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feralive OP wrote

can someone give me a good reason that the idea of a world bereft of the medical technology that we have today would be (overwhelmingly) positive?

Anti and post-civ theorists don't really make that claim so I'm not sure how to engage you here. Anarcho-primitivists might to a certain extent, but I'm not an anarcho-primitivist so I'm not the best person to present their arguments.

While many primitive societies were egalitarian, they also had people with low vision, they had deaf people, they had people with developmental or genetic differences that seriously disabled them in the context of that society. Is that primitive society somehow better without aids to those people? Does being born atypical to everyone else in those societies somehow lead to a typical outcome?

I'd argue that being disabled in an egalitarian society that actually takes care of its members and doesn't view them as a burden would be a much better experience than being disabled in our isolating authoritarian industrial society ("civilization"), where everyone is measured by their ability to earn money, yes.

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this_one wrote

I'd argue that being disabled in an egalitarian society that actually takes care of its members and doesn't view them as a burden would be a much better experience than being disabled in our isolating authoritarian industrial society ("civilization"), where everyone is measured by their ability to earn money, yes.

Surely those are not the only two exact possibilities, though? For example, what if you could be blind, but with glasses in an egalitarian society that actually takes care of its members and doesn't view them as a burden. Isn't that better than being blind with glasses in our isolating authoritarian industrial society where everyone is measured by their ability to earn money?

I know your first answer said you're not into 'un-inventing' glasses or whatever, but I think your answer to I_Knot_Pork's second question (at least, in the way I'm reading it) is kind of ignoring what you said in that first answer.

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feralive OP wrote

Since I'm anti-civ, I see civilization as being inherently violent, structural, totalitarian, alienating and hierarchy-forming - so an egalitarian industrial civilization isn't something I take seriously as a real possibility.

But the question was whether pre-industrial people were better off than industrial people - which they clearly were - since their environment wasn't on the verge of annihilation.

It's not a conflict to my mind - because being anti-civ in this dying world isn't the same as being a "primitive" person in the pre-industrial past. I can talk about (pre) history without confusing it for our current situation - a situation for which I would prescribe anti-civ theory - not primitivism.

I also know most sicknesses like myopia are caused by civilization - so trying to argue that we need more civilization to cure the very ills that civilization itself causes isn't something I can wrap my brain around.

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this_one wrote

I'm sorry, it might be partly that I'm in a bit of a bad mood or something for whatever reason, but I don't know how to read that last paragraph except as:

most of the time, civilisation causes these problems, so I can ignore them, even though they'd still sometimes come up, and even though the specific example was just that - an example.

Unless by "most sicknesses like myopia are caused by civilisation" you mean "most sicknesses that civilisation has answers for" or even "most sicknesses", but I feel like if you're going to make one of those claims, you're probably going to want to back it up.

I also have a question which is probably born of both me misunderstanding and you not communicating perfectly (which, to be fair, can't be expected from anyone :P). If something like glasses is "civilisation" (as your last paragraph says), it seems like that label should extend to other parts of medical technology. If that's true, why aren't you against medical technology (which you said a couple comments up the chain)?

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