May 3rd 1957, a school night, my mother sent us all out to the movies. My oldest sister was already married with a 2 year old which left 5 remaining children in house. Dr Eisenhard, an old-timer, came to the house before we all left. We didn't think anything of it because he made house calls all the time when someone got sick or we all came down with measles at the same time.
He was tall, I was little, but I remember him rolling up his sleeves, going to the kitchen to wash up and then touching us all very gently to examine us. There was no such thing as herding all of us into a car for a doctor visit. He came to us. And charged my mother 2 bucks a head. I still drive by his office and his home was right across the street. Beautiful structures. He obviously made money where he could but had enormous empathy for those who had little. He even accepted baked goods for payment. He was the last of his breed in my neck of the woods.
That night we came home from the movies, ran to my mothers room to tell her about the movie, and there she was, my new sister wrapped like a papoose next to Ma. Dr Eisenhard slumped in a chair, looking exhausted, like he did all the work. I never have to think how old my nephew is. He's 2 years OLDER than his aunt. Ain't that a gas.
We need to return to this. We have a local independent doctor who somewhat does this. It is a big professional sacrifice for doctors to be independent. With massive student loans, they give up the security of having a company ensure paying off their educational debt. They also give up the assured income of being an employee. Many cannot reconcile the conditions. I am grateful for those who do, in all disciplines and callings. How many brilliant writers do we have, for example, who spend their time copy writing or covering an assigned topic beat? How many potentially good physicians who sell out (without realizing it some of them) , because they need to pay off debt or support their families.... How many of us do this?
Around the same time as Flexnor and Wundt the streetcar rails were being torn out so that petro powered buses would be in. All houses would have electricity, then phones. All (majority of) children would be registered at birth, processed in schools. For industrial farming of humans the old infrastructure had to be discredited and destroyed. Certain blood lines had to be culled to obtain the qualities of dometication.
For free range healers to exist, the existing infrastructure would in turn, need to be dismantled, ie legislation, insurance, standards of care, the cultivated ignorance, dependency and demand of the public and a big Etcetera goes here.
"The premise of agnotology is both simple and profound. Most people think of ignorance as the absence of knowledge. Proctor and others in the field argue the opposite — that ignorance is socially constructed in the same way that knowledge is. Powerful interests instruct society to pay attention to some things and not others through a variety of inducements (you get paid to study certain topics and not others) and punishments (you will be blacklisted if you ask too many questions about forbidden topics). Over time these values become invisible and just a part of culture. "
People sell out because of the reward /penalty system we live under on the farm.
When the small medical schools, varied curriculums, herbalists, midwives along with the amateur abortionists and snake oil salesmen were stamped out, it was akin to ripping out the streetcar rails. The wherewithal, will and people to replace it don't exist.
I guess you might not realize this, but there are actually are many people who are healers, who are self trained, descendants of trained doctors or other types of healing practitioners with none to vast degrees of education, who service many people in RURAL America!
Invitation: I'm going to put my fantasy out there because, who knows what may come of it. As a lifelong physically isolated "friend" of Illich, I want to reinvoke the friendship tradition of Illich. He was known to use his professorships to enable gatherings of friends where in the spirit (con-spirit-acy) of friendship they would purposefully explore and work on the concepts and issues, the big questions, in need of discussion. The influence of Illich's intellectual salons or conspiracies of friends has furthered ground-breaking intellectual work in so many domains. You have John McKnight, Barbara Duden, David Cayley, Thomas Szasz, Uwe Poerksen, Nils Christie,....
We need to add to these excellent starts that Unbekoming is offering us. We need to dig in to the big questions. What are they? What can we explore and grow of them? Just as much as Illich's definition of health presumes a responsibility and autonomy, so I see that I must limber my life from not just intellectual exposure from the armchair, but to a cultivation of being alive. In the conspiracy of company, there is for us the work we can do for ourselves and with each other, to grow what is fitting for us to grow, to expect a surprise of good which may come.
In many large American towns the main hospital is now the single largest local employer. Quite a few of these hospitals virtue-signal themselves proudly as "non-profits" while the medicos and executives therein earn salaries in outlandish multiples of the average wage. Keeping people sick would seem to be a lucrative business model. It is paid for by employers via health insurance for staff and by the government through programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Get on a disability benefit and you get free medical treatment forever. No wonder healthcare is 20% of US GDP and shows no sign of slowing.
Read Rockefeller's Medicine Men again. The AMA's original purpose was, on the back of the Flexner report, which made the allopathic, pharma-intense model of medicine a monopoly, to keep medical earnings high, to keep medical education expensive, so as to keep women and blacks, and poor people out of medicine. It enshrined a monopoly that is based on mistaking the symptom fpr the disease, which postpones any meaningful healthcare, and creates health crises at retirement age, allowing the system to bleed the slaves on the plantation dry before they discard them.
Rockefeller's pharmaceuticals were derived from coal tar, something he had in abundance. The profit motive was never far from his mind. What better than a "healthcare" monopoly? Today doctors approach the status of demigods.
I want to note that Ivan Illich was A Catholic priest. For some, this may be a trigger to imagine that his thinking will be unrelatable. I would like to say that this aspect of him offers an incredible depth to his historical and contemporary awareness of the themes and problematics raised. He was truly of the brave liminal of us, those who stand on the edge of many worlds and offer a broader perspective that incorporates and reframes the water in which we swim, making everything we thought was made and done to be newly surprising, alive, and full of sudden potential for a good we had not before imagined.
Wonderful, thank you so much. Reading this book when it just came out, was the basis of the last useful conversation I ever had with my MD father. When I was growing up in the 50´s and 60's he had a circle of MD friends around him who were all concerned about the themes that Illich verbalized so well. For the last 10 years of his life (he died in 1984), I was not much in touch with him, but we did have a talk when Medical Nemesis came out. On a lot of levels, I find Illich's outlook "too much RC for comfort," but I can look past that to the essence of his analysis, and he was so perceptive, and I think with the Corona fiasco, the boil has been lanced. I am not sure we are recovering yet, but at least in some areas, people are trying to start afresh, for our healthcare system is permanently compromised, FUBAR, to use a technical term.
"when hospitals draft all those who are in critical condition, they impose on society a new form of dying."
The book is, in many ways, a companion piece to Jessica Mitford's "The American Way Of Death." Both describe the new "pay to play" paradigm, each treating with a different facet.
Illich's solutions are typical of the specialist's myopia, however insightful and accurate his analysis of the problem. It's a worthwhile read, more relevant now than ever, but the solutions require a more fulsome accommodation of human behavioral psychology writ large.
I really want to understand your comment. This is sort of my chance to hear what people are thinking about in response to some of Illich's ideas.
I have not read Mitford's book. I looked it up. It appears to be about unethical practices in the funeral industry written with flair in the 60's? I just can't figure out what you find conversational between them. Could you talk about that more?
I am also wondering what you mean about Illich and the specialist's myopia? I do want to understand what you are thinking, but I'm not quite getting it. If you are willing to help me, I will try to catch your meaning better.
Not entirely unfairly, Runemasque, I've been considered cynical by some for the way I perceive human motivation. I read Mitford shortly after my father's funeral in 1970, seeking some understanding of what I had witnessed. Her perspective on the way that the funeral industry extracts maximum profit is accurate enough, but the focus is mainly on profit. The unethical side is categorically distinct.
What brought her to mind in the context of Illich, was the gatekeeping aspect of both industries. Owing to regulatory capture, simple human acts now require permission, and that permission always has an associated cost.
The deception and manipulation of people at their weakest and most vulnerable are also commonalities between the two industries.
The specialist's myopia has never been more striking than what we saw with the public health authorities during the last few years; they focused on their specialty, their area of (supposed) competence, to the exclusion of everything else. Great harm resulted from their refusal to consider how poverty kills and their absurd idea that supply chains take decades to form.
We all become even more dependent on complex supply chains each year. Complexity forms a self-reinforcing feedback loop. To some degree, "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" applies here.
Illich's advocacy, his solutions, tend libertarian. I sympathize deeply, but cannot condone the unexamined exposure of unsophisticates to the predation of psychopaths or even the sincere, benevolently incompetent where the stakes are as high as they are in matters of health care.
It's the same approach I take to anarcho-capitalists advocating for absolutely free markets as the antidote to the penurious misery of the masses . By the time market correction deals with the bad guys, too many lives get ruined beyond any hope of surcease or redemption. Worthy and obviously superior standard, but it's a goal, an aspiration, and also a car that no chasing dog can afford to catch.
Perhaps a simpler way to say it is that Illich is correct about people having the right to manage their own lives and deaths (I hold that as a sacred precept myownself,) but there's a cost that people bear for trusting others without some assurance of competence and benevolence. Where health interventions are concerned, that price is heavy indeed.
I see it as a wicked problem, meaning a problem whose every solution presents an even more intractable problem. Liberty is the fundamental human right and must not be infringed upon, but there will always be those who prey upon the credulous liberty of others. If that sounds like a tautology, well...... it is, rather, at least to some degree.
Have I clarified the position, or made it even more obscure?
"There was no greater polymath in the past century"
Perhaps not, Toolate, but not even the greatest human polymath is omniscient. There will always be a hierarchy of cognitive priority. I find the a priori assumption of human perfectibility a blind spot in many of the largest rear view mirrors.
David Cayley's excellent podcast series from his CBC radio broadcasting program: Ideas. Cayley also interviewed many of Illich's friends in other episodes and wrote an intellectual biography which I cannot recommend highly enough. https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/Ivan+Illich
Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey by David Cayley. One of my most treasured books that I own. It is very extensive and thorough. And it has an index to facilitate dabbling by topic! David Cayley is a masterful interviewer whose contributions in making great and complex intellects accessible to regular people shall I hope be an enduring heritage for us all (Unbekoming take note). Because of his unique relationship with Illich and his own intellectual capacity, this book offers many bridges of understanding and exploration. He is capable to refer to many of Illich's friends and others in intellectual conversation with Illich's ideas. The book also offers many and generous excerpts and referential quotes of Illich for every discussed point. You also get the insight of Illich as a real person who was known as a friend to Cayley. Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey https://a.co/d/0ds2C7Y4
I had a page saved with most of Illich's writings freely available, and now it is gone! You can find many books for free on archive.Org. Here is a link to writings in Spanish: http://www.ivanillich.org.mx/libros.htm
Here is a clip from one of Illich's great essays, "To Hell With Good Intentions." Still relevant to today's world.
BTW the Alliance for Progress that Illich speaks about was a ten year plan developed by John F. Kennedy in 1961 to foster "economic cooperation between North and South America." In short it was another project of imperialism. The Camelot cultists omit this (and many other egregious aspects of the Kennedy's) in their never ending desire to glorify JFK.
"Next to money and guns, the third largest North American export is the U.S. idealist, who turns up in every theater of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooders. Ideally, these people define their role as service.
Actually, they frequently wind up alleviating the damage done by money and weapons, or "seducing" the "underdeveloped" to the benefits of the world of affluence and achievement. Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring home to the people of the U.S. the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough to be shared.
By now it should be evident to all America that the U.S. is engaged in a tremendous struggle to survive. The U.S. cannot survive if the rest of the world is not convinced that here we have Heaven-on-Earth. The survival of the U.S. depends on the acceptance by all so-called "free" men that the U.S. middle class has "made it." The U.S. way of life has become a religion which must be accepted by all those who do not want to die by the sword- or napalm. All over the globe the U.S. is fighting to protect and develop at least a minority who consume what the U.S. majority can afford.
Such is the purpose of the Alliance for Progress of the middle-classes which the U.S. signed with Latin America some years ago. But increasingly this commercial alliance must be protected by weapons which allow the minority who can "make it" to protect their acquisitions and achievements.
But weapons are not enough to permit minority rule. The marginal masses become rambunctious unless they are given a "Creed," or belief which explains the status quo. This task is given to the U.S. volunteer - whether he be a member of CLASP or a worker in the so-called "Pacification Programs" in Viet Nam.
The United States is currently engaged in a three-front struggle to affirm its ideals of acquisitive and achievement-oriented "Democracy." I say "three" fronts, because three great areas of the world are challenging the validity of a political and social system which makes the rich ever richer, and the poor increasingly marginal to that system.
In Asia, the U.S. is threatened by an established power -China. The U.S. opposes China with three weapons: the tiny Asian elites who could not have it any better than in an alliance with the United States; a huge war machine to stop the Chinese from "taking over" as it is usually put in this country, and; forcible re-education of the so-called "Pacified" peoples. All three of these efforts seem to be failing.
...
And finally, in Latin America the Alliance for Progress has been quite successful in increasing the number of people who could not be better off - meaning the tiny, middle-class elites - and has created ideal conditions for military dictatorships. The dictators were formerly at the service of the plantation owners, but now they protect the new industrial complexes. And finally, you come to help the underdog accept his destiny within this process!"
In one sense, Allen, the world does depend on a continuing illusion of incrementally universalized prosperity. Bob Marley sums it up with the line "a hungry mob is an angry mob."
Human flourishing requires societal stability, and the nature of human behavior is competitive, Darwinian at it's core. Resource finitude defeats Pareto neutrality, rendering noble cooperation a methodology limited in scope and duration.
Understandable, certainly. I found my elders' references to "human nature" baffling, fifty years ago. Over the last few decades, I came to realize that "human nature" is an overarching reference to neuropsychology and evolutionary biology. The work of Pavlov, Skinner and Stoddard maps the general trend of discovery, augmented by the efforts of myriad other researchers.
It comes down to what is most easily described as an economic calculus, and the theory of economic entropy dovetails rather neatly with evolutionary biology. The reproducible results of experiments in adaptive learning and behavior reinforce the Darwinian aspects of "human nature."
Acknowledging those results does not negate the human potential for cooperation, but it's always only and ever about the resources.
Discussing this is only anti-humanistic in the sense that most people are appalled at the malleability of their own response patterns and are far too uncomfortable about them to squarely face the implications. I sympathize; it's not an easy thing to do.
In that vein, I would say instead, that God has allowed us the leeway to fiddle with a few of the nuts-and-bolts with which He created us. It appears to me that there's a certain "you break it, you own it" justice to this freedom.
Wow! So far, I have seen much of this and have to dedicate more of my time reading this information & Illich's interpretation! Fascinating! Compelling! It makes me wonder, why we've never seen his work before! Much thanks for letting us know!
You and me both. Fantastic. Must get his book. Cogent beyond. Can't you just see thru his words and align those words with what we are subjected to today in medicine? Last time I was at a doctors office, she asked me if I wear seat belts?? Why. That's medicine?
This is indeed true especially nowadays. People around me structure their lives according to doctor and hospital visits. Both of these run procedures on a day-by-day basis. Hence, I cannot plan anything with such people. They can never commit to life.
Excellent book which, along with “The Naked Empress,” by Hans Ruesch, helped me to cope with the fraud of animal, and therefore, human, experimentation.
I have a dreadful habit of skipping to comment before reading the full article (slap self on wrist) & here I go again. I blame my reduced attention-span on Twitter! I started reading this book under alternative title "Limits to Medicine" and found it rather baffling - perhaps the same phenomenon is at play. Anyhow, Kudos to you for your attention [to detail] and determination to disseminate to a wider audience. The book of Illlich's which I DID read in full and enjoyed very much in my 2000s exploration into alternative/low-impact lifestyle and what is now somewhat disparagingly know as the "sustainability" movement was Tools for Conviviality. For what its worth. Thanks for all you do.
Corollary 1: Did you hear that Switzerland has now dispensed with mammograms as a screening protocol? 2: I have a friend who has been through the mill with prostate diagnosis/biopsy/surgery and now - faced with increasing PSA readings and nothing noteworthy from various scans - is being offered (female) hormone treatment as his only option. I despair for him and would welcome any advice.
As a rule, I recommend to doctors I was training, that they should ALWAYS look for a fungal infection of the prostate! Benign Prostate Hypertrophy, BPH, is almost always caused by yeast/fungal infections, shared and passed back and forth by sexual partners. Unfortunately, it's always the female partner who's treated and not the male!
Yeast, does what when it's in a warm environment? It SWELLS UP! This is partially what it does to the prostate, in it's infectious process! Therefore, TREAT BPH, WITH ANTI FUNGALS!! You can do so with MANY different Natural, Nutraceutical products and protocols!❤️
Seek out the information from Anthony Williams the medical medium,see his website, lots of free reading, vids, and podcasts for free. It is about detoxing heavy metals and rebuilding the immune system.
May 3rd 1957, a school night, my mother sent us all out to the movies. My oldest sister was already married with a 2 year old which left 5 remaining children in house. Dr Eisenhard, an old-timer, came to the house before we all left. We didn't think anything of it because he made house calls all the time when someone got sick or we all came down with measles at the same time.
He was tall, I was little, but I remember him rolling up his sleeves, going to the kitchen to wash up and then touching us all very gently to examine us. There was no such thing as herding all of us into a car for a doctor visit. He came to us. And charged my mother 2 bucks a head. I still drive by his office and his home was right across the street. Beautiful structures. He obviously made money where he could but had enormous empathy for those who had little. He even accepted baked goods for payment. He was the last of his breed in my neck of the woods.
That night we came home from the movies, ran to my mothers room to tell her about the movie, and there she was, my new sister wrapped like a papoose next to Ma. Dr Eisenhard slumped in a chair, looking exhausted, like he did all the work. I never have to think how old my nephew is. He's 2 years OLDER than his aunt. Ain't that a gas.
We need to return to this. We have a local independent doctor who somewhat does this. It is a big professional sacrifice for doctors to be independent. With massive student loans, they give up the security of having a company ensure paying off their educational debt. They also give up the assured income of being an employee. Many cannot reconcile the conditions. I am grateful for those who do, in all disciplines and callings. How many brilliant writers do we have, for example, who spend their time copy writing or covering an assigned topic beat? How many potentially good physicians who sell out (without realizing it some of them) , because they need to pay off debt or support their families.... How many of us do this?
Around the same time as Flexnor and Wundt the streetcar rails were being torn out so that petro powered buses would be in. All houses would have electricity, then phones. All (majority of) children would be registered at birth, processed in schools. For industrial farming of humans the old infrastructure had to be discredited and destroyed. Certain blood lines had to be culled to obtain the qualities of dometication.
For free range healers to exist, the existing infrastructure would in turn, need to be dismantled, ie legislation, insurance, standards of care, the cultivated ignorance, dependency and demand of the public and a big Etcetera goes here.
So check this word. Agnotology. This word is like a kleig light shining on the mental construction advertised to us as Medicine. I found it on this substack, https://tobyrogers.substack.com/p/how-anti-corporate-agnotology-studies This is from his article:
"The premise of agnotology is both simple and profound. Most people think of ignorance as the absence of knowledge. Proctor and others in the field argue the opposite — that ignorance is socially constructed in the same way that knowledge is. Powerful interests instruct society to pay attention to some things and not others through a variety of inducements (you get paid to study certain topics and not others) and punishments (you will be blacklisted if you ask too many questions about forbidden topics). Over time these values become invisible and just a part of culture. "
People sell out because of the reward /penalty system we live under on the farm.
When the small medical schools, varied curriculums, herbalists, midwives along with the amateur abortionists and snake oil salesmen were stamped out, it was akin to ripping out the streetcar rails. The wherewithal, will and people to replace it don't exist.
I guess you might not realize this, but there are actually are many people who are healers, who are self trained, descendants of trained doctors or other types of healing practitioners with none to vast degrees of education, who service many people in RURAL America!
Invitation: I'm going to put my fantasy out there because, who knows what may come of it. As a lifelong physically isolated "friend" of Illich, I want to reinvoke the friendship tradition of Illich. He was known to use his professorships to enable gatherings of friends where in the spirit (con-spirit-acy) of friendship they would purposefully explore and work on the concepts and issues, the big questions, in need of discussion. The influence of Illich's intellectual salons or conspiracies of friends has furthered ground-breaking intellectual work in so many domains. You have John McKnight, Barbara Duden, David Cayley, Thomas Szasz, Uwe Poerksen, Nils Christie,....
We need to add to these excellent starts that Unbekoming is offering us. We need to dig in to the big questions. What are they? What can we explore and grow of them? Just as much as Illich's definition of health presumes a responsibility and autonomy, so I see that I must limber my life from not just intellectual exposure from the armchair, but to a cultivation of being alive. In the conspiracy of company, there is for us the work we can do for ourselves and with each other, to grow what is fitting for us to grow, to expect a surprise of good which may come.
Anyone?
"Anyone?"
Everyone, Rumenasque, everyone.
I had a dream once that it was everyone, but it has never been that way in real life. I'll have gratitude for an even-one.
In many large American towns the main hospital is now the single largest local employer. Quite a few of these hospitals virtue-signal themselves proudly as "non-profits" while the medicos and executives therein earn salaries in outlandish multiples of the average wage. Keeping people sick would seem to be a lucrative business model. It is paid for by employers via health insurance for staff and by the government through programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Get on a disability benefit and you get free medical treatment forever. No wonder healthcare is 20% of US GDP and shows no sign of slowing.
It's a racket alright.
Read Rockefeller's Medicine Men again. The AMA's original purpose was, on the back of the Flexner report, which made the allopathic, pharma-intense model of medicine a monopoly, to keep medical earnings high, to keep medical education expensive, so as to keep women and blacks, and poor people out of medicine. It enshrined a monopoly that is based on mistaking the symptom fpr the disease, which postpones any meaningful healthcare, and creates health crises at retirement age, allowing the system to bleed the slaves on the plantation dry before they discard them.
Rockefeller's pharmaceuticals were derived from coal tar, something he had in abundance. The profit motive was never far from his mind. What better than a "healthcare" monopoly? Today doctors approach the status of demigods.
The slaves want back on the plantation...
I want to note that Ivan Illich was A Catholic priest. For some, this may be a trigger to imagine that his thinking will be unrelatable. I would like to say that this aspect of him offers an incredible depth to his historical and contemporary awareness of the themes and problematics raised. He was truly of the brave liminal of us, those who stand on the edge of many worlds and offer a broader perspective that incorporates and reframes the water in which we swim, making everything we thought was made and done to be newly surprising, alive, and full of sudden potential for a good we had not before imagined.
Illich and Ellul.
Wonderful, thank you so much. Reading this book when it just came out, was the basis of the last useful conversation I ever had with my MD father. When I was growing up in the 50´s and 60's he had a circle of MD friends around him who were all concerned about the themes that Illich verbalized so well. For the last 10 years of his life (he died in 1984), I was not much in touch with him, but we did have a talk when Medical Nemesis came out. On a lot of levels, I find Illich's outlook "too much RC for comfort," but I can look past that to the essence of his analysis, and he was so perceptive, and I think with the Corona fiasco, the boil has been lanced. I am not sure we are recovering yet, but at least in some areas, people are trying to start afresh, for our healthcare system is permanently compromised, FUBAR, to use a technical term.
"when hospitals draft all those who are in critical condition, they impose on society a new form of dying."
The book is, in many ways, a companion piece to Jessica Mitford's "The American Way Of Death." Both describe the new "pay to play" paradigm, each treating with a different facet.
Illich's solutions are typical of the specialist's myopia, however insightful and accurate his analysis of the problem. It's a worthwhile read, more relevant now than ever, but the solutions require a more fulsome accommodation of human behavioral psychology writ large.
I really want to understand your comment. This is sort of my chance to hear what people are thinking about in response to some of Illich's ideas.
I have not read Mitford's book. I looked it up. It appears to be about unethical practices in the funeral industry written with flair in the 60's? I just can't figure out what you find conversational between them. Could you talk about that more?
I am also wondering what you mean about Illich and the specialist's myopia? I do want to understand what you are thinking, but I'm not quite getting it. If you are willing to help me, I will try to catch your meaning better.
Not entirely unfairly, Runemasque, I've been considered cynical by some for the way I perceive human motivation. I read Mitford shortly after my father's funeral in 1970, seeking some understanding of what I had witnessed. Her perspective on the way that the funeral industry extracts maximum profit is accurate enough, but the focus is mainly on profit. The unethical side is categorically distinct.
What brought her to mind in the context of Illich, was the gatekeeping aspect of both industries. Owing to regulatory capture, simple human acts now require permission, and that permission always has an associated cost.
The deception and manipulation of people at their weakest and most vulnerable are also commonalities between the two industries.
The specialist's myopia has never been more striking than what we saw with the public health authorities during the last few years; they focused on their specialty, their area of (supposed) competence, to the exclusion of everything else. Great harm resulted from their refusal to consider how poverty kills and their absurd idea that supply chains take decades to form.
We all become even more dependent on complex supply chains each year. Complexity forms a self-reinforcing feedback loop. To some degree, "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" applies here.
Illich's advocacy, his solutions, tend libertarian. I sympathize deeply, but cannot condone the unexamined exposure of unsophisticates to the predation of psychopaths or even the sincere, benevolently incompetent where the stakes are as high as they are in matters of health care.
It's the same approach I take to anarcho-capitalists advocating for absolutely free markets as the antidote to the penurious misery of the masses . By the time market correction deals with the bad guys, too many lives get ruined beyond any hope of surcease or redemption. Worthy and obviously superior standard, but it's a goal, an aspiration, and also a car that no chasing dog can afford to catch.
Perhaps a simpler way to say it is that Illich is correct about people having the right to manage their own lives and deaths (I hold that as a sacred precept myownself,) but there's a cost that people bear for trusting others without some assurance of competence and benevolence. Where health interventions are concerned, that price is heavy indeed.
I see it as a wicked problem, meaning a problem whose every solution presents an even more intractable problem. Liberty is the fundamental human right and must not be infringed upon, but there will always be those who prey upon the credulous liberty of others. If that sounds like a tautology, well...... it is, rather, at least to some degree.
Have I clarified the position, or made it even more obscure?
The "specialists myopia"?
There was no greater polymath in the past century imo
"There was no greater polymath in the past century"
Perhaps not, Toolate, but not even the greatest human polymath is omniscient. There will always be a hierarchy of cognitive priority. I find the a priori assumption of human perfectibility a blind spot in many of the largest rear view mirrors.
Further references to Illich:
David Cayley's excellent podcast series from his CBC radio broadcasting program: Ideas. Cayley also interviewed many of Illich's friends in other episodes and wrote an intellectual biography which I cannot recommend highly enough. https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/Ivan+Illich
Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey by David Cayley. One of my most treasured books that I own. It is very extensive and thorough. And it has an index to facilitate dabbling by topic! David Cayley is a masterful interviewer whose contributions in making great and complex intellects accessible to regular people shall I hope be an enduring heritage for us all (Unbekoming take note). Because of his unique relationship with Illich and his own intellectual capacity, this book offers many bridges of understanding and exploration. He is capable to refer to many of Illich's friends and others in intellectual conversation with Illich's ideas. The book also offers many and generous excerpts and referential quotes of Illich for every discussed point. You also get the insight of Illich as a real person who was known as a friend to Cayley. Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey https://a.co/d/0ds2C7Y4
Found the English collection of writings: davidtinapple.Com/illich/
I had a page saved with most of Illich's writings freely available, and now it is gone! You can find many books for free on archive.Org. Here is a link to writings in Spanish: http://www.ivanillich.org.mx/libros.htm
Here is a clip from one of Illich's great essays, "To Hell With Good Intentions." Still relevant to today's world.
BTW the Alliance for Progress that Illich speaks about was a ten year plan developed by John F. Kennedy in 1961 to foster "economic cooperation between North and South America." In short it was another project of imperialism. The Camelot cultists omit this (and many other egregious aspects of the Kennedy's) in their never ending desire to glorify JFK.
"Next to money and guns, the third largest North American export is the U.S. idealist, who turns up in every theater of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooders. Ideally, these people define their role as service.
Actually, they frequently wind up alleviating the damage done by money and weapons, or "seducing" the "underdeveloped" to the benefits of the world of affluence and achievement. Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring home to the people of the U.S. the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough to be shared.
By now it should be evident to all America that the U.S. is engaged in a tremendous struggle to survive. The U.S. cannot survive if the rest of the world is not convinced that here we have Heaven-on-Earth. The survival of the U.S. depends on the acceptance by all so-called "free" men that the U.S. middle class has "made it." The U.S. way of life has become a religion which must be accepted by all those who do not want to die by the sword- or napalm. All over the globe the U.S. is fighting to protect and develop at least a minority who consume what the U.S. majority can afford.
Such is the purpose of the Alliance for Progress of the middle-classes which the U.S. signed with Latin America some years ago. But increasingly this commercial alliance must be protected by weapons which allow the minority who can "make it" to protect their acquisitions and achievements.
But weapons are not enough to permit minority rule. The marginal masses become rambunctious unless they are given a "Creed," or belief which explains the status quo. This task is given to the U.S. volunteer - whether he be a member of CLASP or a worker in the so-called "Pacification Programs" in Viet Nam.
The United States is currently engaged in a three-front struggle to affirm its ideals of acquisitive and achievement-oriented "Democracy." I say "three" fronts, because three great areas of the world are challenging the validity of a political and social system which makes the rich ever richer, and the poor increasingly marginal to that system.
In Asia, the U.S. is threatened by an established power -China. The U.S. opposes China with three weapons: the tiny Asian elites who could not have it any better than in an alliance with the United States; a huge war machine to stop the Chinese from "taking over" as it is usually put in this country, and; forcible re-education of the so-called "Pacified" peoples. All three of these efforts seem to be failing.
...
And finally, in Latin America the Alliance for Progress has been quite successful in increasing the number of people who could not be better off - meaning the tiny, middle-class elites - and has created ideal conditions for military dictatorships. The dictators were formerly at the service of the plantation owners, but now they protect the new industrial complexes. And finally, you come to help the underdog accept his destiny within this process!"
Essay here:
https://www.uvm.edu/~jashman/CDAE195_ESCI375/To%20Hell%20with%20Good%20Intentions.pdf
In one sense, Allen, the world does depend on a continuing illusion of incrementally universalized prosperity. Bob Marley sums it up with the line "a hungry mob is an angry mob."
Human flourishing requires societal stability, and the nature of human behavior is competitive, Darwinian at it's core. Resource finitude defeats Pareto neutrality, rendering noble cooperation a methodology limited in scope and duration.
Mind you, I advocate nothing, only describe.
I don't believe there is such a thing as "human nature" and certainly not "Darwinian at it's core."
Understandable, certainly. I found my elders' references to "human nature" baffling, fifty years ago. Over the last few decades, I came to realize that "human nature" is an overarching reference to neuropsychology and evolutionary biology. The work of Pavlov, Skinner and Stoddard maps the general trend of discovery, augmented by the efforts of myriad other researchers.
It comes down to what is most easily described as an economic calculus, and the theory of economic entropy dovetails rather neatly with evolutionary biology. The reproducible results of experiments in adaptive learning and behavior reinforce the Darwinian aspects of "human nature."
Acknowledging those results does not negate the human potential for cooperation, but it's always only and ever about the resources.
Discussing this is only anti-humanistic in the sense that most people are appalled at the malleability of their own response patterns and are far too uncomfortable about them to squarely face the implications. I sympathize; it's not an easy thing to do.
In that vein, I would say instead, that God has allowed us the leeway to fiddle with a few of the nuts-and-bolts with which He created us. It appears to me that there's a certain "you break it, you own it" justice to this freedom.
Wow! So far, I have seen much of this and have to dedicate more of my time reading this information & Illich's interpretation! Fascinating! Compelling! It makes me wonder, why we've never seen his work before! Much thanks for letting us know!
You and me both. Fantastic. Must get his book. Cogent beyond. Can't you just see thru his words and align those words with what we are subjected to today in medicine? Last time I was at a doctors office, she asked me if I wear seat belts?? Why. That's medicine?
This is indeed true especially nowadays. People around me structure their lives according to doctor and hospital visits. Both of these run procedures on a day-by-day basis. Hence, I cannot plan anything with such people. They can never commit to life.
They can never commit to life, just To things medical.
I know of no thinker who is more worth the effort (which can be considerable) to plumb the depths of his messages.
Here is a nice recent missive on him
https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2024/07/01/ivan-illich-foresaw-permacrisis-fifty-years-ago-not-least-in-health-care/
Excellent book which, along with “The Naked Empress,” by Hans Ruesch, helped me to cope with the fraud of animal, and therefore, human, experimentation.
I have a dreadful habit of skipping to comment before reading the full article (slap self on wrist) & here I go again. I blame my reduced attention-span on Twitter! I started reading this book under alternative title "Limits to Medicine" and found it rather baffling - perhaps the same phenomenon is at play. Anyhow, Kudos to you for your attention [to detail] and determination to disseminate to a wider audience. The book of Illlich's which I DID read in full and enjoyed very much in my 2000s exploration into alternative/low-impact lifestyle and what is now somewhat disparagingly know as the "sustainability" movement was Tools for Conviviality. For what its worth. Thanks for all you do.
Corollary 1: Did you hear that Switzerland has now dispensed with mammograms as a screening protocol? 2: I have a friend who has been through the mill with prostate diagnosis/biopsy/surgery and now - faced with increasing PSA readings and nothing noteworthy from various scans - is being offered (female) hormone treatment as his only option. I despair for him and would welcome any advice.
As a rule, I recommend to doctors I was training, that they should ALWAYS look for a fungal infection of the prostate! Benign Prostate Hypertrophy, BPH, is almost always caused by yeast/fungal infections, shared and passed back and forth by sexual partners. Unfortunately, it's always the female partner who's treated and not the male!
Yeast, does what when it's in a warm environment? It SWELLS UP! This is partially what it does to the prostate, in it's infectious process! Therefore, TREAT BPH, WITH ANTI FUNGALS!! You can do so with MANY different Natural, Nutraceutical products and protocols!❤️
Seek out the information from Anthony Williams the medical medium,see his website, lots of free reading, vids, and podcasts for free. It is about detoxing heavy metals and rebuilding the immune system.