"Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bact… - Ivan Illich

"A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least
controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the
growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence, exploitation, and impotence. I use the term
"tool" broadly enough to include not only simple hardware such as drills, pots, syringes, brooms, building elements, or
motors, and not just large machines like cars or power stations; I also include among tools productive institutions such as
factories that produce tangible commodities like corn flakes or electric current, and productive systems for intangible
commodities such as those which produce "education," "health," "knowledge," or "decisions." I use this term because it
allows me to subsume into one category all rationally designed devices, be they artifacts or rules, codes or operators, and to
distinguish all these planned and engineered instrumentalities from other things such as basic food or implements, which in a
given culture are not deemed to be subject to rationalization. School curricula or marriage laws are no less purposely shaped
social devices than road networks. 5"

I cannot come to be fully human unless I have received myself as a gift and accepted myself as a gift of somebody who has, as we say today, distorted me the way you distorted me by loving me.

I can choose. I have to choose. I have to make my mind up whom I will take into my arms, to whom I will lose myself, whom I will treat as that vis-a-vis, that face into which I look, which I lovingly touch with my fingering gaze, from whom I accept being who I am as a gift.