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Why is Ivan Illich so underrated ? He predicted and theorized free software 10 years before it happened in Tools for Conviviality, made the most obvious and n

Why is Ivan Illich so underrated ? He predicted and theorized free software 10 years before it happened in Tools for Conviviality, made the most obvious and needed critic of education and hospitals alone against the Zeitgeist, studied step by step a lot of field of society to find patterns to simplify understanding. He created simple concepts that everyone should know —- counter productivity, vernacular, iaotrogenic, radical monopoly, conviviality, poverty vs. misery etc. He is much more pragmatic than all his leftists colleagues. He might not go very deep in economics but at least he’s not a basic marxist. He might not go as deep as Jacques Ellul in his critics of technology, but at least he is very understandable, anyone can be inspired by his books. I read most of Illich writings at 19 years old and it stayed with me for years

taylorlapeyre 1y ago
I agree with you. Is it perhaps because of his religious background (he was a Catholic priest)? For much of the last couple decades, there has been an anti-religious streak in the educational mainstream universities.
- mousethatroared 1y ago
  Half agree. The other half, as a very conservative Catholic, conservative Catholics are neglecting our great teachers like Dorothy Day.
- edwardbernays 1y ago
  Could that perhaps be a reaction to an anti-intellectualism streak in the mainstream religious narrative for the last couple decades?
  - kragen 1y ago
    The last couple of millennia, really. Who lynched Hypatia? Who burned the Timbuktu Manuscripts? Who burned Giordano Bruno alive? Who burned the Maya codices? At the same time, religious institutions have always contained many intellectual traditions, perhaps most of them. When the Christians extirpated knowledge of the hieroglyphs, it was the Egyptian priests they scattered. We don't know what was in the Maya codices, but large parts of the surviving Maya inscriptions are religious in nature. European universities began as seminaries; al-Azhar University is over 1000 years old and initially taught only sharia, fiqh, and the Quran. And everyone knows how Irish monks saved civilization. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that religious people are usually the ones who care about intellectualism, whether in favor or opposed.
    - MonkeyClub 1y ago
      > religious people Seems to me that the focus should be on institutions as power centers, rather than beliefs or loosely defined "religious people". Illich himself also noted how institutionalization of an initially revolutionary idea reverses its meaning, switching, say, liberation into oppression. Power grabbers will always attempt power grabs, and will eventually distort an initial good idea. They will pretend to Embrace it, then attempt to Extend it with their own input, to finally Extinguish the original idea. My Shift key seems to be Jittery, apologies :)
    - jact 1y ago
      Hypatia’s murder had very little to do with religious conflict against a free thinker and everything to do with class alexandrian class politics. https://historyforatheists.com/2020/07/the-great-myths-9-hypatia-of-alexandria/ https://historyforatheists.com/2020/07/the-great-myths-9-hyp... Bruno’s execution was of course evil and wrong but it’s also wrong to depict him as some kind of martyr for science and that the Catholics were setting back intellectual progress. Bruno was not a scientist, he was a mystic. He did not carry out experiments to try to prove his beliefs nor even believe in the ability of math to explain nature. The conflict that lead to his death was between two different religious/mystical traditions and not between “intellectualism” and religion. If he were alive today he would be more comparable with Deepak Chopra than a real scientist Christians simply did not “extirpate” knowledge of the hieroglyphs or “scatter Egyptian priests.” Hieroglyphs were already falling into disuse since they were the writing system of a tiny elite of priests. There was no abolition or persecution of the hieroglyphic using class. The fading of hieroglyphs has its roots in the Hellenization of Egypt centuries before Christianity began. As Egyptians became Christian, the Coptic script came to be dominant for writing the Egyptian language. In the same way very few people bother to learn how to write JCL anymore, very few people were interested in retaining knowledge of hieroglyphs. There’s an implicit idea here too that Christians were some kind of foreign interloper in Egypt instead of being themselves Egyptian — this is simply not the case. Egypt was one of the early hotbeds of Christianity and the modern-day Copts are essentially the people most closely culturally and genetically related to the ancient Egyptians.
      - 1y ago
  - taylorlapeyre 1y ago
    yes, certainly
ants_everywhere 1y ago
This was a whole cottage industry during the cold war, kind of like it is now that we're in another sort of cold war. The Soviets would fund anyone applying Marxist thought to this or that. There may be some interesting ideas for those willing to sort out the chaff, but for the most part you know exactly what they're going to say if you're already familiar with the propaganda that came before.
- xg15 1y ago
  Well, was it wrong what they said?
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    Yes. In general that's why you resort to propaganda and polemics rather than giving a formal argument that can be disproved.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - appreciatorBus 1y ago
      I completely agree that Marxism and its descents are bankrupt ideas, but I’m not getting the connection to Illich. I’ve only read one of his books, Energy and Equity, but I don’t really recall any strain of Marxism or leftism, though it was a long time ago so maybe I’ve forgotten.
      - ants_everywhere 1y ago
        He's connected with liberation theology, which is what the KGB was promoting in Catholic countries to recruit for militant groups. Similar to how they promoted revolutionary Islam to people like Goddafi. I think the Soviets actually claim to have invented liberation theology, but who knows. His deschooling and Limits to Medicine stuff were standard Soviet tropes and still are today. The obvious purposes are to get the US to weaken its education and medical systems. They ran similar strategies to get the US to weaken its nuclear system and to me it looks like they're also trying to weaken adoption of AI through similar ideas. But basically schools are bad, medicine is bad. Claims we're "pathologizing" everything. You see the same ideas in socialist spaces online today. Especially these days around psychology. Similarly with the "factory school" trope. When Energy and Equity was written in 1974 it was a year after the 1973 oil crisis. The Soviet Union was destabilizing countries in the middle east and wanted to secure access to oil especially at the expense of the US. Their normal propaganda would be about American imperialism and how they're evil and oil producing countries should side with the Soviet Union instead. I haven't read the book, but that would be the Soviet take at the time. I don't know whether he was supported by the Soviets. He was a public intellectual who traveled a lot especially to South America. It's very likely he was approached and attempted to be recruited by the KGB. But whether he rebuffed them or not isn't public knowledge. One thing we're learning as more stuff gets declassified is how many household names were more actively involved in the cold war than we realized. For example, Howard Zinn being actively involved in communist organizations despite lying about it for years. Or Earnest Hemingway actively collaborating with the KGB (although in the end wasn't very successful). There are a few other examples.
crabmusket 1y ago
You might enjoy a newsletter called The Convivial Society, which is heavily influenced by Illich. I'm just starting Tools For Conviviality. I suspect that Illich's ideas are underrated because, at least today, most people want more and Illich does not offer that. He offers freedom, I think, in his definition of conviviality... but it seems to be quite clear that offered freedom or comfort, most of us today (I'm not excluding myself from this) prefer comfort.
zolland 1y ago
Poverty vs Misery?
- ttoinou 1y ago
  The distinction between lack of wealth/goods/services and lack of access to services that you now mandatory need to get wealthy/goods/others services (because of how society just changed commons into privatisation). Note that I’m not anticapitalist yet I think there are interesting concepts there Majid RAHNEMA wrote a book about this in french, “Quand la misère chasse la pauvreté” based on similar ideas than Illich
xhevahir 1y ago
The fact that he's a very eclectic thinker and not very systematic, although that's one of the things that a lot of people admire about him. His religious commitments, as well, I would guess. But also he had some very odd ideas--like refusing to get a tumor removed from his face. He also was not the best at communicating his ideas.
vouaobrasil 1y ago
I suspect it's because he's like most of the more radical writers: if you actual dissect his writing, it really gets to the heard of a lot of what is rotten about modern industrial society. And the rectification of the problems he highlights pretty much necessitates disassembling a lot of modern technological society and getting rid of most of its institutions. So while he makes sense, no one wants to discuss his work, because then they must also come to a lot of the same conclusions he did, which is: the global society we have today is a lost cause, and a lot of it needs to be torn down. Which of course goes against the status quo. It's a lot different than the fluffy, weak criticism of many today that recommend making changes that don't change anything. But then at least people reading that stuff can convince themselves that they are doing something, when they are not.
- greg_V 1y ago
  Also his criticism is very specific. Most of contemporary anti-capitalist or marxist thought that gets published is very, very abstract and hence toothless. It's easy to entertain radical ideas as long as they don't pit you against your employer.
- triknomeister 1y ago
  People don't like revolutions, even if they are the one carrying it out. Revolutions are a last resort, mainly because of how uncertain it is what comes out at the end of it. So, an action calling for complete dismantling will never have large support. And everyone kind of knows where to go to. Th difficult thing is knowing how to get there in a piece by piece manner, one area of the social order at a time. Having said that, his criticism is completely on point. But the people who have reached the same solution are then lost on what to do after it.
  - vouaobrasil 1y ago
    > Having said that, his criticism is completely on point. But the people who have reached the same solution are then lost on what to do after it. True. But as Kaczynski rightly pointed out, you can't have a revolution out of thin air, and the seeds of distrust have to be sufficiently grown first before there is a critical mass of tension that can act as fuel for the fire. So the first step might just be to sow seeds of well-placed distrust against the modern tech oligarchs.
oulipo 1y ago
Huuu... he's absolutely not underrated? Quite well-known here in Europe
- ttoinou 1y ago
  Well that’s good news then. I don’t see him quoted often though, or his concepts re-used I like your username ahah.. you might be biased ;)
snovymgodym 1y ago
Tools for Conviviality is insanely relevant today. When I was reading it I just couldn't believe it was written in 1973. So ahead of its time.

taylorlapeyre 1y ago

I agree with you. Is it perhaps because of his religious background (he was a Catholic priest)? For much of the last couple decades, there has been an anti-religious streak in the educational mainstream universities.

mousethatroared 1y ago
Half agree. The other half, as a very conservative Catholic, conservative Catholics are neglecting our great teachers like Dorothy Day.
edwardbernays 1y ago
Could that perhaps be a reaction to an anti-intellectualism streak in the mainstream religious narrative for the last couple decades?
- kragen 1y ago
  The last couple of millennia, really. Who lynched Hypatia? Who burned the Timbuktu Manuscripts? Who burned Giordano Bruno alive? Who burned the Maya codices? At the same time, religious institutions have always contained many intellectual traditions, perhaps most of them. When the Christians extirpated knowledge of the hieroglyphs, it was the Egyptian priests they scattered. We don't know what was in the Maya codices, but large parts of the surviving Maya inscriptions are religious in nature. European universities began as seminaries; al-Azhar University is over 1000 years old and initially taught only sharia, fiqh, and the Quran. And everyone knows how Irish monks saved civilization. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that religious people are usually the ones who care about intellectualism, whether in favor or opposed.
  - MonkeyClub 1y ago
    > religious people Seems to me that the focus should be on institutions as power centers, rather than beliefs or loosely defined "religious people". Illich himself also noted how institutionalization of an initially revolutionary idea reverses its meaning, switching, say, liberation into oppression. Power grabbers will always attempt power grabs, and will eventually distort an initial good idea. They will pretend to Embrace it, then attempt to Extend it with their own input, to finally Extinguish the original idea. My Shift key seems to be Jittery, apologies :)
  - jact 1y ago
    Hypatia’s murder had very little to do with religious conflict against a free thinker and everything to do with class alexandrian class politics. https://historyforatheists.com/2020/07/the-great-myths-9-hypatia-of-alexandria/ https://historyforatheists.com/2020/07/the-great-myths-9-hyp... Bruno’s execution was of course evil and wrong but it’s also wrong to depict him as some kind of martyr for science and that the Catholics were setting back intellectual progress. Bruno was not a scientist, he was a mystic. He did not carry out experiments to try to prove his beliefs nor even believe in the ability of math to explain nature. The conflict that lead to his death was between two different religious/mystical traditions and not between “intellectualism” and religion. If he were alive today he would be more comparable with Deepak Chopra than a real scientist Christians simply did not “extirpate” knowledge of the hieroglyphs or “scatter Egyptian priests.” Hieroglyphs were already falling into disuse since they were the writing system of a tiny elite of priests. There was no abolition or persecution of the hieroglyphic using class. The fading of hieroglyphs has its roots in the Hellenization of Egypt centuries before Christianity began. As Egyptians became Christian, the Coptic script came to be dominant for writing the Egyptian language. In the same way very few people bother to learn how to write JCL anymore, very few people were interested in retaining knowledge of hieroglyphs. There’s an implicit idea here too that Christians were some kind of foreign interloper in Egypt instead of being themselves Egyptian — this is simply not the case. Egypt was one of the early hotbeds of Christianity and the modern-day Copts are essentially the people most closely culturally and genetically related to the ancient Egyptians.
    - 1y ago
- taylorlapeyre 1y ago
  yes, certainly

ants_everywhere 1y ago

This was a whole cottage industry during the cold war, kind of like it is now that we're in another sort of cold war. The Soviets would fund anyone applying Marxist thought to this or that. There may be some interesting ideas for those willing to sort out the chaff, but for the most part you know exactly what they're going to say if you're already familiar with the propaganda that came before.

xg15 1y ago
Well, was it wrong what they said?
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  Yes. In general that's why you resort to propaganda and polemics rather than giving a formal argument that can be disproved.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - appreciatorBus 1y ago
    I completely agree that Marxism and its descents are bankrupt ideas, but I’m not getting the connection to Illich. I’ve only read one of his books, Energy and Equity, but I don’t really recall any strain of Marxism or leftism, though it was a long time ago so maybe I’ve forgotten.
    - ants_everywhere 1y ago
      He's connected with liberation theology, which is what the KGB was promoting in Catholic countries to recruit for militant groups. Similar to how they promoted revolutionary Islam to people like Goddafi. I think the Soviets actually claim to have invented liberation theology, but who knows. His deschooling and Limits to Medicine stuff were standard Soviet tropes and still are today. The obvious purposes are to get the US to weaken its education and medical systems. They ran similar strategies to get the US to weaken its nuclear system and to me it looks like they're also trying to weaken adoption of AI through similar ideas. But basically schools are bad, medicine is bad. Claims we're "pathologizing" everything. You see the same ideas in socialist spaces online today. Especially these days around psychology. Similarly with the "factory school" trope. When Energy and Equity was written in 1974 it was a year after the 1973 oil crisis. The Soviet Union was destabilizing countries in the middle east and wanted to secure access to oil especially at the expense of the US. Their normal propaganda would be about American imperialism and how they're evil and oil producing countries should side with the Soviet Union instead. I haven't read the book, but that would be the Soviet take at the time. I don't know whether he was supported by the Soviets. He was a public intellectual who traveled a lot especially to South America. It's very likely he was approached and attempted to be recruited by the KGB. But whether he rebuffed them or not isn't public knowledge. One thing we're learning as more stuff gets declassified is how many household names were more actively involved in the cold war than we realized. For example, Howard Zinn being actively involved in communist organizations despite lying about it for years. Or Earnest Hemingway actively collaborating with the KGB (although in the end wasn't very successful). There are a few other examples.

crabmusket 1y ago

You might enjoy a newsletter called The Convivial Society, which is heavily influenced by Illich. I'm just starting Tools For Conviviality. I suspect that Illich's ideas are underrated because, at least today, most people want more and Illich does not offer that. He offers freedom, I think, in his definition of conviviality... but it seems to be quite clear that offered freedom or comfort, most of us today (I'm not excluding myself from this) prefer comfort.

zolland 1y ago

Poverty vs Misery?

ttoinou 1y ago
The distinction between lack of wealth/goods/services and lack of access to services that you now mandatory need to get wealthy/goods/others services (because of how society just changed commons into privatisation). Note that I’m not anticapitalist yet I think there are interesting concepts there Majid RAHNEMA wrote a book about this in french, “Quand la misère chasse la pauvreté” based on similar ideas than Illich

xhevahir 1y ago

The fact that he's a very eclectic thinker and not very systematic, although that's one of the things that a lot of people admire about him. His religious commitments, as well, I would guess. But also he had some very odd ideas--like refusing to get a tumor removed from his face. He also was not the best at communicating his ideas.

vouaobrasil 1y ago

I suspect it's because he's like most of the more radical writers: if you actual dissect his writing, it really gets to the heard of a lot of what is rotten about modern industrial society. And the rectification of the problems he highlights pretty much necessitates disassembling a lot of modern technological society and getting rid of most of its institutions. So while he makes sense, no one wants to discuss his work, because then they must also come to a lot of the same conclusions he did, which is: the global society we have today is a lost cause, and a lot of it needs to be torn down. Which of course goes against the status quo. It's a lot different than the fluffy, weak criticism of many today that recommend making changes that don't change anything. But then at least people reading that stuff can convince themselves that they are doing something, when they are not.

greg_V 1y ago
Also his criticism is very specific. Most of contemporary anti-capitalist or marxist thought that gets published is very, very abstract and hence toothless. It's easy to entertain radical ideas as long as they don't pit you against your employer.
triknomeister 1y ago
People don't like revolutions, even if they are the one carrying it out. Revolutions are a last resort, mainly because of how uncertain it is what comes out at the end of it. So, an action calling for complete dismantling will never have large support. And everyone kind of knows where to go to. Th difficult thing is knowing how to get there in a piece by piece manner, one area of the social order at a time. Having said that, his criticism is completely on point. But the people who have reached the same solution are then lost on what to do after it.
- vouaobrasil 1y ago
  > Having said that, his criticism is completely on point. But the people who have reached the same solution are then lost on what to do after it. True. But as Kaczynski rightly pointed out, you can't have a revolution out of thin air, and the seeds of distrust have to be sufficiently grown first before there is a critical mass of tension that can act as fuel for the fire. So the first step might just be to sow seeds of well-placed distrust against the modern tech oligarchs.

oulipo 1y ago

Huuu... he's absolutely not underrated? Quite well-known here in Europe

ttoinou 1y ago
Well that’s good news then. I don’t see him quoted often though, or his concepts re-used I like your username ahah.. you might be biased ;)

snovymgodym 1y ago

Tools for Conviviality is insanely relevant today. When I was reading it I just couldn't believe it was written in 1973. So ahead of its time.