John Zerzan & Victor Cirone - Green Anarchy, Medicine and the Technological Society

A discussion between John Zerzan and Victor Cirone which starts with an overview of the notions of domestication, civilization, the possibility of radical change from the perspective of green anarchy. A focal point of this conversation is medicine and its forms and meanings. Victor and John discuss the ecological crisis and its relation to contemporary medical practice, the technological society and its consequences for mental-emotional health, the meaning behind the chronic disease epidemic, and the possibility and necessity of holistic and sustainable medicine in today's world. They put forward a view of medicine as the restoration of what belongs to nature, and healing as removing whatever works against life’s wonderful capacity to renew itself.

“To assert that we can be whole/enlightened/healed within the present madness amounts to endorsing the madness” (John Zerzan)

[MrManque]

Thank you Victor for this great conversation. I am witness to your passion and love for truth.

[ansharihasanbasri]

I can't express how much i resonate with this, Victor. I've just discovered green anarchy and haven't read much about homeopathy but immediately notice that I've been independently sharing the basic philosophy for a long time. I'm an undergraduate medical student and over the years I've been viscerally sensing something's off with the whole modern medicine enterprise (and finally the idea becomes clearer including thanks to discussions like this). In sum, my current hunch on modern medicine is that it is a 'right solution for the wrong problem' XD

I'm reading Ibn Qayyim's Medicine of the Prophet (translated by Penelope Johnstone) among other things from which I start to develop a theory that the complexity of diseases parallels that of the (complexity of) the civilization of a society; chronic diseases being the primary example. The challenge is that, while I wish we could reverse civilization back to it's "simpler" (yet much more connected to nature's complexity of totality), it's sad that we're kind of trapped already in a time where diseases have become so "unnaturally complex" that it also requires equally "unnaturally complex" treatment (hence the "right solution for the wrong problem). that, as you mentioned, while there are things we practitioners can do, unless we do something to the underlying system, the root causes will never be tended :( it even becomes increasingly scary for me to imagine the rate by which medical technology "grows", because at a philosophical level I intuit that with any advancement of medical technology, we're only inventing new diseases along the way—that is, not only that we're fighting for ever more complex diseases, but we're also the one creating them in the first place... without realizing it.

So much for medicine; the rest of civilizational enterprise you guys commented on—I'm with you all too. Your comment on people who become hopeless and asks "what can we do?" also hit home—for a while I've been depressed with the hopelessness too. But knowing that there really are other people like you and Zerzan who share the realization, it gives me hope and maybe we can really do somehing about humanity.

anyhow, very vey grateful to have found resonating people like you and Zerzan—will definitely check out your videos on homeopathy and stuff.

[suffiice]

You are passionate and wise. I have wondered in awe for so long how so called medical professionals can be so 'stupid' and its not even that their studies are isolated to one field but that somehow they cant even introspect and think themselves for a second that symptoms in the head would be connected to the digestive system and that all disease has spiritual underlying causes and then research this themselves outside their formal study. I am grateful for growing up in the early stages of the internet and being able to come across eastern medical traditions where these interrelationships are already recognised. Things are moving but still I barely meet anyone who has heard of Aryurveda. You are a powerful voice and an inspiration ☆

[adeptpeasant]

Isn't "Green Anarchy" just another word for Big Corporate Company Anarchy? As there the one's who benefit most from any so called "Green - fill in blank?