That word, “healthier,” is doing a lot of lifting in the parent comment. I read it in the maximally-utilitarian viewpoint, in which all the individual harm is completely ignored, and all we’re talking about is the collective health of society.

Few people should want to live in a society which completely disregards the individual in favor of the collective. It is an inherently totalitarian worldview. It has inspired some of the worst atrocities in human history, including eugenics in the USA and Nazi Germany, and de-kulakization in Ukraine.

In discussing such things with authoritarians, I think bringing up your lived experience just triggers their impulse for cruelty. Instead, I’d point out that totalitarian societies that cover up macro and micro level human rights abuses have always underperformed more “liberal” (as in freedom, not politics) societies in the long run.

Ireland was a broken, impoverished backwater, backing in the days of the Magdalene laundries and Catholic theocracy. I’m talking mid-20th century, for those who are not familiar. Now it’s one of the richest countries in the world. It is not a coincidence that America’s least repressed, most godless city, San Francisco, is also its richest. There is a causal link between prosperity and not burying all the skeletons in your closet (individually and collectively).