The original video was removed from Google video. An even more exciting and valuable video may be found here, as Ivan Illich addresses the people of Dallas in 1984 on water -- what becomes his H2O and the Waters of Forgetfullness. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrtO8kPdlRg
This struck me as a disturbing modern counterpart to the "Ode to Man" in Antigone.
ReplyDeletesorry if i sound a bit out of tune, who is the man who lectures in the video? Anna
ReplyDeleteThis is the late Ivan Illich here.
ReplyDeleteIllich ironically, provocatively, didactically argues here in 1968
ReplyDelete"And finally, you might have invited me here hoping that you would be able to agree with most of what I say, and then go ahead in good faith and work this summer in Mexican villages. This last possibility is only open to those who do not listen, or who cannot understand me.
I did not come here to argue. I am here to tell you, if possible to convince you, and hopefully, to stop you, from pretentiously imposing yourselves on Mexicans.
I do have deep faith in the enormous good will of the U.S. volunteer. However, his good faith can usually be explained only by an abysmal lack of intuitive delicacy. By definition, you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen for the middle-class "American Way of Life," since that is really the only life you know. A group like this could not have developed unless a mood in the United States had supported it - the belief that any true American must share God's blessings with his poorer fellow men. The idea that every American has something to give, and at all times may, can and should give it, explains why it occurred to students that they could help Mexican peasants "develop" by spending a few months in their villages.
Of course, this surprising conviction was supported by members of a missionary order, who would have no reason to exist unless they had the same conviction - except a much stronger one. It is now high time to cure yourselves of this. You, like the values you carry, are the products of an American society of achievers and consumers, with its two-party system, its universal schooling, and its family-car affluence. You are ultimately-consciously or unconsciously - "salesmen" for a delusive ballet in the ideas of democracy, equal opportunity and free enterprise among people who haven't the possibility of profiting from these.
Next to money and guns, the third largest North American export is the U.S. idealist, who turns up in every theater of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooders. Ideally, these people define their role as service. Actually, they frequently wind up alleviating the damage done by money and weapons, or "seducing" the "underdeveloped" to the benefits of the world of affluence and achievement. Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring home to the people of the U.S. the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough to be shared."
See the full text here:
http://www.swaraj.org/illich_hell.htm
See a recent commentary on the same and its ongoing relevance, Chase Madar's article: "The People’s Priest" published in The American Conservative, here:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-peoples-priest/
See for more: