cultural criticism | photography | place & space

I gotta new guru

no, no, no, not Ivan Ilyich...

1986
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.

A Turbulent Priest in the Global Village

Wikipedia: Ivan Illich

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