847 --> 00:32:41,411 is far more effective here than it is those brutal dictatorships 530 00:32:41,551 --> 00:32:44,238 where anyone with a mind can see through it. 531 00:32:44,378 --> 00:32:46,232 But there are lots of intelligent people here 532 00:32:46,372 --> 00:32:49,507 who are totally caught up in it, who actually think they're free. 533 00:32:49,647 --> 00:32:52,501 But how can you be free, when you don't have information, 534 00:32:52,641 --> 00:32:56,201 or when the information that you're working with is the opposite of reality? 535 00:32:56,341 --> 00:32:58,512 There's no freedom in that. 536 00:32:58,652 --> 00:33:01,713 For all the Internet, and the reality 537 00:33:01,853 --> 00:33:06,102 that people can access any sort of information they want these days, 538 00:33:06,242 --> 00:33:09,796 that has not increased the freedom quotient in our society significantly 539 00:33:09,936 --> 00:33:13,039 because ideologically, people are blinded. 540 00:33:14,099 --> 00:33:17,106 Even though it's available to them, there's no danger of most people 541 00:33:17,246 --> 00:33:20,665 ever finding out the truth about climate change. 542 00:33:21,200 --> 00:33:23,606 Not at least sufficiently to get them alarmed about it 543 00:33:23,746 --> 00:33:26,572 enough to do something about it politically. 544 00:33:26,712 --> 00:33:28,793 We have people in charge 545 00:33:28,933 --> 00:33:32,834 who are in total denial, and we keep electing them. 546 00:33:35,092 --> 00:33:39,129 It's like if somebody was legally blind, 547 00:33:39,269 --> 00:33:42,954 and you took away their white cane 548 00:33:43,094 --> 00:33:45,778 and you make them the guides in traffic. 549 00:33:46,579 --> 00:33:49,874 This is what we're doing with our politicians, we elect the most blind people 550 00:33:50,014 --> 00:33:52,320 and say "Lead us on!" 551 00:33:52,460 --> 00:33:54,775 How can you talk about freedom? 552 00:33:55,047 --> 00:33:58,501 What person who is actually free would make such a choice? 553 00:33:58,641 --> 00:34:02,959 Uncertainty and lack of information characterizes the average citizen 554 00:34:03,099 --> 00:34:06,434 and the social discourse and the social conversation. 555 00:34:06,574 --> 00:34:08,699 Secondly: loss of control. 556 00:34:08,839 --> 00:34:12,261 You take rats, you yoke them in pairs 557 00:34:12,724 --> 00:34:17,167 and you actually tie them up together. 558 00:34:17,307 --> 00:34:21,374 You attach electrodes to their tails (this is an experiment that's been done) 559 00:34:21,514 --> 00:34:24,342 and through that electrode, they can get an electric shock. 560 00:34:24,633 --> 00:34:27,114 Both rats in each pair 561 00:34:27,254 --> 00:34:30,539 receive the same degree of shock for the same duration, 562 00:34:31,209 --> 00:34:33,490 but one of them has a paw free. 563 00:34:33,630 --> 00:34:36,565 That paw allows them to turn a lever 564 00:34:36,705 --> 00:34:38,857 which would turn off the shock. 565 00:34:39,433 --> 00:34:42,746 Both rats receive the same shock for the same duration, 566 00:34:42,886 --> 00:34:46,021 but one of them has a paw free that they can shut off the lever with. 567 00:34:46,596 --> 00:34:49,075 When you look at their stress hormone levels afterwards, 568 00:34:49,215 --> 00:34:51,417 they receive the same shock for the same duration 569 00:34:51,633 --> 00:34:55,403 but the rat that had a paw free so it could have control, 570 00:34:55,543 --> 00:34:58,046 its stress hormone levels are lower. 571 00:34:58,486 --> 00:35:01,612 So it's not the duration or degree of shock that created the stress, 572 00:35:01,752 --> 00:35:03,742 it's the loss of control, 573 00:35:04,264 --> 00:35:06,815 and similar experiments have been done with human beings. 574 00:35:06,955 --> 00:35:09,320 In stress, there's a loss of control 575 00:35:09,460 --> 00:35:13,521 and if you look at our society, who's got control here? 576 00:35:14,090 --> 00:35:16,808 How many people are actually in charge of their lives, 577 00:35:16,948 --> 00:35:19,033 given the manipulation that takes place, 578 00:35:19,173 --> 00:35:22,702 and given that the most important decisions are made by people far away 579 00:35:22,842 --> 00:35:27,428 who are not in any way subject to any kind of democratic control, 580 00:35:28,026 --> 00:35:31,283 because they do it through their ownership 581 00:35:31,423 --> 00:35:34,336 of the means of production or capital. 582 00:35:35,468 --> 00:35:38,393 We don't elect our capitalists. 583 00:35:39,394 --> 00:35:41,203 There's no elections. 584 00:35:41,343 --> 00:35:44,562 "Hey, I'd like to exploit you, vote for me!" 585 00:35:45,826 --> 00:35:48,004 That doesn't happen. 586 00:35:48,144 --> 00:35:52,233 At the very best, we elect our representatives, who are the politicians. 587 00:35:52,708 --> 00:35:55,346 But in a society like that, there's no genuine control, 588 00:35:55,486 --> 00:35:57,839 so most people feel totally helpless. 589 00:35:57,979 --> 00:36:00,294 That creates stress for people. 590 00:36:00,735 --> 00:36:02,618 That creates stress for people. 591 00:36:03,027 --> 00:36:04,849 Uncertainty, lack of information, 592 00:36:04,989 --> 00:36:07,636 loss of control and finally loss of human contact 593 00:36:07,776 --> 00:36:10,117 because as I indicated in the beginning, 594 00:36:10,257 --> 00:36:13,761 for health, you need a social and human connection. 595 00:36:13,901 --> 00:36:16,723 That mitigates stress, that mitigates everything. 596 00:36:17,245 --> 00:36:20,180 Now, as we isolate people more, 597 00:36:20,320 --> 00:36:23,744 as machines take over more and more, as we talk less to human beings... 598 00:36:23,884 --> 00:36:27,318 Just think about your experience, when you make a phone call 599 00:36:27,662 --> 00:36:31,099 and the machine says "Thank you for your phone call. 600 00:36:32,843 --> 00:36:36,366 Due to an unexpected number of calls, [please hold...]" 601 00:36:36,860 --> 00:36:39,085 and then you wait for half an hour, 602 00:36:39,225 --> 00:36:43,003 and the frustration that you have of not being able to talk to a human being. 603 00:36:43,244 --> 00:36:45,357 We're talking less and less to human beings, 604 00:36:45,497 --> 00:36:48,682 more and more talking to and through machines. 605 00:36:48,822 --> 00:36:50,941 There's less and less community, 606 00:36:51,081 --> 00:36:55,136 people no longer live where they work, they no longer shop where they live. 607 00:36:55,276 --> 00:36:58,248 We don't relate to people that we know on a daily basis; 608 00:36:58,764 --> 00:37:01,758 it's largely strangers that we interact with 609 00:37:02,727 --> 00:37:06,479 in large chain stores, etc., so there's less human contact. 610 00:37:06,619 --> 00:37:08,512 People are more suspicious. 611 00:37:08,652 --> 00:37:11,774 All that leads to stress, which leads to illness. 612 00:37:15,121 --> 00:37:18,587 In terms of creating a positive health, and by the way, 613 00:37:18,841 --> 00:37:22,151 interesting about mental versus physical health, the Buddha 614 00:37:22,291 --> 00:37:26,195 who was a great psychologist, said 2500 years ago: 615 00:37:27,362 --> 00:37:30,063 "You might meet a person who can maintain perfect physical health 616 00:37:30,203 --> 00:37:33,294 for a few years, or even for a hundred years, 617 00:37:33,434 --> 00:37:35,681 but you're rarely meet anybody who can stay mentally healthy 618 00:37:35,821 --> 00:37:38,530 for any length of time." 619 00:37:38,983 --> 00:37:42,425 Because for mental health, you need all kinds of conditions 620 00:37:42,565 --> 00:37:44,974 that most people don't have. 621 00:37:45,114 --> 00:37:49,570 Therefore, the recent Canadian report about mental health, about how 622 00:37:49,710 --> 00:37:52,579 between 6 and 7 million Canadians are affected by mental health issues, 623 00:37:52,719 --> 00:37:55,040 that's probably an underestimate, 624 00:37:55,180 --> 00:37:58,171 but that's one quarter, or one in every five, 625 00:37:58,311 --> 00:38:02,235 and 50% of North American adults have some chronic physical illness. 626 00:38:02,375 --> 00:38:07,161 We're the wealthiest society in history and also one of the sickest, 627 00:38:07,893 --> 00:38:10,034 and overmedicated of course. 628 00:38:10,174 --> 00:38:13,603 In terms of creating positive health 629 00:38:13,743 --> 00:38:17,150 what you need is community, contact, 630 00:38:17,650 --> 00:38:22,020 local control, involvement, engagement, 631 00:38:24,032 --> 00:38:27,298 information (the right information). 632 00:38:28,283 --> 00:38:30,958 In other words, you need consciousness, 633 00:38:31,098 --> 00:38:34,083 you need freedom, you need community. 634 00:38:36,279 --> 00:38:40,202 It's healthy therefore, 635 00:38:40,774 --> 00:38:44,497 those that are involved in any level of social engagement, 636 00:38:44,637 --> 00:38:47,031 that they no longer be passive. 637 00:38:47,171 --> 00:38:51,491 As long as they do that consciously rather than in a driven fashion 638 00:38:52,011 --> 00:38:55,761 (because if you do it unconsciously, you're not helping very much) 639 00:38:56,515 --> 00:38:59,186 social engagement is healthy, 640 00:38:59,665 --> 00:39:03,307 because it connects you to others and it gives you meaning, 641 00:39:03,447 --> 00:39:05,860 so long as you're conscious. 642 00:39:06,000 --> 00:39:10,229 It's entirely possible to be an unconscious social activist; 643 00:39:10,654 --> 00:39:12,576 that's another conversation. 644 00:39:12,716 --> 00:39:15,113 As long as you're a conscious social activist, 645 00:39:15,253 --> 00:39:19,351 that's a healthy thing to do, and also of course, you're creating community. 646 00:39:19,798 --> 00:39:24,140 In our lives, we need to seek contact and communication with other people 647 00:39:27,785 --> 00:39:31,676 and we need to be as informed as possible. 648 00:39:33,017 --> 00:39:34,874 Sometimes, people say to me 649 00:39:35,014 --> 00:39:38,390 "When I get too much information, I get disillusioned." 650 00:39:38,530 --> 00:39:41,958 My response is "Would you rather be illusioned or disillusioned?" 651 00:39:43,851 --> 00:39:46,106 These are the factors that we have to seek, 652 00:39:46,246 --> 00:39:50,215 and not only do we have to seek [them], we have to create [them] in our lives. 653 00:39:50,355 --> 00:39:54,553 Of course, behind all that is a much larger social question: 654 00:39:54,794 --> 00:39:59,333 is this society conducive to human health? The answer is: no it isn't. 655 00:40:00,428 --> 00:40:04,808 Although you can't change society by the flicking of a thumb 656 00:40:04,948 --> 00:40:07,958 or the waving of a magic wand, 657 00:40:10,347 --> 00:40:13,596 certainly, being engaged with the question 658 00:40:13,736 --> 00:40:16,051 of what kind of society we'd like to see 659 00:40:16,191 --> 00:40:19,890 and how do we best work towards whatever vision we may have, 660 00:40:20,030 --> 00:40:23,484 that's a question that's very important for human beings to engage with. 661 00:40:23,624 --> 00:40:27,028 Otherwise, we're passive victims of circumstance. 662 00:40:27,487 --> 00:40:30,935 In terms of a social vision and how to obtain it, 663 00:40:31,075 --> 00:40:32,827 that's going to be... 664 00:40:32,967 --> 00:40:35,875 A particular view of that will be Matt's subject 665 00:40:36,015 --> 00:40:39,239 and I'll turn the mike over to him now. 666 00:40:40,274 --> 00:40:42,864 [Applause] 667 00:40:48,974 --> 00:40:52,666 As he comes up, let me just read you one quote from 668 00:40:52,806 --> 00:40:54,896 from the catholic monk Thomas Merton 669 00:40:55,036 --> 00:40:58,024 who in an autobiography, 'The Seven Storey Mountain' 670 00:40:58,164 --> 00:41:01,277 [made a] very eloquent statement. 671 00:41:01,769 --> 00:41:05,792 He was writing in the 1940s, he's a fantastic writer. 672 00:41:06,311 --> 00:41:10,044 He says: "It is true that the materialistic society, 673 00:41:10,184 --> 00:41:14,429 the so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism, 674 00:41:14,569 --> 00:41:18,598 has produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of worldliness. 675 00:41:19,268 --> 00:41:23,905 And nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, 676 00:41:24,045 --> 00:41:26,218 has there ever been such a flowering of cheap, 677 00:41:26,358 --> 00:41:28,897 petty and disgusting lusts and vanities 678 00:41:29,037 --> 00:41:32,563 as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered 679 00:41:32,703 --> 00:41:35,507 and encouraged for the sake of making money. 680 00:41:35,647 --> 00:41:37,859 We live in a society whose whole policy 681 00:41:37,999 --> 00:41:40,415 is to excite every nerve in the human body 682 00:41:40,555 --> 00:41:43,577 and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, 683 00:41:43,717 --> 00:41:45,989 to strain every human desire to the limit 684 00:41:46,129 --> 00:41:50,909 and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible" 685 00:41:52,895 --> 00:41:55,804 (synthetic passions, not genuine, human ones) 686 00:41:56,277 --> 00:41:59,065 "in order to cater to them with the products of our factories 687 00:41:59,205 --> 00:42:03,525 and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest." 688 00:42:03,665 --> 00:42:07,125 Karl Marx could not have put it better. 689 00:42:07,983 --> 00:42:10,767 [Applause]