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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Gandhi’s argument seems flawed. It’s arbitrary to decide the needle is a primary need because it requires delineation of need vs. want. If we took a time machine back every 100 years, that delineation would be quite apparently different at each stop. Yesterday’s luxuries are today’s basic human rights. I probably wouldn’t have to use up much of my remaining thorium to find a century that laughs at the idea of a school being a basic human right.

He also seems backwards on the outcomes of things like what you listed. Those things all raised people out of poverty and serfdom.

It’s interesting, though, to see someone as revered as Gandhi having to add epicycles to his beliefs after having seen the other side of it.

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You can expect an argument to stand the test of time, but not a material example, because the speaker is always someone in his circumstances. I'm not saying anything for or against the argument, just that the foundation of your disagreement isn't too solid.

I think ghandi speaks much more from a tone of trying to make you think differently, not necessarily being right or wrong, but making you accept or reject him by making you contemplate for a moment his perspective.

In this case you reaffirmed your view of the world that technology is a vector of freedom, but what is the circumstances of that technology? Because when you think of ghandi as an Indian, and that Indians suffered a humanitarian crisis in the hands of the English empire, I can't help but wonder if the colonizers just created the poison than sold them the medicine.

So from his point of view he's right to reject technology that are colonization instruments, but if that same tech would otherwise take place in the world from the needs of the people, then it would be an acceptable technology to adopt. And this argument is timeless, because how many current tech, the social networks, the language models, are actually being used as colonization tools today, by influencing elections or by spreading misinformation? We don't need to go that fast, not when the price to pay is our freedom.

I disagree his arguments are timeless.

https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/hind_swaraj.pdf

I posted more in another comment on this thread but here’s a PDF of his book. Gandhi says in the “A Word of Explanation” section that he would welcome the natural destruction of hospitals. How is that timeless?

I have no idea, what's a hospital for him? Does he have the same idea of a hospital as we have? What if he's talking about the destruction of the hospitalar, higenic, disciplinary society of you extend it beyond the materialism of the word hospital?

Do you want to see beyond the mere meaning of words or do you just want to be a good thesaurus? Because we have the luxury of access to accumulated knowledge. Here I'm appropriating byong chul Hans lingo, but ghandi didn't have access to this vocabulary at his time. That's maybe the best he would have done, and it's a figure that I think is worth it giving the benefit of the doubt and reading him in good faith, but that requires lifting the lenses of skepticism for a little while.

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