In an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemployment as a condition for autonomous, useful work. The infrastructure of society is arranged so that only the job gives access to the tools of production...Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.

In an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemployment as a condition for autonomous, useful work. The infrastructure of society is arranged so that only the job gives access to the tools of production...Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.

Ivan Illich
Save QuoteView Quote
Similar Quotes by ivan-illich

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

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
Save QuoteView Quote

The public school has become the established church of secular society.

Ivan Illich
Save QuoteView Quote

Effective health care depends on self-care this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.

Ivan Illich
Save QuoteView Quote

Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

Ivan Illich
Save QuoteView Quote

Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet; in an environment equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying... Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition and die.

Ivan Illich
Save QuoteView Quote

Leadership does not depend on being right.

Ivan Illich
Save QuoteView Quote

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

Ivan Illich
Save QuoteView Quote

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

Ivan Illich
Save QuoteView Quote

The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.

Ivan Illich
Save QuoteView Quote

Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need.

Ivan Illich
Save QuoteView Quote