01c. 1964 ADSchools themselves pervert the natural inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
02c. 1964 ADHomo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
03c. 1964 ADIn the late Middle Ages the stupefying simplicity of the heliocentric model was used as an argument to discredit the new astronomy. Its elegance was interpreted as naivete...Just as the legendary inquisitor refused to look through Galileo's telescope, so most modern economists refuse to look at an analysis that might displace the conventional centre of their economic system.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
04c. 1964 ADBeyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
05c. 1964 ADIn a society caught up in the race for the better, limits on change are experienced as a threat. The commitments to the better at any cost makes the good impossible at all costs. Failure to renew the bill of goods frustrates the expectation of what is possible, while renewal of the bill of goods intensifies the expectations of unattainable progress. What people have and what they are about to get are equally exasperating to them. Accelerating change has become both addictive and intolerable. At this point the balance among stability, change and tradition has been upset; society has lost both its roots in shared memories and its bearings for innovation. Judgement on precedents has lost its value.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
06c. 1964 ADAny industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
07c. 1964 ADThe compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
11c. 1964 ADHealthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet; in an environment equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying... Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition and die.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
12c. 1964 ADModern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
13c. 1964 ADEffective health care depends on self-care this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
14c. 1964 ADThe public school has become the established church of secular society.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
