The personal freedom to choose who will be my other has been transformed into the use of power and money to provide a service. This not only deprives… - Ivan Illich
" "The personal freedom to choose who will be my other has been transformed into the use of power and money to provide a service. This not only deprives the idea of the neighbour of the quality of freedom implied in the story of the Samaritan. It also creates an impersonal view of how a good society ought to work.
About Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich (4 September 1926 – 2 December 2002) was an Austrian-born Christian anarchist, author, polymath, and polemicist.
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Additional quotes by Ivan Illich
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 client to be saved by experts...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. This illusion is due to an educated blindness to the worth of use-values in the total economy. In none of the economic models serving as national guidelines is there a variable to account for non-marketable use-values any more than there is a variable for nature's perennial contribution.
Protection against this general monopoly is as difficult as protection against pollution. People will face a danger that threatens their own self-interest but not one that threatens society as a whole. Many more people are against cars than are against driving them. They are against cars because they pollute and because they monopolize traffic. They drive cars
because they consider the pollution created by one car insignificant, and because they do not feel personally deprived of freedom when they drive. It is also difficult to be protected against monopoly when a society is already littered with roads, schools, or hospitals, when independent action has been paralyzed for so long that the ability for it seems to have atrophied, and when simple alternatives seem beyond the reach of the imagination. Monopoly is hard to get 4d of when it has frozen not
only the shape of the physical world but also the range of behavior and of imagination. Radical monopoly is generally discovered only when it is too late.
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