Choices for the Authentic Self Under Medical Coercion

Choices for the Authentic Self Under Medical Coercion: Trauma Expert Gabor Maté Still Ignores the Elephant in the Room


I write this critique of trauma expert Gabor Maté with some reluctance because I have admired his work for a long time. I wish it were not necessary to do this again because this is my second time to address his stance on the mandates for the experimental mRNA therapy. Yet I feel it is essential to write this because he has continued to speak with great hypocrisy on this matter while he enjoys glowing reviews and flattering interviews during the promotional tour of his new book The Myth of Normal. I could let it go if he were not someone seeking a large, sympathetic audience and if he were not revered as an expert on trauma.


I wrote the previous essay about Dr. Maté after I heard him claim in an interview that a university student who didn’t want to take the mRNA treatment was free to make that choice, but “he doesn’t have to go to university” if he doesn’t want to comply with the coercion to take a medical treatment. I was stunned to hear him take this position, considering his life story as a Holocaust survivor and an expert on trauma.


In spite of his reputation for being a contrarian thinker and critic of capitalism’s destructive effects on mental health, he took a completely conventional, incurious, and conformist view of the most traumatizing and socially divisive issue to emerge in the last twenty years—one that was brought to us by the pharmaceutical industry and the “charitable foundations” that are part and parcel of that destructive capitalism.


Instead of engaging with the critiques of vaccination policy made by the medical experts who formed the great Great Barrington Declaration (and numerous other experts in other organizations), he focused his attention on examples of powerless people who were having an apparently irrational response to the mandates because they were being triggered, supposedly, by unresolved childhood trauma.


Dr. Maté never bothered to face the truth about the “vaccines” that emerged soon after they were injected into millions: It was a lie that the mRNA treatments are safe and effective. They do have harmful effects. They have done nothing to stop the spread of the virus, and there is no benefit to people who are in reasonably good health, considering the risks. We could say, as the joke goes, “safe and effective” is not a lie; it’s two lies. The only ethical position to take was that no one should be coerced into taking these treatments in order to avoid becoming a pariah. Dr. Maté has stressed repeatedly in his lectures, books, and interviews that social isolation is the worst thing a human can suffer, and it has devastating effects on mental and physical health over the long term, especially if one suppresses one’s true self in order to please others.


If he doesn’t address this horrible position he took about the vaccines and renounce it, I don’t see why anyone should buy his new book or take him seriously in the numerous interviews he has given recently to promote it. I’m not saying he should be dismissed entirely. I admired his work, and I might again, but before I do that, all he has to do is admit he got it wrong. It could be a good example of one of his humble admissions of how he let his own past trauma get the best of him.


However, one has to wonder if he has decided to avoid the issue because he knows the interviews and the favorable reviews would vanish if he took a stance that would divide his audience. Perhaps he fears the backlash that would come from suppressing his authentic self. Book sales would decline, and he would be cancelled and shadow banned just like everyone else who has taken a dissident stance. No one wants to become the next Eric Clapton. Book sales would decline, and there would be no more invitations to appear on the CBC or to write editorials for The Globe and Mail.


It is safe to assume that he has made a conscious effort to not address the issue. Like many celebrities who agree to interviews, he probably set conditions about what questions he would not answer and which topics he would not discuss. For example, in his long interview with Joe Rogan in September 2022, the pandemic was mentioned only briefly toward the end of the conversation.[1] And this was Joe Rogan—the guy who was the victim of an abusive media shitstorm in 2021 when he recovered within a few days, while unvaccinated, from a SARS-Cov-2 infection. He credited his recovery to alternative treatments (including the forbidden ivermectin) and healthy living—something that the officially-sanctioned “science” never endorsed. There is no way that the pandemic and all its controversies was not the enormous elephant in the room during this interview when the topic was “healing from trauma.” This omission had to have been pre-arranged.


The same omission was evident in Dr. Maté’s interview with Chris Hedges,[2] who is himself another example of a political analyst and harsh critic of capitalism for whom the pandemic seems to be invisible. Thomas Harrington recently wrote an excellent essay on high-profile writers on the left who have chosen not to write anything critical about the vaccine push by the pharmaceutical industry for the last two years. They used to write about the shortcomings of privatized medical care and the crimes of the pharmaceutical industry in the opioid crisis, but they’ve been silent on the pandemic response and the money that was spent by the industry to promote vaccines as the only way to “get back to normal.”





I have also noticed the omission in the appearances of Dr. Maté’s son Aaron on the Jimmy Dore show. Jimmy Dore has been a constant harsh critic of the vaccine push throughout the 2021-22 period, with many searing tirades recorded weekly against Anthony Fauci and the “shitlib” segment of society that has treated him as a hero. Yet when Aaron Maté appeared on the show in mid-2022 (after a long, unexplained absence as a regular guest), other matters were discussed, even though the pandemic is the elephant in the room on the Jimmy Dore show, just as it is in Joe Rogan’s studio. Aaron Maté writes for The Grayzone, which has published a few articles critical of the covid response, so it is probably a delicate matter for Aaron to dodge with his colleagues there as well.[3] I could only conclude that Jimmy and Aaron had a tense falling out for a while, and Aaron stayed away because the show was an embarrassing direct attack on views held by his father, but now they have agreed to work together again with an understanding that they won’t discuss anything that would be awkward for the Maté family.


To illustrate Dr. Maté’s hypocrisy in more detail, below there are some excerpts from Dr. Maté’s interview with Brian Rose.[4] This was a softball interview in which the host avoided asking the pertinent questions about the traumatizing social disruption that, it appears, is a sort of Lord Voldemort—the pandemic for some is “he who shall not be named.” However, it did come up briefly in the interview, but it was quickly put aside. Dr. Maté was careful not to mention his endorsement of coercive medical treatment, and Brian Rose never asked about it, probably because of a prior agreement.


It is odd that Brian Rose would avoid this topic because he interviewed the often-maligned radical alleged “conspiracy nut” David Icke early in the pandemic.[5] In that interview, Icke claimed the pandemic response was an engineered social crisis designed to transfer wealth upward and consolidate the power of transnational elites. Brian Rose seemed sympathetic to his views and never challenged him. He was willing to give him a platform, so it is curious that he would not ask challenging questions of Dr. Maté in order to discuss the contradictions between the views of his two guests.


To suggest what some challenging questions could have been, I refer to the recent essay by Thomas Harrington (mentioned above) Why Did the Left Fail the Covid Test So Badly? that readers can keep in mind.[6] He noted that there is a curiously long list of people like Gabor Maté—perceptive veteran critics of capitalism and US foreign policy—who ignored the globally coordinated virus response and failed to apply their sharp analytical skills to it. He listed several propaganda-savvy journalists and journals he had championed over the years that failed to notice...


  1. ·         the now heavily documented collaboration between the US government and Big Tech in censoring opinions that go counter to the government’s and Big Pharma’s desired discourse on Covid
  2. ·         the US government’s abrogation of the Nuremberg principle relating to informed consent and medical experimentation
  3. ·         experimental vaccines that were sold to the population on the basis of their ability to stop infection do not stop infection, and this was known to anyone who read the FDA briefing papers published when these injections were unleashed on the public
  4. ·         the millions of people who lost their jobs over the lies
  5. ·         the government’s abject disdain for the longstanding statutory right to object to medical treatment on religious grounds
  6. ·         the mafia-like nature of the vaccine contracts forced upon sovereign countries around the world
  7. ·         Pfizer sought to keep all clinical information relating to the vaccines under wraps for 75 years
  8. ·         the upward transfer of wealth that took place during the years of the Covid state of exception
  9. ·         the trauma imposed on billions of children around the world whose lives were thrown into chaos by the useless quarantine and masking rules

_____


EXCERPTS (discussion follows)


Dr. Gabor Maté: The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, London Real, October 3, 2022:


6:00~


Gabor Maté: The pandemic… whatever side of the vaccine debate or the mandate debate one finds oneself on, globally the pandemic revealed certain aspects of our society that we should have been aware of before. Didn’t it teach us how important human contact and communal presence is? Whether you agree with the policies—I’m not getting into that debate now—but it certainly taught us the importance of each other, of the we that contains me.


In a lot of the suspicion and rancor I saw in the Covid debate, I was seeing the effect of trauma. People couldn’t see another point of view, no matter which side [they were on] … If a child is given the sense early that the world is not trustworthy, that’s going to show up in politics. It’s going to show up in our social discourse.


… I don’t think they have the technology to introduce microchips into people’s circulation through a vaccine... [The preacher who believed such microchips existed] was projecting into the political debate a personal experience of trauma, not realizing that’s what he was doing.


1:12:05~1:17:00


In Western medicine, for all the brilliance of Western medical techniques and curing modalities, there’s still a tendency for the patient to be a passive recipient of health care rather than being the agent who actually decides what he’ll accept or not. That’s not helpful to people…


How long do you survive in the wild if you’re not in touch with your feelings?


… Have you ever had the experience of having a strong gut feeling, ignoring it, and feeling sorry afterwards?


… Something happens to most of us where we have to give up our authenticity, our connection to ourselves, in order to belong to our family of origin and to our society, so there is this tension between attachment and authenticity, and we go for attachment every time. We go for being accepted, being nurtured, and liked and so on. Once we make that decision—it’s not conscious; it’s automatic—it becomes our lodestar, and we follow it. We keep choosing attachment, other people’s acceptance of us, over our own authentic feelings and opinions and sense of self, and that leads to pathology of mind and body.


… A child has no choice, but as adults we have to realize the price that we are paying for not being ourselves. Am I still a helpless child who has to choose the attachment? … Or… can I choose authenticity instead, even at the risk of losing some attachment relationships? Or even better, can I choose such adult attachment relationships where I don’t have to sacrifice my authenticity?


_____


Discussion


Everything Dr. Maté said in the passage above should be taken as a strong endorsement of the individual’s right to refuse the experimental mRNA treatments, yet he has not renounced the position he took previously.


Given the lack of proven efficacy and safety of the mRNA shots, and the low risk posed by the virus to the large majority, there was never a threat to the social fabric that justified the devastating lockdowns and the suppression of the fundamental right to medical autonomy. Dr. Maté should know all this by now and be willing to discuss what it means for our severely traumatized society, and he should be able to see the contradictions in what he said during the interview with Brian Rose.


… I don’t think they have the technology to introduce microchips into people’s circulation through a vaccine... [The preacher who believed such microchips existed] was projecting into the political debate a personal experience of trauma, not realizing that’s what he was doing.


This reaction brings to mind the quote from Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Although Dr. Maté seems to have found an interesting target to make a point about irrational conspiracy theories, it turns out that the fear of inserted microchips is not that far off from what has actually been studied seriously in recent years. For example, a paper in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research describes how it is not microchips but rather nanoparticles that are the focus of attention on this matter of implantation of communication devices. A quote from the abstract of the paper:


Interdisciplinary research on the well-documented problems posed to human beings by the injectable mRNA platforms claiming to address COVID-19 medical complications reveal surprising, if not deeply troubling, new evidence of apparent fraud and deceit. Analysis presented here bolsters both the reported laboratory studies of blood samples from injected subjects and experimental work exploring the potential reasons for observed phenomena relating to electromagnetic properties exhibited in human bodies. The impetus for this cross-disciplinary study was current reports from a substantial proportion of injected subjects who emitted alphanumeric signals in the frequency range corresponding to Bluetooth communications networks.[7]


A glance at the works cited list of this journal article should give pause to anyone who thinks that concern over implanted devices is a just a pre-occupation of whacko conspiracy nuts who are living out their unresolved childhood trauma. Consider also that the smartphone apps that everyone is required to have to prove their health status might as well be an implanted device or an ankle bracelet, monitoring citizens as if they were all paroled convicts.


In Western medicine... there’s still a tendency for the patient to be a passive recipient of health care rather than being the agent who actually decides what he’ll accept or not.


… Have you ever had the experience of having a strong gut feeling, ignoring it, and feeling sorry afterwards?


... there is this tension between attachment and authenticity, and we go for attachment every time... we have to realize the price that we are paying for not being ourselves...


Am I still a helpless child who has to choose the attachment? … can I choose adult attachment relationships where I don’t have to sacrifice my authenticity?


These excerpts of the longer excerpts above prompt me to wonder why Dr. Maté did not congratulate Joe Rogan for “expressing healthy anger,” for not being a “passive recipient of health care,” and for “being the agent who actually decides what he’ll accept or not.” Like millions of lockdown and mandate skeptics who chose authenticity over attachment, Joe Rogan listened perhaps to his “strong gut feeling” that Anthony Fauci, the media, and the government agencies were perpetrating a massive fraud[8] and a witch-hunt,[9] and so he didn’t have to be sorry afterward that he didn’t listen to his gut feeling. Intuition was just as important as reading the facts presented and the rational arguments made by hundreds of dissenting scientists, social scientists, and lawyers. Joe Rogan rejected childish attachment to dishonest and foolish authority figures, found new friends, and risked losing the successful podcast that has made him wealthy. However, the backlash in the fall of 2021 was more than he expected, and he seems to have backed away from controversy since then in order to save his show. There must be a long list of celebrities now who think twice about accepting an invitation to interview with him. This caution seemed evident in this interview with Dr. Maté because he appears to have gone along with a request to not discuss the pandemic in order to have a high-profile guest on his podcast.


Perhaps Joe Rogan can be forgiven for wanting to steer clear of controversy because he has done enough already by sticking his neck out at the peak of the vaccination panic. There are so many other high-profile people and medical professionals who could step up but have chosen to stay silent.


I also need to point out here that in the interview I discussed in my previous post on this subject, Dr. Maté stated that medical staff and first responders must lose their jobs if they don’t want to get the vaccine because they will be in contact with the vulnerable and the elderly. But here was the elderly Dr. Maté sitting in a small studio for three hours with the unvaccinated Joe Rogan! That’s a risk he chose to take, I suppose, but still it suggests that he knew the risk was no greater than that posed by all the vaccinated people he encounters. Furthermore, if young people must lose their jobs to make the vulnerable feel safe, then the vulnerable have to stay home as much as possible. He is not setting an example as a vulnerable person doing the responsible thing by refraining from travel and minimizing contact with society. Not everyone can do this, but he certainly has the financial resources to stay home and arrange for the necessities of life to be brought to him. His presence on the Joe Rogan show is probably a tacit admission that his previous stance was wrong, but nonetheless he prefers not to discuss it.


On the topic of staying silent, I will leave the last word to Dr. Maté himself, then end with a reference to a peer-reviewed article in the journal Vaccine that shows a clear signal of vaccine injury occurring at a rate above what has caused other vaccines to be discontinued. There are dozens of similar articles and thousands of testimonies that point in the same direction, for anyone who cares to look for them.


Gabor Maté in an interview with Russell Brand in May 2021:


Albert Speer was a Nazi armaments minister and economics minister ... He was a war criminal and condemned as such ... he said he was often asked, “What did you know?” And he said what he knew wasn’t the right question ... The question is what he could have known if he had wanted to. He said he had plenty of hints ... So the question is not what he knew. It is what he could have known had he wanted to know. We’re not living in Nazi Germany ... You can get all the information you want, so if anybody these days doesn’t know, it’s not because the information is not available. It’s not what you know. It’s what you could know if you wanted to find out.[10]


Following this reasoning, here is an example of information that is accessible to those who look for it:


The most conservative, minimalist conclusion one can draw from this study is that [the mRNA] vaccines may not confer net benefit to everyone, and therefore, universal mandates were dangerous, unscientific, and unethical. They led to marginalization and systemic discrimination of the unvaccinated and untold preventable vaccine injuries among healthy people in particular. Not to mention all the economic, cultural, and political divisions that were exacerbated.[11]


These are the words of Rav Avora in his discussion of a research paper published in Vaccine in September 2022. In that paper, the authors adopt the usual tentative and unprovocative language of the genre, but the wording used in the article is stunning enough for those who can read the dangerous current moving under the calm surface, especially for what it implies with the phrase “stratified according to risk,” which refers to healthy people who were at lower risk from the virus but at higher risk from the mRNA injections:


Combined, the mRNA vaccines were associated with an excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest of 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated ... Combined, there was a 16 % higher risk of serious adverse events in mRNA vaccine recipients: risk difference 13.2 ... risk ratio 1.16 ... The excess risk of serious adverse events found in our study points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes. These analyses will require public release of participant level datasets ... [these results] raise concerns that mRNA vaccines are associated with more harm than initially estimated at the time of emergency authorization.[12]


So there it is. This article in Vaccine won’t be discussed on legacy media or by people seeking a large audience with their books to sell and places to go that require proof of vaccination. But the information is available. It is not a question of what you know. It’s a question of what you could know if you wanted to know, and what you could say and do after you know.


From the Joe Rogan podcast, episode 1869, September 13, 2022  


Dr. Maté: “So as you know, for example—because I’ve heard you talk about it—people who are obese are more likely to get Covid, right? But who gets obese? … the obesity epidemic in our society is an epidemic worldwide as globalized capitalism extends its influence internationally... What’s happening is that number one, people are more and more isolated, more and more stressed. Now they eat to soothe the stress, and then, in the goodness of their hearts, the sugar companies come along and say, “Have this food, it will make you feel better”... So the system works elegantly … It creates the problem in the first place, and it exploits the openings it creates. You couldn’t design a better system.”


Final comment


The system is actually even “better” than what the doctor describes. Dr. Maté likes to attribute everything to trauma, but it is speculation, and probably not helpful to tell the parents of an obese child that the cause is something they did or didn’t do. The problem is probably caused much more by the degradation of the food supply over the past five decades since high fructose corn syrup became the staple sweetener. After the food companies made the population chronically ill with manufactured high fructose corn syrup, the pharmaceutical companies stepped in with drugs for symptomatic relief. Those helped somewhat, but they had side effects that would require further medical interventions and drugs. Finally, the chronically ill are susceptible to a new virus, and the pharmaceutical industry profits again with the offer of a vaccine (which doesn’t live up to its initial promise), and the side effects from that provide another goldmine. In fact, the human body is being mined as if it is the last frontier when all the inanimate resources are reaching exhaustion. Goldminers do indeed dream of “striking a vein.”


UPDATE, November 20, 2022


In an interview with Jimmy Dore that was published on November 20th, 2022, Gabor Maté addressed some of the criticisms that I have made in this post and another one from a few months ago. In that earlier one, I cited a podcast recorded in January 2022 in which he endorsed coerced vaccination for college students by saying the following:


What you seem to see as dictatorial vaccine mandates, I see as necessary public health measures... That’s not being forced. He doesn’t have to go to university. He can choose not to. He’s not being forced to take a vaccine.


In the November 2022 interview with Jimmy Dore, he seemed to address this reprehensible stand he took by admitting that he had shared, to some degree, in the lamentable venom and rancor that the pandemic produced in public discourse, but he didn’t specify exactly what his error was. He suggested that we should end the disdain for the so-called vaccine refusers and try to understand what is in their minds and in their histories.


This statement falls short of recognizing what a tremendous crime it was to coerce people into taking a new medical treatment for which there was no long-term safety data. The statement also suggests that the reasons people refused were based on their psychology or emotional disposition, and not based on rational judgment and facts about the risks of the vaccines and their lack of benefit for people who had got immunity by infection or who were too healthy to be at risk of a severe outcome due to infection. I give him some credit for backing away from the uncharacteristically harsh attitude he took in early 2022, but he has very carefully tiptoed around what he actually said (“that’s not being coerced… he doesn’t have to go to university”). He admitted that he had not done a lot of reading on the vaccines and all the scandals related to Anthony Fauci and so on, so his views may continue to evolve. He said in the interview that these issues will be discussed for a long time, and that they should be discussed.


The discussion of the pandemic begins at about 1:10:00 in the interview, and the comment about “the lamentable rancor and venom” is cited below. 


How to Heal Trauma Wounds in a Toxic Culture w/Gabor Mate,’” The Jimmy Dore Show, November 20, 2022. https://youtu.be/MNnr2jLiZto 1:16:45~


The really lamentable thing is the rancor, the venom on both sides. I have to say I probably shared in it to some degree. I no longer do, you know—the disdain for people who are so-called refusers. There are so many reasons why people might resist the vaccine. We don’t know what’s in their minds. We don’t know what’s in their histories. We have to be much more gentle and appreciative of differences, and one of the things that has really gone out the window is civility in discourse.


Notes



[1] Joe Rogan (interviewer), “#1869-Dr. Gabor Maté,” The Joe Rogan Experience (on Spotify), September 13, 2022, 2:19:00~.

[2] Chris Hedges (interviewer), “Dr. Gabor Maté on Trauma, Addiction, and Illness Under Capitalism,” The Real News Network, October 14, 2022.

[4] Brian Rose (interviewer), Dr. Gabor Maté: The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, London Real. October 3, 2022.

[6] Thomas Harrington, “Why Did the Left Fail the Covid Test So Badly?Zero Anthropology, September 30, 2022. This article was also published by the Brownstone Institute. The posting on Zero Anthropology includes a useful list of articles that have addressed this question of why “the left” failed and let opposition to the lockdowns and mandates be erroneously tarnished as a dangerous and misguided “right-wing” preoccupation. Many libertarian commentators saw the entire virus phenomenon, with its unleashing of an accelerated capitalist concentration of wealth, then, ironically, called it a “communist” takeover.

[7] Valerie Kyrie and Daniel Broudy, “Cyborgs R Us: The Bio-Nano Panopticon of Injected Bodies?International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research 2, no. 2 (August 2022).


[8] Jim Kavanagh, “Devil’s Advocate: Farewell to Fauci,” The Polemicist, October 15, 2022. A highlight from this excellent review of the last three years: “My summary take on Fauci is that he’s a self-admitted deceiver, dissembler, and, ultimately, liar. He has played a central role in creating what is a social, political, and epistemological (undermining our ability to know how to know), as well as medical, disaster from which it is going to be very difficult for U.S. society, public health, and scientific practice to recover. The reality of what may be the worst iatrogenic medical disaster in history is becoming harder to ignore in the wake of multiple reinfections of the multiply-vaccinated, all-cause morbidity and mortality statistics, myocarditis and DNA-transcription studies, Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, negative vaccine effectivity, evident harms from lockdowns and masking, etc. … Anybody who, at this point, does not see, based on what Fauci himself has told us [the truths he spoke before he lied to promote the official narrative], the incompetence and incoherence of the whole Covid project of which he was a prime director, including how unsafe and ineffective the vaccines are and how scientifically ridiculous and politically pernicious the mandate and passport policies were and are, is a stubborn and dangerous fool, who will be fooled again—by their attachment to effectively religious, anti-scientific ideologies about magic potions and omniscient saints.”


[9] James Kunstler, “American Inquisition,” Klusterfuck Nation, October 17, 2022. This blog post is an excellent report on one of the many witch-hunts being carried out against Covid dissenters.

[10] Russell Brand (interviewer), “Israel/Palestine—This Needs to be Heard,” Under the Skin Podcast, May 28, 2021.

[11] Rav Avora, “One Serious Adverse Event Per Eight-Hundred Vaccinations,” Substack, October 16, 2022.


[12] Joseph Fraiman et al., “Serious Adverse Events of Special Interest Following mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination in Randomized Trials in Adults,” Vaccine 40, no. 40 (September 22, 2022): 5798-5805.

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