Transcript
ILLICH: Well I had a strange experience with this title. My editor said, "Well, if you want really to write another book, it sounds strange [to be?] reschooling, retooling." So I finally agreed on the title Tools for Conviviality, which old Mr. [Cascanfield?] found very attractive, but very (inaudible) objective [to as?] being [pornographic?]. Now
Mr. [Canfield?] said that he was too old to understand. And, I'm sorry. I'll, thank you for reminding me. Last evening, there were some serious doubts about my reasonableness when I spoke about transportation. So today, with some colleagues here, I sat down. And we figured out that, according to the statistics which I can find in
the library, the median American travels some 5000 miles a year. The typical car owner travels something like 10,000 miles a year. It seems, also, quite reasonable to assume that between earning the money to drive a car, wait for the car, sit in the car, drive the car, this is my estimate,
now. The typical American adult spends some three to four hours with occupied earning his car. The year has 350 days, which means that one would assume that normally, Americans now spend between 1000 and 2000 hours a year engaged in bridging the distance from between 5000 and 10,000
miles, which brings down, as I suggested yesterday, the effective speed of locomotion in terms of invested time, to five hours a mile. (inaudible). And it seems rather obvious. I mean, you might correct me on some details. Yeah, it's a fact. I mean, but there's one great difference, of course, between Americans
today, or Germans or Frenchmen, and people in primitive societies. In primitive societies, when people... In order to make it possible for some people to go at a speed of five miles, other people don't have to bridge great distances, or distances which can be bridged only by car. And the social budget, time budget spent on transportation,
from [the?] few estimates which we have, lies between five and seven percent. While in the United States, we are all compelled to spend something like 25 percent of our lifetime making transportation possible at five miles or six miles or seven miles per hour invested into it. There's another,
I'm not sure if it came up here in discussion or if it came up right afterwards in the discussion. We discussed housing. Now in Mexico, the housing code was revised some four years ago in a very enlightened way. Because for Mexican architects, who define this housing code which tells you what kind of housing is such that it deserves public protection
and that it is considered legally rentable. These architects defined the criteria for such housing much lower, much simpler than these would be defined in the United States. Notwithstanding this, thanks to the new housing code, an inhabitable housing unit
costs as much as the total monthly per month, as the total monthly income of a Mexican who gets the legal minimum salary, which only about one-third of all Mexicans get. Therefore, since the housing code was passed, all but 15 percent of Mexicans -- and this is true for almost all poorer countries -- live in houses which do not enjoy the protection
of the law. Here you have again a good example, as we had in the case of compulsory education. Of industrial definition of human needs, which then no industrial machinery can satisfy, I believe that we are in the midst of a very serious crisis of which people are becoming aware, slowly. It's very strange, but you are not aware of
the very slow, very high cost in time for moving every now and then at top speeds of 60 miles. I believe that this crisis is rooted in a major two-fold experiment which failed. And that the resolution of the crisis which we face, which we called yesterday the convergence of second [water ships?], begins with
a recognition of the failure of an experiment. For [hundreds of?] years, we have tried to make energy-powered machines work for men, and to school men in the service of these machines. Now, it turns out that in the original sense of the word, machines do not work. And that people cannot be schooled for a satisfactory life at the service of machines.
The hypothesis on which the experiment was built might have to be discarded now. The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. That men are born slave-owners, and if they cannot have human beings as slaves, they need energy slaves. The concept was invented by a minister of commerce in England some 70 years ago.
The evidence shows that used for the purpose of substituting slaves, machines enslave men. Neither a dictatorial proletariat nor a (inaudible) can escape the dominion of constantly expanding industrial tools. The crisis in which we are can be solved only if we learn to invert the present deep structure of tools. If we give people tools that
guarantee the right to work with high and independent efficiency, and [while?] simultaneously eliminating the need for either slaves or masters, and enhancing each person's range of freedom. People need new tools to work with, rather than tools that work for them. In other words, I believe that our vision of society must be reconstructed to enlarge the
contribution of autonomous individuals and primary groups, to the total effectiveness of a new system of production, which is designed to satisfy the human needs which it also determines. In fact, the institutions of industrial society do precisely the opposite. As the power of machines increases, the role of persons more and more decreases to that of mere consumers. Now people do
need things. But they do not only need to obtain things. They need, above all, the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, to put them to use in caring for and caring about others. I thought about this [Attica prison riot?] exploded. Prisoners in rich countries very
often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in how things are to be made, and cannot decide what to do with them. Their punishment consists in being deprived of what I shall call conviviality. They are degraded to the status of mere consumers. And quite two or three people whom I personally know have told me that they prefer
to live in a Mexican prison, where people get very little, rather than in a US prison, where people are compelled to high levels of consumption. I choose the term conviviality to designate the contrary of industrial productivity. I want it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and intercourse of persons with their environment. And this, in contrast with the conditioned
response of persons to demands made upon them by others and by the man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in mutual personal interdependence, and as such, I consider conviviality to be an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain
level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society's members. I will argue that we can no longer live and work effectively without public controls over the articulation between man and his environment. Between the articulation between man and other men. In other words, without political controls over tools
and institutions that curtail or negate a person's right to the creative use of his own energy. For this purpose we need procedures to ensure that controls over the tools of society are established and governed not by expert control, but by political process. Unless we become aware that it is not
the supposed ownership of tools, but the deep structure of tools themselves which must come under political control, we head right towards technocratic disaster. The contrary to it, a post-industrial, very modern, scientific society in which tools are controlled politically, I call a convivial society. It would be the result of
social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community, and limit his freedom only in favor of another member's equal freedom. When I, therefore, insist in my analysis on the basic ethical value of conviviality, I put it, so to speak, as a third among three values which I have to explicit. One, survival.
Second, distributive justice or some more or less equal claim of all members of society to the products produced by society. And third, participatory justice, or somewhat of an equal right to control energy inputs into society. In a modern society, energy
inputs inevitably are large. Even though our per capita energy consumption were to drop enormously in the next two generations, competition for them inevitably would lead to destruction, and centralization of control inevitably would sacrifice what I called participatory justice
to an appearance of distributary justice. What I want to discuss here is not. I want to first make clear what I do not want to discuss here. I want to discuss a methodology by which to recognize when means turn into ends, not describe a utopia, not provide an engineering manual for the future, not
engage into a discussion of the type of social character which would be necessary in order to accept life or desire life in a modern low-energy society. Not provide strategic or tactical devices to move from where we are to where we want to go or might have to go. Fifth, not some kind of
explicit ethics about a future society, and sixth, not some new kind of economic theory. It will become very clear in the process of my explanation why I do not want to move into any of these directions. A utopia I do not want to describe, because I want to provide negative design criteria for the tools of a possible society within which many different
utopias could be realized. I do not want to provide design criteria for potentially convivial tools, because this would distract our imagination from the essence I propose, namely, the distinction between prescriptive planning, prescriptive politics in which we want to accomplish for all something previously
conceived in abstract terms by experts, as opposed to proscriptive decision-making, in which we decide what nobody can have if we all want to survive. I do not want to provide a strategy for moving from where we are to where we have to go, because, as I hope it will become evident in my last talk, the politics of social inversion cannot
rely -- as we also suggested yesterday in a short conversation -- on one or the other group in society taking power. And I do not want to deal, as I said, with new economics, because I'll try to define, in my talk tomorrow, the different categories of limits which have to be imposed onto our tools by starting from
design criteria which, in their nature, are not economic in the present sense. A convivial society should be so designed to allow its members the most autonomous actions by means of tools which are least controlled by others, because people feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their labor is creative, while the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence,
exploitation, and impotence. I use the term "tool" here broadly enough to include all rules or codes, all instructions or implements which are designed rationally for the achievement of a certain purpose. And I use it fully aware that this leaves me open to the
accusation of misusing an ordinary word, so that both a bicycle and a car, a road system and a school system, can be comprised within its concept. I want, during this evening, to make us aware of the degree to which we are hooked
on the idea that a modern tool inevitably is a tool which consumes more or less large amounts of environmental energy, and to begin to ask ourselves if, in our devotion to energy, is not hidden a form of idolatry which blinds us to the possibilities of seeing alternatives. It has become difficult
for our contemporaries to imagine developments and modernization in terms of lower, rather than higher, energy use. The illusion that high culture is one that uses the highest possible quantities of energies, in my opinion, must be overcome if we are to get our tools or instruments into focus. In classical society, power sources were very equally distributed.
Each man was born with the potential to use most of the power he would need in a lifetime if his organism was properly maintained. Control over the use of physical energy was overwhelmingly psychological. It was the result of psychic manipulation, or of political domination. Men did not need power tools to build the Mexican pyramids of Teotihuacan, or the Philippine rice terraces which I
saw in [Ibague?]. Their muscles provided the force to raise St. Peter's Cathedral, or to dig the channels of the plain of (inaudible). Runners carried the messages between Caesar's generals and between village chiefs in (inaudible). Hands and feet moved the spindle and the loom, the pottery wheel, and the saw. Human metabolism provided the energy that powered all classical
agriculture, manufacture, and war. Individual skills were the controls that shaped animal energy into socially defined work. The energy that rulers could control was equal to the sum of the performance of their subjects, which they gave up voluntarily or involuntarily. I do not claim that human metabolism provided all useful power. But I
do claim that, in most culture, it was the main source of power. Men knew how to harness some of the forces of the environment. They steered barges down the Nile, [the gentle?] beasts to draw the plow. They caught the wind in their sails. They became experts in the construction of simple machines which combined the power of men and the rain and of gravity. They also tamed fire in the forge [in?] the
kitchen. But the total output of these sources remained secondary. Even the Mongols, who lived on their mounts, provided the empire more with their muscles than with their horsepower. All the energy tapped from the environment to build Athens or Florence did not contribute much more controlled power to these classical societies as did their men. Only when men lit fires to turn cities into ruins or jungles into
(inaudible) did he release -- but he certainly did not control -- energies that overwhelmed the power of the people who used them. The amount of physical power available to old societies can be rather easily estimated. It can be expressed in multiples of the average man's working time and metabolic energy. He can burn 2500 calories, and four-fifths of them he just needs to stay alive. They go into making his heart beat and
his brain pulse. The remainder can be externalized. But this does not mean that all of it can be transformed into work, in a physical sense. A large portion of the lifetime capacity of man to act on his physical environment is spent running around while he grows up. More is spent for chores which lie beyond his personal choice, but also beyond other men's reach. He consumes energy just in getting up in the morning and preparing food and seeking protection from the cold
or avoiding, ducking the slave driver's whip. If man is deprived of the use of this power, he becomes useless for work. Society can give shape to these personal activities. It cannot appropriate the energy used on them to make other tasks. Custom, language, and law can determine the form of a slave's pottery, but the master cannot take the last [pot of?] a roof away from his slaves, not, at least,
if he wants him to work the next day for him. Only a small energy parcel from each man was the major source of physical power with which temples were built, mountains were moved, cloth was woven, wars were waged, and kings were carried around or amused. Power was limited. It was proportional to the population. Its major source was the muscle of individual men.
Its efficient use depended on the stage to which hand tools had developed, and the distribution of necessary tools among the population. And as I said yesterday, we have made extraordinary progress, which has been totally overshadowed, unfortunately, during the last 100 years in rendering the [trans uses?] of human energy more effective. Tools, in a primitive society or in a low-energy society, have the purpose to match the impedance of manpower
to a certain task. Except when redirecting the forces of gravity and wind, they did not and could not act as amplifiers of human power. To control more power than others in his society, a man really had to lord it over his fellows. If a ruler could draw power from sources other than men, this control over the powers still depended over his control of men. Each pair of oxen required a
man to lead them. Even the forge needed a boy to blow into the fire. Political control coincided with the control over physical power. And the control over power depended entirely on authority. Equal power and equal direct control of power were both features of a pre-industrial society. But this did not guarantee an equal autonomy in the exercise of this
control. On a very primitive level, the physical predominance of one person made him into the lord of others. A slight advantage in organization of weaponry made on people the master of another. The appropriation of resources and tools created the basis of class societies, and fostered the rituals and myths that shaped men to fit, psychologically, where they were defined as belonging sociologically.
In a pre-industrial society, political control could extend only over the excess power that people could produce. As soon as a population became efficient enough to produce more power than what's required to maintain it, people could be deprived of control over this surplus energy. They could be compelled to cede their power to the decision of others. They could be either taxed or enslaved. Part of what they produced on their own could be taken from them.
Or they could be put to work for the king or the public. Ideology, economic structure, and lifestyle tended to favor this concentration of excess energy under the control of [the?] few. The degree to which this concentration of control polarized social benefits, of course, varied from culture to culture. At best, we (inaudible) of a healthy peasant society. At worst, the concentration of decision over power left
to the establishment of empires, which were expanded by mercenaries and fed from plantation work by slaves. The total environmental energy available to society increased rapidly towards the end of the Iron Age. That is, between the time of Agrippa and the time of (inaudible). I just re-read Marx's Kapital again this summer, and was amazed at
how much he was amazed at the extraordinary power of his machines which, today, could easily be put into a truck. Most of the radical technical mutations that came into existence before the scientific discoveries in the field of electricity came about in the Middle Ages, according to [Broddel?]. Because they used wind power more effectively than any previous invention, free-masted sailing ships made worldwide transport possible. Speedy transportation
with regular deliveries came about through the building of canals in Europe. A millennium later in Southeast Asia, a vastly increased application of nonhuman energy to industries like brewing, dyeing, pottery making, brick making, sugar refining, salt manufacture, transport, with parallel with the construction of vastly improved water winds and windmills, which produced rotary power.
From the High Middle Ages to the late Renaissance, new social tools developed that ensured the protection of workers' self-image and dignity. I'm speaking of the guilds, although the worker was now sometimes dwarfed by the size of his [mill?]. Lewis Mumford points out that one particular enterprise, namely mining, then began to set the pattern for later modes of mechanization by its disregard of
the human factor, by its indifference to pollution and destruction of the environment, by its concentration of chemical processes in order to extract fuel [or?] coal. And above all, by its topographical and mental isolation from the organic world of the farmer and the craftsman. It is very interesting here to see -- and I had some time today in the library to check some further on it -- how, during this time, a new type of nature
creature develops, particularly -- I've looked at it in Germany -- the [coboil?], the black man, the little man who lives outside of the peasant community, under the earth. This mining became the symbol of new use of environmental energy to a task
which men wanted to accomplish. This new attitude towards gainful activity is reflected in a new term which was introduced at this time, at least into the Latin languages. Trabajo. (inaudible). I found the word first mentioned in a Spanish council of the ninth century, when clerics were exempted from
having the (inaudible) applied to them. A new machine invented to impale a man simultaneously on three stakes rather than on one. By the twelfth century, the word, both in French and Spanish, expressed a painful experience to which man is subjected by a tool. Only in the sixteenth century did it become possible to use the word "trabajar"
interchangably with "laborar" and "sudar," on the job. Equally significant is what happened in the English language. Things began to work. Until that time, only men worked. And now, suddenly, things began to work. First, medicines, in the beginning of the seventeenth century. And then physical tools towards the middle of the seventeenth century. Even though these tools, which began to -- the word
"work" was used, to work -- were not yet driven by outside powers. The alchemist's dream of making a (inaudible) in the still slowly took the shape of creating robots to work for men. The ideology of an industrial organization of tools and of capitalist organization of the economy thus preceded, by many centuries, what is now, by two centuries at least, what is now frequently called the industrial
revolution. Men became concerned to save time, to shrink space, to augment power, to multiply goods, to overthrow the organic norms under which he had felt constrained so far. Ritual regularity, working by the clock, having, saving, economizing,
time became important. A new relation of man to time developed. The lending of money against interest -- which had been considered against nature by the church -- suddenly became acceptable. During the 17th century, the church abandoned the view, though reluctantly, that money could not be lent for interest. Scientists began to consider
man as a power source. It is near the end of the seventeenth century that we have the first studies on the comparison of man as a power source with animals as a power source. People began to measure the maximum daily exertion that might be expected from a man, and compare both his maintenance and his power to that of a horse. Man somehow reinvented himself as a source of mechanical power. Prisoners
condemned to the galleys were not much use most of the time, since the galleys, were most of the time in port. So prisoners were condemned to the treadmill. Up to the early nineteenth century, men actually labored in English prisons on the treadmills to do work. The new attitude of man to his tools during the industrial revolution -- that began as capitalism in the fifteenth century -- finally called for the invention of sources of power.
(inaudible) says very beautifully, "It is not power sources which made the industrial revolution possible, but it is rather the industrial revolution which made the finding of new power sources a necessity." Power plants became mobile. With the railroad, the Iron Age and the industrial revolution came to their end.
The industrial ways became the status quo. It's really absurd to speak about an industrial revolution after the end of the last century. Immense new sources of power were tapped during the twentieth century, and much of this power was made self-governing. Man has now almost been replaced by machine, and reduced to being their operator. Fewer men are needed as [gang?] workers, as in the fields, and
slavery has become uneconomical. But also, fewer men are needed on the assembly line, as engineers have designed machines to perform the tasks that mass production and industrialization had created in the centuries before the steam engine. More power has become available, and therefore, seemingly more power has to be used. The human slaveholder is replaced by the operant conditioning of men into a mega machine.
And I think many of us are blind to this fact, that power, simple energy, has become a major instrument for our enslavement. We have all grown up as children of our time. And therefore, it is so difficult to envisage a post-industrial yet human type of work. I go here back to the
distinction which Hannah Arendt has said, "The human condition has been so beautifully worked up between work and labor." Which I'm sure that many of you are aware of. (inaudible) are what a free man makes, as opposed to the laboring of a slave under the direction of somebody else and at the service of somebody else. Or if he is a peasant, at the service of the field.
I argue that in the High Middle Ages, a third way of human activity developed, el trabajo. The [cry?]. The working of man at the rhythm of machines powered by environmental energy sources. And it seems to me that now, we have made a fourth step ahead. We have
become operators. Machines operate and people operate, and their relationship is one of symbiosis. I do not believe that it's very easily possible to get to the root of our crisis unless we distinguish these four modes of human activity -- work, labor, trabajo, and I always laugh when I read the theological treatise as La [Scientifion de Trabajo?]. This trying to
become subservient to a masochistic worldview. But we are so much grown up in our time that we have become incapable of imagining an alternative. To reduce industrial tools seems equivalent to return to the tortured labor of the mine and of the factory, or to the labor of the US farmhand, who has to compete with mechanicized neighbors. The worker
who had to dip a heavy tire into a solution of hot sulfur each time the machine asked for it was literally hooked on its apparatus. Agricultural labor also ceased to be what it was for a slave or a farmer when the farmer has to compete with the mechanized neighbor. For the slave, it was labor at behest of a master. For the peasant, it was his work which he could organize and shape in accordance to the demands of growing plants, or hungry animals.
The modern farmhand in the US today who is deprived of power tools, is under a double pressure quite different from that of a classical slave. He must measure up to performance standards set by farmhands elsewhere who use machines. And he is constantly aware that he's underprivileged, exploited, and abused, because in an age of the mega machine, he feels that he is used like any component. The prospect that moving
towards a convivial society might imply a society with [low?] power tools would seem to him like a return to the exploitation of manpower by inefficient industrial machines in the early periods of steam. I've described these three types of institutional arrangements within which tools can be used-- to work, to labor or be labored, and to operate. Certain tools can be used effectively
within only one of these three arrangements. There are tools which can be used normally for fully satisfying, imaginative, and independent work. Others tend to be used primarily in activities best labeled as labor. The hoe. And finally, certain machines can only be operated. Even a truck driver operates his truck. The same can be said about physical artifacts, and about
the set of rules that define formal institutional arrangements. Cars, for instance, are machines that call for highways, and highways pretend to be public utilities while, in fact, they are discriminatory devices for operators. Compulsory schools constitute a huge bureaucratic system. No matter how convivially a teacher tries to conduct his class, his pupils learned through him into which class they belong. Cars operate on highways, and
teachers in schools. Only in a very limited sense can what the truck driver and the teacher do be called labor. Only exceptionally will a teacher feel that his operations within the school system do not directly interfere with his work as a human which he would like to do with his pupil. Both of them, basically, are reduced to the status of operators. The distinction between these three ways of
organizing human activity, dependent on the institutional arrangements or the tools used for their purpose, can be very clearly seen by a simple experiment. By looking at the marked characteristics of these three types of human activity. Labor can be purchased or sold in the marketplace. Work, as an activity, cannot. But only the
result of work, (inaudible) -- I assume that most of you have read The Human Condition of Hannah Arendt -- can be sold. Finally, the right to operate machines and to obtain the scarce privileges that go with employment must be earned through previous consumption of certified treatments which take the form of a curriculum of schooling, or of tests, along with successful previous jobs.
You can sell your labor. You can sell the fruits, the result of your work. But you require interior capitalization with invisible commodity, in order to get the privilege to operate a machine. Tools for a convivial, yet efficient society, could not have been designed at an earlier stage of history. But we now
can design the machinery for eliminating slavery without enslaving man to machine. Science and technology are not bound to the peculiar notion -- which is seemingly characteristic of the last 150 years of their application -- that new knowledge of nature's laws has to be locked into increasingly more specialized and highly capitalized tools. And into increasingly more specialized and highly specialized preparation for
men to operate them. The science which specialized out of philosophy, all of them, have become the rationale for an increasing division of operation. The division of labor has finally led to supposedly laborsaving division of tools. New technology is now used to amplify supply funnels for commodities. Public utilities are turned from facilities for persons into arenas for owners of
expensive tools. The use of science and technology constantly supports the industrial mode of production, and thereby crowds off the scene all, if you want, tool shops for independent enterprise. But this is not the necessary result of new scientific discoveries, or of the application of the service of people. It is rather the result of a total prejudice in favor of the future expansion of the industrial mode of production.
Research teams are organized to remedy minor inefficiencies that hold up further growth of a specific production process. These planned discoveries are then heralded as costly breakthrough in the interest of further public service. Research is now development-oriented. Science could, however, be just as easily used to increase the toolkit available to everyone. Permitting individuals and transient gatherings of associations to
constantly recreate the environment, and to do so with an (inaudible) of freedom. Let me give you two examples. One, a black girl attended my course in Mexico some two and a half years ago, three years ago now. It was January three years ago. About eight months later, she called me up. "Ivan, I need your help."
"What is it?" "I need a lawyer." "For what?" "Possession of drugs." Somehow, she [hauled them a?] long distance. I said, "Can you tell me on the phone what drugs?" She says, "Yes, penicillin." "What else?" "Improper competition with business." I said, "Which?" "Clinical lab." So I gave her the name of a lawyer. Unfortunately, I gave
her the name of too good a lawyer, interested only in the case of his client and not in further social influence of the case. The lawyer defended her. She was accused of having come back from (inaudible), and identified somewhere in the Midwest in her school, identified 137 cases of primary [lupus?] among her high school colleagues, and treated them. The lawyer got her off the hook. The case was dismissed. When he called
in witnesses from several US public health services, who all testified that in no public health service a retesting six weeks after the first penicillin injection of 100 percent would be possible. Something which the girl could show that she had done. Everybody, every one of her teenage syphilis-infected
patients she had identified she had also retreated six weeks later. Certainly, medical tools have become extraordinary simpler, unless you want to use them for pretentious purposes. Identification, diagnosis, and therapy are possible for many of the
problems for which people undergo, with a precision which was unthinkable when I was born. Today, people could be trained (inaudible) to be doctors in days or weeks to administer these tools. Let me take the other example of housing, [with?] which I have started out. It is, I think there can't be any question that the only way how we can solve the housing crisis in Latin America
is not to define what kind of housing everybody will have, but to define what are the maximum amounts of BTUs for their housing which anybody can get, and then concentrate public resources on providing simple building elements and tools for anybody who wants to house himself and does so any way now, in a bad way or in a low-level way. Or take the case of transportation.
I just was two months ago in Calcutta, even more impressive for me in Banaras. I drove with one of the outstanding socialists in his car through Banaras. The man constantly leaned on his horn to tell rickshaw drivers to get out of his way, because he wanted to overtake them. By overtaking three or 10
rickshaw drivers, he didn't in any way accelerate our transportation, because there remained 500 more ahead of him. But the entire flow pattern of the traffic was very badly disturbed by the huge car driving through the road. If, at the same time, if you look where Banaras or India can go if it wants to develop its
traffic -- I'm speaking now of personnel traffic, let's leave the transportation of materials [in parenthesis?] for a movement -- it is the same direction into which reasonable Americans would go who realize that they now move usually at the investment of one hour of lifetime in order to move over a distance of five miles. I see that I have, again, spoken longer than I wanted. I would like to open myself now to
questions from your part. Yes?
F: In speaking of (inaudible) operators for a very long time, from priests and doctors and their equivalents.
ILLICH: You say that bureaucrats usually are operators, and priests and...
F: Well, priests and administrators and doctors, especially, for thousands of years.
LLICH: Were operators. In other words, you say, we always have had bureaucracies with us.
F: Perhaps.
ILLICH: But we did not have with us the ideal that in the next generation, all people will be operators. That labor, physical labor will be eliminated or reduced through a monopoly of operating as a principle human mode of action.
F: So we have seen that these operators have been the privileged class in a society. Those have been (inaudible).
ILLICH: The slaveholders. Yes. But I think it is a fallacy to believe, which was my argument, that by substituting machines for slaves and making a man holder of energy slaves, we can create more freedom for more people.
It is very difficult to argue in 1970 that the only way of creating a desirable modern society is to create a society in which we reduce not only the consumption of natural resources, but also the available energy per capita very radically. Today in the United States,
per capita we use about, I don't know, a thousand times the energy which can be produced by the human organism. And the more you think about what we do with this energy and what this accomplishes for us, the more you become aware that it enslaves people. And I would like to call for a theological analysis of this
demonic?] energetic pattern to which we subscribe. Yes.
M: If a man has a choice between freedom and slavery, do you think he always chooses freedom?
ILLICH: No. I would quote St. Paul.
M: If he doesn't choose freedom, (inaudible).
ILLICH: I remember some passages in Holy Scripture about man's enslavement to other men, as opposed to man's enslavement to demonic powers. I do know that men do not choose freedom, and very frequently, seek
to make themselves dependent on other people. I seem to observe, in modern society, a desire to submit to idols, to enslave oneself to idols.
Did I make myself... I began yesterday by saying, "I want to present to you issues about which I am puzzled," rather than answers I can give. Yes.
F: (inaudible). And I was wondering if you could describe (inaudible).
ILLICH: The transformation of means into ends, the escalation of means, the self-defeating, frustrating enslavement of entire human communities to the pursuit of increasing means.
I think that, in this sense, the peace in Vietnam is an extraordinary symbol.
M: (inaudible)
ILLICH: But you see, I was in Mexico last Thursday and Wednesday. And I looked at The Excelsior. And my newspaper reading is the front page of The Excelsior. It's a very good newspaper, after all. But it was completely taken up with some issue which resulted from the publication of US State Department documents, which had been finally declassified of 1942, which were related to some attempted
sell-out of the Mexican petrol industry. And then, I think it was Thursday, I found also a little sign. "Peace treaty to be signed in Paris. See page 15." I went to page 15, and there I found the information that unconditional surrender of US.
Because it explained that the US had accepted, in addition to withdrawing its troops and leaving the North Vietnamese troops, etcetera, in, also the destruction of its bases. This is how it was presented, so the next day I took a plane to United States, and first thing, bought a US newspaper in order to find out how the same issue will be presented. Forgive me. (inaudible). I just say
it is an extraordinary illustration. But unless I am incorrect -- and I really would suggest that some of you sit down this evening and figure out how much time we spend per mile -- but when people will come to the conclusion that the time has passed at which we could still have walked,
we are now obligated to invest -- and that moment will come sooner or later, no matter if you go with public or private transportation-- where you will invest an hour for three and a half miles, but there will be no space to walk. You'll be in a similar position. Do I... Any medicine you might (inaudible)? Yes, sir.
M: Is, by you saying you want to present some issues which puzzled you. I'd like to try to probe (inaudible). What frightens me about your analysis, especially on transportation and issue, something like this. If you're questioning the high per capita use of energy to get stuff done,
I take it that you're calling that to question. And that perhaps we shouldn't be consuming this much energy. All right. Now you characterized social relationships in classical society. But I don't know, if we cut back on the total amount of energy we use, or the amount of energy per capita, I don't know if I want to live in a kind of society
which you characterized as classical. Because it seems to me that was very elitist, and there were very few people who controlled very many, politically. And I'm just wondering, are you suggesting there's a correlation between [highness?] of power, low energy, (inaudible)? I mean, I'm trying to say hey, it's slavery either way.
ILLICH: Yes, but first, that is true. But there might be a different slavery to human beings and to machines. And I wished we could speak clearer about the self-enslavement to idols versus the enslavement to people. Second --
M: You're saying qualitatively, there's a difference? Are you making distinctions?
ILLICH: I think it is something very... I'm not making it. I'm suggesting there might be at this moment, at least. Second, there is... One of the points which I wanted to make is calling attention to another great illusion, and that illusion is that we
can distribute environmental energy of a certain size, size X, over a population of human beings maintaining the distribution of both output and control over inputs
along the same curve which [this?] distribution could follow in a good peasant society. In other words, I am told -- and we are just at this moment having a research seminar on the subject in Larnaca -- that, in order to distribute energies to do things by mechanical slaves with more
or less equal control by all people over what is being done for them, that energy would have to be practically infinite. And then it would radically exclude man's ability to use his own energy. Oh, I'm saying something else again. It's always the same thing. If you look at the control, at the difference of
control in society, which the elite and the masses had in all past ages, and the difference which today exists between the privileged and the majority, the distance was never anywhere comparable, both in terms of horsepowers, and in terms of bits, and in terms of status. This is what I mentioned yesterday
to the young man who sat here. We have created a worldwide society divided into 16 classes of dropouts. And -- I mentioned it today to Dr. [Scholl?], I see he's sitting here so forgive me for repeating it -- but in Latin America, in 1963, the major preoccupation at the big UNESCO meeting was that the [slum?] Latin American parents don't
understand that they should send their children to school. Only six years later, we had a demand for schooling which by far exceeded any possibility of providing schools. Do I? And I already said, I do not want to say what society would look like, which I dream of, [nor?] how I want to get to there --
M: And I'm pushing you in that direction (inaudible).
I hope you don't mind. I (inaudible). The most efficient machines we have probably realize, waste 90 percent of the energy. (inaudible). And so although, [by use of?] that machine, our society is going to be
more complicated. And we have tended to define complexity as an advancement and a more lively, a better life. But in reality, what we're doing is we are expending 90 percent (inaudible). And so we are tithing the life force, and giving 90 percent to this elemental spirit
called (inaudible). And this (inaudible). But when they consider that, in our tools which are of somewhat dubious purpose to begin with, you might say (inaudible). When we invest ourselves in things like hydrogen bombs, there's an example where we are absolutely worshipping
[death?] in a very worthwhile form. I mean, we are [cultivating?] that worship of (inaudible). I mean, we now are capable of blowing ourselves to kingdom come, and I only hope that no one is sane enough to see that that is the end of our society, and decides to do it. (inaudible).
ILLICH: Nobody is sane enough.
M: Well, what I mean is, our mindset that [is?] sanity (inaudible)--
ILLICH: You mean I'm really in the madhouse when I... ?
M: (inaudible) Man becomes a tool when he works with a tool. It's not only the hand, but it's the (inaudible) device for the computer.
ILLICH: But you see, there's a very good article which a professor from this university has written for a meeting which [clattered?] his editor on some simultaneous invention of, during the last century, about 12 people, of the laws of entropy. Of the thermodynamic laws. He points out that the only four who were really successful were those who identified the [vis viva?]. You use the word. The
living force of the universe, that which can operate machines, or lift weights. And since then, without questioning the issue any further, we identify as energy that which can operate machines. If I... I do believe that only the theologian
can, at this moment, dispose of the intellectual tradition necessary in order to get our society into focus. Because I do believe that we are witnessing, certainly for the first time in history, is a true catholic
world religion, world-spanning religion, coming to the point where it is becoming self-destructive. I do believe that the ritual of this world religion has taken the form of schooling, which is now going into its liturgical reform. It is a ritual which, like any true ritual, initiation, ritual, hides from
those who participate in it the divergence between the ideal to which it is subservient and the social structure which it supports. There is the definition which Max (inaudible) gave to initiation rituals in his book on African rites. The goal which people pursue is equality, for instance. Or universal education. The social
structure sustained is a class society. People are supposedly becoming freer, while in fact, it costs year after year, geometrically more to teach them as they progress in having learned how to learn. People cannot go to school without learning to class promotion,
without learning that what specialized setting somehow produces an interior growth through consumption. I mean, so it's a reverse consumption, if you want. In that, their progress can be measured. All this [for?] ritual teaches. I would suggest that we look at the liturgy of progress, institutionalization of values,
large-scale organization, standard performance, operational verification of results. See what kind of a theology or ideology corresponds to it, which, in my opinion, is far overarching the little differences between politically bickering groups who have different proposals of how to speed up the process. And then
look at the structure of tools. This can be done only, if you want, in a contemplative mood. As (inaudible) the religious [word?] of a contemplative mood, because, as long as you are engaged in practical politics, you will want to get for your group some benefit, either in the control of the tools, or a higher percentage of the
outputs of the tools. You cannot get the tool itself out of the blind spot of your analysis. It is along these lines that I would like to encourage thinking. Yes?
M: (inaudible)
ILLICH: The major intellectual tool is probably specialized language, which you refer to. By constantly saying, "Boo." By constantly calling in dialog to the other man's attention that he's making a fetish out of a real living word. By using clean language. Clean language which can be
(inaudible) defined as dirty language, but living language. One could (inaudible) great length to discuss this, but it's in this direction that I would seek the answer. Yes, there was somebody. My moderator told me that at 9:00, we have to close. I'm looking forward tomorrow
to sum up, and I will not read tomorrow. I made the mistake today, in order to be proper and correct, to read. I [hope?] tomorrow stutter more and speak freely, and discuss six major dimensions in which any tool can first become frustrating of the purpose of which it is used. And then,
destructive of society, putting, identifying the first five, which belong together as pollution and depletion, on which we don't have to discuss much, radical monopoly, which we have touched upon both yesterday and today, when tools disable man first partially and then totally from the use of his native abilities, over programming, when society becomes such that people cannot
participate in it unless they have first been educated for it, prepared for life, for the future, programmed. Polarization, when it becomes intolerable, and change, when it becomes destructive of legality. This will be my theme for tomorrow lunch. Thank you.