Marcel Proust’s 4,000 page magnum opus, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) was written shortly before his death in 1922. Proust’s sprawling work is a meditation on the human condition in all its complexities and foibles. To mark the 100-year anniversary of Proust’s death, philosopher Justin E. H. Smith joins Chris Hedges to discuss this towering achievement of 20th century literature.

Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of history and the philosophy of science at University of Paris 7 – Denis Diderot. The main-belt asteroid 13585 Justinsmith is named after him. You can find him on Substack at Justin E. H. Smith’s Hinternet.

Studio: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Chris Hedges:  A century ago on Nov. 18, 1922, Marcel Proust died. He worked feverishly in his final hours on his masterpiece, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, In Search of Lost Time. His 4,000 page novel is one of the most remarkable works of literature of the 20th century. During the war in Bosnia, I plowed my way through its seven volumes populated with 400 characters not as an escape from the war, for the specter of death and the twilight of an expiring society haunts Proust’s work, but as a way to reflect on the disintegration around me. Proust, like all great writers, gave me the words to describe aspects of the human condition I knew instinctively but had trouble articulating.

Proust understood the conflicting ways we perceive reality and come to our own peculiar self-serving truths. He illuminated human folly with its illusions, ambiguities, and contradictions. He reminded his readers that empathy is the most important virtue in life, especially for the vulnerable. He explored the fragility of human goodness, the seduction and hollowness of power and social status, the inconsistency of the human heart, racism, especially antisemitism, and our looming mortality, which hovers over every page, as it did for the sickly Proust as he struggled to finish his masterpiece, dictating changes on the last night he was alive in his hermetically sealed, cork-lined bedroom in Paris.

Those who see in his work a retreat from the world are poor readers of Proust, for his power is his Freudian understanding of the unconscious and subterranean forces that define and shape human existence. There are very few writers who are his equal.

Joining me to discuss Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is Justin E.H. Smith, a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. The main-belt asteroid 13585 Justinsmith is named after him. You can find him on Substack at Justin E.H. Smith’s Hinternet.

So Justin, the passage of time haunts the novel, especially at the end. It exposes as we age, as the character’s age, the vanity of our youthful pretensions. I think this is true for most of the characters, including Berma, who’s a thinly disguised Sarah Bernhardt, abandoned by her admirers in her old age; the main courtesan, Odette, the passion of Swann and the Comte de Forcheville, who was once a beauty and a seductress who enchanted, certainly, male Paris, is, in the end, relegated to the corner of her daughter’s salon where she’s ignored, even ridiculed. Proust writes about Odette. “And this woman, adulated and worshiped her whole life, now a human wreck in formal dress and grande toilette looks out alarmed and bewildered at the ferocious social world and seems, to me, for the first time likable.” So I wondered if you could address time, the passage of time and its effects, which is certainly one of the themes that is central to Proust’s novel.

Justin E. H. Smith:  Absolutely. Thanks, Chris. I know you want to talk about Proust and philosophy later, but I think it’s hard, at least for me, to talk about time without engaging at least a bit with the question of Proust’s relationship to philosophy, in particular to the reflections on the nature of time as something experienced that are unfolding in the early 20th century, of which Proust is, I would say, vaguely aware, interested. I wouldn’t call him a dabbler. I would call him a thorough reader who is also intelligent enough to absorb reflections from phenomenology, from figures like [inaudible], from Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time and to translate this into something that, on the face of it, is a sort of auto fiction. It’s an auto fiction, but it’s also a philosophy of time.

For me, that really only becomes clear, or the payoff really only emerges, in the seventh and final volume, Le Temps retrouvé, Time Regained, as we usually translate it. And it’s funny that you mentioned your coverage of the war in Bosnia in the 1990s and your encounter with Proust in the context of war because for me, it’s the ravages of World War I that are recounted in the seventh volume that really make us understand what it means for the things we value to slip into the past and for our world to collapse. So obviously throughout the previous six volumes, there are the, let’s say, gentler ravages of time with La Berma getting old and wrinkly, and of course also the several little deaths of falling out of love with the people he has at least thought he was in love with. That’s debatable, and we can get back to that. And also, of course, the more signature moments of the madeleine and the tea and the unsolicited memories that come back to us that make us realize what’s been lost.

But nothing makes this clearer than his ghost-like stalking throughout Paris when there are curfews because of the air raids and his sense that everything is really in the past. And of course the real Proust, not the narrator, but the real Proust during World War I already surely has a sharp sense of his own declining health and his own near-ghost status already.

So that’s where it really comes through, to my mind, and that’s where we start getting le Temps capitalized with a big capital T, and his, so to speak, discovery of time as something approaching transcendent or divine worship-able and awesome and terrible entity. That’s the culmination of the previous six volumes. That’s one thing that’s so striking about À la Recherche, is the way that there’s often, for the most important themes, a very slow buildup where you only realize the full depth or the full awesomeness of the theme he’s exploring little by little. And that is, above all, the case with time. But we can talk more about this when we get back to philosophy.

Chris Hedges:  So let’s just stay on that because there’s two… When I read the last volume, they were like death charges. You really needed everything that came before to get there. He talks a lot about masks. That pervades the entire novel, but can you just address that issue of masks, which he suddenly becomes cognizant of at the end?

Justin E. H. Smith:  Well, it’s especially haunting when we think of Man Ray’s famous photograph of Proust on his deathbed when he’s grown a long beard and he’s very close to death and he has a face that looks very much, as Proust himself puts it, like Marcel Proust the Assyrian. Very dark, a very stark nose that looks like something sculpted in deep antiquity. And I don’t know if Man Ray is trying to show in a visual form this notion of mask that had become so important to Proust, but it’s certainly an important datum in our reflection on Proust and masks.

But also, of course, the example that you bring up of La Berma, the famous actress modeled broadly on Sarah Bernhardt, who is such a focus of Proust’s or of the narrator’s fascination and adoration in his youth. And of course, he already loses the fascination long before she has been relegated to a corner of her daughter’s salon. But he loses it when he goes – And this is one of my favorite scenes in the whole novel, when he watches her perfect gestures on stage and he contemplates the fact that there are parts of the actress’s body, like for example between the wrist and the elbow, over which the actress has no control. So this part of my arm cannot be transfigured by art no matter how great a genius artist I am. And Proust sees this on the stage and loses it. Basically he thinks, why was I so impressed by La Berma? She’s got a forearm just like I do. And it’s such a weird thing to discover, or at least to articulate, but Proust does it.

And of course, this has something to do with the whole novel’s long reflection on the relationship between art and life. Ordinarily, you couldn’t put a mask on a forearm, that’s not the sort of thing that is masked, but it is still the sort of thing that shows the limits of transfiguration by art. And then when she is elderly and relegated to a corner of her daughter’s salon and evidently overly made up as some old women who are not going gently into the good night often are, this is literally a mask. It’s cosmetics or mascara that are showing the futility of the fight against time and, ultimately, I suppose, showing the futility of trying, struggling to live in a world that is perpetually transfiguration in the name of art against death. Something like that.

Chris Hedges:  Well, he’s constantly uncovering masks. He holds up from the beginning [inaudible] and he idolizes the elite, and these turn out to be very banal, disappointing figures. I think there’s an undercurrent of disillusionment that runs constantly throughout the book. We are going to have to talk about the tea madeleine. I loathe mentioning it. [crosstalk]

Justin E. H. Smith:  You gotta do it. You gotta do it. Yeah.

Chris Hedges:  But this unconscious, involuntary memory, and it’s not just with the madeleine and the tea. But are there any examples of this that evoke the past? And I wondered if you could… These dim fragments, these brief flashes of recognition in an unexamined life, which keeps that life fragmented and unknown and void of context. And I just wondered how, for Proust, do we locate the past? How do we give it context? And then if you can talk about the importance of involuntary memory and illuminating the reality of experience.

I’m just going to read a little quote from Proust. “I find the Celtic belief very reasonable that the souls of those we have lost are held captive in some inferior creature, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate thing, effectively lost to us until the day, which for many never comes, when we happen to pass close to the tree, come into possession of the object that is their prison. Then they quiver. They call out to us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and they return to live with us.” So that’s a lot, but maybe you can address those issues.

Justin E. H. Smith:  Oh, yeah. Can I say something first about unmasking, the last thing we were talking about?

Chris Hedges:  Sure.

Justin E. H. Smith:  One of the most striking parts of the whole novel, for me, is the scene when we know Swann is dying, and he comes to the home of the [foreign language] and the Duke and his wife, Basin and Oriane, are leaving for some social engagement and she’s worried about which shoes to wear, and basically he’s trying to tell them he’s dying and they’re not going to see him anymore, and they’re just chattering back and forth about whether the shoes match the robe.

Somehow I always picture that couple – This is my dumb American pop culture orientation – As Thurston Howell and his wife on Gilligan’s Island. And it’s fascinating indeed the way they are unmasked, taken down so many notches from their early exalted status. And this is why I really hate the commentary by people like Maxim Gorky on Proust who say that he is a slavish, adoring lackey of the aristocrats. Obviously that’s not all that’s going on. This is more like an exposé of how base and petty these people are, just like all of us. It’s definitely not any sort of class consciousness of the sort Gorky would like to see, but it’s also not sycophancy towards the nobility. All right. So that’s just one thing. We can go back to –

Chris Hedges:  I’m going to just stop you on that scene, because first of all, Gorky ends up becoming a tool of Stalin. But he eviscerates the ruling… I don’t know how you can read Proust and not see that.

Justin E. H. Smith:  I don’t know. I don’t know.

Chris Hedges:  But just that scene that you pointed out, because they dismiss him, and the way they dismiss Swann is by saying, oh, you’re not really that sick. You’ll be fine. And then they’re saying, well, we have to go. We’re in a hurry. And then the Duke sees that his wife’s shoes don’t match her outfit and sends her back inside for a half hour to get another pair of shoes. So they’re in the face of death. I think it says it all. Like you, I found that scene haunting. But let’s address the other issues.

Justin E. H. Smith:  Yeah. Sure, sure. So I have to say, it’s not like my interest in the novel trailed, but I think there’s no more powerful part than the opening maybe third of the first volume of the whole novel when he is a child and when he is very much an animist describing the natural milieu of Combray and the flowers and the grass and the weather. And he is very, very good at evoking natural landscapes.

And it’s in this connection rather early on that the allusion to the Celts and their beliefs… I think this comes from Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, where there’s some reflection on druidic religion, and then it becomes commonplace in French history of ancient peoples of France that the druids did indeed believe that we are reincarnated in trees. I see this a lot in 17th century texts. But it’s a way for Proust to indulge this proximity to nature and also to pursue the themes of memory.

And I love the scenes in the early parts of the novel, particularly surrounding asparagus and the idea that a stalk of asparagus is some kind of nature sprite or fairy. That is presumably rooted in Northern French folk beliefs, and that it’s this supernatural entity in turn that causes the peculiar bouquet, as he would put it, in your urine some hours after you eat asparagus. And it’s such an intense engagement with the smells and colors and sensations of nature that he practically goes metempsychotic himself and inhabits a tree for a while.

I just love all that stuff. And I think it’s at its strongest in the first volume where he is, of course, a boy, and you’re supposed to get over that when you get older and enter society. So he retreats from the intense engagement with nature as he becomes an adult and leaves behind childish things. But in the particular sequence of images associated with the Celtic or druidic beliefs, I think, indeed, the idea seems to be that, in this reduced state, you have a dimmer sense of who you are and it has to be coaxed back out in order for the ancestor to rejoin us. And that, in a sense, to evoke this image of the soul lodged in a tree is to give an account of the condition we are all actually in, where we can scarcely hold onto our pasts and they only come back to us in dim fragments.

Chris Hedges:  What’s interesting is that they do come back to everyone in a smell, a sound, a something, but Proust… Here maybe we can talk about art. While they can evoke the past, they’re largely meaningless unless we are able to interpret them through artistic expression. I don’t know if you would agree.

Justin E. H. Smith:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s absolutely right. And of course, he covers, really, all of the great arts, not just literature, but also certainly music and painting. These are leitmotifs of the whole novel. And indeed, they do seem to be the answer to the question, what are these dim fragments of memory for, anyway? Well, that can be catalyzed or sublimated into a great musical idea like, for example, the phrase in Vinteuil’s sonata that seems to hold the secret to our existence. And we really get this towards the very end of the novel, the seventh volume, again, functioning as the payoff for so much of the long-windedness of the whole thing. The realization that the narrator has of himself that he needs to conjure out of himself something as valuable, as redeeming as Vinteuil’s sonata in order to make this whole lifetime of dim fragmentary memories do anything for him at all.

Chris Hedges:  I want to talk about the mutation of the self, especially around grief. Albertine, who he has a relationship with, modeled after his driver who was killed. But there’s that lamentation… And of course of the death of his grandmother, which is probably modeled on the death of his mother. He had pretty much a nervous breakdown after his mother died. But he doesn’t fear grieving. I thought this was brilliant. He fears the day he no longer grieves, because the self that was once in love with those we lost no longer exists. I wonder if you could talk about that.

Justin E. H. Smith:  Sure. Well, we already alluded to the several small deaths, not in the sense of orgasms, but in the sense of falling out of love, with Gilberte in particular, that so much surprise him, that make him really, I think, question the nature of love, that you can fall out of love with someone and sit in a room with them and be like, oh yeah, I used to be in love with this person, makes it seem very fragile and far from transcendental, and that seems to worry him a great deal. At the same time, it seems like the love that he has for his grandmother is, in some respects, of a different character than these various romantic loves that he has, that the narrator has.

And I should say, incidentally, that I’m not a Proust scholar. I’m a scholar of other things. And weirdly, since I started writing about Proust on Substack, I’ve had journals send me requests to referee Proust scholarship. And I have to say, sorry, I’m not your guy. That’s not my field. And in fact, for that reason, this helps to explain why I do not read secondary literature on Proust. I don’t want to read it. I think it would make me fall out of love, so to speak. It would take away the magic if I learned much more than I know about Proust’s life.

I know, at least, that the female love objects that the narrator has are transformed versions of his own same sex love objects. That much I know, but I don’t know exactly how the transformation is affected. What I can say is that Marcel Proust, whatever his sexual orientation, is remarkably good at describing heterosexual desire and obsession. He’s certainly capable of imagining his way into other people’s desires. So that’s just a little parenthesis.

So this falling out of love is something that, again, seems to be what… I just read Mary Shelley. A lovely line. It’s a weaning from the things of this earth, and in that sense a rehearsal for death. And I think the narrator sees it this way. The question of whether the narrator ever experiences true love or whether it’s just obsession… And certainly I find the narrator rather morally abhorrent and someone who really never figures some basic things out about how to be good to other people. I think the whole fifth volume, The Prisoner, is just shocking.

Chris Hedges:  [inaudible], which essentially Albertine… His lover becomes his prisoner.

Justin E. H. Smith:  Yeah. Yeah. And he’s extremely sadistic for no good reason and doesn’t seem to have any compunction about this. He doesn’t seem to have any interest in his own moral growth. And you might say that his attachment to his grandmother, and having to knock on the wall is an example you mentioned earlier, having to knock on the wall of the hotel so that she’ll hear him in his room and feeling reassured when he hears her knock back. That’s already a bit like the relationship to Albertine, right? And yet, his love for his grandmother is, in many respects, the best thing he’s got going, and it is, indeed, very sad when she dies.

Let me also add that there’s another person towards whom the narrator is morally abhorrent, who I think is a really key figure for understanding the whole novel. She’s the backbone of the novel, and that’s Françoise, the maid, the nanny who is, of course, alive until the very end, witnesses it all, has a wisdom that aristocrats can never have and that he can never have, and really, really holds things together. He’s nasty to her, too, but I think it’s pretty clear he loves her.

Chris Hedges:  Great. That was Justin E.H. Smith, professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

How does living in a consumer society at war with basic human needs affect our minds and, ultimately, our bodies? In his new book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, Dr. Gabor Maté and his son Daniel argue that our culture’s standards of normalcy are destructive to the health of human beings. In a society where profit and personal attainment are the highest values, traumas abound, and everyday people are left to endure their pain and shame in silence. The consequence of this dark ethic, Dr. Maté illustrates, plays out on our bodies, severely damaging our psyches, and pushing us towards individual and social self-annihilation. Dr. Gabor Maté joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his new book.

Dr. Gabor Maté is a physician and childhood development specialist who has written several best-selling books, including In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection, and Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder.

Studio: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden
Post-Production: Dwayne Gladden

Transcript

Chris Hedges:  Dr. Gabor Maté in his new book The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, which he wrote with his son Daniel, argues that what is defined as normal in a consumer society is at war with basic human needs. The engine of capitalism, defined by the cult of the self, thrives on the fostering of psychological and physical chronic disorders, including high blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, depression, addictions, and suicide. It rewards the core traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.

Personal style and personal advancement are mistaken for individualism, equated falsely with democratic equality. We have a right in the cult of the self to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. The consequence of this dark ethic Dr. Mate illustrates plays out on our bodies, severely damaging our psyches and pushing us towards individual and social self-annihilation.

Joining me to discuss his new book is Dr. Gabor Maté, who has written several bestselling books including In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection, and Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder.

So I said before we went on the air, this is a book that could have easily been three or four books, so your readers are rewarded. You write that most of us are in the grip of what you call a distant past, a psycho emotional time warp that prevents us from inhabiting the present moment. This is what the psychotherapist Peter Levine calls the tyranny of the past. Can you explain this process?

Gabor Maté:  Yes. First of all, thank you for having me on your broadcast. In my own life, coming to reflect on many of my behaviors, I’ve had to realize that often I wasn’t reacting to the present, I was reacting to some interpretation of the present based on old traumatic programming for my early childhood. So often when I get upset, say in my relationship with my spouse, the degree of upset is not related to anything that’s occurring right now, but it’s some dark pain or wound, which is what trauma means, based on a sense of me being rejected or not being loved or not being accepted when I was a very young infant.

And so that’s what Peter means by the tyranny of the past, that the past colors are… the Buddha said once that with our minds we basically create the world. But what it didn’t say is that before with our minds we create the world, the world creates our minds. So that the mind, in fact the very brain itself, including the physiology of the brain, is programmed very early in childhood by our earliest relationships with our caregivers beginning in utero, and those imprints govern a lot of our behaviors even into adulthood.

Chris Hedges:  Well, you write about it. One of the things I liked about the book was its honesty. You give voice to your wife and your son, and are quite frank and, I think, courageous about your own failings as a father. We all have them. It’s painful to confront that we failed, in some way, those we love, and I wondered if you could, for people who don’t know your story, just tell us quickly what that trauma – It is in the book – But what that trauma that you endured was.

Gabor Maté:  So, in a large historical context, the trauma was that I was born in January 1944 in Budapest, two months before the Nazis occupied Hungary, which is when the genocide began, two months after I was born. Now, the day after the Germans marched into Budapest, my mother phoned a pediatrician, I was two months of age, and she said, would you please come and see Gabor, because he’s crying all the time? And the doctor said, of course I will come, but I should tell you, all my Jewish babies are crying. And this is true, you don’t have to have war and genocide for this, infants absorb the stresses of their parents, and that has an impact on their nervous systems.

So I spent the first year under predictably difficult, even life-threatening circumstances, which culminated with my mother giving me to a total stranger in the street in Budapest, because where we were living, I would not have survived. So I didn’t see her for five or six weeks. Of course, an infant can only experience that as an abandonment, and who gets abandoned? Somebody who’s not lovable, somebody who’s not wanted. So my sense of self, on a deep unconscious level, was somebody who’s not lovable, who’s not wanted. And that then leads to all kinds of behaviors in adulthood. Not to mention that, for the whole year, I’m absorbing the stresses and terrors of my mother, which, infants and children being narcissistic in the sense that they think it’s all about them, naturally I think, she’s suffering so much, it must be my fault.

So this tremendous sense of guilt and shame that comes with trauma. It does not take historical trauma of those proportions. It doesn’t take war or genocide. In a diary entry, my mother described, when I’m two weeks old, before they were Nazis, before the Germans occupied Hungary, just how she was following doctor’s orders not to pick me up and feed me when I was asking for it because then the ethic was you feed on schedule, not on the child’s demand. That itself is a trauma, because what message do I get as a two-week-old? That my needs aren’t important, that I’m alone, that the person who loves me doesn’t care enough about me to pick me up. And that kind of trauma is very common in all societies, so I don’t want to create the impression that trauma is only under dramatic circumstances such as I endured as an infant.

Chris Hedges:  Well, you’re writing the book about your mother’s instincts and that she didn’t like it, and of course, I think much of your book is a celebration or holding up those instincts against modern medicine or modern psychotherapy. The psychiatrist, Basil van der Kolk –

Gabor Maté:  Bessel, if I may say.

Chris Hedges:  Bessel. Excuse me, yes. Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score, he writes that trauma is when we are not seen and known, and you build on this idea that trauma is a fracturing of the self, of one’s relationship to the world. You define this fracturing as the essence of trauma. What do you mean by fracturing of the self, and how does this fracturing work?

Gabor Maté:  Well, so trauma means a wound, wounding, a psychic wound, and you can wound people in two major ways, you might say. By doing terrible things to them, such as the abuse that many people endure in childhood, whether at home or in school, but the other way you can hurt people is just not to meet their needs. Now, one of the essential needs of human children – I’m talking about essential needs in a sense that if it’s not met the child suffers – Is to be seen and accepted for exactly who they are. Now, in Bessel’s words, if you’re not seen, that hurts you, because a child develops their self-image, their self-concept based on how he’s seen and treated by the adults around them. If the adults themselves are too limited, too stressed, too traumatized, too preoccupied to see the child in their child’s fullness, with all their emotions, the child will develop a very limited sense of themselves. So that’s part of that fracturing, first of all.

Secondly, when you’re not being seen, or worse, if you’re being hurt or abused, it’s just too painful to be in your own body and to experience your own emotions. So literally, as a survival adaptation, quite unconsciously, the child will cut off their sense of feeling, their gut feelings, and they even disconnect from their bodies. So that disconnection then fracturing the self, which is the essence of trauma, happens if you’re not seen and accepted just who you are, even more so if you’re hurt.

Chris Hedges:  You’ve long argued that addiction is an outcome of childhood trauma. You say this is based on shame, a shame-based view of ourselves, negative self-perception, a loss of compassion for one’s self. You write, “The more severe the trauma, the more total that loss.” Can you talk about the loss and its effects?

Gabor Maté:  Sure. So for 12 years I worked as a physician in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which, I don’t know if you’ve ever been here, Chris.

Chris Hedges:  I have. I have. And I have gone down to the Eastside.

Gabor Maté:  It’s shocking for people coming even from the ghettos in the United States. It’s North America’s most concentrated area of drug use. And in 12 years I worked down there, I never met a single female patient who had not been sexually abused as a child, and all the men had been severely abused, sometimes sexually, sometimes in other ways, neglected and so on. Not by accident, 30% of our clients down there were Indigenous First Nations Canadians. They make up 5% of the population. They’re also the most traumatized segment of the Canadian population. A shocking 50% of the women in jail in our country are Indigenous. They make up 5% of the female population. So what that trauma does is it hollows out the self because, again, it’s too painful to be connected to the self, and that pain will break through. And there’s a sense of emptiness, because the sense of fulfillment as a human being needs to come from within.

It needs to come from an embrace of one’s self as one is. But when it’s treated that badly, one ends up rejecting one’s self as not hurt, as a flawed, deficient individual. So underneath all trauma is a shame-based view of oneself, and that shame is searing. Now, all addictions are an attempt to escape from pain. So I don’t care if you’re addicted to gambling or sex or shopping or the internet or self-cutting or eating or drugs or alcohol, it’s all about soothing the pain of that shame, soothing the pain of what you endured. And when that pain breaks through, you have to soothe the pain by some addictive behavior. So that’s what I meant there. So underneath addiction – People think that they’re ashamed of themselves because they’re addicted, it’s as least as much the other way around. They’re addicted because they’re so ashamed of themselves.

Chris Hedges:  Well, you write about how consumer society plays on this. You say that if trauma entails a disconnection from the self, then it makes sense to say that we are being collectively flooded with influences that both exploit and reinforce this trauma.

These are your words, “Work pressures, multitasking, social media news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources, these all induce us to become lost in our thoughts. Frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We’re caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on, not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.” Those are your words.

So that passage reminded me of the lines from W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1st, 1939”. “Faces along the bar, clinging to the average day. The lights must never go out, the music must always play. All the conventions conspire to make this ford assume the furniture of home. Least we should see where we are, lost in a haunted wood, children afraid of the night who have never been happy or good.”

Gabor Maté:  I should have just published a book with that poem and forgot everything else, because he says it all. Well, there are two large classes of people who confuse their desires with their needs. One of them is young children. When they want something, they think they need it, and they’re desperate if they don’t get it. In the hands of healthy adults, one learns that needs are not the same as desires. The other class of people who confuse their desires with their needs, of course, are addicts of all kinds. I need to go shopping, I need to have a drink. These aren’t needs, these are desires, but consumer society is based on making addicts out of everybody, to confuse our desires with our needs.

As the Catholic monk, whose work I’m sure you’re familiar with, Thomas Merton, said, the whole society is geared to raising our desires to this fever pitch so that we can be consuming the products of the film studios and all the factories. And so our whole consumerism is based on creating false needs. And if we weren’t at this fever pitch of desire all the time, we wouldn’t buy all the stuff that we buy, nor would we be coasting on the internet to fill every moment because we’re so empty and we’re so afraid of ourselves that we have to distract ourselves from our own presence by whatever means. Now, if you look on the internet, on YouTube for example, what gets seen by millions?

There’s, recently, Eli Manning, the former New York Jets, was it? No, Giants quarterback went to this college, and he pretended to be somebody he wasn’t. It doesn’t matter, it’s trivial. 11 million views in three weeks. So the average person in America knows a whole lot about what quarterbacking strategy the Denver Broncos or the Tampa Bay Buccaneers should be pursuing, and then there’s big discussions about this. What does it matter to anybody? But ask the average American or Canadian to string two intelligent sentences together about the history of Afghanistan, or the history of Ukraine, or even about climate change, they’re not able to do it. So the whole society is designed, the whole culture is designed to draw our attention away from what’s important and make us believe that what’s trivial is actually essential. And that’s both a consumer strategy, but it’s also a propaganda imperative.

Chris Hedges:  Well, you’re right about the dopamine hits, and a constant need because you get a high, but then you fall into a low and you need another hit, and that consumer society depends on this pleasure principle, if we want to quote Freud. But in fact, of course, what makes us content, what provides joy, is outside of that self-destructive behavior.

Gabor Maté:  Absolutely. And this society is perfectly, I would say designed, but it’s not actually designed. As you and I know, it’s not that there aren’t conspiracies at the top and in all aspects of corporate life, but the whole thing is not a conspiracy as such. It’s almost a self-organizing organism that, on the one hand, deprives us of our genuine needs as children and as young people so that we create false needs to which you can cater. So society both creates these false needs and then creates an economy that caters to them. In fact, the economy couldn’t survive the way it is if it wasn’t based on false needs. So it’s a perfect mechanism, and it couldn’t have been designed better to sustain itself, at the cost of human health, of course, and human life even.

Chris Hedges:  I want to talk about passing on trauma. That’s something that I’ve had to deal with, that when we don’t resolve that trauma, you write in Ourselves, you say, “The home becomes a place where we unwittingly recreate scenarios reminiscent of those that wounded us when we were small.” Can you talk about how this trauma is passed down?

Gabor Maté:  I’m reminded of a statement of Primo Levi. I don’t know if you’ve read Primo Levi, but –

Chris Hedges:  Oh, of course.

Gabor Maté:  …He’s one of the great writers, one of the very few great writers, actually, on the genocide. He wasn’t somebody who sentimentalized anything. And he said at some point in one of his books that let’s not recreate in our homes the same conditions that existed in the camps. And that may seem like a shocking statement, because how can you possibly compare the two? But in terms of wounding children, again, you don’t need those dramatic historical circumstances. So I talked about my own formative year, the first year of my life, in the sense that I thought I wasn’t lovable and wanted.

Well, the way I compensated for that, in part, was to go to medical school, because when you go to medical school, you get a sense of self-importance. And it’s very traumatic to go to medical school, but you come out of it with a lot of power and a lot of knowledge that makes you indispensable to the world, and now they’re going to want you all the time. And the beeper’s always going. Every time the beeper goes, you get a dopamine hit. Oh, they want me. I’m so important. But it’s addictive, because it never fills the emptiness inside. So I’m a workaholic physician and I’m carrying my depressions and anxieties and so on, but not on the job. They come out at home.

Now, what message do my kids get when daddy’s not around because he’s always busy looking after other people, or when he is home, he’s kind of depressed and morose? Same message I got: that they’re not wanted. And this is a middle class Vancouver, British Columbia, home in a leafy, lovely neighborhood, no circumstances of abuse or deprivation or war, and yet my children are getting the same message I got. So this is how we pass it on unwittingly. And not because we don’t love our kids, and not because we don’t do our best, but simply because our best is constrained and informed by our own unresolved trauma. And most of us, or many of us have children when we’re very young, before we actually have resolved or even recognized our traumas.

Chris Hedges:  Yes. That was something I’ve dealt with. I remember helping my kids build a gingerbread house when they were little and then just without thinking, I said, let’s play Bosnia and burn it down.

You say that all illnesses, if not psychosomatic in origin, have psychosomatic components, and there are long passages in the book where you tie trauma of individuals, often childhood trauma, to a variety of diseases. You argue that confronting the underlying trauma often mitigates and even, at times, eradicates the disease. Stress, you say, may disable our immune system’s capacity to control and eliminate malignancy. That’s a big topic, and people are going to have to buy the book, which they should do, but can you touch on that?

Gabor Maté:  Yeah. I’ve discussed this in a previous book of mine which you mentioned, When the Body Says No. But this is what’s so frustrating, Chris, is that I’m talking here not about conjecture or intuition, I’m talking about science. So in the 1860s or ’70s, whenever it was, Jean Martin-Charcot, the French neurologist who first described multiple sclerosis, said that this is a stress-driven disease. James Paget, a British surgeon around the same time, talked about breast cancer in women and how it’s inescapable to link between emotions and breast cancer. Sir William Osler, one of the founding physicians at John Hopkins in Baltimore, said in the 1890s, I think, that rheumatoid arthritis was a stress-driven disease.

Without going into, in 1938, a great lecturer at Harvard, a physician whose name is still honored at Harvard in a research day named after him, Dr. Soma Weiss, like myself from Hungary, he said that emotional factors are at least as important in the causation of illness as physical elements and should be at least as important in the treatment. This lecture was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Now, they had no science to back it up, they just had their intuition. Since then, we’ve had 80 years of science showing the relationship between emotions and physiology, because you can’t separate the mind from the body. Scientifically speaking, you cannot separate the mind from the body, and the emotional apparatus is part and parcel of the same system that runs the immune apparatus as well. So when I say psychosomatic, I’m not meaning imagined, I’m meaning literally the oneness of psyche and soma, the mind and the emotional circuits of the body and the brain with the physiology of the rest of the body.

Chris Hedges:  Is this what you mean by neurogenic inflammation?

Gabor Maté:  Well, neurogenic inflammation simply means that the nervous system can trigger inflammation in the body, and of course the nervous system, as easy to demonstrate, is very much influenced by emotions. You have a certain emotional state, your nervous system changes by definition, and that can initiate inflammation in a body. A recent study three weeks ago showed that a single episode of racism will instigate inflammation in the body and suppress the immune system. So everything is psychosomatic in that sense, not in the sense of imagined, but that the psyche is influencing the soma because they’re one system.

Long-term stress, long-term release of stress hormones like cortisol, suppresses the immune system and makes it less able to resist malignant transformation, and also can turn the immune system against oneself so that one has more of a chance of developing autoimmune disease, which not surprisingly, who’s most prone for? Women of color. Because A, they’re women, so they’re more stressed over gender reasons, and of color because they’re more stressed because of racist reasons. So the more intersection there is of gender and race, the more autoimmune disease you have. It’s strict science. And the frustrating part of it is the average medical student doesn’t get a single lecture on any of this stuff despite the voluminous science. It’s incredible, the gap between science and medical practice.

Chris Hedges:  On pages 101 and 102, you drop a list of personality features that you say are most often present in people with chronic illnesses. What are the traits, and why do so many chronically ill people have those traits?

Gabor Maté:  Yes. So in family practice, which I pursued for 22 years, I think, some of which I also was the medical coordinator of the palliative care unit at Vancouver Hospital, I noticed that who got sick and who didn’t wasn’t accidental. And as a family physician, I did have an advantage over my specialist colleagues in that I knew my patients as people. I knew them before they got sick. I knew them in their families of origin. I knew them in their multi-generational family context, so I began to notice that people that developed chronic illness had certain character traits. These were an automatic regard for the emotional needs of others while ignoring their own, rigid identification with duty, role, and responsibilities. So in other words, their duty out in the world, their responsibility out there rather than who they were as individuals, a repression of healthy anger.

Healthy anger. There’s a distinction between rage and unhealthy and healthy anger. And finally, two fatal beliefs that one is responsible for how other people feel, and one must never disappoint anybody. Now, these traits, it’s not, again, fanciful they lead to illness because they all impose tremendous stress on the individual. If you’ve ever been angry and if you know what a perturbation of the nervous system and the visceral anger involves, imagine not feeling anger, what energetic demand it is to repress the anger so much so you don’t even feel it, so one of these really nice people that never gets angry. It’s a tremendous diversion of body energy. That wears on the immune system and the nervous system.

So it’s that long-term stress, then, that leads to the illness. Not these traits cause the illness, but these traits make you much more prone to be stressed without even you knowing it, and therefore you’re more prone to illness. It’s a very straightforward correlation.

Chris Hedges:  I see that play out in the prison, because my students in the prison cannot express anger to the guards, and it’s just an epidemic. Diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, everything because, of course, if they express that anger, they’re immediately punished.

Gabor Maté:  Yeah. And no wonder, you see, like James Baldwin once said, I think that to be an American Black is to be in a constant state of suppressed anger.

Chris Hedges:  Yes.

Gabor Maté:  And the question is what to do with that anger? It’s no wonder that Black American males have a much higher risk of high blood pressure. It’s got nothing to do with genetics. Their genetic relatives in Africa do not have the same risk. It has to do with the stress of being American and Black and not being allowed to be angry.

Chris Hedges:  I want to talk about the tension or the clash between what you call two essential needs: attachment and authenticity. You call this ground zero for the most widespread form of trauma in our society. Can you explain that idea?

Gabor Maté:  Sure. So attachment is simply the drive to be close to somebody. It’s a biological, instinctive, psychological drive that’s part of our evolutionary heritage. And we share that with other mammals, because without attachment, the drive to be close between parent and infant, no mammalian infant would survive. So we’re simply wired for it, and especially the young child is wired to attach because without that attachment, there’s just no life, period.

Now, we also have another need as well, which is what I call authenticity, and that comes from the word auto, for the self, and being in touch with our feelings, knowing what we feel and being able to act on that. Now, don’t forget, we evolved out there in nature for millions of years and for hundreds of thousands of years until a blink of an eye ago in humans, even in existence of our own species, we lived out in nature. How long does any creature survive in nature if they’re not in touch with their gut feelings? And that’s what I mean by authenticity, is being in connection with our bodies and our emotions.

However, according to much of the toxic parenting advice that is doled out, the tiger mom and Emily Oster’s Parenting by the Numbers, it is designed to teach parents to ignore their parenting instincts. And if a child shows up angry, for example, they should be made to sit by themselves until they come back to normal, according to a very famous psychologist who, blessedly, will remain unnamed in this program. But he’s Canadian –

Chris Hedges:  He’s named in your book, isn’t he?

Gabor Maté:  He’s named in my book. And he says that an angry child should be made to sit by themselves until they come back to normal. So anger in a child is not normal. I got news for that psychologist. Anger is built into our brain as one of our essential brain circuits because it’s an important boundary defense. Now, if a child gets the message, or Hillary Clinton, who I talk about, who runs into her mother’s home at age four seeking protection from bullies and she’s told there’s no room for cards in this house, that you get out there and deal with it, when a child’s natural fear is not acceptable and a child’s desire for help is not acceptable, when the child’s natural anger is not acceptable, the child has a decision to make.

Am I going to be authentic and be rejected by my parents, or should I reject myself and be accepted by my parents? Well, the tragic tension invariably gets resolved in favor of attachment, and a person adaptively suppresses their authenticity, but then that becomes a lifelong paradigm and we live out of a false sense of self. We don’t know what we feel, we dare not ask for help. We dare not say no at the demands of the world, and that makes us sick. So that’s what the tragic tension is. And a lot of people, when they get sick, they actually learn to be themselves. And when they do, not just as documented by myself but by others as well, there’s a much better chance for health.

Chris Hedges:  Yeah. I think this is why you write that the personality traits we come to believe are us, and perhaps even take pride and actually bear the scars of where we lost connection to ourselves.

I’m going to stop there. I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrisedges.substack.com.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, is among America’s greatest novels. It is a prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a nation and perhaps a species. Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness, and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. Melville’s description of the ship’s captain, Ahab, is a description of the bankers, corporate boards, politicians, television personalities, and generals who through the power of propaganda fill our heads with seductive images of glory and lust for wealth and power. We are consumed with self-induced obsessions that spur us toward self-annihilation. Melville is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England, or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia.

Joining Chris to discuss Melville’s novel is Nathaniel Philbrick author of Why Read Moby Dick? as well as books such as In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleboat Essex, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War, Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy and The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and The Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Watch The Chris Hedges Report live YouTube premiere on The Real News Network every Friday at 12PM ET.

Listen to episode podcasts and find bonus content at The Chris Hedges Report Substack.

Studio: Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino, Rebecca Myles

Transcript

The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

American society is the most violent of any nation in the industrialized world. Nothing we do, from administrating the world’s largest prison system to militarizing our police, seems to help. Dr. James Gilligan argues that childhood abuse, and the shame it engenders, is the engine that fuels America’s deadliest epidemic. This abuse and shame, he argues, fosters a dangerous numbness that breeds a deep self-loathing and inchoate rage. It is only by understanding the causes of our national epidemic, and addressing those causes, that we will have any hope of stemming the nihilistic violence that grips American society. Dr. Gilligan grounds his writing not only in case studies of the violent patients he works with, but Greek myths and Shakespeare.

Dr. James Gilligan is a professor of Clinical Psychiatry at New York University. Formerly, he served as the director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts. He is the author of Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes, and Holding a Mirror up to Nature: Shame, Guilt, and Violence in Shakespeare, which he co-authored with David A.J. Richards.

Watch The Chris Hedges Report live YouTube premiere on The Real News Network every Friday at 12PM ET.

Listen to episode podcasts and find bonus content at The Chris Hedges Report Substack.

Pre-Production: Kayla Rivara
Studio: Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Chris Hedges:  American society is the most violent of any nation in the industrialized world. Nothing we do, from administering the world’s largest prison system to militarizing our police, seems to help.

Dr. James Gilligan, the former director of the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School and the former director of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, argues that childhood abuse and the shame it engenders is the engine that fuels America’s deadliest epidemic.This abuse and shame, he argues, fosters a dangerous numbness that breeds a deep self-loathing and inchoate rage.

It is only by understanding the causes of our national epidemic and addressing those causes, that we will have any hope of stemming the nihilistic violence that grips American society.

Dr. Gilligan grounds his writing not only in case studies of the violent patients he has worked with, but Greek myth and Shakespeare. Joining me to discuss his book Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes, as well as his book Holding a Mirror up to Nature: Shame, Guilt, and Violence in Shakespeare, which he co-authored with David Richards, is Dr. James Gilligan, professor of clinical psychiatry at New York University.

You argue that the usual dichotomies between life and death, this world and the other world, rationality and irrationality, pleasure and pain, reward and punishment, the body and the soul, self-preservation and self-destruction, have broken down for those who commit violence. Can you explain this dichotomy?

James Gilligan:  One of the first things I started hearing from, really, the most violent of the prison inmates I was working with was that they would tell me that they had died, even before they started killing other people. What they meant by that was they felt dead inside. They felt empty. They felt numb. They lacked the capacity for emotions or even physical sensations.

They would refer to themselves with terms that refer to the living dead, like zombie or vampire or robot. They would mutilate themselves to see if they could have feelings. They weren’t doing this as an act of penance. They didn’t feel guilty about their crimes. What they found was that their feeling of numbness and deadness inside was more tormenting than even physical pain would be. So, they were trying to see, could they feel alive? Could they see blood flow? They cut themselves to prove that they had blood, rather than being filled with straw or other lifeless matter.

Now, what struck me was these people were willing to go to their physical death in order to try to resurrect their soul death, their psychological death. There’s a very good book that a psychoanalyst at Yale wrote called Soul Murder. The most violent people I saw in the prisons were victims of soul murder.

Now, what I discovered with them was, when most of us talk about self-preservation, we take it for granted that we mean both the body and the soul. You don’t survive if your body dies. I mean, your soul goes with it. In the prisons, the most violent inmates had disassociated the body from the soul. They were willing to sacrifice their bodies in order to try to save their souls or to resurrect their dead souls.

I heard from the most violent ones that their goal in life is to go to their own death, physical death, but in a blaze of glory. A hail of gunfire in which they would kill as many other people as possible before they themselves got killed by the police. In many actual cases in the community, you see mass murderers who kill themselves after they have killed as many people as they could.

The Columbine High School boys, the mass shooting there. The guy in the hotel room in Las Vegas, I mean, you can’t read the newspapers without seeing it.

Of course, we see this with the suicide bombers in the Middle East. When people feel so desperately, overwhelmingly humiliated, it causes the death of the self. And they’re willing to sacrifice their bodies in order to try to reclaim some sense of agency, of power, of revenge, these things that they feel will undo the shame and humiliation that they have suffered all their lives.

Chris Hedges:  This is the point Emile Durkheim makes, that people who seek the annihilation of others are driven by a desire for self-annihilation.

I’m just going to stop and ask you about the word soul. That’s a religious term. You’re a medical doctor. I went to Harvard Divinity School. I’m curious how you define a soul.

James Gilligan:  Well to me, I mean, it’s the English translation for the Greek word psyche, which really is the root of the words psychology and psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

But I think it makes sense to use the word soul. The human person has something I think you can only describe as a soul. It’s more than just a mind. It’s what it means to be human. I mean, other animals have minds, to one degree or another, but only humans have a soul. To me, but I would actually go further. I would say this. To me, I was approaching trying to understand the causes and prevention of violence as a psychiatrist. But actually, for me, this was really a religious vocation.

I’ve felt every major world religion has put the problem of violence very much at the center. I’m thinking in the Old Testament, one of the first of the Ten Commandments is thou shalt not kill. And then you think that the iconic symbol of Christianity is the most cruel form of murder ever invented, the cross, the crucifix. I mean, the problem of violence is absolutely central to religion itself.

My approach to the prisons was to… I quote something I used as an epigraph in my first book on violence, a statement that from a religious point of view, none of us humans are good, but all are sacred. When I say none are good, I mean that we have all committed harm to people we love and who loved us. There are none of us who do not stand in need of forgiveness. But on the other hand, every human being, even the worst, has what I would say is a soul that is sacred.

I took that attitude with the worst murderers that our society produces. They were still human beings. They had a soul. It was our obligation, my obligation and that of my colleagues, to reach that soul, to try to bring it to life after it had died on them. We were trying to resurrect their dead souls, or help them to resurrect them.

So to me, the word soul is the only word that has a large enough meaning, a large enough capacity to describe what I thought we were really working with when we worked with the most violent people that our society produces.

Chris Hedges:  One of the consequences of PTSD is numbness. Is that the numbness that these people endure, or is it different from the numbness one gets from PTSD?

James Gilligan:  Well I mean, I’d say both. When I would ask people about their feeling of being dead, they could often tell me what had happened. They could describe an event in their lives in which they felt totally unloved, treated like dirt. Our word humiliation comes from the Latin word humus, which means earth. To be humiliated is to feel like you’re treated like dirt, that you can just be stepped on. That is how the men that I saw in the prisons felt. I’d say this feeling of deadness had been caused by experiences of total rejection and humiliation and having it made clear to them how unloved they were, beginning at home, beginning in the family.

Chris Hedges:  You talk about murder as an attempt by these people to bring back one’s dead self, bring it back to life. You say, of course, that fails, but can you speak about that process?

James Gilligan:  Well, actually, their method of trying to resurrect their dead soul does fail. I compare it to, it’s like they’re drinking salt water to try to quench their thirst. It’s really counterproductive. They only provoke more loss of love. They provoke hatred from other people.

But I’ll tell you what would happen when I would work with these guys in the prison. When they first came into the prison, after some of them having committed terrible crimes, murders and rapes and so on, they would feel absolutely innocent. They would feel they were the victims. When I would ask them why they had assaulted somebody in this way, they’d say because the person had disrespected them. So, they were trying to gain respect by being violent. But it was, as I said, like drinking salt water.

When they’d been in the prison for a couple of years, working with the prison mental health service that my colleagues and I ran, where we treated them with respect. We didn’t put them down. We showed an interest in them and in their life history, their life story. We engaged them in psychotherapy. We offered them opportunities for education. After a couple of years or so, these impossible people often became capable of empathy toward other people. They began to realize how much pain and suffering they had caused others. And they developed the capacity to feel guilty about that. Up to that point, they were noticeably incapable of feelings of guilt.

For example, Freud said once that nobody feels guiltier than the saints. I mean, guilt feelings inhibit people from hurting other people. I mean, saints feel too guilty to hurt a butterfly. But I would add something that Freud did not know because he never worked with violent people, and that is that no one feels more innocent than the criminals. That’s why they’re capable of committing crimes, because they lack the capacity to feel guilt or remorse about hurting other people.

But after they’d had an experience of being treated like a human being and responded to as a human being with dignity, they developed the capacity to empathize with other people and realized that they actually were guilty of having committed horrible pain and suffering on other people. Then they would feel so guilty they would become suicidal. They would make serious suicide attempts. Our struggle then would be not so much to prevent them from committing homicides, but to prevent their suicides. That might take another couple of years.

However, then something happened that I had not anticipated. I hadn’t read about it anywhere. It took me by surprise. They discovered something that enabled them to transcend both the shame and guilt. That is, they discovered that they could be useful and helpful to other people. They could teach the illiterate prisoners – And many prisoners are illiterate – They could teach them to read and write. They could help them to write letters home. They could help them navigate the law library in the prisons, and so on.

Once they had discovered that, they had something that enhanced their own self-esteem, but also enabled them, actually, to care about other people and to care for them. To me, that was the resurrection of… Maybe resurrection’s the wrong word. Maybe it was the coming to life for the first time of a soul. People who had really just been treated in a way that was inhuman and had become what we use the word inhuman to describe, they became human.

Chris Hedges:  Yeah. I think that point is correct and matches my own experience teaching in the prison.

You write about capital punishment. You say, correctly, that more prisoners are killed by other prisoners than are killed by the state. You even say that for this reason, perhaps no group is more strongly and widely in favor of capital punishment. And then you say, you just find it risible, these people who argue that capital punishment deters murder and other violent crimes. Can you explain that?

James Gilligan:  Well, one thing I’d mention is that more murderers killed themselves than were ever killed by the state, even when capital punishment was the default punishment for murder. I think the biggest mistake that our criminal justice system makes is to make the assumption that punishment will deter violence or crime. On the contrary, punishment is the most powerful stimulant of violence that we have yet discovered.

If you’ll remember what I just said about the childhood history of the violent criminals I worked with, they had been punished by their parents, as severely as it is possible to punish somebody without actually killing them. As I said, they were often the victims of attempted murder. I saw one multiple murderer whose mother had thrown him out the window, on another occasion set him on fire, on another occasion attacked him with an ax. He said to me, more in a state of confusion than bitterness, I guess she wanted to kill me, but I just didn’t die.

Then the thing is that so many of them do kill themselves after they have killed other people. Or, as I mentioned earlier, many of them want to kill as many as they can even though that will mean going to their own death. So the notion that the death penalty will deter them is just based on total ignorance of the psychology of people who commit serious violence, and precisely the people that we need to be most concerned about. I mean, the most violent.

We know this from developmental psychology. Psychologists who study child development have found that the more severely children are punished, the more violent they become, both as children and as adults. As I said, if punishment would prevent violence, then the people I saw in the prisons would never have become violent in the first place, because they had already been punished so severely.

I would see this also on a day-to-day basis in the prisons. The more a prisoner was punished by prison guards, the more violent they’d become until there would be an endless vicious cycle between the prisoners and the guards. They would punish, the prisoner would become more violent. They’d punish more, the prisoner would become more violent, and on and on. Until finally the officers would ask me to see people like this, just to help them figure out how to get out of this vicious cycle of punishment stimulating violence.

I remember talking to one man who finally wound up in solitary confinement with the door closed. He was in darkness. The light was turned off. He was deprived of a mattress. The toilet was a hole on the floor, and so on. I asked him, what is it you want so badly that you’re willing to give up everything in order to get it? Because that’s what he was doing. This guy, who was usually so inarticulate, he usually just talked to his fists, he stood up tall and looked at me and said, pride, dignity, self-esteem. And then he went on, more in his usual way, and said, I’ll kill everybody in this cell block if I have to in order to get it.

Again, my point is the idea that punishment deters violence is totally the opposite of the truth. I think it’s very important, particularly for Americans but really for all human beings, to know this, when America has the most punitive criminal justice system in the developed world. As you mentioned, we have the highest imprisonment rate in the world, even of the non-developed countries. We have more prisoners in our prisons on a per capita basis than the countries we call police states.

Yet, despite that, or I’d say because of it, in part, we have the highest murder rates in the developed world. Our murder rate is seven times as high as the murder rates in the political democracies and social democracies of Western Europe, and roughly five times higher than the other English-speaking democracies of Canada, Australia.

Our violent criminal justice system, including the death penalty, it only stimulates violence, to the extent it has any effect at all. There is no Western European country or English-speaking democracy that still has the death penalty. The US stands alone on that. And it’s not surprising, since punishment only stimulates violence, that there would be this correlation between our violence and the violence of those that we punish.

Chris Hedges:  Before we get into Shakespeare in the last five minutes, you write, “Actions are symbolic representations of thought.” What do you mean by that?

James Gilligan:  I mean that violence doesn’t occur at random. One reason I wrote about Shakespeare, and I refer to him often in describing the prisoners I see, is because he described what I saw in the prisons. In King Lear he describes how Edmond, the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, has his father’s eyes gouged out after having been humiliated repeatedly by his father. That helped me to understand a criminal that came into the prison who had killed and gouged out the eyes of his victim. He made it clear. He had the same motive that Shakespeare’s character did. He said, he didn’t like the way she was looking at [him].

He had felt he had also been bullied, been called humiliating words, a wimp, a punk, a pussy. He felt overwhelmingly humiliated. The way to undo his humiliation was to destroy the eyes of a person, because, as Aristotle put it, people experienced shame in the eyes of others. We experience shame as we’re being in front of an audience that is witnessing our shame and seeing how weak and shameful we are. So, attacking the eyes is not an accident.

I could give you many other examples of the part of the body that inmates attack, the violent criminals attack, it is not chosen at random. It has a real emotional meaning. I just saw this over and over.

Chris Hedges:  I want to ask you about Antony and Cleopatra, where Antony says to the soothsayer, “Say to me, whose fortunes shall rise higher, Caesar’s or mine?” The soothsayer says, “Caesar’s. Therefore, Antony, stay not by his side: Thy demon, that’s thy spirit which keeps thee, is noble, courageous high, unmatchable. Where Caesar’s is not; But, near him, thy angel becomes a fear, as being overpowered: Therefore make space enough between you.” I’m asking whether love is a helpless force against those who have been rendered numb.

James Gilligan:  You mean giving them love, is that helpful?

Chris Hedges:  Well, that Antony, in a way, his strength and his weakness is that unlike Caesar, he can feel love.

James Gilligan:  Yes.

Chris Hedges:  He loves Cleopatra. That, of course, leads to his downfall, at least in the play. While Caesar, who feels nothing but a cold lust for power, rises. There’s that moment in the play that said, in a way, your greatest strength is your greatest weakness. Other students in the class, in the prison, would caution me about trying to care for people who couldn’t care for themselves.

James Gilligan:  Well, when I think of Antony and Cleopatra, I think of Antony as having… His love for Cleopatra was so deep that it made what Caesar did to him relatively irrelevant. Remember when he said, “Let Rome in Tiber melt.” My world is here with Cleopatra. There’s a sense of, she didn’t even care what Caesar did. He had achieved, I think a sense of personal immortality in his love, his love for Cleopatra was so deep. I’d say he had transcended the difference between life and death, not dissociated himself from it.

I think that if people can develop the capacity for love… Well, first of all, as I mentioned earlier, when prisoners learned they could be helpful to other people, that was a form of loving other people. It was not personal intimacy, but it was transpersonal. It was just helping people because they needed help, responding to other people’s needs. I think that once people develop that capacity for love, that they lose the incentive for violence.

Now, what I do think Shakespeare showed in the play Antony and Cleopatra is that there was no room in that world of ancient Rome and the Roman Empire. That was a world based on violence and on the denial of love. So in that sense, I think Shakespeare correctly was showing that there was no room for love between people in that kind of world. I thought it was a powerful indictment of the world that he lived in, that Shakespeare lived in, and that Antony lived in.

Chris Hedges:  Yes, I think that’s right. But it’s an understanding, I think, of the attributes that, in many ways, are required for power, certainly autocratic power. It’s really those who objectify and dehumanize others who have many of the characteristics, the numbness that you write about.

James Gilligan:  Absolutely. I think that Octavian, who later became Emperor Augustus, exemplified the kind of person who does not have the capacity for love and whose life is really, frankly, dull and empty and not fully human compared to Antony’s. Yes, Antony becomes the victim who dies in the play. I mean, he kills himself, but in order to stay with Cleopatra and be loyal to her.

He’s much more human, and I think had a much fuller life,even though he died young, or relatively younger than necessary. He had a much fuller life than I think Augustus could ever even imagine or ever realize existed.

Chris Hedges:  Great. That was Dr. James Gilligan speaking about his book Violence. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, and Kayla Rivera. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.