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Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Ivan Illich: Four Of His Keenest Insights

Alan: The only time I met Illich, he reprimanded me. 
I think he's a genius, an intellectual titan.

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The medical campaign to eliminate pain overlooks the connection between pain and happiness. As we decrease our sensitivity to pain we also decrease our ability to experience the simple joys and pleasures of life. The result is that stronger and stronger stimuli - drugs, violence, horror - are needed to provide people in an anesthetic society with a sense of being alive. Increasingly, pain-killing promises an artificually painless life and turns people into unfeeling spectators of their own decaying selves. The very idea of having pain killed by somebody else, rather than facing it, was alien to traditional cultures because pain was a part of man's participation in a marred universe. Its meaning was cosmic and mythic, not individual and technical. Pain was the experience of the soul's evolution, and the soul was present all over the body. The doctor could not eliminate the need to suffer without doing away the patient. Ivan Illich
If conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy "the needs" it creates among society's members.  Ivan Illich paraphrase

Gangsters, for their own profit, corner a basic necessity by controlling supplies. Educators and doctors and social workers today...gain legal power to create the need that, by law, they alone will be allowed to serve.   Ivan Illich






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