Word: illich
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...IVAN ILLICH...
Still, few men take as harsh a view of medicine as Ivan Illich, 51, a Viennese-born priest who now makes his home in Cuernavaca. Mexico. An iconoclast who has already attacked another major institution in his 1971 diatribe Deschooling Society, Illich zeroes in on the health industry in his newest attack and leaves no doubt as to how he regards the target. "The medical establishment," he writes in Medical Nemesis opening sentence, "has become a major threat to health...
...Illich supports his thesis with a recitation of medicine's best-known faults: unnecessary surgery, the unforeseen long-term effects of certain "miracle" drugs, equipment malfunctions, malpractice. However justified, they add little if anything new to the case against modern medicine. Illich's attack is more telling when he takes up the extent to which medicine induces people to forgo control over their own lives in favor of getting as much treatment as they can. Says Illich: "Until proved healthy, the citizen is now presumed to be sick." The result, he points out, is "a morbid society that...
...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...
...Although Illich provokes his readers to see the ultimate irrationality of unlimited energy consumption in a fresh perspective, he leaves these two gaping holes in his argument. Indeed, it is not necessarily the visionary's responsibility to show a reasonable means to his end. But the American public will hardly be influenced until the right political leader appears to tell the people just what "the road to liberation from affluence" exactly means in the mid-seventies...