Our Politics and Our Societies Are Literally Making Us Sick – But It’s Not Just About Pollution

“The flaws of our leaders perfectly mirror the emotional underdevelopment of the society that elevates them to power.” – Gabor Maté

I haven’t talked about it directly in this project but it’s what so much of what I cover leads to:

Our environment is making us sick.

And it’s not only the pollution and the toxins we are already aware of.

These are the traumas we experience and pass on.

If you’re interested in politics, you might be aware of the concept of intergenerational trauma: how certain features of our neurobiology get passed on to generations. This lens confirms that racism is trauma. Any kind of structural oppression is trauma.

If our personalities are more about what happened to us and the mechanisms we have developed to cope with it, what does an unhealthy environment do to all of us?

This is exactly what Dr. Gabor Maté, a medical doctor and a trauma expert, explores in his work.

Among other things, he talks about how our “modern” societies – capitalist, with shrinking family units, with lots of pressure to perform, etc. – are making us more disconnected from others and ourselves. And disconnecting from the Self is one of the ways to describe what trauma is.

The very values of a society are traumatizing for a lot of people.

But I will let Gabor himself explain this better.

PS. I point to different resources (therapist and authors) in my other project, Investigative Selfism, and you can find it all here. You can also read more about intergenerational trauma here.