Honesty requires that we each recognize the need to limit procreation, consumption, and waste, but equally we must radically reduce our expectations … - Ivan Illich

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Honesty requires that we each recognize the need to limit procreation, consumption, and waste, but equally we must radically reduce our expectations that machines will do our work for us or that therapists can make us learned or healthy. The only solution to the environmental crisis is the shared insight of people that they would be happier if they could work together and
care for each other. Such an inversion of the current world view requires intellectual courage for it exposes us to the unenlightened yet painful criticism of being not only anti-people and against economic progress, but equally against liberal education and scientific and technological advance. We must face the fact that the imbalance between man and the environment is just one of several mutually reinforcing stresses, each distorting the balance of life in a different dimension. In this view, overpopulation is the result of a distortion in the balance of learning, dependence on affluence is the result of a radical monopoly of institutional over personal values, and faulty technology is inexorably consequent upon a transformation of means into ends

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About Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich (4 September 1926 – 2 December 2002) was an Austrian-born Christian anarchist, author, polymath, and polemicist.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Ivan D. Illich Ivan Dominic Illich
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For the simple Christian there was the requirement of going to Mass every Sunday – otherwise you go to hell – or of going to confession once a year. The elaboration of this legal organisation, and this legal imposition, which defined missing out on services a sin, immediately preceded the epoch in which the state, the new Church-like state, as I called it earlier, began to introduce its own rituals. And the easiest one to follow is education.

Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.

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I believe that the Incarnation makes possible a surprising and entirely new flowering of love and knowledge. For Christians the Biblical God can now be loved in the flesh. Before I was limited by the people into which I was born and the family in which I was raised. Now I can choose whom I will love and where I will love. And this deeply threatens the traditional basis of ethics, which was always an ethnos, an historically given “we” which proceeds any pronunciation of the world “I”.

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