Ill With Want

“To formulate a theory about a future society both very modern and not dominated by industry, it will be necessary to recognize natural scales and limits,” Illich argued. “Once these limits are recognized,” he concluded, “it becomes possible to articulate the triadic relationship between persons, tools, and a new collectivity. Such a society, in wh... See more

In Illich’s view, modern institutions—including, for example, education, transportation, and medicine—had the (possibly unintended) consequence of deskilling the person and generating dependence on professionalized services. “Deskilling” is my word. Illich talked about a loss of competence and autonomy (always, though, in the service of mutual inte... See more

Endless wanting will wreck us and also the world that is our home. By contrast, our economic order and the ostensible health of our society is premised on the generation of insatiable desires, chiefly for consumer goods and services. Your contentment and mine would wreak havoc on the existing order of things. “That’s enough, thanks,” is arguably a ... See more

Illich was not a romantic, and he is often explicit about the futility of romanticizing the past. But even more importantly, the apparent severity, from the perspective of consumerist assumptions, was, in fact, a pathway to the experience of life-giving community, environmental health, meaningful work, social solidarity, and personal well-being. Th... See more

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the w... See more

The average home has almost tripled in size over the last half century, and, despite this, storage facilities proliferate in suburban settings to accommodate all the stuff that doesn’t fit in these expansive homes. And every purported cure to this problem involves another services, another purchase, another technique proffered by a professional cla... See more

In a recent newsletter, “The Shopping Cure,” Anne Helen Petersen explored the compulsion to buy and accumulate stuff that’s been fostered by technologies of frictionless consumption. Every conceivable activity or hobby one sets out to enjoy becomes an occasion to buy stuff: “They transform from sites of actual pleasure and diversion to means of sel

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These are, of course, material needs we cannot do without. Profound suffering accompanies their absence. But there are other critical needs which are nonmaterial in nature and thus cannot be simply manufactured and distributed. Your list and mine of what these might be will differ in the details of the enumeration, but I suspect we would both agree... See more