no, no, no, not Ivan Ilyich...
The Death Of Ivan Ilyich
The Cossacks
Tolstoy
-vs-
Grass
Katz und Maus
Die Blechtrommel
...but Ivan Illich
His fundamental argument, widely admired in some quarters and ridiculed and caricatured in others, was that once our institutions developed beyond a certain scale, they became perverse, counterproductive to the beneficial ends for which they were originally conceived. The end result of this paradoxical counter-productivity was schools which make people dumb, complacent and unquestioning; hospitals which produce disease; prisons which make people violent; travel at high speed which creates traffic jams; and ‘aid and development’ agencies which create more and more ‘needy’ and ‘underconsuming’ people.
