Escaping the Ruins of Society
Living under corporate-state collusion in the light of Ivan Illich's warning that institutions that grow too large thwart their purposes
Escaping the Ruins of Society
“Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production renders the milieu hostile, when it extinguishes the free use of the natural abilities of society’s members, when it isolates people from each other and locks them into a man-made shell, when it undermines the texture of community by promoting extreme social polarization and splintering specialization, or when cancerous acceleration enforces social change at a rate that rules out legal, cultural, and political precedents as formal guidelines to present behaviour.” - Ivan Illich (1973)
It is half a century since the renegade Catholic priest Ivan Illich wrote these prophetic words, the half century that I have been alive. I have thus witnessed first hand the ruination of society predicted by Illich, even though many of my contemporaries have barely noticed. The eeriest aspect of our macabre nightmare is the extent to which it is accepted as not merely ‘normal’ (indeed it is ‘the New Normal’), but sane and desirable. Having destroyed communities of autonomous individuals, the transnational corporate-state collusion has seized control of everything. It now must endlessly manufacture justifications for why none of this was a mistake, why all of this remains necessary, and why we should willingly concede to ever-diminishing freedoms for our own good. The much-denounced power of the Vatican in the Middle Ages is as a gnat compared to this anti-political behemoth.
At the heart of all of Illich’s critiques is his condemnation of scale. He repeatedly insisted that when an institution grows beyond a certain size, “it first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed, and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself.” This is the keystone to all of Illich’s philosophy, and it is less a hypothesis to be proven (what data would you collect in such an experiment...?) than a metaphysical imperative to be witnessed. The anti-political discourse of our time conceals this monstrosity by obsessing about whether such enterprises should be owned by corporations, the state, or individuals (that is: the false choice between capitalism, socialism, and libertarianism). Yet as Illich attested, this is entirely irrelevant since “no form of management can make such fundamental destruction serve a social purpose.”
Since the metastasising specialisations within our fallen universities are no longer joined into a union of thinking people by a shared theology or moral philosophy, technological development inevitably led to values becoming severed from people and their communities. They were instead co-opted by ever-broader institutions, rendering us all into “the accessories of bureaucracies or machines”. Against this, Illich’s untaken path was the shaping of technological prowess towards tools that enlarge and enhance our competences, our initiative, and our expressiveness, limited only by each individual’s claim to “an equal range of power and freedom”. In medicine, in transportation, in universities, in each case we rejected Illich’s convivial tools and accepted instead incorporation into the world-eating machine that became inevitable when economics (the unlimited growth of money) became the corrupt substitute for the ethics of knowledge.
Once again, the roots of this rot are entangled with our incessant belief in naïve belief. The tremendous collective knowledge of individual citizens - more than enough for any honest democracy! - can be denounced as merely ‘subjective’ and inappropriate to inform the creation of appropriate policies. Meanwhile the ‘objective’ - the knowledge of objects - is erroneously linked to those experts endorsed by the imperial apparatus of the corporate-state leviathan, and mistaken as a commodity capable of endless refinement. Citizen democracy is required to give way to a “new mythology of governance”, whose foundation is an utter misrepresentation of scientific process.
Many of us are now waking up to what Illich saw with clear eyes half a century ago: that the economic imperative towards the supposedly ‘better’ (safer, kinder…) is now the nemesis to the good life. Society lies in ruins because there is no citizen democracy in which we are united through disagreeing about how we will live together. There is just the corporate-state empire instructing us all as to why the withdrawal of our freedom is necessary. Yet Illich insists, this can all end quite suddenly, as it did to the Vatican in the Reformation, and to the thrones of kings in the Revolutions. Betrayed, the people accepted the unthinkable and struck off royal heads. Our new civic rebellion need not and cannot be so bloody: all we require to escape the ruins of society is the rediscovery of our extraordinary capacity to think together about how to live.