Word: illich
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...invention of the ball bearing, Illich says, gave Western man a choice between more freedom in equity or more speed. When men selected more speed, they were not aware of the hidden costs their progeny would discover in high-energy transportation: inhuman times scarcity, massive space consumption, invidious class conflict and the consequent psychic and social frustration. He incisively explains how this "raindance of continuing acceleration" increasingly determines the schedule of daily life, the geography of social space, the correlation of speed with socio-economic rank and the very quality of human existence: "Past a certain threshold of energy consumption...
...like the education and health industries--seeks only to expand its own power and social control over men. The industry exerts a "radical monopoly" that wastefully gorges the "overdeveloped" part of the world at the expense of the Third World, which remains "underequipped" to merely feed its own people. Illich lucidly points to the government and corporate transportation bureaucracy that creates and designs the needs which it alone can satisfy. This forced dependence on the industry's machines "denies a community just those values supposedly procured by improved transportation." One can see his argument in an action taken last week...
ALTHOUGH WEALTHY countries like the U.S., Japan or France may not choke on their own waste, Illich predicts that their societies will collapse into a "sociocultural energy coma" and undergo cold-turkey treatment when they are forced by the rest of the world to reduce their energy consumption. Nations like China (for a short time, at least), India and Burma have not yet reached the point of no return and can still "stop short of an energy stroke." But while people in developed countries speed onward blindly addicted to ever-increasing energy consumption, he tells Third World peasants to remain...
...Illich extols the bicycle as the ideal means of transportation. "The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from where he's barred," he writes. Anyone who has ever endeavored to circumnavigate New York's Kennedy Airport on foot will immediately recognize his point. The Port Authority, in this case, has decided that even the casual visitor must ride a bus in order to merely enter the terminal next door. "The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-time and life-space...
...Illich proposes a society of participatory democracy and "technological maturity" where the industrial mode of production complements other more "autonomous" modes of production. He writes, "... Power must be reappropriated and submitted to the sound judgment of the common man. The reconquest of power starts with the recognition that expert knowledge blinds the secretive bureaucrat to the obvious way of dissolving the energy crisis, just as it has blinded him to recognize the obvious solution to the war in Vietnam." The rich must achieve technological maturity by pursuing "the road to liberation from affluence" and the poor must take "the road...