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An imaginative and relentlessly skeptical critic of technology and bureaucracy, Ivan Illich demonstrates that all of the social institutions cherished by human beings are harmful to human welfare. In his work he has attacked compulsory schooling, economic development, and centralized medicine for self-serving policies and practices that deprive individuals of the right to take care of themselves. By this process, Illich argues, people are gradually robbed of the creativity and power to live outside of institutional structures or to imagine alternatives to them. Commodities, in essence, become more important than basic human requirements. And this loss of what he calls the "vernacular values" of "subsistence living" is the central problem with modern industrial and postindustrial societies. As a remedy, Illich advocates nothing less than a revolution of individual spirit that would transform the basic institutions of society. A lifelong Catholic, he sees the refusal of power and the constant reimagining of community ethics as the heart of the Christian gospel.
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