during the last century doctors have affected epidemics no more profoundly than did priests during earlier times. Epidemics came and went, imprecated… - Ivan Illich

Unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for one's neighbor. An active woman who runs a house and brings up children and takes in those of others is distinguished from a woman who 'works', no matter how useless or damaging the product of this work might be. Activity, effort, achievement, or service outside a hierarchical relationship and unmeasured by professional standards, threatens a commodity-intensive society. The generation of use-values that escape effective measurement limits not only the need for more commodities but also the jobs that create them and the paycheques needed to buy them.

Disembodiment is reaching a second level which I can only call algorithmization or mathematization. People annihilate their own sensual nature by projecting themselves into abstracta, into abstract notions. And this renunciation of intimate uniqueness through the introjection and self-ascription of statistical entities is being cultivated with extraordinary intensity by the way in which we live. This has to be explored. The consequence is an insensibility not only to myself but to you.

School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.