An ever growing part of our major institutions’ functions is the cultivation and maintenance of three sets of illusions which turn the citizen into a… - Ivan Illich

The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services....What people do or make but will not or cannot put up for sale is as immeasurable and as invaluable for the economy as the oxygen they breathe.

It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they ''speak with the accent of natives'' they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.

A just society would be one in which liberty for one person is constrained only by the demands created by equal liberty for
another. Such a society requires as a precondition an agreement excluding tools that by their very nature prevent such liberty.
This is true for tools that are fundamentally purely social arrangements, such as the school system, as well as for tools that are
physical machines. In a convivial society compulsory and open-ended schooling would have to be excluded for the sake of
justice. Age-specific, compulsory competition on an unending ladder for lifelong privileges cannot increase equality but must
favor those who start earlier, or who are healthier, or who are better equipped outside the classroom. Inevitably, it organizes
society into many layers of failure, with each layer inhabited by dropouts schooled to believe that those who have consumed
more education deserve more privilege because they are more valuable assets to society as a whole. A society constructed so
that education by means of schools is a necessity for its functioning cannot be a just society. Power tools having certain
Tools for Conviviality
Page 18 Document developed using Purplestructural characteristics are inevitably manipulative and must also be eliminated for the sake of justice. In a modern society,
energy inputs represent one of the major new liberties. Each man's ability to produce change depends on his ability to control
low-entropy energy. On this control of energy depends his right to give his meaning to the physical environment. His ability
to act toward the future lie chooses depends on his control of the energy that gives shape to that future. Equal freedom in a
society that uses large amounts of environmental energy means equal control over the transformation of that energy and not
just an equal claim to what has been done with it. 5

Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.