Toward A History of Needs

Copyright 1977, 1978 by Ivan Illich
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4 3 2
"Outwitting Developed Nations" wa previously published as "Planed
Povery: The End Result ofTechnical Assistance," in the book CeIebrar/oaof
Awcrcncrrby Ivan Illich. Copyright 1969 by Iva D. Illich and published
by Doubleday & Co.
"Energy and Equity" was frst published as a book in 1974 by Calder &
Boyars in Great Britain, and in the same yea by Harer and Row, Publishers,
in te United States.
Contents
IIr0ducI0 r
Usefl Unemployment ad Its Profesional Enemie 3
Z Outwitting Developed Nations J+
In Lieu of Eucation 68
4 Tantalizing Needs 93
o Energy and Euity 110
nlfOduClOn
The fve essays in this volume refect a decade's thinkng on the
industra mode of production. During this perod, I have
focused on the proces e through which growing dependence
on mas-produced goods and serice gradually erodes the con
ditions neces ary for a convivial life. In examining a distinct
are of eonomic growth, each esay demonstrates a general
rle: Use-value are inevitably detroyed when the industra
mode of producton achieve the preominance that I have
tered "radical monopoly." Thee piece decrbe how indus
trial growth produce the moderiztion of povery.
Moderized povery appeas when the intensity of market
dependence reche a cerain threshold. Subjectively, it is the
experence of frtrtng auence which occurs in persons
mutilate by their overhelming reliance on the rches of in
dutral productivity. Simply, it deprves those afected by it of
their freedom ad power to act autonomously. to live crea
tively; it confne them to suriva through being plugged into
market relations. Ad precisely because this new impotence is
s deeply experienced, it is with difculty expresed. We are the
witnese of a baely perceptible transfonation in ordinary
langage by which verbs that fonerly deignated satisfying
actions ae replaced by nouns that denote package deigned for
passive consumption only: for exaple. "to le" become
"acquisition of cre." A profound change in individual and
social self-image is here refeted. Ad the layman is not the
only one who ha difculty in accurately descrbing what he
experence. The profesional eonomist is unable to recognize
the poverty m conventiona intrments fai to uncover.
viii
TOWARD A HISTORY OF NEEDS
Neverheles, the new mutant of impovershment continue to
spread. The peculiarly mode inability to ue persona endow
ments, communal life, and environmental reources in an au
tonomous way infects ever aspect of life where a profesionally
engineered commodity has succeded in replacing a culturally
shape use-value. The opporunity to experience personal ad
social satisfaction outside the market is thus detroyed. I a
por, for instance, when the use-value of my feet is lost becuse
I liv in Los Angele or work on the thiry-ffh foor.
This new impotence-proucing povery must not bconfsed
with the widening gap between the comsumption of rch and
poor in a world where basic needs ae increasingly shaped by
industral commodities. That gap is the for traditional pov
ery assumes in an industral society, and the conventional
ters of class strggle approprately reveal ad reduce it. I
furher distinguish moderized povery from the burdensome
prce exacted by the exteralities which increased levels of pro.
duction spew into the environment. It is clear that thee kinds
of pollution, stress, and taxation are unequally imposed. Core
spondingly, defenses against such depredations are unequally
distributed. But like the new gaps in acces, such iequiti in
social costs are aspets of industralized povery for which eco
nomic indictors and objective verfcation cn b found. Such
is not tre for the industralized impotence which afect both
rich and poor. Where this kind of poverty reigns, life without
addictive acces to commodities is rendered either impossible or
crminal. Making do without consumption becomes impossible,
not just for the average consumer but even for the por. All
fors of welfare, from a ative action to environmental ac
tion, are of no help. The libery to deign and craf one's own
distinctive dwelling is abolished i favor of the bureucratic
provision of stadardized housing, a in the Unite State,
Cuba, or Sweden. The organization of employment, skills,
building resources, rules, and credit favor shelter as a commod
ity rather than a an activity. Whether the product is provided
by an entrepreneur or a apparatchik, the efective result is the
same: citizen impotence, our specifcally modem experence of
povery.
INTRODUCTION
ix
Wherever the shadow of eonomic growth touches us, we are
lef useles unles employed on a job or engaged in consump
tion; the attempt to build a house or set a bone outside the
control of certifed specialist appears as aarchic conceit. We
lose sight of our resources, lose control over the environmental
conditions which make these resources applicable, lose tate for
self-reliant coping with challenges from without and axiety
from within. Take childbirh in Mexico today: delivery without
professional cre has become unthinkable for those women
whose husband are regularly employed and therefore have
access to social serice, no matter how marginal or tenuous.
'ey move in circles where the production of babie faithfully
refects the patters of industrial outputs. Yet their sisters in the
slums of the poor or the villages of the isolated still feel quite
competent to give birh on their own mats, unaware that they
face a modem indictment of criminal neglect toward their in
fants. But a professionally engineered delivery models reach
these independent women, the desire, competence, and condi
tidns .for autonomous behavior are being detroyed.
For advanced industral society, the moderiztion of pov
e_mthat people are helples to recognize evidence unless
it has been ceried by a professional, be he a television weather
commentator or a educator; that organic discomfort become
itolerably thetening unless it ha been medicalized into de
pendence on a therapit; that neighbors and friends are lost
unless vehicle brdge the separating distance (created by the
vehicle in the frst place). In shor, most of the time we find
ouselves out of touch with our world, out of sight of those for
whom we work, out of tune with what we feel.
At the invitation of Andre Schifrn, my United States pub
lisher, I have selected five esays which review and develop my
aguments on these themes. With their publication, I wat to
close ten yeas of teaching ad writing about the counterpro
ductive myth-making which is latent in all present-day indus
tral enterrise.
The frst esay is a postscrpt to my book Tools for Convivil
it (New York, 1973). It refects the changes that have occurred
durng the past deade, both in economic reality and in my own

perceptions of it. It assume a rather large increase in the non
technical, ritual, and symbolic powers of our major technologi
cal and bureaucratic systems, and a coresponding derease in
their scientifc, technical, and instrumental efectiveness. In
1968, it was still qute ey to dismiss organized lay resistance
to professional dominance as nothing more than a throwback
to romantic, obscurantist, or elitist fantasie. The grasroot,
common-sense assessment of technological systems I then out
lined seemed childish or retrograde to the political leders of
citizen activism, and to the .. radical" professionas who laid
clam to the tutorship of the poor by means of their special
knowledge. The reorganization of industrial society around
professionally defned needs, problems, and solutions wa still
the commonly accepted vaue implicit in ideological, political,
and jurdical systems otherwise clealy and sometime violently
opposed to one another.
Now the picture ha chaged. Today, a hallmark of advanced
and enlightened technical competence is a self-confdent com
munity, neighborhood, or group of citizens engaged in the sys
tematic analysis and consequent ridicule of the "needs," .. prob
lems," and "solutions" defned for them by the agents of
professiona etablishments. In the sixtie, lay opposition to
legislation baed upon exper opinion still sounded like anti
scientifc bigotry. Today, lay confdence in public policie based
upon the exper's opinion is tenuous indeed. Thousands now
reach their own judgments and, at great cost, engage in citizen
action without any professional tutorship; they gain the scien
tifc inforation they ned through personal, independent
efor. Sometimes rsking limb, freedom, and repectability,
they bear witness to a newly matured scientifc attitude. They
know, for example, that the quality ad amount of tehnical
evidence sufciently conclusive to oppose atomic power plats,
the multiplication of intensive-care units, compulsory educa
tion, fetal monitoring, psychosurgery, electroshock tretment,
or genetic engineerng is also simple and clea enough for the
layman to grasp and utilize.
Ten years ago, compulsory schooling was still protected by
powerful taboos. Today, its defenders are almost exclusively
INTRODUCION x
either teacher whose jobs depnd upon it or Marxist ideologue
who defend professional knowledge-holders in a shadow battle
against the hip-bourgeoisie. Ten yers ago, the myths about the
efectivenes of moder medical institutions were still unques
tioned. Most economics textbooks accepted the belief that adult
lie expectancy wa increaing, that tretment for cancer post
pone death, that the availability of doctors resulte in higher
infat-survival rate. Since then, people have "discovered"
what vitl statistics have always shown: that adult life expect
ancy has not changed in any socially signifcant way over the
lat few generations; that it is lower i most rich countrie today
than in our grandparents' time, and also lower there than in
many poor nations. Ten years ago, universal acces to post
secondary schooling, to adult education, to preventive medi
cine, to highways, to a wired global village, was still a prestigi
ous goal. Today, the gret myh-making rituals organized
around education, transportation, health care, and urbaniz
tion have indeed been paly demystifed. They have not yet,
however, ben disestablished.
The second essay is the text of a speech I delivered for the
Caadia Foreign Polcy Association i 1969. It is a crtique of
the Person Repor, a document intende to conclude the frst
so-calle Development Deade and open the seCond. Herein I
cle attention to the exaperatng ipotence that is inficted
upon the poor i those countries which have beneftted most
from the importation of the public utilitie in which the rch
take prde.
The last three esays focus on the kind of social and political
paralysis which crpple not just the poor but the vat majorty
in the industralize nations. The production of moderized
povery in the shadow of eonomic expansion is descrbed prn
cipaly in the are of transporation, eduction, ad health
care. It H fom these sectors that I have leed much during
this decade.
Shadow prce and increased consumption gaps are impor
tant aspects of the new povery. but my prncipa interet is
direted toward a diferent concomitt of moderiztion: the
proces by which autonomy is underined, satisfaction dulled,
xii TOWARD A HISTORY OF NEEDS
experience fattened o:t, and need frustrated for nealy every
one. For example, I have exaed the society-wide obstacles
to mutual preence whch are necessary side efects of energy
itenive transportation. I have wanted to defne the power
limits of motors equitably used to increase people's acces to
one another. I recognized, of course, that high speeds inevitably
impose a skewed distrbution of haredness, noise, pollution,
and enjoyment of priviege. But my emphasis is other tha this.
My arguments are focused on the negative interal
ities of moderity-time-consuming acceleration, sick-making
health care, stupefying education. The unequal distrbution of
the ersatz benefits, or the unequal imposition of their negative
exteralities, are corollares to my basic argument. I thee
esays, I am intereted in the direct ad specifc efects of mod
eried povery, in human tolerace for such efects, ad in the
possibility of ecaping the new misery.
Durng thee last yers I have found it neesar to exaine
again and again the corelation between the nature of tool and
the meaning of justice that prevails in the society that uses
them. I have had to observe the decline of freedom in societies
where rght are shaped by experise. I have had to weigh the
trade-ofs between new tools that enace the producton of
commoditie and those equaly moder one that pent the
generation of value in use; between rghts to mas-produced
commoditie and the level of liberty that perts satisfing and
cretive personal expresion; between paid employment and
useful unemployment. Ad in each dimension of the trade-of
between heteronomous maagement and autonomous action, I
fd that the laguage that would perit us to insist on the
latter must be recovered with difculty. I am, like those I sek
a my reders, so profoundly comitted to a radically equitable
acces to goods, rghts, and jobs that I fnd it almost unnece
sary to insist on our strggle for this side of justice. I find it
much more imporant, ad difcult, to deal with its comple
ment: the politics of conviviality. I use this ter in the technical
sense I gave to it in Tools for Convivialty: to deignate the
strggle for a equtable distribution of the libery to generate
use-vaue ad for the instrmentation of thi libery through
INTRODUCION xiii
the assigent of an absolute prorty to the production of
those industra ad profesional commoditie that confer on
the lest advatage the gretet power to generate values in
use.
New, convivial politics are based on the insight that in a
modem society, both welth and jobs c be equitably shared
and enjoyed in libery only when both are limite by a political
process. Excesive forms of wealth ad prolonge fora em
ployment, no matter how well distrbuted, destroy the social,
cultural, ad environmental conditions for equal productive
freedom. Bits and wattswhich here stand for units of infor
mation and of energy, respectively-when packaged into any
mass-produced commodity in amounts that pas a threhold,
inevitably constitute impoverishing wealth. Such welth is
either too rae to be shaed or it is detrctive of the freedom
and libery of the weaket. With ech of thee fve essays, I have
attempted to make a contribution to the political process by
which the socially crtical threholds of erichment are recog
nized by citizens and translated into society-wide ceiligs or
limits.
1
USEFUL UNEMPLOYMENT AND
ITS PROFESSIONAL ENEMIES
This esay on trade-of between commodities and use-values
in a modern societ was written in and i published here for
the .rt time. John McKnight and Lee Hoinacki have helped me
to clari my thought. I am also indebted here to the work
of William Leis, who, in The Limits to Satisfaction (Tor
onto, 1976), deals with the correlation of moder needs and
commodities
Fifty years ago, most of the words an American heard were
personally spoken to him a an individual, or to somebody
standing neby. Only occaionally did words reach him a an
undiferentiated member of a crowd-in the classroom or in
church, at a rally or a circus. Words were mostly like handwrit
ten, sealed letters and not like the junk that now pollutes our
mails. Today, words that are directed to one person's attention
have become rare. Engineered staples of images, ideas, feelings,
ad opinions, packaged and delivered through the media, as
sault our sensibilitie with round-the-clock regularity. Two
points now become evident: (1) what is occurrg with language
fts the patter of an increaingly wide range of need-satisfac
tion relationships; (2) this replacement of convivial means by
manipulative industral ware is trly universal, and is relent
lessly making the New York teacher, the Chinese commune
member, the Bantu schoolboy, and the Brailian sergeant alike.
In this esay, a postscript to Tools for Convivialty, I shall do
three things: (I) decribe the character of a commodity/mar
ket-intenive society in which the very abundance of commodi-
4
ties paralyzes the autonomous cretion of use-values; (2) insist
on the hidden role that professions play in such a society by
shaping its needs; and (3) expose some illusions and propose
some strateges for breaking the professional power that per
petuates market dependence.
DISABLING MARKET INTENSITY
Lrtttt has come to mean that moment when doctors, diplo
mats, bankers, and assorted social engineers take over and liber
ties are suspended. Like patients, nations go on the crtical list.
Lrtttt. the Greek term that has deignated "choice" or "turing
point" in all modem language, now means "drver, step on the
gas." Crisis now evokes an ominous but tractable threat against
which money, manpower, and management ca be rallied. In
tensive care for the dying, bureaucratic tutelage for the victim
of discrimination, fssion for the energy glutton, are typical
responses. Crsis, understood in this way, is always good for
exeutives and commissars, epecially those scavengers who
live on the side efects of yesterday's growth: educators who live
on society's alienation, doctors who prosper on the work and
leisure that have destroyed health, politicians who thve on the
distribution of welfare which, i the frst instanc 'a fanced
by those assisted. Crisis understood a a call for acceleration not
only puts more power under the control of the drver, while
squeezing the pasengers more tightly into their safety belt; it
also justifies the depredation of space, time, and reource for
the sake of motorized wheels, and it does so to the detrment
of people who want to use their feet.
But crisis need not have this meaning. It need not imply a
headlong rsh for the eclation of management. Instead, it can
mean the instant of choice, that marelous moment when peo
ple suddenly become aware of their self-imposed cages and of
the possibility of a diferent life. And this is the crsis that, as
choice, confronts both the United State and the world today.
USEFUL UNEMPLOYMENT AND IT PROFESSIONAL ENEMIES 5
A World-wide Choice
In only a few decades, the world has become an amalgam.
Human response to everyday occurence have been standard
ized. Though languages and gods still appear to be diferent,
people daily join the stupendous majority who march to the
beat of the ver same megamachme. The light switch by the
door has replaced the dozens of ways in which fres, candles,
and lanters were formerly kindled. In ten years, the number
of switch-users in the world has tripled; fush and paper have
become essential conditions for the relief of the bowels. Light
that does not fow from high-voltage networks and hygiene
without tissue paper spell poverty for ever more people. Expec
tations grow, while hopeful trust in one's own competence and
the concer for others rapidly decline.
The now soporifc, now raucous intrusion of the media
reache deeply into the commune, the village, the corporation,
the school. The sounds made by the editors and announcers of
programmed texts daily pervert the words of a spoken language
into building blocks for packaged message. Today, one must
be either isolated and cut of or a carefully guarded, afuent
dropout to allow one's children to play in an environment
where they listen to people rather ta to stars, speaker, or
instrctors. All over the world, one can see the rapid encroach
ment of the disciplined acquiecenc that characterze the au
dience, the client, the customer. The standardization of human
action grows apace.
It now become clear that most of the world's communities
are facing exactly the same critical issue: people must either
remain ciphers in the conditioned crowd that surge toward
greter dependence {thus nesitating savage battles for a
share of the drgs to feed their habit), or they must fnd the
courage that alonr save in a panic: the courage to stand still
and look aound for another way out than the obvious marked
exit. But many, when told that Bolivians, Canadians, and Hun
gaans all fac the same fundamental choice, are not simply
annoyed but deeply ofended. The idea appears not only foolish
6 TOWARD A HISTORY OF NEEDS
but shocking. They fail to detect the sameness in the new bitter
degradation that underlies the hunger of the Indian in the
Altiplano, the neurosis of the worker in Amsterdam, and the
cynical corrption of the bureaucrat in Warsaw.
T award a Culture for Staples
Development has had the same efect in all societies: everyone
has been enmeshed in a new web of dependence on commoditie
that fow out of the same kind of machines, factories, clinics,
television studios, think tanks. To satisfy this dependence, more
of the same must be produced: standardized, engineered goods,
designed for the future consumer who will be trained by the
engineer's agent to need what he or she is ofered. These pro
ducts, be they tangible goods or intangible serices, constitute
the industrial staple. Their imputed monetr value as a com
modity is deterined by state and market in varying propor
tions. Thus diferent cultres become insipid residues of tradi
tional styles of action, washed up in one worldwide wasteland:
a arid terain devatated by the machinery nede to produce
and consume. On the banks of the Seine ad those of the Niger,
people have unleed how to milk beause the white stuf now
come from the grocer. (T to more rchly edowe con
sumer protetion, it is les poisonous i Franc than i Mai.)
Tre, more babie get cow's mik, but the bret of both rch
and poor dr up. The addicted consumer i bor when the baby
cries for the bottle: when the organism i trained to reach for
mil from the grocer and to tum away from the brest that thus
defaults. Autonomous and cretive huma action, reque to
make man's universe bloom, atrophie. Rofs of shingle or
thatch, tile or slate, are displaced by concrete for the few and
corugated plastic for the may. Neither jungle, swaps, nor
ideological biase have prevented the poor and the soiaist
from rushing onto the highways of the rch, the roads leading
them into the world where economists replace prests. The mint
stamps out all local treure ad idols. Money devalu
e what
it canot measure. The crsis, then, is the same for all: the
choic of more or les dependence upon industral commodte.
USEFUL UNEMPLOYMENT AND ITS PROFESSIONAL ENEMIES 1
More will men the rapid and complete detruction of culture
which are programs for satisfying subsistence activitie. Less
will mean the variegated fowerng of use-values in modem
culture of intense activity. For both rch and poor the choice
is essentially the same, although hard to imagine for those
already accustomed to living inside the superarket-a struc
ture diferent only in name from a ward for idiots.
Preent-day industrial society organizes life around com
modities. Our maket-intensive societies measure materal
progress by the increase in the volume and variety of commodi
ties produced. And taking our cue from this sector, we measure
social progress by the distribution of access to these commodi
ties. Eonomics ha been developed as propaganda for the take
over by large-scale commodity producers. Socialism has been
debased to a strggle against handicapped distribution, and
welfare economics has identifed the public good with opulence
-the humiliating opulence of the poor in United State hospi
tals
,
jails, or asylums.
By disregarding. all trade-ofs to which no price tag is at
tached, industral society ha created an urban landscape that
is unft for people unles they devour each day their own weight
in metals and fels, a world in which the constant need for
protection against the unwanted reults of more thigs and
more cmmands ha generated new depths of discrmination,
impotence, ad frstration. The etablishment-orentated eco
logca movement so far has furher strengthened this trend: it
has concentrated attention on faulty industrial technology and,
at best, on exploitation of industral production by private own
ers. It has quetioned the depletion of natural reource, the
inconvenience of pollution, and net trasfers of power. But even
when prce tgs ae attched that refect the environmental
impact, the disvalue of nuisace, or the cost of polarzation, we
still do not clerly see that the division of labor, the multiplica
tion of commoditie, and dependence on them have forcibly
substituted standardized packages for almost everything people
forerly did or made on their own.
For two decde now, about ffty languge have died each
year; half of those still spoken in 1950 surive only as subjects
8
for doctoral these. And what distinct languages do remain to
witness the incomparably diferent ways of seeing, using, and
enjoying the world now sound more and more alike. Conscious
nes is everywhere colonized by impored labels. Yet even those
who do worry about the loss of cultural and genetic varety, or
about the multiplication of longimpact isotopes, do not adver
to the ireversible depletion of skills, stores, and senses of form.
And this progresive substitution of industrial goods and ser
vice for useful but nonmarketable values has been the shared
goal of political factions and regimes otherwise violently op
posed to one another.
In this way, ever larger pieces of our lives are so transformed
that life itself comes to depend almost exclusively on the con
sumption of commodities sold on the world market. The United
States corrpts its faners to provide grain to a regime which
increaingly stakes its legitimacy on the ability to deliver even
more grain. Of course, the two regimes allocate resources by
diferent methods: here, by the wisdom of prcing; there, by the
wisdom of planners. But the political opposition between
proponents of alterate methods of allocation only mak the
similar ruthles disregard of personal dignity and freedom by
all factions and parties.
Energy policy is a good example of the profound identity in
the world-views of the selfstyled socialist ad the socale
capitalist supporters of the industral system. Possibly exclud
ing such places as Cambodia, about which I am uninfone, no
governing elite nor any socialist opposition can conceive of a
deirable future that would be base on per capita energy con
sumption of a magnitude inferior to that which now prevails in
Europe. All existing political parie stress the nee for energy
intensive production-albeit with Chinee discipliewhe
failng to comprehend that the corresponding society wl fr
ther deny people the fre use of their limbs. Here sedans and
there buses push bicycle of the road. All goverments stre
an employmentintensive force of production, but are unwilling
to recognize that jobs can also detroy the use-vaue of free
time. They all stres a more objective and complete profesional
defnition of people's needs, but are insensitive to the conse
quent expropration of life.
USEFUL UNEMPLOYMENT AND IT PROFESSIONAL ENEIiES 9
In the late Middle Ages the stupefying simplicity of the
heliocentrc model was used as an argument to discredit the
new astronomy. Its elegance was interpreted as naivete. In our
days, use-value-centered theories that analyze the social costs
generated by established economics are certainly not rare. Such
theores are being proposed by dozens of outsiders, who ofen
identify them with radical technology, ecology, community life
style, smallnes, or beauty. As an excuse to avoid looking at
thee theorie, the frequent failure of their proponents' experi
ments in personal living is held against them and magnifed.
Just as the legendary inquisitor refused to look through
Galileo's telecope, so most modern economists refuse to look
at an analysis that might displace the conventional center of
their economic system. The new analyical systems would force
us to recognize the obvious: that the generation of nonmarketa
ble use-values must inevitably occupy the center of any culture
that provide a program for satisfactory life to a majority of its
members. Cultures are programs for activities, not for frms.
Industrial society detroys this center by polluting it with the
measured output of corporations, public or private, degrading
what people do or iake on their own. As a consequence, soci
eties have been transformed into huge zero-sum games, mono
lithic delivery systems in which ever gain for one turs into a
loss or burden for another, while tre satisfaction is denied to
both.
On the way, innumerable sets of infrastructures in which
people coped, played, ate, made frends, and made love have
ben destroyed. A couple of so-called development decades
have sufced to dismantle traditional patterns of culture from
Manchuria to Montenegro. Prior to thee years, such patters
peritted people to satisfy most of their needs in a subsistence
mode. Afer thee years, platic had replaced pottery, car
bonated beverage replaced water, Valium replaced camomile
tea, and records replaced guitars. All through history, the best
measure for bad time was the percentage of food eaten that had
to b purchaed. In good time, most familie got most of their
nutrition from what they grew or acquired in a network of gift
relationships. Until late in the eighteenth century, more than 99
per cent of the world's food was produced inside the horizon
10
that the consumer could see from the church steeple or minaret.
Laws that tried to control the number of chickens and pigs
within the city walls suggest that, except for a few large urban
areas, more than half of all food eaten was also cultivated
within the city. Before World War II, less than 4 per cent of
all food eaten was transpored into the region from abroad, and
these impors were largely confned to the eleven citie which
then contained more than to million inhabitants. Today, +
per cent of all people survive only because they have acces to
interregional markets. A future in which the world market of
capital and goods would be severely reduced is as much taboo
today a a modem world in which active people would use
modem convivial tools to create an abundance of use-values
that liberated them from consumption. One can see in this
patter a refection of the belief that useful activities by which
people both express and satisfy their needs can be replaced
indefnitely by standardized goods or serices.
The Moderiztion of Povery
Beyond a ceran threhold, the multiplication of commoditie
induce impotence, the incapacity to grow food, to sing, or to
build. The toil and pleaure of the human condition become a
faddish privilege retrcted to some of the rch. We Kennedy
launche the Alliace for Progres, Acatzingo, like most Mexi
c villages of its size, had four groups of musicians who played
for a drink and sered the population of eight hundred. Today,
records and radios, hooked up to loudspeakers, drown out local
talent. Occaionally, in an act of nostalgia, a collection is taken
up to bring a band of dropouts from the university to sing the
old songs for some special holiday. On the day Venezuela legis
lated the rght of each citizen to "housing," conceived of as a
commodity, three-quarters of all familie found that their self
built dwellings were thereby degraded to the status of hovels.
Furheroreand this is the rself-building was now prej
udiced. No house could be legally stare without the submis
sion of an approved architet's plan. The useful refuse and junk
of Caraca, up till then re-employe as excellent building
materials, now creted a problem of solidwaste disposal. The
man who produce his own "housing" is looked down upon as
a deviant who refuse to cooperate with the local presure group
for the delivery of massproduced housing units. Also, innu
merable regulations have appeare which brand his ingenuity
as illegal or even crminal. This example illustrates how the
poor are the first to sufer when a new knd of commodity
castrate one of the traditional subsistence craft. Te usefl
unemployment of the jobles poor is sacrifced to the expansion
of the labor market. "Housing" as a selfchosen activity, just
like any other freedom for useful employment of time of the
job, become the privilege of some deviant, often the idle rich.
An addiction to paralyzing afuence, once it becomes in
grained in a culture, generate "moderize povery." This is
a for of disvalue necessarily associated with the proliferation
of commodities. Tis rsing disutlity of industrial mas pro
duct has ecaped the attention of economists, because it is not
accesible to their measurements, and of social serices, because
it cannot be "operationalized." Economists have no efective
means of including in their calculations the soietywide loss of
a kind of satisfaction that has no market equivalent. Thus, one
could today defe economists a the members of a fraterity
which only accepts people who, in the pursuit of their profes
sional work, can prctice a trained social blindnes toward the
most fundamental trade-of in contemporary systems, both East
and Wet: the deline in the individual-peronal ability to do or
make which is the price of every additional degree of commod
ity afuence.
The existence and nature of moderized poverty remained
hidden, even in ordinary conversation, a long a it primarily
afected the por. As development or moderiztion, reached
the poor-those who until then had been able to surive in spite
of being excluded from the market economy-they were sys
tematically compelled to surive through buying into a pur
chasing system which, for them, always and necesarly ment
getting the dregs of the market. Indians in Oaaca who for
merly had no acces to schols are now 4rafed into school to
"er" certifcates that measure precisely their inferorty rela-
12 TOWARD A hbTOY O NttOb
tive to the urban population. Furhermore-and this is again
the rub- without this piece of paper they can no longer enter
even the building trades. Moderization of "needs" always adds
new discrimination to poverty.
Moderized poverty has now become the common experi
ence of all except those who are so rch that they can drop out
in luxury. As one facet of life after another becomes dependent
on engineered supplies, few of us escape the recurrent exper
ence of impotence. The average United State consumer is bom
barded by a hundred adverisements per day d reacts to many
of them-more ofen than not-in a neative way. Even well
heeled shoppers acquire, with each new commodity, a fresh
experence of disutility. They suspect they have purchased
something of doubtful value, perhaps soon to become useles or
even dangerous, and something that calls for an aray of even
more expensive complements. Afuent shoppers organize: they
usually begin with demands for quality control, and not infre
quently generate consumer resistance. Across the tracks, slum
neighborhoods "unplug" themselves from serice and "care,"
from social work in South Chicago and from textbooks in Ken
tucky. Rich and poor are almost ready to recognize clearly a
new for of frustrating welth in the furher expansion of a
market-intensive culture. Also, the afuent come to sense their
own plight as it is mirored in the poor, though for the moment
this intimation has not developed beyond a kind of romanti
cism.
The ideology that identifes progress with afuence is not
restrcted to the rich countries. The same ideology degrade
nonmarketable activities even in areas where, until recently,
most needs were still met through a subsistence mode of life.
For example, the Chinee-rawing inspiration from their own
tradition-seemed willing and able to redefne technical prog
ress, to opt for the bicycle over the jet plane. They seemed to
stress local self-deterination as a goal of inventive people
rather than as a means for national defense. But by 1977, their
propaganda was glorying in China's industrial capacity to de
liver more helth care, education, housing, and general welfae
-at a lower cost. Merely tactical functions are provisionally
assigned to the herbs in the bag of the barefoot doctor, and to
labor-intensive production methods. lere, as in other ares of
the world, heteronomous-that is, other-directed-production
of goods
,
standardized for categores of anonymous consumers,
fosters unrealistic and ultimately frstrating expectations. Fur
therore, the process inevitbly corrupts the trst of people in
their own and their neighbors' ever surrising autonomous
competenc. China simply represents the latest example of the
paricular Weter version of moderzation through intensive
market dependence seizing a traditional society as no cargo cult
did even at it most irrational extreme.
The Histor of Needs
i
n both traditional and modem societies, an important change
b
a occured in a very shor perod: the means for the satisfac
tion of needs have been radically altered. The motor has sapped
the muscle; instrction has deadened self-confdent curiosity.
As a consequence, both needs and wants have acquired a char
acter for which there is no historical precedent. For the first
time, neds have become almost exclusively coterinous with
commoditie long as most people walked wherever they
wanted to go, they felt restrained mainly when their freedom
was retrcted. Now that they depend on transportation in
order to move, they claim not a freedom but a right to passenger
mile. And as ever more vehicles provide ever more people with
such .. rights,.
,
the freedom to walk is degraded and eclipsed by
the provision of these rights. For most people, wants follow
suit. They cannot even imagine liberation from universal pas
sengerhood, that is, the libery of modem man in a modem
world to move on his own.
This situation, by now a rgid interdependenc of needs and
market, is legitimated through appeal to the expertise of an elite
whose knowledge, by its very nature, cannot be shared. Econo
mists of rightist as well a leftist persuasion vouch to the public
that an increse a jobs depends on more energy; . educators
prsuade the public that law, order, and productivity depend on
more instrction; gynecologists claim that the quality of infant
I4 TOWARD A HISTORY OF NEEDS
life depends on their involvement in childbirh. Therefore, the
near-universal extension of market intensity in the world's
economies cannot be efetively quetioned a long as the immu
nity of the elites that legitimate the nexus between commodity
and satisfaction has not been detroyed. The point is well illus
trated by a woman who told me about the birth of her third
child. Having bore two children, she felt both competent and
experienced. She was in the hospital and felt the child coming.
She called the nurse, who, instead of helping, rushed for a
sterile towel to press the baby's head back into the womb and
ordered the mother to stop pushing because "Dr. Levy ha not
yet arved."
But this is the moment for public dsion for political action
insted of professional management.ode societies, rch or
poor, can move in either of two opposite directions. They can
produce a new bill of goods-albeit safer, les wastefl, more
esily shared-and thereby further intensify their dependence
on consumer staple. Or, they can take a totally new approach
to the interelationship between needs and satisfactions. In
other words, societies can either retain their market-intensive
economies, changng only the design of the output, or they can
reduce their dependence on commodities>The latter alterative
entails the adventure of imagining and constructing new frae
works in which individuals and communitie ca develop a new
kind of moder tool kit. Tis would be organied so a to
perit people to shape ad satisfy a expanding proporion of
their needs directly and personally.
The frt direcuon represents a continuing identifcation of
tehnical progress with the multiplication of commoditie. The
bureaucratic managers of egalitaran persuasion and the tech
nocrats of welfare would converge in a call for austerty: to shit
from goods, such a jets, that obviously cannot be share, to
so-called "social" equipment like buses; to distribute more
equitably the decreasing hours of employment available and
ruthlessly l
i
mit the typicl work week to about twenty hours on
the job; to draft the new resource of unemploye life-time into
retraining or voluntar serce on the model of Mao, Castro, or
Kennedy. This new stage of industial society, though socialist,
USEFUL UNEMPLOYMENT AND ITS PROFESSIONAL ENEMIES IS
efective, and rational, would simply usher in a new state of the
culture that downgraded the satisfaction of wants into the re
petitive relief of imputed needs -through engineered staple. At
its bet, this alterative would produce goods and serice in
smaller quantities, distribute them more equitably, and foster
les envy. The symbolic paricipation of people in deciding what
ought to be made might b transferred from a buck in the
market to a gawk in the political assembly. The environmental
impact of production could be softened. Among commodities,
serices, epecially the various fors of social control, would
cerainly grow much faster than the manufacture of goods.
Huge sums are alredy being spent on the oracle industry so
that goverment prophets can spew out "alterative" scenarios
designe to shore up this frst choice. Interetingly, many of
them have alredy reched the conclusion that the cost of the
social controls neesary to enforce austerity in an ecologically
feaible but still industr-centered society would be intolerable.
The second choice would ring down the curtain on absolute
market dominance and foster an ethic of austerty for the sake
of wdespred satisfying action. If in the frst alterative auster
ity would men the individual's acceptance of managerial
ukae for the sake of increed institutional productivity, aus
terty in the seond alterative would mean that social virue
by which people recognie and decide limits on the maximum
aount of intrmente power that anyone may claim, both for
his ow stisfaction ad in the serice of others. This convivial
austerty inspire a society to protet peronal use-value against
dsabling enrchment. Under such protection against disablng
afuence many distinct cultre would arse, each modem and
ech emphaizng the dispersed use of modem tools. Convivial
austerty so limits the use of any tool that tool ownerhip would
lose much of its preent power. If bicycle are od here by
the commune, there by the rder, nothing is changed about the
esentially convivial nature of the bicycle as a tool. Such com
moditie would still be produced in large measure by industral
metos, but they would b seen and evaluated diferently.
Now, commodte ae vewe mostly a stple that diretly
fe the nees shape by their designers. In the second option,
16
they would be valued either as raw materals or a tools that
peritted people to generate use-values in maintaining the sub
sistence of their respective communities. But this choice de
pends, of course, on a Coperican revolution in our perception
of valuesAt present, we see consumer goods and profesional
serices at the center of our economic system, and speialists
relate our needs exclusively to this center. In contrat, the social
inversion contemplated here would assign use-value created
and personally fostered by people themselve to the center. It
is true that people have recently lost the confidence to shape
their own desirq> The world-wide discrimination against the
autodidact has vitiated many people's confdence in determin
ing their own goals and needs. But the same discrimination has
also resulted in a multiplicity of growing minoritie who are
infurated by this insidious dispossession.
DISABLING PROFESSIONS
These minortie already see that they-ad all autochtho
nous cultural life-are threatened by megatools which sys
tematically exproprate the environmental conditions that fos
ter individual and group autonomy. And so they quietly
deterine to fght for the useflness of their bodie, memore,
and skills. Because the rapidly increasing multplication of im
puted needs generate ever new kinds of dependence and ever
new categores of moerized poverty, present-day industral
societie take on the character of interdependent conglomerate
of bureaucratically stigmatized majorities. Among this great
mass of citizens who are crippled by transport, rendered sleep
les by schedule, poisoned by horone therapy, silenced by
loudspeakers, sickened by food, a few for minoritie of orga
nized and active citizens. Now thee are barely begnning to
grow and coalesce for public dissidence. Subjectively, thee
groups are ready to end an age. But to b dispatched, an age
neds a name that sticks. I propose to cl the mid-twentieth
centur the Age of Disblig Profesions. I choose this deiga
tion because it commits those who use it. It expose the atiso-
USEFUL UNEIIPLOYMENT AND ITS PROFESSIONAL ENEMIES 1 7
cial functions perfored by the least challenged provider
educators, physicians, social workers, and scientists. Simultane
ously, it indicts the complacency. of citizens who have submit
ted themselves to multifaceted bondage as clients. To speak
about the power of disabling professions shames their victims
into recognizing the conspiracy of the lifelong student, gyneco
logical case, or consumer, ech with his or her manager. By
decribing the sixtie as an apogee of the problem-solver, one
immediately expose both the infated conceit of our academic
elites and the greedy gullibility of their victims.
But this focus on the makers of the social imagination and
the cultural value doe more than expose and denounce; by
deignating the last twenty-fve years as the Age of Dominant
Professions, one also propose a strategy. One see the necesity
of going beyond the expert redistrbution of wasteful, irational,
and paralyzing commodities, the halmark of Radical Profe
sionalism, the conventional wisdom of today's good guys. The
strategy demands nothing les than the unmasking of the pro
fesional ethos. The credibility of the profesional exper, be he
scientist, therapist, or executive, is the Achille' heel of the
industrial system. Therefore, only those citizen initiative and
radica tehnologie that diretly challenge the insinuating
dominance of disabling profesions open the way to freedom for
nonhierarchical, community-base competence. The waning of
the curent profesional ethos is a necesar condition for the
emergence of a new relationship between needs, contemporary
tools, and persona satisfaction. The frst step toward this emer
gence is a skeptical and nondeferential posture of the citizen
toward the professional exper. Social reconstruction begins
with a doubt raised among citizens.
When I propose the analysis of profesional power a the key
to social reconstrction, I am usually told that it is a dangerous
eror to selet this phenomenon as the crux for recovery from
the industra system. Doe not the shape of the educational,
medical, and planning establishments actually refect the distri
bution of power and prvilege of a capitalist elite? Is it not
ireponsible to underine the trst of the .man in the street in
his scientifca y trained techer, physician, or economist pre-
1 8 TOWARD A HI STORY OF NEEDS
cisely at the moment when the poor need these trained protec
tors to gain access to classroom, clinic, and exper assistance?
Ought not the indictment of the industrial system to expose the
income of stockholders in drug frs or the perquisite of pow
er-brokers that belong to the new elite? Why spoil the mutual
dependence of clients and profesional providers, epecially
when increingly-as in Cuba and the Unite States-both
tend to come from the same social class? Is it not pervere to
denigrate the ver people who have painfully acquired the
knowledge to recognize and service our needs for welfare? In
fact, should not the radically socialist professional leaders be
singled out as those most apt for the ongoing societal task of
defning and meeting people's "real" needs in an egalitaran
society?
The arguments implicit in these questions are frequently ad
vanced to disrpt and discredit public analysis of the disabling
efects of industral welfare systems which focus on serice.
Such efects are esentially identical and clerly inevitable, no
matter what the political fag under which they are imposed.
They incapacitate people's autonomy through forcing them
via legal, environmental, and social changes-to become con
sumers of care. These rhetorical quetions repreent a frantic
defense of privilege on the par of those elite who might lose
income but would cerainly gain status and power if, in a new
for of market-intensive economy, dependence on their ser
vices were rendered more equitable.
A further objection to the critique of professional power
drive out the devil with Beelzebub. This objection singles out
as the key target for analysis the defense conglomerate seem
ingly at the center of each bureaucratic-industrial society. The
developed argument then posits the securty forces as the motor
behind the contemporary univeral regimentation into market
dependent discipline. It identifes as the prncipal need-makers
the ared bureaucrcie that have come into being since, under
Louis XIV, Rchelieu established the first profesional plice:
that is, the profesional agencie that ae now in charge of
weaponr, intelligence, and propaganda. Since Hiroshima,
thee so-called serice appear to be the deterinats for re
USEFUL UNEMPLOYlENT AND I PROFESSIONAL ENEMIES 19
search, deign production, and employment. They ret upon
civilian foundations, such as schooling for discipline, consumer
training for the enjoyment of waste, habituation to violent
speeds, medical engineering for life in a world-wide shelter, and
standardized dependence on rations dispensed by benevolent
quareraters. This line of thought sees state security as the
generator of a society's production patters, and views the
civilian economy as, to a large extent, either the militar's
spin-of or its prerequisite.
If a argument constructed around these notions were valid,
how could such a society forgo atomic power, no matter how
poisonous, oppresive, or counterproductive a furher energy
glut might be? How could a defense-ridden state be expected to
tolerate the organization of disafected citizen groups who un
plug their neighborhoods from consumption to claim the lib
ery to small-scale use-value-intensive production that happens
in an atmosphere of satisfying and joyful austerty? Would not
a militarze society soon have to move against need-deerers,
brand them as traitors, and, if possible, expose them not just to
scor but to ridicule? Would not a defense-drven society have
to stamp out those example that would led to nonviolent
moderity, just at the time when public policy calJs for a decen
traliztion of commodity production reminiscent of Mao and
for more rtional, equitable, and professionally superised con
sumption?
This argument pays undue credit to the mlitar as the source
of violence in an industrial stte. The asumption that military
requirements are to blame for the aggresivenes and destrc
tivenes of advancd industrial soiety must be exposed as an
illusion. No doubt, if it were tre that the military had somehow
usurpd the industrial system, if it had wrenched the varous
sphere of social endevor and action away from civilian con
trol, then the preent state of militarzed politics would have
reached a point of no retur-at leat, of no potential for civil
ian refor.
T
is is in fact the argment made by the brightet
of Brazil's militr leader, who see the are force as the only
legitimate tutor of peaceful industrial pursuit durng the. ret of
this centur.
30
But this is simply not so. The moder industral state is not
a product of the ary. Rather, its army is one of the symptoms
of its total and consistent orentation. True, the preent indus
trial mode of organization can be traced to military antecedents
in Napoleonic time. True, the compulsory education of pe
ant boys in the 1 830, the universal health care for the industral
proletariat in the 1 850, the growing communications networks
in the 1860, as well as most forms of industrial standardiza
tion, are all strategies frst introduced into moder societie as
militar requirements and only later understood as dignifed
fors of peaceful, civilian progress. But the fact that systems
of health, education, and welfare needed a militar rationale to
be enacted into law doe not mean that they were not
thoroughly consistent with the basic thrst of industrial devel
opment, which, in fact, was never nonviolent, peaceful, or re
spectful Opeople.
Today, this insight is easier to gain. First, becuse since
Polaris it is no longer possible to distinguish between warime
and peacetime aries, and second, because since the war on
poverty peace is on the warpath. Today, industrial societies are
constantly and totally mobilized; they are organized for con
stant public emergencies; they are shot through with variegated
strategies in all sectors; the battlefelds of health, education,
welfare, and afrative equality are strewn with victims and
covered with rins; citizens' liberies are continually suspended
for campaigns against ever newly discovered evils; ech ye
new frontier dwellers are discovered who must be proteted
against or cured of some new disese, some previouly un
known ignorance. The basic needs that are shape and imputed
by all profesional agencies are needs for defense against evis.
Today's profesors and social scientists who seek to blame
the military for the detrctivenes of commodity-intensive so
cietie are people who, in a very clumsy way, are attempting to
arrest the erosion of their own legitimacy. They claim that the
military pushes the industrial system into its frstrating and
detructive state, thereby distracting attention from the pro
foundly detructive nature of a market-intensive soiety which
drives its citizens into today's wars. Both those who seek to
protect professional autonomy against citizen maturty and
USEFUL UNEMPLOYMENT AND ITS PROFESSIONAl. ENEMIES 21
those who wish to porray the professional as victim of the
militarized state will be answered by a choice: the direction in
which free citizens wish to go to supersede the world-wide
crisis.
The Wanin
g
of the Professional Age
-\
The illusions that permitted the installation of profesions as
arbiters of needs are now increasingly visible to common sense.
Procedures in the serice sector are often understood for what
they areLinus blankets, or rituals that hide from the provid
er-consumer cboodle the disparty and antipathy between the
idel for the sake of which the serce is rendered and the reality
that the service create. Schools that promise equal enlighten
ment generate unequally degrading meritocracy and lifelong
dependence on further tutorship; vehicles compel everyone to
a fight forward. But the public has not yet clarifed the choices.
Projects under professional leadership could result in compul
sory political creeds (with their accompanying versions of a new
fascism), or the experience of citizens could dismiss our hubris
as yet another historcal collection of nee-Promethean but es
sentially ephemeral follies. Infored choice requires that we
examine the specific role of the profesions in determining who
in this age got what from whom and why.
To see the present clerly, let us imagine the children who
will soon play in the ruins of high schools, Hiltons, and hospi
tals. In thee profesional catle tured cathedrals, built to
protect us against ignorance, discomfort, pain, and death, the
children of tomorrow will re-enact in their play the delusions
of our Age of Professions, as from ancient castle and cathe
drals we reconstrct the crsades of knights against sin and the
Turk in the Age of Faith. Children in their games will mingle
the Uniquack which now pollutes our language with archaisms
inherited from robber barons and cowboys. I see them addres
ing ech other as chairan and secretary rather than as chief
and lord. Of course, adults will blush when they slip into
mana
g
eral pid
g
in with ters such as policy-making, social
planning, and problem-solving.
The Age of Professions will be remembered as the time when
politics withered, when voters guided by professors entrsted to
technocrats the power to legislate needs, the authorty to decide
who needed what, and a monopoly over the mens by which
those nees should be met. It will be remembered a the Age
of Schooling, when people for one-third of their live were
trained to accumulate needs on precrption and for the other
two-thirds were clients of pretigious pushers who managed
their habits. It will be remembered as the age when reretional
travel meant a packaged gawk at strangers, and intimacy meat
training by Masters and Johnson; when formed opinion was a
replay of last night's talk-show, and voting, an endorement to
a salesman for more of the same.
Future students will be as much confsed by the supposed
diferences between capitlist and socialist school, helth-care,
prson, or transporation systems as today's students are by the
claimed diference between justifcation by works as opposed to
justifcation by faith in the late Reforation Christian sets.
They will also discover that the professional librarians, sur
geons, or superarket deigners in poor or soialist countres
toward the end of each decade came to keep the same reords,
use the same tools, and build the same space that their col
leagues in rich countrie had pioneered at the decade's begin
ning. Archaeologts will periodize our life-span not by pot
sherds but by profesional fashions, refected in the mod-trends
of United Nations publications.
It would be pretentious to predict whether this age, when
needs were shaped by profesional desig, will be remembered
with a smile or a curse. I hope, of course, that it will be remem
bered as the night when father went on a binge, dissipated the
family fortune, and obligated his children to str anew. Sad to
say, it will much more probably be remembered as the time
when a whole generation's frenzie pursuit of impovershing
wealth rendered all freedoms alienable and, after first turig
politics into the organized gpes of welfare recipient, extin
guishe it in expr totalitaranism.
USEFUL UNEMPLOYMENT AND IT PROFESSIONAL ENEMIE 23
Profesional Dominance
Let us frst face the fact that the bodie of specialists that now
dominate the creation, adjudication, and satisfaction of needs
are a new kind of carel. And this must be recognized in order
to outfank their developing defense. For we already see the
new biocrat hiding behind the benevolent mask of the physician
of old; the pedocrat's behavioral aggression is shrgged of as
the overzelous, perhaps silly care of the concered teacher; the
personnel manager equipped with a psychological arsenal pre
sents himself in the guise of an old-time foreman. The new
specialists, who are usually sericers of human needs that their
specialty has defned, tend to wear the mask of love and to
provide some for of care. They are more deeply entrenched
than a Byzntine bureaucracy, more interational than a world
church, more stble than any labor union, endowed with wider
competencie than any shaman, and equipped with a tighter
hold over those they claim than any mafa.
The new organized specialists must, frst, be carefully distin
guishe from racketeers. Educators, for instance, now tell soci
ety what must be leared and wte of what has been leared
outside school. By this kind of monopoly, which enable tyran
nical profeions to prevent you from shopping elsewhere and
from making your own booze, they at frst seem to ft the
dictionar defnition of gangsters. But gangsters, for their own
proft, corer a basic necessity by controlling supplies. Educa
tors and doctors and social worker today-as did prests and
lawyers forerly-gain legal power to create the need that, by
law, they alone will ballowed to sere. They tur the moder
state into a holding corporation of enterprse that facilitate the
operation of their self-certifed competencies.
Legalized control over work has taken many diferent fors:
soldiers of fortune refused to fght until they got the license to
plunder; Lysistrata organized female chattels to enforce pece
by refusing sex; doctors in Cs conspired by oath to pass trade
serets only to their ofsprng; guilds set the currcula, prayer,
tets, pilgmage, and hazings through which Has Sachs had
to pass before he was peritted to shoe his fellow burgher. In
capitalist countres, unions attempt to control who shall work
what hour for what pay. All thee trade asociations are at
tempts by specialists to deterine how their kind of work shall
be done and by whom. But none of these specialists are profes
sionals in the sense that doctors, for instance, are today.
Today's domineering professionals, of whom physicians pro
vide the most striking and painful example, go further: they
decide what shall be made, for whom, and how it shall b
administered. They claim special, incommunicable knowledge,
not just about the way things are and are to be made, but also
about the reasons why their service ought to be needed. Mer
chants sell you the gods they stock. Guildsmen guarantee
quality. Some crafspeople tailor their product to your measure
or fancy. Professionals, however, tell you what you need. They
claim the power to prescrbe. They not only adverise what is
good but ordain what is right. Neither income, long trainig,
delicate task, nor social standing is the mark of the profe
sional. Their income can be low or taxe away
,
their training
compressed into weeks instead of year; their status can ap
proach that of the oldest profesion. Rather, what count is the
profesional's authority to defne a person as client, to deter
mine that person's need, and to hand that person a prerption
which defne this new social role. Unlike the hookers of old,
the modem professional is not one who sells what others give
for free, but rather one who decides what ought to be sold and
must not be given for free.
There is a furher distinction between professional power and
that of other occupations: professional power springs from a
diferent source. A guild, a union, or a gang force respect for
its interet and right by a strke, blackmail, or over violence.
In contrast, a profession, like a presthood, holds power by
concesion from an elite whose interets it props up. As a
priethood ofers the way to salvation in the train of an anointed
king, so a profession interrets, protects, and supplies a special
this-worldly interet to the constituency of modem rulers. Pro
fessional power is a speciaized for of the privilege to precrbe
what is rght for other ad what they therefore ned. It i the
source of pretige and control within the industrial state. This
kind of professional power could, of course, come into existence
only in societies where elite membership itself is legitimated, if
not acquired, by profesional status: a society where govering
elites are attrbuted a unique kind of objectivity in defning the
moral status of a lack. It fts like a glove the age in which even
acces to parliament, the house of commons, is in fact limited
to those who have acquired the title of master by accumulating
knowledge stock in some college. Professional autonomy and
license in defning the needs of society are the logical fors that
oligarchy take in a political culture that has replaced the
mens tet by knowledge-stock cerifcates issued by schools.
The profesions' power over the work their members do is thus
distinct in both scope and origin.
Toward Professional Tyranny
Profesional power has also, recently, so changed in degree that
two animals of entirely diferent colors now go by the same
name. For instance, the practicing and experimenting health
scientist consistently evades critical analysis by dressing up in
the clothe of yeterday's family doctor. The wandering physi
cia becme the medica doctor when he left commerce in drgs
to the pharacist and kept for himself the power to precrbe
them. At that moment, he acquired a new kind of authorty by
uniting thre role in one person: the sapiential authorty to
advise, instruct, and direct; the moral authorty that makes its
acceptance not just useful but obligatory; and the charsmatic
authorty that allows the physician to appeal to some supreme
interet of his clients that outranks not only conscience but
sometimes even the raison d'etat. This kind of doctor, of course,
still exists, but within a modem medical system he is a fgure
out of the past. A new kind of health scientist is now much more
common. He increaingly deals more with cases than with per
sons; he dels with the breakdown that he can perceive in the
cae rther than with the complaint of the individual; he pro
tect society's interet rather than the person's. The authoritie
that, durng the liberal age, had coaleced in the individual
practitioner in his tretment of a patient are now claimed by the
professional cororation in the serice of the state. This entity
now cares out for itself a social mission.
Only durng the last twenty-fve years has meicine tured
from a liberal into a dominant profesion by obtaining the
power to indicate what constitutes a health need for people in
general. Helth specialists as a cororation have acquire the
authority to deterine what helth care must be provided to
society at large. It is no longer the individual profesional who
impute a "need" to the individual client, but a corporate
agency that imputes a need to entire classes of people and then
claims the mandate to tet the complete population in order to
identify all who belong to the group of potential patients. And
what happens in health care is thoroughly consistent with what
goes on in other domains. New pundits constantly jump on the
bandwagon of the therapeutic-care provider: educators, social
workers, the military, town planners, judge, policemen, and
their ilk have obviously made it. They enjoy wide autonomy in
creating the diagnostic tools by which they then catch their
clients for treatment. Dozens of other need-creators try: inter
national bankers "diagnose" the ills of an Afrcan countr and
then induce it to swallow the prescribed treatment, even though
the "patient" might die; securty specialists evaluate the loyalty
rsk in a citizen and then extinguish his prvate sphere; dog4
catchers sell themselves to the public as pet-controllers and
claim a monopoly over the lives of stray dogs. The only way to
prevent the ecalation of needs is a fundamental, political exp
sure of those illusions that legitimate dominating professions.
Many profesions are so well etablished that they not only
exercise tutelage over the citizen-bcome-client but also deter
mine the shape of his world-become4ward. The language in
which he perceive himself, his percption of rghts and free
doms, and his awarenes of needs all derve from profesional
hegemony.
The diference between craftsman, liberal profesiona, and
the new technocrat can be clarfed by comparng their typical
rections to people who neglect their repetive advice. If you
did not take the crasma's advice, you were a fool. If you did
not take libral counel, society blame you. Now the profe-
USEFUL UNEMPLOYMENT AND ITS PROFESSIONAL ENEMIE 27
sion or the goverment may be blamed when you ecape from
the care that your lawyer, techer, surgeon, or shrink has de
cided upon for you. Under the pretense of meeting needs better
and on a more equitable basis, the serice profesional has
mutated into a crsading philanthropist. The nutritionist pre
scrbes the "right" forula for the infant and the psychiatrist
the "rght" antidepresant, and the schoolmaster-now acting
with the fuller power of "educator"-fels entitled to push his
method between you and anything you want to lear. Ech new
specialty i service production thrive only when the public has
accepted and the law has endorsed a new perception of what
ought not to exist. Schools expanded in a moralizing crusade
against illiteracy, once illiteracy had been defned as an evil.
Materity wards mushroomed to do away with home births.
Profesionals claim a monopoly over the defnition of devi
ance and the remedies needed. For example, lawyers asser that
they alone have the competence and the legal rght to provide
assistance in divorce. If you devise a kit for do-it-yourself di
vorce, you find yourself in a double bind: if you are not a lawyer,
you are liable for practicing without a license; if you are a
member of the ba, you can be expelled for unprofessional
behavior. Profesionals also claim seret kowledge about
huma nature and its weakese, kowledge they are also
mandated to apply. Gravedigger, for example, did not beome
members of a profeion by calling themselves morticians, by
obtaining college credentials, by raising their incomes, or by
getting rd of the odor attached to their trade by electing one
of themselves preident of the Lion's Club. Morticians fored
a profesion, a dominant and disabling one, when they acquired
the muscle to have the police stop your burial if you are not
embalme and boxed by them. In any area where a human need
c b imagined, thee new disbling professions claim that
they ae the exclusive wardens of the public good.
Professions as a New Clerg
The transforation of a liberal profession into a dominant one
is euivalent to the legal etablishment of a church. Physicians
transmogrife into biocrats, techer into gnosocrats, mori-
28
cians into thanatocrats, are much closer to state-supported cler
gies than to trade associations. The professional as teacher of
the current brand of scientifc orthodoxy act as theologian. As
moral entrepreneur, he acts the role of priest: he create the
need for his mediation. A8 crusading helper, he act the part of
the missionary ad hunts down the underprivileged. Ainquisi
tor, he outlaws the unorthodox-he impose his solutions on
the recalcitrant who refuse to recognize that they are a problem.
This multifaceted invetiture with the task of relieving a specific
inconvenience of man's etate turs each profession into the
analogue of an established cult. The public acceptance of domi
neering professions is thus essentially a political event. The new
profession creates a new hierarchy, new clients and outcasts,
and a new strain on the budget. But also, each new establish
ment of professional legitimacy means that the political tasks
of lawmaking, judicial review, and executive power lose more
of their proper character and independence. Public afairs pass
from the ' layperson's elected peers into the hands of a self
accrediting elite.
When medicine recently outgew its liberal restraints, it in
vaded legislation by etablishing public norms. Physicians had
always deterined what constituted diseae; dominant mei
cine now deterine what disease society shall not tolerate.
Medicine ha invaded the cours. Physicians had always diag
nosed who was sick; dominant medicine,
.
however, brands those
who must be treated. Liberal practitioners precribed a cure;
dominant medicine has public powers of correction: it decides
what shall be done with or to the sick. In a democracy, the
power to make laws, execute them, and achieve public justice
must derive from the citizens themselves. This citizen control
over the key powers has been restrcted, weakened, and some
times abolished by the rise of churchlike profesions. Gover
ment by a congress that bases its decisions on expert opinions
of such profesion might be goverment for, but never by, the
people. This is not the place to investigate the intent with which
political rule was thus weakene; it is sufcient to indicate the
professional disqualifcation of lay opinion a a necessar condi
tion for this subversion.
Citizen liberie are grounde in the rle that exclude her
say from tetimony on which public decisions are based. What
people can se for themselve ad interret is the common
ground for binding rule. Opinions, beliefs, inferences, or per
suasions ought not to stand when in confict with the eyewitnes
-ver. Exper elites could beome dominant profesions only
by a piecemel erosion and fnal reversal of this rle. In the
legislature and courts, the rle against hearsay evidence is now,
de facto, suspended i favor of the opinions profered by the
members of thee self-accredited elites.
But let us not confuse the public use of exper factual knowl
edge with a profession's cororate exercise of norative judg
ment. When a crafsman, such as a gunmaker, was called into
cour as an exper to reveal to the jury the secrets of his trade,
he apprenticed the jury to his craft on the spot. He demon
strated visibly from which barel the bullet had come. Today,
most experts play a diferent role. The dominant profesional
provides jur or legislature with his fellow initiate's opinion
rather tha wth factual evidence and a skill. He calls for a
suspension of the hearsay rle and inevitably underine the
rule of law. Thus, democratic power is ineluctably abrdged.
The He
g
emony of Imputed Needs
Professions could not have become dominant and disabling
unless people had been ready to experience a a lack that which
the expert imputed to them as a need. Their mutual dependence
a tutor and charge has become resistant to analysis because it
has been obscured by corpted language. Good old words have
been made into branding irons that claim wardship for expers
over home, shop, store, and the space or ether between them.
Language, the most fndamental of commons, is thus polluted
by tsted strands of jargon, ech under the control of another
profesion. The disseizin of words, the depletion of ordinary
language and its degradation into bureaucratic terinology,
parallel in a more intimately debaing manner that paricular
for of environmentl degradation that dispossese people of
their useflnes unless they are gainflly employed. Possible
30
ch
anges in design, attitude, and laws that would retrench pro
fessional dominance cannot be proposed unles we become
more sensitive to the misnomers behind which this dominance
hide.
When I leared to speak, "problems" existed only in m
a
th
or chess; "solutions" were saline or legal, and "need" was
mainly used as a verb. The expressions "I have a problem" or
"I have a need" both sounded silly. As I grew into my teens and
Hitler worked at "solutions," the "social problem" also spread.
"Problem" children of ever newer shade were discovered
among the poor as soial workers leared to brand their prey
and to stndardize their "needs." Need, used as a noun, became
the fodder on which professions fattened into dominance. Pov
erty was moderized. Management translated poverty from an
experience into a meaure. The poor became the "needy. "
During the second half of my life, to be "needy" became
respectable. Computable and imputable needs moved up the
social ladder. It ceaed to be a sign of poverty to have needs.
Income opened new registers of need. Spock, Comfort, and the
vulgarizers of Nader trained laymen to shop for solutions to
problems they leared to cook up accordig to professional
recipes. Education qualifed graduates to climb to ever more
rarefe heights and implant and cultivate there ever newer
strains of hybrdized needs. Precrptions increed ad compe
tence shrank. In medicine, for example, ever more pharaco
logically active drugs went on prescrption, and people lost
their will and ability to cope wth indisposition or even discom
for. In Amercan superakets, where it is estimated that
about 1, 50 new products appear ech year, les than 20 per
cent survive more than one year on the shelves, the remainder
having proved unsellable, faddish, risky, or unproftble, or
obsolete competitor with new models. Therefore consumers
are increasingly forced to seek guidance from professional con
sumer protectors.
Furherore, the rapid turover of products renders wants
shallow and plastic. Paradoxically, then, high aggegate con
sumption resulting from engineered needs fosters growing con
sumer indiference to specifc, potentially felt wants. Increas-
USEFUL UEMPLOYMENT AND IT PROFESIONAL ENEMIE 3I
ingly, neds are creted by the adverising slogan and by pur
chase made by order from the registrar, beautician, gynecolo
gist, and dozens of other precrbing diagnosticians. The nee
to be forally taught how to ned, be this by advertising,
precription, or guide discussion in the collective or in the
commune, appers in any culture where decisions and actions
are no longer the reult of personal experience in tisfaction,
and the adaptive consumer cannot but substitute lered for felt
needs. Apeople become apt pupils in learing how to need, the
ability to shape wants from experienced satisfaction becomes a
rare competence of the very rich or the seriously undersupplied.
As needs are broken down into ever smaller component parts,
each managed by an appropriate specialist, the consumer ex
perences difculty in integrating the separate oferings of his
various tutors into a meaningful whole that could be deired
with commitment and possesed with pleaure. The income
managers, life-style counselors, consciousness-raisers, aca
demic advisers, food-fad expers, sensitivity developers, and
others like them clerly perceive the new possibilities for man
agement and move in to match packaged commoditie to the
splintere needs.
Used a a noun, "need" is the individual ofprint of a profes
siona patter; it is a platic-foam replica of the mold in which
profesionals cat their staple; it is the advertised shape of the
brood cells out of which consumers are produced. To be igno
rant or unconvinced of one's own needs has become the unfor
givable antisocial act. The good citizen is one who imputes
stadadize needs to himself with such conviction that he
drowns out any desire for alterative, much les for the renun
ciation of neds.
Wen I wa bor, before Stlin and Hitler and Roosevelt
came to power, only the rch, hypochondracs, and members of
elite unions spoke of their need for medical care when their
temperature rose. Doctors then, in response, could not do
much more than grandmothers had done. In medicine the frst
mutation of nees cme with sulfa drgs and antibiotics. Athe
control of infetons beme a simple and efective routine,
drgs went more ad more on precription. Assignment of the
32
sick-role became a medical monopoly. The person who felt ill
had to go to the clinic to be labeled with a disese name and
to be legitimately declared a member of the minority of the
so-called sick: people excused from work, entitled to help, put
under doctor's orders, and enjoined to heal in order to become
useful again. Paradoxically, a pharacological tehnique
tests and drgs-became so predictable and cheap that one
could have dispensed with the physician, society enacted laws
and police regulations to restrict the free use of those proce
dures that science had simplifed, and placed them on the pre
scription list.
The second mutation of medical needs happened when the
sick ceased to be a minority. Today, few people echew doctors'
orders for any length of time. In Italy, the United States,
France, or Belgium, one out of every two citizens is being
watched simultaneously by several health professionals who
treat, advise, or at let observe him or her. The object of such
specialized care is, more often than not, a condition of teeth,
womb, emotions, blood pressure, or horone levels that the
patient himself does not feel. Patients are no more in the minor
ity. Now, the minority are those deviants who somehow escape
from any and all patient-roles. This minority is made up of the
poor, the peants, the recent immigrant, and sundr other
who, sometimes on their own volition, have gone medically
AWOL. Just twenty years ago, it was a sign of normal health
-which was assumed to be good-to get along without a doc
tor. The same status of nonpatient is now indicative of poverty
or dissidence. Even the status of the hypochondriac ha
changed. For the doctor in the forie, this was the label applied
to the gate-crashers in his ofce-the designation resered for
the imaginary sick. Now, doctors refer to the minorty who fee
them by the same name: hypochondracs are the imaginar
healthy. To be plugged into a professional system a a lifelong
client is no longer a stgma that sets apart the disabled person
from citizens at large. We now live in a society organize for
deviant maorties and their keepers. To be an active client of
several professionals provides you with a well-defned place
within the realm of consumers for the sake of whom our society
functions. Thus, the transformation of medicine from a liberal
consulting profession into a dominant, disabling profession has
immeasurably increased the numbr of the needy.
At this crtical moment, imputed needs move into a third
mutation. They coalesce into what the experts call a multidisci
plinar problem necesitating, therefore, a multiprofessional
solution. First, the proliferation of commoditie, each tending
to tum into a requirement, has efectively trained the consumer
to need on command. Next, the progressive fragmentation of
needs into ever smaller and unconnected parts has made the
client dependent on professional judgment for the blending of
his needs into a meaningfl whole. The auto industry provide
a good example. By the end of the sixties, the adverised op
tional equipment needed to make a basic Ford desirable had
been multiplied immensely. But contrary to the customer's ex
pectations, this "optional" fim-ftam is in fact installed on the
assembly line of the Detroit factory, and the shopper in Plains
is left with a choice between a few packaged samples that are
shipped at random: he can either buy the convertible that he
wants but with the green seats he hates, or he ca humor his
girlfrend with leopard-skin seats at the cost of buying an un
wanted paisley hardtop.
Finally, the client is trained to need a tem approach to
receive what his guardians consider "satisfactory tretment."
Personal services that improve the consumer illustrate the
point. Therapeutic afuence has exhausted the available life
time of many whom serice profesionals diagose a standing
in need of more. The intensity of the serice economy has made
the time neded for the consumption of pedagogical, medical,
and soial treatments increasingly scarce. Time scarcity may
soon tr into the major obstacle to the consumption of pre
scrbed, and ofen publicly financed, services. Signs of such
scarcity become evident from one's early years. Alredy in
kindergarten, the child is subjected to management by a team
made up of such specialists as the allergist, speech pathologist,
peiatrician, child psychologist, social worker, physical-educa
tion instrctor, and teacher. By foring such a pedocratic
tem, many diferent profesionals attempt to share the time
34
that has become the major limiting factor to the imputation of
further needs. For the adult, it is not the school but the work
place where the packaging of serice focuses. The personnel
manager, labor educator, in-serice trainer, insurance planner,
consciousness-raiser find it more proftable to share the
worker's time than to compete for it. A need-less citizen would
be highly suspicious. People are told that they need their jobs
not so much for the money as for the service they get. The
commons are extinguished and replaced by a new placenta built
of funnels that deliver profesional service. Life is paralyzed in
peranent intensive care.
ENABLING DISTINCTIONS
The disabling of the citizen through profesional dominance
is completed through the power of illusion. Hopes of religious
salvation are displaced by expectations that center on the state
as supreme manager of professional service. Each of many
special priesthoods claims competence to defne public issues in
terms of specifc sericeable problems. The acceptance of this
claim legitimates the docile recognition of imputed lacks on the
par of the layma, whose world turs into an echo-chamber of
needs. The satisfaction of self-defned preference is sacrifced to
the flfllment of educated needs. This dominance of engneered
and managed needs is refected in the skyline of the city: profes
sional buildings look down on the crowds that shuttle between
them in a continual pilgrimage to the new cathedrals of helth,
education, and welfare. Helthy home are transformed into
hygienic aparments where one cannot be bor, cannot be sick,
and cannot die decently. Not only are helpful neighbors a van
ishing species, but also liberal doctors who make house calls.
Workplaces fit for apprenticehip tum into opaque maes of
corrdors that perit access only to functionaries equipped
with "identities" in mica holders, pinned to their lapels. A
world designed for serice deliveries is the utopia of citizens
tured into welfare reipients.
The prevailing addicton to imputable needs on the par of
the rich, and the paralyzing fascination with needs on the part
of the poor, would indeed be irreversible if people actually ftted
the calculus of needs. But this is not so. Beyond a certain level
of intensity, medicine engenders helplessnes and disease; edu
cation turs into the major generator of a disabling division of
labor; fast transportation systems tum urbanized people for
about one-sixth of their waking hours into passengers, and for
an equal amount of time into members of the road gang that
works to pay Ford, Exxon, and the highway department. The
threhold at which medicine, education, and transportation
tum into counterproductive tools has been reached in all the
countre of the world with per capita incomes comparable at
least to those prevalent in Cuba. In all countries examined, and
contrary to the illusions propagated by the orthodoxie of both
East and West, this specifc counterproductivity bears no rela
tion to the kind of school, vehicle, or health organization now
used. It sets in when the capital intensity of the production
process passe a crtical threshold.
Our major institutions have acquired the uncanny power to
subvert the ver puroses for which they were orginally engi
neered and fnanced. Under the rule of our most pretigious
profesions, our institutional tools have as their principal prod
uct paradoxical counterroductivity-the systematic disabling
of the citizenry. A city built around wheels become inappropri
ate for feet, and no increae of wheels can overcome the engi
nered immobility of such cripple. Autonomous action is par
alyzed by a surfeit of commoditie and treatments. But this does
not represent simply a net loss of satisfactions that do not
happen to ft into the industral age. The impotence to produce
use-values ultimately renders counterpurposive the very com
moditie ment to replace them. The car, the doctor, the school,
and the manager are then commoditie that have tured into
destructive nuisance for the consumer, and retain net value
only for the provider of services.
Why are there no rebellions against the coalecence of late
industral society into one huge disabling service-delivery sys
tem? The chief explanation must be sought in the illusion
generating power that these same systems possess. Beside
3
doing technical things to body and mind, professionally at
tended institutions function also as powerful rtuals which gen
erate credence in the things their managers promise. Beside
teaching Johnny to red, schools also teach him that learing
from teachers is "better" and that without compulsor schools,
fewer boks would be read by the poor. Beides providing
locomotion, the bus just as much as the sedan reshape the
environment and puts walking out of step. Beside providing
help in avoiding taxes, lawyers also convey the notion that laws
solve problems. An ever-growing par of our major institutions'
function is the cultivation and maintenance of three set of
illusions which turn the citizen into a client to be saved by
experts.
Congestion versus Paralysis
The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are bor to
be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by
purchasing goods and services. This illusion is due to an edu
cated blindness to the worh of use-value in the total economy.
In none of the economic models serving a national guidelines
is there a variable to account for nonmarketable use-value any
more than there is a variable for nature's perennial contrbu
tion. Yet there is no economy that would not collapse immedi
ately if use-value production contracted beyond a point; for
example, if homemakng were done only for wage, or inter
coure engaged in only at a fee. What people do or make but
will not or cannot put up for sale is as immeaurable and as
invaluable for the economy as the oxygen they breathe.
The illusion that economic models can igore use-value
sprngs from the assumption that those activities which we
deignate by intransitive verbs can be indefnitely replaced by
institutionally defned staples referred to as nouns: "education"
substituted for "I lear," "health care" for "I heal," "transpor
tation" .for "I move," "television" for "I play."
The confusion of personal and standardized values ha
spread throughout most domains. Under profesional leader
ship, use-values are dissolved, rendered obsolete, and fnally
deprived of their distinctive nature. Love and institutional care
become coterinous. Ten years of running a far can be
thrown into a pedagogical mixer and. made equivalent to a high
school degree. Things picked up at random and hatched in the
freedom of the street are added as "educational experience" to
things funneled into pupils' heads. The knowledge accountants
seem unaware that the two activities, like oil and water, mix
only a long as they are osterized by an educator's perception.
Gangs of crusading need-creators could not continue to tax us,
nor could they spend our resources on their tets, networks, and
other nostrums, if we did not remain paralyzed by this kind of
greey belief
The usefulness of staples, or packaged commodities, is intrin
sically limited by two boundaries that must not be confused.
First, queues will sooner or later stop the operation of any
system that produces needs fater than the corresponding com
modity, and second, dependence on commodities will sooner or
later so detenine needs that the autonomous production of a
functional analogue will be paralyzed. The usefulness of com
modities is limited by congestion and paralysis. Congestion and
paralysis are both results of ecalation in any sector of produc
tion, albeit reults of a very diferent kind. Congestion, which
is a measure of the degree to which staple get in their own way,
explains why mas transportation by prvate car in Manhattan
would be useless; it doe not explain why people work hard to
buy and insure cars that cannot move them. Even less does
congestion aone explain why people become so dependent en
vehicles that they are paralyzed and just cannot take to their
feet.
People become prsoners to time-consuming acceleration,
stupefying education, and sick-making medicine because be
yond a cerin threhold of intensity, dependence on a bill of
industrial and professional goods detroys human potential,
and does so in a specifc way. Only up to a point can commodi
ties replace what people make or do on their own. Only within
limits can exchange-values satisfactorily replace use-value. Be
yond this point, furher production serves the interests of the
profesional producer-who has imputed t
h
e need to the con-
3
sumer-and leave the consumer befuddled ad giddy, albeit
rcher. Needs satisfed rather than merely fed must be deter
mine to a signifcant degree by the pleasure that is derived
from the remembrance of personal autonomous action. There
are boundaries beyond which commoditie cannot be multi
plied without disabling their consumer for this self-afnation
in action.
Package alone inevitably frustrate the consumer when their
delivery paralyze him or her. The measure of well-being in a
society is thus never an equation in which these two modes of
production are matched; it is always a balance that results when
use-values and commodities fruitfully meh in synergy. Only up
to a point can heteronomous production of a commodity en
hance and complement the autonomous production of the cor
responding personal purpose. Beyond this point, the synergy
between the two mode of production paradoxically tur
against the purpose for which both use-value and commodity
were intended. Occaionally, this is not clearly seen because the
mainstream eology movement tends to obscure the point. For
example, atomic-energy reactors have been widely crticized
because their radiation is a thret, or because they foster tech
nocratic controls. So far, however, only ver few have daed to
crticize them becuse they add to the energ glut. The palysis
of human action by socially destrctive energy quant m not
yet been accepted a a argument for reucing the call for
energy. Similarly, the inexorable liits to growh that are built
into any serice agency are still widely igored. Ad yet it
ought to be evident that the institutionaliztion of health cae
tends to make people into unheathy marionettes, and that
lifelong education fosters a culture of progamme peple.
Ecology will provide guideline for a feaible for of moderty
only when it is recognized that a man-made environmet de
signed for commoditie reuce peronal alivenes to the point
where the commoditie themselve lose their value as mens for
personal satisfaction. Without this insight, industral tehnol
ogy that wa cleaner and les aggesive would be ued for
now-impossible levels of frstrating enchmet.
It would be mistake to attribute counterroductivity esn-
USEFUL UNEMPLOYMEN AND ITS PROFESSIONAL ENEMIES 39
tially to the negative exteralitie of economic growth, to ex
haustion, pollution, and varous fors of congestion. This leads
us to confuse the congetion by which things get in their own
way with the paralysis of the person who can no longer exercise
his or her autonomy in an environment designed for things. The
fundamenta reaon that market intensity leads to counter
productivity must be sought in the relationship between the
monopoly of commoditie and huma needs. This monopoly
extends furher than what usually goe by the name. A com
mercial monopoly merely comers the market for one brand of
whisky or car. An industr-wide carel can restrct freedom
furher: it can comer all mass transporation in favor of internal
combustion engine, as General Motors did when it purchased
the Los Angeles trolleys. You can ecape the frst by sticking
to rum and the second by purchasing a bicycle. I use the term
radical monopoly" to deignate something else: the substitu
tion of an industral product or a profesional service for a
useful activity in which people engage or would like to engage.
A radical monopoly .paralyzes autonomous action in favor of
professional deliverie. The more completely vehicles dislocate
people, the more trc managers will be needed and the more
powerles people W be to walk home. This radical monopoly
would accompany high-speed trafc even if motors were pow
ere by sunshine and vehicle were spun of air. The longer ech
peron is in the gp of education, the les time and inclination
he has for browsing and exploration. At some point in every
domain, the amount of goods delivered so degrades the environ
ment for personal action that the possible synergy between
use-values and commoditie turs negative. Paradoxical, or
specifc, counterproductivity sets in. I will use this ter when
ever the impotenc reulting from the substitution of a com
modity for a value in use turs this very commodity into a
disvalue in the pursuit of the satisfaction it was meant to pro
vide.
Industrial versus Convivial Tools
Man ces to b recognizble as one of his knd when he can
no longer shape his ow needs by the more or les competent
use of those tools his culture provides. Throughout histor,
most tools were labor-intensive means that could be employed
to satisfy the user of the tool, and were used in dometic produc
tion. Only margnally were shovels or hammers used to produce
pyramids or a surplus for gift-exchange, and even more rarely
to produce things for the market. Occasions for the extraction
of profts were limited. Most work was done to create use-value
not detined for exchange. But technologica progres has been
consistently applied to develop a very diferent kind of tool: it
has presed the tool primarily into the production of marketa
ble staples. At frst, during the industrial revolution, the new
technology reduced the worker on the job to a Charlie Chaplin
in Moder Times. At this early stage, however, the industral
mode of production did not yet paralyze people when they were
of the job. Now women or men who have come to depend
almost entirely on deliveres of stndardized fragments pro
duced by tools operated by anonymous others have ceaed to
fnd the same direct satisfaction in the use of tools that stimu
lated the evolution of man and his cultures. Although their
needs and thei consumption have multiplied many times, their
satisfaction in handling tools has beome rare, and they have
ceased to live a life for which their organism acquired its for.
At best, they barely survive, even though they do so surounded
by glitter. Their life-span has become a chain of needs that have
been met for the sake of ulterior strving for satisfaction. Uti
mately man-the-passive-consumer loses even the ability to dis
criminate between living and surival. The gamble on insurance
and the gleful expectation of rations and therapie take the
place of enjoyment. In such company, it become esy to forget
that satisfaction and joy can reult only a long as personal
alivenes and engineered provisions are kept in balace while a
goal is pursued.
The delusion that tools in the serice of market-orented
institutions can with impunity detroy the conditions for con
vivial and personally manageable means perits the extinction
of "aliveness .. ' by conceiving of technological progess a a kind
of engineerng product that license more profesional domi
nation. This delusion says that tools, in order to become more
efcient in the pursuit of a specifc purpose, inevitably become
more complex ad inscrtable: one thinks of cockpits and
cranes. Therefore, it would seem that modem tools would re
quire special oprators who were
h
ighly trained and who alone
could be securely trusted. Actually, just the opposite is usually
tre, and necesarly so. As techniques multiply and become
more specifc, their use often requires les complex judgments.
They no longer require that trust on the part of the client on
which the autonomy of the liberal profesional and even that
of the craftsman wa built. However far medicine has advanced,
only a tiny fraction of the total volume of demonstrably useful
medical services necessitates advanced training in an intelligent
person. From a social point of view, we ought to reserve the
deignation "technical progress" to instances in which new
tools expand the capacity a
n
d the efectivenes of a wider range
of people, epecially when new tools permit more autonomous
production of use-values.
There is nothing inevitable about the expanding professional
monopoly over new technology. The great inventions of the last
hundred years, suc
h
as new metals, ball-bearings, some building
materials, electronics, some tests and remedies, are capable of
incresing the power of both the heteronomous and the autono
mous mode o
f
production. In
f
act, however, most new technol
ogy ha not been incororated into convivial equipment but
into institutiona packages and complexe. The professionals
rather consistently have used industral production to establish
a radicl monopoly by means of tehnology's obvious power to
sere its maager. Counterroductivity due to the paralysis of
use-value production is fostered by this notion of tehnological
progress.
There is no simple "technological imperative" which re
quire that ball-berings be used in motorized vehicles or that
electronics be used to control the brain. The institutions of
high-speed trafc and of mental health are not the necessary
result of ball-beings or electronics. Their functions are deter
mine by the needs they are supposed to sere-needs that are
overwhelmingly imputed and reinforced by disabling profes
sions. Tis is a point that the young Turks in the profesions
42
seem to overlook when they justify their institutional allegiance
by preenting themselve a the publicly appointed ministers of
technological progress that must be dometicated.
The same subservience to the idea of progres conceives of
engineering prncipally as a contribution to institutional efec
tivenes. Scientifc research is highly fnanced, but only if it can
be applied for military use or for furher professional domi
nation. Alloys which make bicycle both stronger and lighter
are a fall-out of research designed to make jets faster and weap
ons deadlier. But the reults of most reearch go solely into
industrial tools, thus making already huge machines even more
complex and inscrutable. Because of this bias on the par of
scientists and engineers, a major trend is strengthened: needs
for autonomous action are precluded, while those for the acqui
sition of commoditie are multiplied. Convivial tools which
facilitate the individual's enjoyment of use-values-without or
with only minimal supervision by policemen, physicians, or
inspectors-are polarized at two extremes: poor Asian workers
and rch students and profesors are the two kinds of people
who ride bicycle. Perhaps without being conscious of their
good fortune, both enjoy being free from this seond illusion.
Recently, some groups of profesionals, goverent agen
cie, and interationa organiztions have begun to explore,
develop, ad advocate smal-scale intereiate technology.
Thee efor might be interprete as an attempt to avoid the
more obvious vlgartie of a technologcal imperative. But
most of the new technology deigned for self-help in health
care, education, or home building is only an alterative model
of high-intensity dependence commodities. For example, ex
perts are asked to deign new medicine cabinets that allow
people to follow the doctor's orders over the telephone. Women
are taught to examine their breats to provide work for the
surgeon. Cubans ae given paid leave from work to erect their
prefabricated houses. The enticing prestige of profesional pro
ducts as they become cheaper ends by making rch and poor
more alie. Both Bolivians and Swedes feel equally backwad,
underrvileged, and exploited to the degree that they ler
without the supersion of cerifed teachers, keep healthy with-
Y
out the check-ups of a physician, and move about without a
motorized crtch.
Liberties versus Rghts
The third disabling illusion looks to experts for limits to
growth. Entire populations socialized to need on command are
asumed ready to be told what they do not need. The same
multinational agents that for a generation imposed an intera
tional standard of bookkeeping, deodorants, and energy con
sumption on rich and poor alike now sponsor the Club of
Rome. Obediently, UNCO gets into the act and trains ex
perts in the regionalization of imputed needs. For their own
imputed good, the rich are thereby programmed to pay for
more costly professional dominance at home and to provide the
poor with assigned needs of a cheper and tighter brand. The
brghtest of the new profesionals see clearly that growing scar
city pushe controls over needs ever upward. The central plan
ning of output-optimal decentralization has become the most
pretigious job of 1978. But what is not yet recognized is that
this new illusory savation by profesionally decreed limits con
fuse libertie and rights.
In ech of the seven United Natons-efned world regions
a new clergy is being trained to prech the appropriate style of
austerity drafe by the new need-eigners. Consciousnes
raisers roam through local communitie inciting people to meet
the decentraie production goals that have been assigned to
them. Milkig the family goat was a libery until more rthless
planning made it a duty to contribute the yield to the GN.
The synergy of autonomous and heteronomous production is
refecte in society's balance of liberie and rght. Liberies
protet use-vaues a rights protet the acces to commoditie.
And just a commoditie c extinguish the possibility of pro
ducing use-value and tur into impoverishing welth, so the
profesional defnition of rghts c extinguish liberties and
etablish a tyranny that smothers people undereth their
rghts.
The confusion is reveled wth speial clarity when one con-
sid
ers the expert on health. Health encompasse two apects:
liberties and rghts. It designates the are of autonomy within
which a person exercises control over his own biological states
and over the conditions of his immediate environment. Simply
stated, health is identical with the degree of lived freedom.
Therefore, those concered with the public good should work
to guarantee the equitable distribution of health as freedom
which, in tur, depends on environmental conditions that only
organized political efors can achieve. Beyond a cerain level
of intensity, professiona health care, however equitably dis
tributed, will smother health-as-freedom. In this fundamental
sense, the care of health is a matter of well-protected libery.
As is evident, such a notion of health hnplies a principled
comnitment to inalienable freedoms. To understand this, one
must distinguish clearly between civil liberty and civil rghts.
The libery to act without restraint from goverment has a wider
scope than the civil rights the state may enact to guarantee that
people will have equal powers to obtain cerain goods and
services.
Civil liberie ordinarly do not force others to act in accord
with one's own wishes. I have the freedom to spek and publish
my opinion, but no specifc newspaper is obliged to prnt it, nor
are fellow citizens required to red it. I am free to paint a I see
beauty, but no museum has to buy my canvas. At the same
time, however, the state as guarantor of libery can and does
enact laws that protect the equal rights without which its mem
bers would not enjoy their freedoms. Such rights give meaning
and relity to equality, while liberties gve possibility and shape
to freedom. One cerain way to extinguish the freedoms to
speak, to lear, to heal, or to care is to delimit them by transmog
rfying civil rights into civic duties. The precise character of this
third illusion is to believe that the publicly sponsored puruit
of rghts leads inevitably to the protection of libertie. In reality,
as society gives profesionals the legitimacy to defne rghts,
citizen freedoms evaporate.
EQUITY IN USEFUL UNEMPLOYMENT
At preent, every new need that is professionally cerified
translates sooner or later into a right. The political pressure for
the enactment of each right generates new jobs and commodi
tie. Ech new commodity degrades an activity by which people
so far have been able to cope on their own; each new job take
away legtimacy from work so far done by the unemployed. The
power of profesions to measure what shall be good, rght, and
done warps the desire, willingnes, and ability of the "common ..
man to live within his means.
As soon as all law students currently registered at United
State law schools are graduated, the number of United States
lawyers will increase by about 50 per cent. Judicare will com
plement Medicare, as legal insurance increasingly turs into the
kind of necessity that medical insurance is now. When the rght
of the citizen to a lawyer has been established, settling the
dispute in the pub will be branded unenlightened or antisocial,
a home births are now. Alredy the right of ech citizen of
Detroit to live in a home that ha been profesionally wired
tur the auto-electrcian who installs his own plugs into a
lawbreaker. The loss of one lbery after another to be useful
when out of a job or outside professiona control is the unnamed
but also the most reented experence that come with moder
ized poverty. By now the most signifcnt prvilege of high
social status might well be some vestige of freedom for useful
unemployment that is increaingly denied to the great majorty.
The insistence on the rght to be taken cae of and supplied has
almost tured into the rght of industries and profesions to
conquer clients, to supply them with their product, and by their
delivere to obliterte the environmental conditions that make
unemployed activitie useful. Thus, for the time being, the
strggle for a equitable distrbution of the time and the power
to be useful to self and others outide employment or the draft
has been efectively paralyzed. Work done of the paid job is
looked down upon if not ignored. Autonomous activity threat
ens the employment level, generate deviance, and detracts
from the GNP: therefore it is only improperly calle "work."
Labor no longer means efor or toil but the mysterious mate
wedded to productive investments in plant. Work no longer
means the creation of a value perceived by the worker but
mainly a job, which is a social relationship. Unemployment
means sad idleness, rather than the freeom to do things that
are useful for oneelf or for one's neighbor. An active woman
who rns a house and brings up children and tkes in those of
others is distinguished from a woman who work, no matter
how useles or damaging the product of this work might be.
Activity, efort, achievement, or serice outside a hierarchical
relationship and unmeasured by professional standards threat
ens a commodity-intensive society. The generation of use-val
ues that escape efective measurement limits not only the need
for more commodities but also the jobs that create them and the
paychecks needed to buy them.
What counts in a market-intensive society is not the efor to
please or the pleasure that fows from that efor but the cou
pling of the labor force with capital. What counts is not the
achievement of satisfaction that fows from action but the status
of the social relationship that commands production-that is,
the job, situation, post, or appointment. In the Middle Age
there was no salvation outside the Church, ad theologians had
a hard time explaining what God did with those pagans who
were visibly virtuous or santly. Similarly, in contemporar
society efor is not productive unless it is done at the behet of
a boss, and economists have a hard time deing with the obvi
ous usefulnes of people when they are outside the corporate
control of a corporation, volunteer agency, or labor camp.
Work is productive, repectable, worhy of the citiz only
when the work proces is planned, monitored, and controlled
by a profesional agent, who ensures that the work meets a
certifed need in a standardized fashion. In an advanced indus
trial society it becomes almost impossible to sek, or even to
imagine, unemployment a a condition for autonomous useful
work. The infrastrcture of soiety is so arnged that only the
job give acces to the tools of production, ad this monopoly
of commodity. production over the generation of use-value
7
turs even more stringent as the state takes over. Only with a
license may you tech a child; only at a clinic may you set a
broken bone. Housework, handicraf, subsistence agriculture,
radical technology, learing exchange, and the like are de
graded into activitie for the idle, the unproductive, the very
poor, or the ver rich. A society that fosters intense dependence
on commoditie thus turs its unemployed into either its poor
or its dependents. In 1 945, for each Amercan social securty
recipient there were still 35 workers on the job. In 1917, 3. 2
employe worker have to support one such retiree, who is
himself depedent on many more serices than his retired
grandfather could have imagined.
Henceforth, the quality of a society and of its culture will
depend on the status of its unemployed: will they be the most
repreentative productive citizens, or will they be dependents?
The choice or crsis again seems cler: advanced industral
society can degenerate into a holding operation harking back to
the drem of the sixties: into a well-rationed distribution system
that dole out decresing commoditie and jobs and trains its
citizens for more standardized consumption and more power
les work. This is the attitude refected in the policy proposals
of most goverments at preent, from Gerany to China, albeit
with a fndamental diference in degee: the richer the country,
the more urgent it seems to ration access to jobs and to impee
usefl unemployment that would threaten the volume of the
labor market. The invere, of course, is equally possible: a
modem society in which frustrate worker organize to protect
the freedom of people to b useful outside the activitie that
reult in the production of commodities. But again, this social
alterative depends on a new, rational, and cynical competence
of the common man when face with the profesional imputa
tion of nes.
OUTFLANKING THE NEW PROFESSIONAL
Today, profesional power is clearly threatened by increasing
evidenc of the counterroductivity of its output. Peple are
beginning to see that such hegemony deprives them of their
4-8
right to politics. The symbolic power of expers which, while
defning needs, eviscerate personal competence is now seen to
be more perlous than their technical capability, which is
confned to sericing the needs they create. Simultaneously, one
hears the repeated call for the enactment of legislation that
might lead us beyond an age dominated by the professional
ethos: the demand that professional and bureaucratic licensing
be replaced by the investiture of elected citizens, rather than
altered by the inclusion of consumer representatives on licens
ing boards; the demand that prescrption rules in pharacies,
school curricula, and other pretentious superarkets be
relaxed; the demand for the protection of ]r0dvcIt90 liberties;
the demand for the right to practice without a license; the
demand for public utilities that facilitate client evaluation of all
practitioners who work for money. In response to these threats,
the major professional etablishments, each in its own way, use
three fundamental strategies to shore up the erosion of their
legitimacy and power.
The Self-critical Hooker
The frst approach is represented by the Club of Rome. Fiat,
Volkswagen, and Ford pay economists, ecologsts, and experts
in social control to identify the products industries ought not
to produce, in order to strengthen the industral system. Also,
doctors in the Club ofKos now recommend that surger, radia
tion, and chemotherapy be abandoned in the tretment of most
cacers, since these treatments usually prolong and intensify
sufering without adding to the life-span of the treated. Lawers
and dentists promise to police a never before the competence,
decency, and rates of their fellow professionals.
A varant of this approach is seen in some individuals, or
their organizations, who challenge the Amercan Bar Associa
tion, American Medical Association, and other power brokers
of the establishment. These claim to be radical because (I) they
advise consumers against the interests of the majority of their
peers; (2) they tutor laymen on how to behave on hospital,
university, or police govering boards; and (3) they ocion-
ally testify to legislative committees on the uselessness of proce
dure proposed by the professions and demanded by the public.
For example, in a province of Weter Canada doctors pre
pare a repor on some two dozen medical procedure for
which the legislature was considerng a budget increase. All the
procedures were costly, and the doctors pointed out that they
were also very ptnful, that many were dangerous, and that
none could be proved efective. For the time being the legisla
tors refused to act on such medical advice, a failure that, provi
sionally, tends to reinforce the belief in the necessity of profes
sional protection against professional hubris.
Professional self-policing is useful principally in catching the
grossly incompetent-the butcher or the outright charlatan.
But a ha been shown again and again, it only protects the
inept and cements the dependence of the public on their ser
vices. The "critical" doctor, the "radical" lawyer, or the "advo
cacy" architect seduces clients away from his colleague, who
are les aware than he of the vagare of fahion. First liberal
profesions sold the public on the need for their serices by
promising to watch over the poorer laymen's schooling, ethics,
or in-serice training. Then dominant profesions insisted on
their rghtful duty to guide and furher disable the public by
organizing into clubs that brandish the high consciousnes of
ecological, economic, and social constraints. Such action inhib
its the furher extension of the profesional sector but strength
ens public dependence within that sector. The idea that profes
sionals have a right to sere the public is thus of very recent
orgin. Their struggle to establish and legitimate this corporate
rght becomes one of our most oppresive social threats.
Te Allianc of Hawkers
The second strategy seks to organize and coordinate profes
sional reponse in a manner that puroredly is more faithful
to the multifaceted character of human problems. Also, this
approach seeks to utilize ides borowed from systems analysis
and operations reserch in order to provide more national and
all-ncompasing solutions. An example of what this mens in
50
TOWARD A HI STORY OF NEEDS
pra
ctice can be taken from Canada. Four years ago, the Cana
dian minister of helth launched a campaign to convince the
public that spending more money on physicians would not
change the country's patters of diseae and death. He pointed
out that premature loss of life was due overhelmingly to three
factors: accidents, mostly in motor vehicle; heart disease and
lung cancer, which doctors are notorously powerless to hel;
and suicide combined with murder, phenomena that are outside
medical control. The minister called for new approaches to
health and for the retrenchment of medicine. The task of pro
tecting, restoring, or consoling those made sick by the detruc
tive life-style and environment typical of contemporary Canada
wa taken up by a great varety of new and old profesions.
Architects discovered that they had a mission to improve
Canadians' health; dog control was found to be an interdepar
mental problem calling for new specialists. A new corporate
biocracy intensifed control over the organisms of Canadians
with a thoroughnes the old iatrocracy could hardly have imag
ined. The slogan "Better spend money in order to stay healthy
than on doctors when you get sick" can now be recognized as
the hawking of new hookers who want the money spent on
them.
The practice of medicine in the United States illustrate a
similar dynamic. There, a coordinated approach to the health
of Americns ha become enormously expensive without being
especially efective. In 1950, the typical wage-earer trasfered
less than two weeks' pay per year to profesional helth care.
In 1976, the proporion was up to around fve to seven weks'
pay per year: buying a new Ford, one now pays more for worker
hygiene than for the metal the car contains. Yet with all this
efor and expense, the life expectancy of the adult male popula
tion has not sensibly changed in the last one hundred yers. It
is lower than in many poor countre, and has been delining
slowly but steadily for the last twenty yers.
Where disese patters have changed for the better, it has
ben due principally to the adoption of a healthier life-style,
especially in diet. To a small degre, inoulations and the rou
tine administration of such simple interventions as antibiotics,
contraceptive, or Caran tube have contributed to the de
cline of cerain disee. But such procedure do not postulate
the need for professional serice. People cannot become
healthier by being more firly wedded to a medical profession,
yet many "radical" doctors call for just such an increased bioc
racy. They seem to be unaware that a more rational .. problem
solving" approach is simply another version-though perhaps
a more sophisticated onef afrative action.
The Professionalization of the Client
The third strategy to make dominant profesions survive is this
ye's radical chic. Athe prophets of the sixties drooled about
development on the doorsteps of amuence, thee mythmakers
mouth about the self-help of professionalized clients.
In the United Sttes alone since 1965, about 2,70 books have
appeared that tech you bow to be your own patient, so that
you need see the doctor only when it is worhwhile for him.
Some books recommend that only after due training and exami
nation should graduates in self-medication be empowered to
buy apin and dspense it to their children. Others suggest that
profesionalized patients should receive preferential rates in
hospitals and that they should benefit from lower insurance
premums. Ony women with a license to practice home birth
should have their children outside hospitals since such profe
sional mother can, if necessar, be sued for malpractice. I have
seen a "radical" proposal that such a license to birh be ob
taine under feminist rather than medical auspice.
The profesional dream of rooting each hierarchy of needs in
the grasroots goe under the banner of self-help. At preent it
is promoted by the new trbe of expers in self-help who have
replace the experts in development of the sixties. The universal
profesionalization of client is their aim. American building
experts who last fall invaded Mexico sere as an example of the
new crusade. About two years ago, a Boston professor of archi
tecture came to Mexico for a vacation. A Mexcan friend of
me took him beyond the arr where, during the last twelve
yers, a new city had grown up. From a. few huts, it had
52
mu
shroomed into a community three time the size of Cam
bridge, Massachusetts. My friend, also an architect, wanted to
show him the thousands of example of peasant ingenuity with
patters, structure, and uses of refuse not in and therefore not
derivable from textbooks. He should not have been surrised
that his colleague took several hundred rolls of picture of these
brlliant amateur inventions that make the two-million-person
slum work. Te picture were analyzed in Cambrdge; and by
the end of the year, new-baked Unite Stte specialists in
community architecture were busy teaching the people of Ci
udad Netzahualcoyotl their problems, needs, and solutions.
THE POSTPROFESSIONAL ETHOS
Te inverse of profesionally certifed lack, need, and poverty
is modem subsistence. The ter "subsistence economy" is now
generally used only to designate group surival which is mar
ginal to market dependence and in which people make what
they use by means of traditional tools ad within an inherited,
often unexamined, social organization. I propose to recover the
ter by speakng about modem subsistence. Let us cl modem
subsitence the style of life that prevails in a postindustral
economy in which people have succeeded in reucg thei
market dependence, and have done so by proteting-by politi
cl means-a social infratrcture in which technique and
tools are used prmarly to generate use-value uneaured ad
unmeasurable by profesional need-maker. I have developed a
theory of such tools elsewhere ( Tools for Convivialt, New
York, 1973) and proposed the technical ter "convivial tool"
for use-value-oriented engineered arifact. I have shown that
the inverse of progressive moderized povery is politiclly gen
erated convivial austerty that protects freeom ad euity in
the use of such tools.
A retooling of contemporar society with convivia rather
than industral tools implies a shit of emphais in our strggle
for socia justice; it implie a new knd of subordination of
distrbutive to participator justice. In a industral society,
individuals are trained for extreme specializtion. They are
rendered impotent to shape or to satisfy their own needs. They
depend for commodities on the managers who sig the prescrp
tions for them. The rght to diagosis of need, prescription O
therapy, and-in general-istrbution of goods predominate
in ethics, politics, and law. This emphasis on the right to im
puted necsitie shrnks to a fragile luxur the libery to lear
or to heal or t move on one's ow. In a convivial society, the
opposite would be tre. The protetion of equity in the exercise
of personal librie would be the predomnant concer of a
society baed on radical technology: scence and technique at
te service of more efective use-value generation. Obviously,
such equitably distrbuted libery would be meaningless if it
were not grounde in the right of eual acces to raw materials,
tools, and utilitie. Food, fel, freh air, or living space can no
more be equitably ditributed than wrenche or jobs unles they
are rationed without regard to imputed need, that is, in equal
maximum amounts to young and old, cripple and president. A
society dedicated to the protection of eually distributed, mod
em, ad efective tools for the exercise of productive liberie
cannot come into existence unes the commoditie and re
source on which the exercise of these libertie is base are
equally distributed to a.
2
Outwitting Develo
p
ed
Nations
This is the text ofa lecture addressed in the summer of 1968
to the Kuchiching meeting ofthe Canadian Foriegn Polcy Asso
dation. I have not revied the text even where today I would use
di erent language or a dif erent emphais. It i a reminder of
where m) thought has evolved from.
It is now common to demand that the rich nations conver their
war machine into a program for the development of the Third
World. The poorer four-ffths of humanity multiply unchecked
while their per capita consumption actually decline. Ths pop
ulation expansion and decrease in consumption threten the
industralied nations, who may still, a a result, conver their
defense budgets to the economic pacifcation of poor nations.
Ad this in tum could produce ir eversible depair, beuse the
plows of the rich can do as much han as their swords. Unted
States trcks c do more lastng damage than United States
tanks. It is esier to create mass demand for the faner than
for the latter. Only a miorty nees heavy weapons, while a
majority can become dependent on unrealistic levels of supply
for such productive machine as modem trocks. Once the Thrd
World ha become a mas market for the goods, product, and
processes which are deigned by the rch for themselve, the
discrepancy between demand for these Weter arifacts and
the supply wl increse indefitely. The family cr canot
drve the poor into the jet age, nor can a school system provide
the poor with education, nor c the family refrgerator ensure
healthy food for them.
OUTWITING DEVELOPED NATIONS 55
It is evident that only one man in ten thousand in Latin
America can aford a Cadillac, a hear operation, or a Ph.D.
This restriction on the goals of development does not make us
despair of the fate of the Third World, and the reason is simple.
We have not yet come to conceive of a Cadillac as necessary for
good trasporation, or
of a he operation as noral health
cae, or of a Ph.D. as the prerequisite of an acceptable educa
tion. In fact, we reognize at once that the importation of
Cadillacs should be heavily taxed in Per, that an organ-trans
plant clinic is a scandalous playhing to justify the concentra
tion of more doctors in Bogota, and that a betatron is beyond
the teaching facilities of the University of Sao Paulo.
Unfortunately it is not held to be universally evident that the
majorty of Latin Amercas-not only of our generation but
also of the next and the next again-annot aford any kind of
automobile, or any kind of hospitalization, or for that matter
an elementar school education. We suppress our conscious
nes of this obvious reality because we hate to recognie the
comer into which our imagination has been pushed. So persua
sive is the power of the institutions we have created that they
shape not only our preferences but actually our sense of pos
sibilities. We have forgotten how to speak about modem trans
portion that doe not rely on automobiles and airlanes. Our
conception of modem health care emphaize our ability to
prolong the lives of the desperately i. We have become unable
to thin of better education except i ters of more complex
schools and of teachers trained for ever longer perods. Huge
institutions producing costly serices dominate the horizons of
our inventivenes.
We have embodied our world-view in our institutions and are
now their prisoners. Factorie, news media, hospitals, gover
ments, and schools produce goods and serice packaged to
contain our view of the world. Wethe rch-onceive of prog
ress as the expansion of these establishments. We conceive of
heightened mobility as luxury and safety packaged by General
Motors or Boeing. We conceive of improving the general well
bing a increing the supply of doctors and hospitals, which
package health along with protracted suferng. We have. come
56
to
identify our need for furher learing with the demand for
eve
r longer confnement to classrooms. In other words, we have
packaged education with custodial care, cerification for jobs,
and the rght to vote, and wrapped them all together with
indoctrnation in the Christian, liberal, or communist virte.
In less than a hundred yeas industral society has molded
patent solutions to basic human needs and convered us to the
belief that man's nee were shaped by the Creator a demad
for the products we have invented. This is as tre for Russia and
Japan as for the North Atlantic community. The consumer is
trained for obsolecence, which means continuing loyalty to the
sae producers who will give him the same basic package in
diferent quality or new wrappings.
Idustralized societie can provide such packages for per
sonal consumption for most of their citizens, but this is no proof
that these societie are sane or economical, or that they promote
life. The contrar is tre. The more the citien is trained in the
consumption of packaged goods and serices, the less efective
he seems to become i shaping his environment. His energies
and fnances ae consumed in procuring ever newer models of
his staple, and the environment become a by-product of his
own consumption habits.
The deign of the "package deals" of whch I speak i the
main cause of the high cost of satisfing baic needs. So long
as ever man "needs" his car, our cities must endure longer
trafc jams and absurdly expensive remedies to relieve them. So
long as helth mens maximum length of surival, our sick will
get ever more extraordinary surgical interentions ad the
drgs required to deaden their consequent pain. So long as we
want to use school to get children out of their paents' hair or
to keep them of the stret and out of the labor force, our young
will be retained in endless schooling and wil need ever incre
ing incentive to edure the ordeal.
Rch nations now benevolently impose a straitjacket of trafc
jams, hospital confnements, and classrooms on the poor na
tions, and by interationa ageement cal this "development."
Te rch and schoole ad old of the world tr to share tei
dubious blessings by foistig their prepackaged solutions onto
OUTWITiNG DEVELOPED NATIONS 57
the Third World. Trafc jams develop in Sao Paulo while al
most a million norheater Brazilians fee the drought by walk
ing fve hundred miles. Latin Amer doctors get training at
the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, which they apply
to only a few, while amoebic dysenter remains endemic in
slums where 90 per cent of the population live. A tiny minorty
get advanced education in basic science in Norh America-not
infrequently paid for by their own goverments. If they retur
at all to Bolivia, they become second-rate techers of preten
tious subject at L Paz or Cochabamba. The rch expor out
dated versions of their standard models.
The Aliance for Progess is a good example of benevolent
production for underdevelopment. Contrary to it slogans, it
did succeed-a an alliance for the progress of the consuming
classe, and for the domestication of the Latin Amercan
masse. The aliace has been a major step in moderizg the
consumption patters of the middle clase in South Aerc
by integrating them with the dominant culture of the Norh
American metropolis. At the same time, the alliance ha mod
erized the apirations of the majority of citizens and fxed their
demands on unavailable products.
Each car that Brazil put on the road denie ffty people good
transportion by bus. Each merchadised refrgerator reuce
the chance of building a community freezer. Ever dollar spent
in Latin America on doctor and hospitals costs a hundred
lives, to adopt a phrae of Jorge de Aumada, the brlliat
Chilea economist. Had each dollar been spent on providing
safe drnkng water, a hundred lives could have been saved.
Each dollar spent on schooling means more prvileges for the
few at the cost of the many; at bet it increase the number of
those who, before dropping out, have been taught that those
who stay longer have eaed the rght to more power, wealth,
ad prestige. Wat such schooling doe is to teach the schooled
the superiority of the btter schoole.
All Latin Amercan countrie are frantically intent on ex
panding their school systems. No countr now spends les than
the euivalent of 0 pr cet of t-derved public income on
educaton-which mens schoolig-and many countrie
58
spen
d almost double that. But even with thee huge invet
ments, no countr yet succeeds in giving fve full yea:s of educa
tion to more than one-third of its population; supply and de
mand for schooling grow geometrically apar. And what is true
about schooling is equally true about the products of most
institutions in the proces of moderization i the Thd World.
Continued technological refnements of products which are
already etablished on the market frequently beneft the pro
ducer far more than the consumer. The more complex produc
tion proceses tend to enable only the largest producer to re
place outmoded models continually, and to focus the demad
of the consumer on the marginal improvement of what he buys,
no matter what the concomitant side efects: higher prces,
diminished life-span, less general usefulnes, higher cost of re
pairs. Think of the multiple uses for a simple can opener,
wheres an electric one, if it works at all, opens only some kds
of cans, and costs one hundred time a much.
This is equally true for a piee of agrcultral machiner and
for an academic degee. The Midweter faer can become
convinced of his need for a four-axle vehicle whch can go 70
mph on the highways, ha an electric windshield wiper ad
upholstered seats, and c be tured in for a new one withn a
year or two. Most of the world's farers do not need such
speed, nor have they ever met with such comfor, nor are they
interested in obsolescence. They need low-prced transpor, in
a world where time is not money, where manual wipers sufce,
and where a piece of hevy equipment should outlat a genera
tion. Such a mechanical donkey requires entirely diferent engi
neering and design than one produced for the United Stte
market. This vehicle is not in production.
Most of South Amerca nees paramedical workers who can
function for indefnite periods without the superision of a
M.D. Instead of establishing a process to train midwive and
visiting healers who know how to use a very limited arsenal of
medicines while working idependently, Latin American un
versities etablish every yer a new school of specialized nuring
or nursing administration to prepare profesionals who cn
fnction only in a hospital, and pharacists who know how to
sell incresingly more dangerous drgs.
OUTWITINC DEVELPED NATIONS
59
The world is reaching an impasse where two processes con
verge: ever more men have fewer basic choices. The increase in
population is widely publicized and. creates panic. The decrease
in fundamental choice cause anguish and is consistently over
looke. The population explosion overhelms the imagination,
but the progresive atrophy of social imagination is rationalized
as an icree of choice between brads. The two procese
converge i a dead end: the population explosion provide more
consumers for everything from food to contraceptives, while
our shrnking imagination can conceive of no other ways of
satisfying their demands except through the packages now on
sale in the admired societie.
I will focus successively on thee two factor, since, in my
opinion, they for the two coordinates which together perit
us to defne underdevelopment.
In most Third World countres, the population grows, and
so doe the middle class. Income, consumption, and the well
being of the middle class are all growing while the gap between
this clas and the mass of people widens. Even where per capita
consumption is risig, the majorty of men have les food now
than in 43,less actul care in sickes, less meaningful work,
les protetion. This is parly a consequence of polarzed con
sumption and parly caused by the brekdown of the traditional
family and culture. More people sufer from hunger, pain, and
exposure i 1969 than they did at the end of World War II, not
only numerically, but also as a percentage of the world popula
tion.
These concrete consequences of underdevelopment are ram
pant; but underdevelopment is also a state of mind, and under
stnding it as a state of mind, or as a for of consciousnes, is
the critical problem. Underdevelopment as a stte of mind
occurs when mas needs are convered to the demand for new
brands of packaged solutions which are forever beyond the
reach of the majority. Underdevelopment in this sense is rising
rapidly even in countries where the supply of classrooms, calo
re, cars, and clinic is also rising. The ruling groups in these
countre build up serices which have been deigned for an
afuent culture; once they have monopolized demand in this
way, they ca never satisfy majorty needs.
60
Un
derdevelopment as a fon of consciousness is an extreme
reult
of what we can call in the language of both Marx and
Freud Verdinglchung, or reifcation. By reifcation I men the
ha
r
dening of the perception of real needs into the demand for
mass-manufactured products. I me the translation of thirst
into the need for a Coke. This kind of reifcation occurs in the
manipulation of prmary human neds by vast bureaucratic
organizations which have succeeded in dominating the imagi
nation of potential consumers.
Let me retur to my example taken from the feld of educa
tion. The intense promotion of schooling leads to so close an
identification of school attendance and education that in every
day language the two ters are interchangeable. Once the
imagination of an entire population ha been "schooled," or
indoctrated to believe that school has a monopoly on foral
education, then the illiterate can be taxed to provide free high
school and university education for the children of the rich.
Underdevelopment is the reult of rsing levels of apiration
achieved through the intensive marketing of "patent" products.
In this sense, the dynamic underdevelopment that unow taking
place is the exact opposite of what I believe education to be:
naely, the awakening awareness of new levels of human po
tential and the use of one's creative powers to foster human life.
Underdevelopment, however, implies the surrender of social
consciousnes to prepackaged solutions.
The proces by which the marketing of "foreign" products
increase underdevelopment is frequently undertood in the
most supercial ways. The same man who feels indignation at
the sight of a Coca-Cola plant in a Latin Amercan slum often
feels pride at the sight of a new noral school growing up
alongside. He reents the evidence of a foreign "license" at
tached to a sof drink which he would like to see replaced by
"Cola-Mex. " But the same man is willing to impose schooling
-at all cost-n his fellow citizens, and is unaware of the
invisible license by which this institution is deeply enmehed in
the world market.
Some yers ago I watche worken putting up a sixty-foot
Coca-Cola sign on a deser plain in the Mexquital. A serous
OUTWITING DEVELOPED NATIONS
61
drought and famine had just swept over the Mexican highland.
My host, a poor Indian in lxmiquilpan, had just ofered his
visitors a tiny tequila glass of the costly black sugar-water.
When I recall this scene I still feel anger; but I feel much more
incensed when I remember UNECO meetings at which well
meaning and well-paid bureaucrats serously discusse Latin
Amerca school curricula, and when I think of the speeche
of enthusiastic liberas advocating the need for more schools.
The fraud perpetrated by the salemen of schools is less
obvious but much more fundamental than the self-satisfied
salemanship of the Coca-Cola or Ford repreentative, because
the schoolman hooks his people on a much more demanding
drg. Elementary school attendance is not a harless luxury,
but more like the coca chewing of the Anden Indian, which
haese the worker to the boss.
The higher the dose of schooling an individual has received,
the more depressing his experence of withdrawal. The seventh-
grade dropout feels his iferorty much more acutely than the
dropout from the third grade. The schools of the Thrd World
adinister their opiu with much more efect than the
churche of other epochs. the mind of a society is progre
sively schooled, step by step its individuals lose their sense that
it might be possible to live without being inferor to others.
the majority shifs from the land into the city, the hereditry
inferorty of the peon is replaced by the inferorty of the school
dropout who is held peronally responsible for his falure.
Schools rationalize the divine origi of social stratifction with
much more rgor than churches have ever done.
Until this day no Latin American country has declare
youthful underconsumers of Coca-Cola or c to be lawbreak
er, while all Latin Amercan countre have passed laws which
defne the erly dropout as a citizen who ha not fulflled his
legal obligations. The Brazilian goverment recently almost
doubled the number of years during which schooling is legally
compulsor and free. From now on any Brazilian dropout
uder the age of sixteen will b faced durng his lifetime with
the reproach that he did not take advatage of a legally obliga
tory prvilege. This law was passed in a countr where not even
63
the most optimistic could foresee the day when such levels of
schooling would be provided for only 25 per cent of the young.
The adoption of interational standards of schooling forever
condemns most Latin Americans to marginality or exclusion
from social life-in a word, underdevelopment.
The translation of social goals into levels of consumption is
not limited to only a few countries. Across all frontiers of
culture, ideology, and geography today, nations are moving
toward the establishment of their own car factories, their own
medic and noral schools-and most of these are, at best,
poor imitations of foreign and largely North American models.
The Third World is in need of a profound revolution of its
institutions. The revolutions of the last generation were over
whelmingly political. A new group of men with a new set of
ideological justifications assumed power to administer funda
mentally the same scholastic, medical, and market institutions
in the interest of a new goup of client. Since the institutions
have not radically changed, the new group of clent remains
approximately the same size as that previously served. This
appears clearly in the case of education. Per pupil costs of
schooling are today comparable everhere since the stndads
used to evaluate the quality of schooling tend to be interation
ally shared. Access to publicly fnanced education, considered
as access to school, everywhere depends on per capita income.
(Places like China and Norh Vietnam might be meaningful
exceptions.)
Everywhere in the Third World moder institutions are
grossly unproductive, with respect to the egalitarian purpose
for which they are being reproduced. But so long a the social
imagination of the majorty has not been destroyed by its fxa
tion on thee institutions, there is more hope of planning an
institutional revolution in the Third World than among the
rich. Hence the urgency of the task of developing workable
alteratives to "moder" solutions.
Underdevelopment is at the point of becoming chronic in
many countre. The revolution of which I speak must begn to
take place before this happens. Education again ofers a good
example: chronic educational underdevelopment occurs when
OUTWITING DEVELOPED NATIONS 63
the demand for schooling become so widespred that the total
concentration of educational reources on the school system
becomes a unanimous political demand. At this point the sepa
ration of education from schooling becomes impossible.
The only feasible answer to ever increasing underdevelop
ment is a reponse to baic needs that is planned a a long-range
goal for areas which will always have a diferent capital struc
ture. It is eaier to speak about alteratives to existing institu
tions, serice, and products than to defne them with precision.
It is not my purose either to paint a utopia or to engage in
scrpting scenaros for an alterate future. We must be satisfied
with examples indicating simple directions that research should
take.
Some such examples have already been given. Buses are alter
natives to a multitude of private cars. Vehicl designed for
slow trasportation on rough terrain are alteratives to stan
dard trck. Safe water is a alterative to high-prced surger.
Meical workers are a alterative to doctors and nurse. Com
munity food storage is an alterative to expensive kitchen
equipment. Other alteratives could be discussed by the dozen.
Why not, for exaple, consider walking as a long-range alter
native to locomotion by machine ad explore the demands
which UH would impose on the city planner? And why can't
the building of shelters be standardized, element be precast,
and ech citizen be obliged to le i a year of publc serice
how to contruct his own sanitar housing?
It is hader to speak about aterative in education, parly
because schools have recently so completely pre-mpted the
available educational reources of good will, imagination, and
money. But even here we can indicate the direction in which
research must be conducted.
At preent, schooling is conceived as graded, curricular class
attendance by children, for about one thousand hours yerly
during an uninterrpted succession of years. On the average,
Latin American countres can provide each citizen with be
tween eight and thiry months of this serice. Why not, instead,
mae one or two months a year obligatory for all citizens below
the age of thiry?
64
Mone
y is now spent largely on children, but an adult can be
taught t
o read in one-tenth the time and for one-tenth the cost
it takes to teach a child. In the cae of the adult there is a
immediate retur on the investment, whether the main impor
tance of his learing is seen in his new insight, political aware
nes, and willinges to assume reponsibility for his family's
size and future, or whether the emphais is placed on increased
productivity. There is a double retur in the case of the adult,
because he can contribute not only to the education of his
children but to that of other adults as well. In spite of thee
advantage, basic literacy programs have little or no suppor in
Latin Amerca, where schools have a frst call on all public
resources. Worse, these programs are actually rthlessly sup
pressed in Brail and elsewhere, where militar support of the
feudal or industral oligarchy has thrown of its forer benevo
lent disguise.
Another possibility is harder to define, because there is a yet
no example to point to. We must therefore imagine the use of
public reource for education distributed in such a way a to
give every citizen a minium chance. Education will beome
a politicl concer of the majorty of voters only when each
individual has a precise sense of the euctional reource that
are owing to him-and some idea of how to sue for them.
Something like a universal GI Bill of Rights could be iaged,
dividig the public reouce assigne to education by the num
ber of children who are legally of school age, ad making sure
that a chid who did not take advantage of his credit at the age
of seven, eight, or nne would have the accumulate beneft at
hs disposal at age
.
ten.
Wat would the pitiful eucation credit which a Latin
American republic could ofer to its children provide? Almost
all of the basic supply of books, pictures, blocks, game, ad
toys that are totally absent from the homes of the relly poor,
but enable a middle-class child to lear the alphabet, the colors,
shape, and other classe of objects and experiences which en
sure his educational proges. The choice between thee thgs
and schools is obvious. Unfortnately, the poor, for whom
alone the choice is rel, never get to exercise this choice.
65
Defining alteratives to the products and institutions which
now pre-empt the feld is difcult, not only, as I have been
trying to show, because these prQducts ad institutions shape
our conception of reality itself, but also because the constrc
tion of new possibilities requires a concentration of will and
intellgence in a higher degree than ordinarly occurs by chance.
This concentration of will and intelligence on the solution of
parcular problems regardless of their nature we have become
accustomed over the last century to call reserch.
I must make clear, however, what kind of research I am
talking about. I am not talking about basic reserch either in
physics, enginering, genetics, medicine, or learing. The work
of such men as F. H. C. Crick, Jean Piaget, and Murray Gell
Mann may contnue to enlarge our horzons in other fields of
science. The labs and libraries and specially trained collabora
tors thee men need cause them to congregate in the few re
search capitals of the world. Their research can provide the
bais for new work on practically any product.
I am not speking here of the billions of dollars annually
spent on applied research, for this money is largely spent by
existing institutions on the perfection and marketing of their
own product. Applied reerch is money spent on making
planes faster and airorts safer; on making medicine more
specifc and powerful and doctors capable of handling their
dedly side efects; on packaging more learing into classrooms;
on methods for admiisterng large bureaucracies. This is the
kind of reearch for which some knd of counterfoil must some
how be developed if we are to have any chanc to come up with
basic alterative to the automobile, the hospital, and the
school, and any of the many other so-called "evidently nece
sar implements for modem life."
I have i mind a diferent, and peculiarly difcult, kind of
research, which has been largely neglected up to now, for obvi
ous reasons. I am calling for reearch on alteratives to the
products which now dominate the market; to hospitals and the
professions dedicated to keeping the sick alive; to schools and
the packagig process which refuse education to those who are
not of the right age, who have not gone through the rght
66
cu
r
icu
lum, who have not sat in a classroom a sufcient number
of successive hours, who will not pay for their leing with
submis
sion to custodial care, screening, and cerifcation or
with indoctrination in the values of the dominant elite.
This counterreech on fundamental alteratives to curent
prepackaged solutions is the element most critically neeed if
the poor nations are to have a livable future. Such counter
research is distinct from most of the work done in the name of
"the yer 20," because most of that work seeks radica
changes in social patters through adjutments in the organiza
tion of an already advanced technology. The counterresearch of
which I speak must take a one of its assumptions the continued
lack of capital in the Third World.
The difculties of such reearch are obvous. The reeacher
must fst of all doubt what is obvious to every eye. Seond, he
must persuade those who have the power of decision to act
against their own short-run interets or brg presure on them
to do so. And fally, he must surive a an individua in a world
he is attempting to chage fndamentaly so that m felows
among the prvileged mnority see him a detroyer ofth ver
ground on which all of us stad. He knows that i he should
succeed in the interet of the poor, technologically advanc
societie still might envy the "poor" who adopt this vision.
There is a normal course for those who make development
polcie, whether they live in Norh or South Aerca i
Russia or Israel. It is to defne development ad to set its goals
in ways with which they are famliar, which they are accus
tomed to use in order to satisfy their own needs, and which
perit them to work through the institutions over which they
have power or control. This forula has failed, and must fail.
There is not enough money in the world for develQpment to
succeed along thee lines, not even in the combined arms and
space budgets of the superowers.
An analogous course is followed by those who are tring to
make politicl revolutions, epeialy in the Third World. Usu
ally they promise to make the familar privilege of the preent
elites, such a schooling ad hospitl care, accesible to all
citizens; and they bae this vain promise on the belief that a
7
change in political regime will permit them to sufciently en
large the institutions that produce thee privileges. The promise
and appeal of the revolutionary are therefore just as threatened
by the counterresearch I propose as is the market of the now
dominant producers.
In Vietna a people on bicycles and armed with sharened
bamboo sticks have brought to a standstill the most advanced
machiner for reearch and production ever devised. We must
seek survival in a Third World in which human ingenuity can
peacefully outwit machined might. The only way to reverse the
disastrous trend to increasing underdevelopment, hard as it is,
is to lear to laugh at accepted solutions in order to change the
demands which make them necessar. Only free men can
change thei minds and be surprsed; and while no men are
completely free, some ae freer than others.
3
^ LIEU OF EDUCATION
During the late sities I conducted a series ofseminars at the
Centro Intercultural de Documentaci6n (CIDOC) in Cuer
navaca, Mexico, .that dealt with the monopoly ofthe industrial
mode ofproduction and with conceptual alteratives that would
ft a postindustrial age The frst industral sector that I analyed
was the school sstem and it presumed output education. Seven
papers written during thi period were publshed in 1971 under
the title Deschooling Society. From the reaction to that book
I saw that my decrption ofthe undesirable latent function of
compulsor schol (the "hidden curculum" ofschoolng wa
being abused not onl by the promoters ofso-called free schol
but even more by schoolmater who were anxious to tranmo
grf themselves into adult educator
Tefollowingessay wa written in mid-1971. I here init that
the alterative to the dependence ofa societ on its schools i not
the creation ofnew devices to mak6 people lear what epert
have decided they need to know, rather, it i the creation ofa
radically new relationship beteen human beings and their envi
ronment. A societ committed to high levels ofshared learing
and personal intercoure, free yet critical cannot eist unles it
sets pedagogically motivated constraint on it inttutional and
industrial growth.
For generations we have tred to make the world a better plac
by providing more and more schooling, but so fa 66BdNV0t
h8 failed. What we . have leed instead is that forcing all
children to climb an open-ended euction ladder cnnot en-
IN LIEU OF EDUCATION 69
hance equality but must favor the individual who stars out
elier, healthier,. or better prepared; that enforced instrction
deadens for most people the will .for independent learing; and
that knowledge treated as a commodity, delivered in package,
and accepted as private property once it is acquired must al
ways be scarce.
People have suddenly become aware that public education by
means of compulsory schooling has lost its social, its pedagogi
cal, and its economic legitimacy. In response, crtics of the
educational system are now proposing strong and unorhodox
remedie that range from the voucher plan, which would enable
each person to buy the education of his choice on an open
market, to shifting the responsibility for educaton from the
school to the media ad to apprenticehip on the job. Some
individuals foreee that the school will have to be disestablished
just as the Church wa disetablished all over the world during
the lat two centures. Other reforers propose to replace the
universal school with varous new systems that would, they
clam, better prepare everbody for life in modem society.
Thee proposals for new educational institutions fall into three
broad categorie: the reforation of the clasroom within the
school system; the dispersal of fee clasrooms throughout soci
ety; and the transforation of all society into one huge clas
room. But these three approache-the refored classroom,
the free cJasrom, and the world-wide classroom-represent
three stage in a propose escalation of education in which each
step threatens more subtle and more peraive social control
than the one it replace.
I believe that the disestablishment of the school ha become
inevtable and that this end of a illusion should fll us with
hope. But I also believe that the end of the age of schooling"
could usher i the epoch of a global schoolhouse that would be
distingishable only i name from a global madhouse or a
global prson in which education, correction, and adjustment
bee synonymous. I therefore believe that the breakdown of
the school force us to look beyond its imminent demise and to
face fndaent aterative i eduction. Either we c work
for new ad ferome educational devices that teach about a
T0
worl
d which progressively beome more opaque and forbid
ding
for man, or we can set the conditions for a new era in
which technology would be used to make society more simple
and
transparent, so that all men could once again know the
facts and use the tools that shape their live. In shor, we can
disestablish schools or we can deschool cultre.
THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM
In order to see clearly the alterative we face, we must frst
distinguish learing from schooling, which means separating
the humanistic goal of the teacher from the impact of the
invariant strcture of the school. This hidden strcture consti
tutes a course of instrction that remains forever beyond the
control of the teacher or of the school board. It neesarily
conveys the message that only through schooling ca an indi
vidual prepae for adulthood in society, that what is not taught
in school is of little value, and that what is leed outside
school is not worth kowing. I call it the hidden curriculum
becuse it constitutes the unalterable framework of the school
ing system, within which all changes in the visible curculum
are made.
The hidden curriculum is always the same regardles of
school or place. It require all children of a certa age to
asemble in groups of about thirty, under the authority of a
cerified techer, for some 50 or 1,0or more hours per yea.
It does not matter whether the curriculum is deiged to teach
the principles of fascism, liberalism, Catholicism, socialsm, or
liberation, so long as the institution claims the authority to
defne which activities are lptimate "education." Iidoe -not
matter whether the purose of the school is to produce Soviet
or United Stte citizens, mechanics, or doctor, so long as you
cannot be a legitimate citizen or doctor unles you are a gradu
ate. It make no diference where the meetings occur-in the
auto repair shop, the legislature, or the hospitl-so long a
they are understood a attendance.
Wat isimportant in the hidden curculum is that student
IN LIEU OF EDUCTION
71
lear that tducation is valuable whe
n
it is acquired in the school
through a graded proces of consumption; that the degree of
succes the individual will enjoy in society depends on the
amount of learing he consumes; and that learing about the
world is more valuable than leing from the world. The
imposition of this hidden currculum within an educational
program distinguishes schooling from other forms of planned
education. All the world's school systems have common char
acteristics as distinguished from their institutional output, and
thee are the reult of the common hidden curriculum of all
schools.
It must be clearly understood that the hidden curriculum
translate learing from an .ctivity into a commodity for which
tool monopolize m
ark
et.
Th
e
.
name we now give to
this commodity is "education," a quantifable and cumulative
output of a professionally deigned institution called school,
whose value can be measured by the duration and the costliness
of the application of a process (the hidden curriculum) to the
student. The grammar school teacher with an M.A. commands
a greater salary than one with fewer hours of academic credit,
regardles of the relevance of the degree to the tak of teaching.
In a"schooled" countre knowledge is regarded a the frst
necessity for survival, but also as a form of curency more liquid
tha rubles or dollars. We have become accustomed, through
Karl Marx's wrtings, to speak of the alienation of the worker
from his work in a class society. We must now recognize the
etrangement of man from his lering when it become the
product of a serice profesion and he becomes the consumer.
The more education an individual consume, the more
"kowledge stock" he acquire and the higher he rses in the
hierarchy of knowledge capitalists. Education thus defnes a
new class strcture for society within whi
:
large co
n
sum
ers of knowledgethose who have acquired greater quantities
of knowledge stock-an claim to be of superior value to soci
ety. They represent gilt-edged securities in a society's porfolio
of human capital, and acces to the more powerful or scarcer
tools of production is reered to them.
The hidden curculum thus both defnes and measure what
72
edu
cation is, and to what level of productivity it entitle the
con
sumer. It sere a a rationale for the growing corelation
between jobs and coresponding privilegewhich trslate
into personal income in some societie and into direct claims to
time-saving serices, further education, and pretige i others.
(his point is epecially important in the light of the lack of
correspondence between schooling and occupational compe
tence established in studies such as Ivar Berg's Education and
Jobs: The Great Training Robber [ew York, 1970].)
The endeavor to put all men though succesive stage of
enlightenment is rooted deeply in alchemy, the Gret Pof the
waning Middle Ages. John Amos Comenius (1 592-1 670), a
Moravian bishop, self-styled pansophist, and pedagogue, is
rightly considered one of the founders of modem schools. He
was among the frst to propose seven to twelve grades of com
pulsory learing. In his Didactica magna, he described schools
as devices to "teach everybody everything" and outlined a blue
prnt for an asembly-line production of knowledge, which ac
cording to his ideas would make education cheaper and better
and make growth into fll humanty possible for all. But
Comenius was not only an erly efciency exper; he wa a
alchemist who adopted the technical laguage of hs craf to
decrbe the art of rerng children. The alchemst sought to
refne base elements by conducting their distilled spirts
through seven succesive stages of sublimation, so that for their
own and all the world's benefit they might be transmuted into
gold. Of course, the alchemsts failed no matter how often they
tried, but ech time their "science" yielde new reaons for
their failure, and tey tred agai.
Pedagogy opened a new chapter in the history of the Ar
Magna. Education became the search for an alchemic proces
that would bring forh a new type of man, who would ft into
an environment created by scientifc magic. But no matter how
much each generation spent on its schools, it always tured out
that the maority of people were unfit for enlightenet by this
process and had to b discaded as unprepare for life in a
man-mae .. world.
Educational reforer who accept the idea that schools have
I LIEU OF EDUCATION
73
failed fall into thre groups. The most repetble are cerainly
the great maters of alchemy who promise better schools. The
most seuctive are the popular magicians who promise to make
ever kitchen into an alchemical laboratory. Ihe most sinister
are the new masons of the universe who wan'to transfor the
'
entire world into one huge temple of learing)
Notable among today's masters of alchemy are cerain re
search directors employed or sponsored by the large founda
tions who believe that schools, if they could somehow be im
proved, could also become economically more feasible than
those that are now in trouble, and simultaneously could sell a
larger package of serice. Those who are concered mainly
with the curiculum claim that it is outdated or irelevant. So,
the curriculum is filled with new packaged courses on Afrcan
Culture, North Aerican Imperialism, Women's Lib, Pollu
tion, or the Consumer Society. Passive learing is wrong-it is,
indeed-so students are graciously allowed to decide what and
how tey want to be taught. Schools are prison house; there
fore principals are authorzed to approve techouts, moving the
school desks to a roped-of Halem street. Sensitivity traiing
become fahionable, so we import group therapy into the class
room. School, which wa supposed to teach everbody every
thing, now become all things to all children.
Other crtics insist that schools make inefcient use of mod
er science. Some would admiister drgs to make it eier for
the instrctor to chage the child's behavior. Others would
transfor school into 8 stadium for eductional gaming. Still
others would electrf the classroom. If they are simplistic disci
ple of McLuhan, they replac blackboards and textbooks with
multimedia happenings; if they folow Skinner, they claim to be
able to modify behavior more efciently than old-fashioned
classroom practitioners.
Most of thee chage have, of course, some good efects. The
expermental schools have fewer trants. Paents do have a
greter feeling of paricipation in a decentralized district. Pupils
asigned by thei techer to a apprenticeship often do tum
out more cmpetent than those who stay in the classroom.
Some children do improve their knowledge of Spanish in the
74
lan
gUage lab because they prefer playing with the knobs of a
tape recorder to conversing with their Puero Rc peers. Yet
all these improvements operate withn preictably narrow lim
its, since they leave the hidden curculu intact.
Some reforers would like to shake loose from the hidden
currculum of public schools, but they rarely suceed. Fre
schools that lead to further free schools produc a mirage of
freedom, even though the chain of attendnce is often inter
rpted by long stretches of loafng. Attendance through seduc
tion inculcates the need for educational treatment more persua
sively than reluctant attendance enforced by a trant ofcer.
Perissive teachers in a padded classroom can easiy render
their pupils impotent to survive once they leave.
Learing in these schools ofen remains nothing more than
the acquisition of socialy valued skl s defned, in this instance,
by the consensus of a commune rather tha by the decree of a
school board. New prebyter is but old priet wrt large.
Free schools, to be trly free, must meet two conditions: frt,
they must be rn in such a way to prevent the reintroducton
of the hidden curriculum of grade atendace and certifed
students stdying at the feet of cerifed teachers. And more
iporant, they must provide a framework in which al parici
pants, stf and pupils, c free themelve from the hidden
assumptions of a schooled society. The first condition is fre
quently stated in the aims of a free school. The second condition
i only rarely recognize and is difcult to state a the goa of
a free school.
THE HIDEN ASSUMTIONS
OF EDUCATION
It is usefu to distinguish between the hidden currculum,
which I have decribed, and the occult foundations of school
ing. The hidden curriculum is a rtual that can be considered
the ofcial initiation into moder society, institutionally etb
lished thro:gh the school. It is the purose of this rtua to hide
from its paricipants the contradictions between the myth of an
IN LIEU OF EDUCATION
76
egalitarian society and the class-conscious reality it cerifes.
Once they are recognized as such, rtuas lose their power, and
this is what is now beginning to happen to schoolng. But there
are cerin fndamental assumptions about gowing up- the
occult foundations-which now fnd their expresion in the
ceremonial of schooling, and which could esily be reinforced
by what fre schools do.
On frt sight, any generalization about free schools seems
rash. Especially in the United States, in Canada, and in Ger
many of 1971, they ae the thousand fowers of a new spring.
Abut those expermental enterrse which claim to be educa
tional institutions, generalizations can be made. But first we
must gain some deeper insight into the relationshp betwen
schooling and education.
We often forget that the word "education" is of recent coin
age. It was unkown before the Refonation. The education of
children is frst mentioned in French in a document of 1498.
This was the year when Eramu settled in Oxford, when
Savonaola was bured at the stake in Florence, and when
Direr etched his Apocalypse, which speak to us powerully
about the sense of doom hanging over the end of the Middle
Ages. In the English language the word "education" frt ap
peared in 153the yer when Henry VIII divorced Catherine
of Aragon and when the Lutheran Church separated from
Rome at the Diet of Augsburg. In Spanish lands another cen
tur passed before the word ad idea of education became
know. I 1 632 Lope de Vega stil refers to "eduction" as a
novelty. That yer, the University of San Marcos in Lima cele
brated its sixtieth anversar. Leaing centers did exist before
the ten "education" entered common parlace. You "red"
the classic or the law; you were not educated for life.
During the sixteenth century the universal need for ustif
cation" was at the core of theologica disputes. It rationalized
politics and sered as a pretext for large-scale slaughter. The
Church splt, and it beame possible to hold widely divergent
opinons of the degree to which a men were bor sinful and
corpt and predetine. But by the early seventeenth century
a new consnsus bega to arse: the idea that man was bor
T0
inc
ompetent for society and remained so unles he wa pro
vided with .. education." Education came to mean the inverse
of vital competence. It came to mean a proces rather than the
plain knowledge of the facts and the ability to use tools which
shape a man's concrete life. Educ .amJq_men__i!tan
gible commodity that had to be(roduced for_ the eneft of all,
ana-Uiparedtothe -in-tie " manne "i" which the visible
Church forerly impared invisible grace. Justifcation in the
sight of society became the frst nesity for a man bor in
orginal stupidity, analogous to original sin.
Schooling and education are related to each other lie
Church and religion, or in more general ters, lke rtual ad
myth. The ritual created and sustains the myth; it is myo
poeic, and the myth generates the curculum through which it
is peretuated. "Education" a the designation for an al
embracing categor of social justifcation is an idea for which
we cannot fnd (outside Christia theology) a speifc analogue
in other culture. And the production of education through the
*=~ ~+&.a~
proces of schooling sets schools apar f!9_9th_e_n_ttions
tat1 tames|smii-oiher eochs. This point ust be
maeutaaiffwe-wao"cfaify te manee|agsof mtfree,
unstrcturo:ormdependent "schools . . .
To a beyond. the simple refor of the clasroom, a fre
school must avoid incorporating the hidden curiculum of
schooling which I have decrbed above. An idel fre school
trie to provide education and at the same time tres to prevent
that eduction from being used to etablish or justify a class
strcture, from becoming a rationale for measurng the pupil
against some abstract scale, ad from represing, controlling,
and cutting him down to size. But a long as the free school trie
to provide "general education," it cannot move beyond the
hidden assumptions of education.
"""^"" '
Among thee assumptions is what Peter Schrag ca s the
"im_jg_aion sxndrome," which impels u to tret apeople as
if they were newcomers who must go through a naturaltion
procs. OJ! cered onsumers of kowledge ae admited to
citgenship_. __ Meao bor.
e
qual butare.maae-equdthrough
gestation' by Alma Mater. They must b guided away from thei
natural environment and pass though a social womb in which
they are fored sufciently to fit into everyday life. Free
schools ofen peror this function better than schools of a less
seductive knd.
Free eucational establishments share with less free estab
lishments aother characteristic: theJ dep_e:onalizeJhe respon
sii!ttyJQ!_ lucation. They. pJc-8 1-tjt_li(_J!lo_copsJentis.
They peretuate the idea that teachng, if done outside the
family, ought to bdone by an agency, for which the individual
techer is but a agent. In a schoole society even the family
is reduced to an "agency of acculturation., Educational agen
cie that employ teachers to peror the cororate intent of
their boards are instruments for the depersonaliztion of inti
mate relations.
Of course, many free schools do function without accredited
teacher. By doing so, they represent a serous threat to the
etablishe teacher' unions. But they do not repreent a threat
to the professional structure of society. A school in which the
boad appoints people of its own choice to car out its educa
tional endevor even though they hold no profesional certif
cate, license, or union card is not thereby challengng the legti
macy of the teaching profesion any more than a mada,
operating in a coutr which for legal operation demands a
police license, challenges the social legitimacy of the oldet
profesion by rnning a private house.
Most techers who teach in free schools have no opporunity
to tech in their ow name. They car out the cororate tk
of teaching in the name of a board, the les transparent fnction
of teching in the name of their pupils, or the more mystical
fnction of teaching in the name of "society" at large. The best
proof of this is that most teachers in free schools spend even
more time than thei profesional colleague planning with a
committe how the school should educate. When they are faced
with the evidence of their illusion, the length of committee
meetings drves many generous teachers fom public into free
school and after one ye beyond it.
Te rhetorc of aeducational etablishments state that they
for men for something, for the ftur .. But they do not relee
T8
the
r
for this tsk before they have developed a high level of
to
ler
ance to the ways of their elders: education for life rather
than in everyday life. Few free schools can avoid doing pre
cisely this. Neverheles, they are among the most imporant
centers from which a new life-style will radiate, not because of
the efect their graduates will have, but rather because elders
who choose to bring up their children without the beneft of
propery ordained teachers frequently belong to a radical mi
nority and because their preoccupation with the rearing of their
children sustains them in their new style.
THE HIDDEN MN IN AN
EDUCATIONAL MAKET
The most dangerous category of educational reforers are
those who maintain that kowledge can be produced ad sold
much more efectively on an open market than on one con
trolled by the school. These people argue that skills can be
easily acquired from skill models if the learer is trly iter
ested in their acquisition, that idividual entitlements c pro
vide a more equa purchasing power for education. They de-.
mand a careful separation of the proces by which kowledge
is measured and cerified. Thee seem to me obvious statements.
But it would be a fallacy to believe that the etablishment of a
free market for knowledge would consttute a radical altera
tive in education
. The etablishment of a fee market would indeed abolish
what I have previously called the hidden curriculum of preent
schooling-its age-specifc attendance in a grade curiculum.
Eually, a free market would at fst give the appearance of
counteracting what I have called the occult foundations of a
schooled society+ the "immigration syndrome," the istitu
tional monopoly of teachig, and the rtual of line intiation.
But at the same time a free market in education would provide
the alchemist with innumerable hidden hads to ft ech ma
into the mtjple tight little niche a more complex technocracy
c provide.
7
Manydccad ofrcliancc on schoolinhavctumcdknl-
edge into acommodity, amarkctablcstaplcofaspccia| kind.
Knowlcisnowrcmdcdsim1tancosasarst ncccssity
andassocicty'smostprcciouscurrcncy.(Thctransfomationof
knowlcdc into a commodity is rccctcd in a conpondin
transfomonWordsm mmly1nctioncdas
vcrbs n nouns_ that_dinatc posscssions. Until
rct1y'MeIm" and "lcamin" and hcalin" dinatcd
auvticsT arcqyy !ycoccivd itr
scnic to bc dcIivcrcd. Wc talk about thc manufacturc of
m~~*
housin orthc dcIivcry ofmcdicalcarc, pcoplcarcno loncr
rcardcd as t to hcal or housc thcmsclv. In such a socicty
pcoplccomctobclicvcthatprofsionalscrvicarcmorcvalu-
ablcthanpcrsonalcarc.Instcadoflminhowtonurscrand-
mothcr,thctccn-acrlstopickctthchospitalthatdocsnot
admthcr.)Thisattitudccouldcily survivcthcdistablish-
mcnt of school, just aIiation wth a church rcmaincd a
conditionforoccIonaftcrthcadoptionofthcFirstAmcnd-
mcnt. It iscvcnmorccvdcntthatbattcncs oftcsts mcasurin
complcxknowlcdcpackacouldsiIysurvivcthcdiscstab-
lishmcnt ofschool~and alon wth thcm thc compulsion to
obliccvcqbodytoacquircaminimum packacofknowlcdc
stock. Thcscicnticmcasurcmcntofch pcrson's wonh and
thcUchcmisticdrcamofcachpcrson's"cducabilityto hs full
humanity"wouldnallycoincidc.Undcrthcappcarancc ofa
hccmarkct, thclobalviIlacwouldtumintoancnvironmcn-
t womb whcrc pcdaoic thcrapists controlIcd thc complcx
pIaccntaby which ch hum bcinwas nourishcd.
At prcnt schools limit thc tcachcr's compctcncc to thc
clsroom.Tcyprcvcnthimfromclaiminman'swholclifcas
hisdomain.Thcdcmiscofschoolwouldrcmovcthisrcstriction
dvcascmblccofIcitimacytothcl]fclonpcdaoical
invasion ofcvcrybodys pnvacy. Itwould opcn thc way for a
scramblcfor "knowlcdcon afrccmarkct,whichwouldlcad
ustowardthcparadoxofavular,albcitsccminlycaIitarian,
mcritccracy.
SchoolsarcbynomcsthconIyorthcmostccicntinstitu-
tionsthatprctcndtotranslatcinfomation,undcrstandin,and
80
wisd
om into behaLora _i__t_he_ mesurement of which i the
key to_p!!_ige_!n_p9wer. Nor ae schools the fst institutions
used
- to conver education into an entitlement. Te Chinee
mandarn system, for exaie;-was-for centuries a stable and
efective incentive for education in the serice of a relatively
open class whose privilege depended on the acquisition of mea
surable knowledge. Promotion to a scholarly rank did not pro
vide entitlement to any of the coveted jobs, but it did provide
a ticket for a public lottery at which ofce were distributed by
lot among the cerifed mandarins. No schools, much les uni
versities, developed in China until that countr began to wage
war wth European powers. The teting of idependently ac
quired measurable kowledge enabled the Chinee Empire for
three thousand years, alone among nation state in having nei
ther a tre church nor a school system, to select its goverg
elite without etablishig a large hereditar aristocrcy. Ao
to this elite wa open to the emperor's famiy and to those who
passed tests.
Voltaire ad his contemporares praised the Chinese system
of promotion through proven learing. Civil serice teting wa
introduced in France in 1791, only to be abolished by Napo
leon. It would be fascinating to speculate what would have
happened had the mandarin system been chosen to propagte
the ideals of the French Revolution, instead of the school sys
tem, which inevitably supported nationalism and military dici
pline. As it happened, Napoleon strengthened the polYtechic,
residentia school. The Jesuit model of rtual, sequentia promo
tion in a cloistered etablishment prevaied over the mdarn
system a thepreferred method by which Weter societie gave
legitimacy to ther elite.
Principals became the abbot in a world-wide chain of mon
asteries in which everbody was busy accumulating the kowl
edge necessay to enter the constantly obsolecent heave on
earth. Just as the Calvinists disestablishe monastere only to
tur all of Geneva into one, so we must fer that the disetab
lishment of school may brg forh a world-wde factor for
kowledge. _ )nles the concpt of learig or kowledge is
transfore, the disetablhment of school wll led to a wed-
I LIEU OF EDUCATION
81
ding between the mandarin system-which separate lering
fom cerifcation-and a society committed to provide therapy
for ech man until he be ripe for he glded age.
THE CONTRICTION OF SCHOOLS AS
TOOLS OF TECHNOCRATIC PROGRSS
Education for a consumer society is equivalent to consumer
training. The refor of the clasroom, the dispersal of the
clasroom, and the difsion of the classroom are diferent ways
of shapig conumer of obsolecent commoditie. The suriva
~~-~:

of a society in which technocracie can constantly redefne
human happines as the consumption of their latet product
depends on educational institutions (from schools to ads) that
traslate education into social cgntrol.
In rch countne such a the Unite State, Canada, or the
Soviet Unon, huge invetments in schooling make the institu
tional contradictions of technocratic progess very evdent. In
these countre the ideological defense of unlimited progress
rest on the claim that the equazing efects of open-ended
schooling c counteract the disequng force of constant
obsolecnce. The legitimacy of industral society itself comes
to depend on the credibility of schools, and it does not matter
if the GOP or the Comunist Pary is in power. Under thee
circumstance the publc is avid for books like Chale Silber
ma's report to the Cegie Comission, publshed a Crii
in the Clasroom (New York, 1970). Such reech inspire
confdece because of its well-documented indictment of the
preent schol, i the lght of which the insignifcant attempts
to save the system by manicurng its most obvious faults can
crete a new wave of ftile expectations.
Neithe alchemy nor magic nor maonry can solve the prob
lem of the preent crsis "in education." The deschooling of our
world-vew demands that we recogze the illegitimate . and
religious nature of the educational enterprise itself. Its hubr
lie i it attept to make ma a soial being as the reult of
hs tetent in an enginered process.
.
82
For those who subscrbe to the technocratic ethos, whatever
is technically possible must be made available at least to a few
whether they want it or not. Neither the prvation nor the
frustration of the majority counts. If cobalt treatment is possi
ble, then
the city of Tegucigalpa must have one apparatus in
each of its two major hospitals, at a cost that would free a
important par of the population of Honduras from paraite.
If supersonic speeds are possible, then some mut travel at such
speeds. If the fght to Mars can be conceived, then a rationale
must be found to make it appear a neces ity. In the technocratc
ethos povery is moderized: not only are old -Stematives
closed- of by rew monopolies, but the lack of necessitie is also
compounded by a growing distnce between those serice that
are technologically feasible and those that are i fact available
to the majorty.
A teacher turs "educator" when he adopts this technocratic
ethos. He then acts as i_e_c!i_(--re_ _!lQga enter
prise designed to make man ft into_ hatever envionment the
' 'progres" of science creates. He seems blind to the evidence
that COI!tan.. obspecence of all commodities comes at a high
price: the mounting-t of training-people to kow about them.
He seems to forget that the rising cost of tools is purchae at
a high price in education: they decrese the labor-intensivenes
of the economy and make learing on the job impossible, or at
best the privilege of a few. All over the world the cost of
educating men for society rses fter than tprductivity of
th-etire conom,, and fer people have ssene of intelligent
particpation in the commonweal.
Further investments i school everhere render the futity
of schooling monumental. Para4_.xically, _ the poor_are_ the fst
vyti_. _({ _more school. The Wrght Commission in Ontaro
had to repor to its goverment sponsors that postsecondary
education is inevitably and without remedy the disproporion
ate taxing of the poor for an education that will always b
enjoyed mainly by the rich.
Experence confirs thee warings. For several decades a
quota syst.m in the Soviet Union favored the admssion to the
universityof sons of working parents over sons of university
graduates. Nevertheless, the latter are overepreented in Rus-
83
sian gduating classes much more than they are in those of the
Unite State.
In poor countre, schools rationaliz the economic lag of a
entire nation. The majority of citizens are excluded from the
scarc mode mens of production and consumption, but long
to enter the eonomy by way of the school door. The legitimiza
ton of hierarchical distrbution of prvilege and power ha
shifted from linege, inheritace, the favor of king or pope, and
rthlenes on the maket or on the battlefeld to a more subtle
for of capitalism: the hierarchical but liberal institution of
compulsory schooling, which perts the well-schoole to im
pute guilt to the lagging consumer of knowledge for holding a
cerifcate of lower denomination. Yet this rationaliztion of
ineuality c never square with the fact, and populist regime
fnd it increasingly difcult to hide the confict between rhetorc
and reality.
For ten year Castro's Cuba ha devoted great energie to
rapid-gowh popular education, relyng on available man
power, without the usual repect for profesional creentials.
The initial spetacular succs of"this campaign, epeially in
diminishing illiteracy, have ben cite a evidence for the claim
that the slow growh rte of other Latin Aercan school sys-.
tes is due to corption, militarsm, and a capitalist market
economy. Yet now the logic of hierarchical shooling is catch
ing up with Fidel and his attempt to schol-produc the New
Man. Even when students spend half the ye in the cane felds
and fl y subscrbe to the egalitaran ideals of compaier Fidel,
the school trains ever yea a crop of self-conscious knowlege
consumers redy to move on to new levels of consumption. Also
Dr. Catro face evidence that the school system will never tum
out enough cerife technicl manpower. Those license grad
uate who do get the new jobs detroy by their conseratism the
reults obtaine by noncere cadres who muddle into their
positions through on-the-job trining. Teacher simply cannot
be blae for the failures of a revolutionar goverment that
insist on the institutional capitaliztion of manpower through
a hdden cur cuum garate to produce a univer bour
geisie.
On March 8, 1971 , an act of the Unte State Supreme
84
Co
ur made it possible to begin the legal challenge of the hidden
cur
iculum's legitimacy in that country. Expressing the unani
mous opinon of the Court in the case of Grggs et a/. vs. Duke
Power Company, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger stated that
"diplomas and tets are useful serants, but Congress has man
dated the commonsense proposition that they are not to become
masters of relity." The Chief Justice wa interreting the in
tent of Congress in the equalopporunitie section of the 1 96
Civil Rghts Act, and the Cour was ruling that any school
degee or any tet given prospective employees must "meure
the man for the job" and not the .. man in the abstract." The
burden of proving that educational requirements are a .. reson
able meaure of job perforance" rets with the employer. In
this decision, the Cour ruled only on tets and diplomas a
mens of racal discrmination, but the logic of the Chief Jus
tice's argument applie to any use of an educational pedigre as
a prereguisite for employment. Employers will fnd it difcult
to show that schooling is a necessa prerequisite for any job.
It is ey to show at it is neesar_y antidemocratic beause
it--tably discm1nates - li e- Gret Traning Reote s
-- *
'** + ++ m+
efetively exposed by Ivar Berg shquld now face repeate chal-
lenge from students, employers, and taxpayers.
THE RECOVERY OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR
TEACHING AND LEARNING
A revolution against those fors of prvilege and power that
are base on clams to profesional knowledge must star with
a transforation of consciousnes about the nature of leing.
This mens, above M, a shif of reponsibility for teaching and
leaming. /-wledge can b defned as a commodity only so
long as it is viewed as the reult of institutional enterrse or as
the flfllment of institutional objectives. WeJa_Tre_vers
.bc.e-rQnal rep_sibility for wl_l le and
tech this spll c be broken and the alienation of lerng
rrm living h-oercome.
I LIEU OF EDUCTION 85
The recovery of the power to lear or to teach mens that the
teacher who takes the rsk of intererng in somebody else's
prvate afairs also asumes reJnsibility for the reults. Simi
larly, the student who expose himself" to te infuence of a
techer must take reponsibility for his ow education. For
such puroses eunal ! ons-if they are neee at all
-idealy take the for of facility centers where one c get a
roof of the rght sizeis hed and acces to a piano or a
kiln ad to reords, books, or slide. Schools, television stations,
theater, ad the like are designed primarily for use by profes
sionals. Deschooling society mens above all the denial of pro
fessional status to the second oldet profession, namely, tech
ing. The cerifcation of techers now constitutes an undue
retriction on the rght to fre speech; the corporate strcture
and profesional pretensions of jouralism an undue restrction
on the right to a fre pres. Compulsory-attendance rle inter
fere with fre asembly. c deschoolig of society is nothing
les than a cultura muttion by which a people reover the
efectve use of its constitutional freedoms: lering and tech
ing by men who know they are bor fre rather than treted to
freom. Most peple ler most of the time when they do
whatever they enjoy; most people ae curious and want to give
meig to whatever they come in contact with; and most
peple are capable of peronal, intiate intercourse with other
unles they are stupefed by inhuma work or tured of by
schooling.
The fact that pople in rch countre do not le much
on their ow constitute no proof to the contra. Rther it
is a consequence of life in an environment from which, para
doxically, they canot ler much precisely bcause it is so
highy programme. They are constantly frstrated by the
strcture of contemporar society in which the facts that are
the bais for making decisions have become more elusive.
Tey live in an environment where tols that can be used
for cretive pu have beome luxure, an environment
where the chan els of communication allow a few to talk to
the may.
86
A NEW TECHNOLOGY RATHER THAN
A NEW EDUCATION
Durng the Kennedy years, a peculiar image appered:
knowle. stock. It then gained wide currency in eonomic
thought through Kenneth Boulding. Ts vauable social good
is viewe a the
_ cumu_ti_aCcretion ofJhe_:ental excrement

four brgJtt. a_n_d
.
bet. We here succeed in imagining an anal
''capital'; that replace the heaps of erh or gold of previous
capitalisms. Instead of bankers and brnksmen, scientists and
inforation storage and retrieval specialists guard it. Men
while, thanks to it accruement in a critical mass, it produce
. interet. A special kind of marketing speialist caled an "edu
cator" distillte the stnby aann|ing it toward those _prvi
legeenou-gito hy- acces t9 the hiher .. acl_lir!ema
tionafknowlege exchange called "school." Here, thee acquire
"knoeCgehoidqcerificaie wlidi increae the possesor's
social value. In some societie, this value translate principally
into incresed personal income, while in those where knowl
edge capital is considere too valuable to end up a prvate
property, the value translate into power, rank, ad prviege.
Such singular tretment is rationalized by the pomp due the
guardians of such stock whe they put it to furher use.
Such a view also afects the maner in which we think of
modem technology's development. A contemporar myth
would make us believe that the sense of impotence with which
most men live today is the consequence of a tehnology that
cnnot but create huge systems. But it is not tehnology that
mae systems huge, tools immensely powerfl, channels of
communiction one-diretional. Quite the contrary. Properly
controlled, technology could provide ech man with the abilty
to understand his environment better and to shape it pwerfuly
with his own hands, ad would perit hm fl intercmmuni
ction to a dege never before possible. Such an alterative use
of tehnology cntitute the centra alterative in eucation.
If a peron is to grow up he nees, ft of all, acs to thing,
b7
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88
tr
a
ce into all feld and thereby stamp teching by uncerifed
in
dividuals as quacker. There are few mechanical skills used
in industr or reearch that are 8 demading, complex, and
dangerous 8 drvng a car, a skill that most people quicky
acquire from a per. Not all people are suite for advanced
logic, yet those who are make rapid progres dthey are chal
lenge to play mathematical game at an erly age. One out of
twenty kids in Cuemavaca can beat me at Wif'n' Proof aer
a couple of weeks traing. In four months a but a small
percentage of motvated adult at our CIDOC center were able
to lear Spanish well enough to conduct academic busines in
the new language.
A frsLs_ep toward oning up access _ skills. would be to
provide varoas lnetivr sk||eIndividuals. to .. share their
knOlage.
-
Inevitably, this would rn counter to the interet of
pilds and profesions and unions. Yet multiple apprenticehip
is attractive; it provides everbody with an opporunity to le
something about almost anything. Tere is no reson why a
person should not combine the abilitie to drive a cr, repair
telephone and -toilets, act 8 a midwife, and function a an
architectural draftsman. Special-interet groups ad their disci
plined consumers would, of course, clai that the public nes
the protection of a professional guarantee. But this argument
i now stedily being chalenged by consumer-protetion a
sociations. We have to tae much more serously the objection
that economists raise to the radical soializtion of sk s: that
.. progres" will b impeded if knowledgepatents, skls, and
al the ret-is democratie. Their arguments can be faced
only if we demonstrate to them the growth rate of ftile
diseconomie generated by any existing eucational system.
Aces to people wilig to share their sks i no guatee
of leing. Such acces i restrcted not only by the monopoly
of eucational programs over leing and of unions over lic
ensing but also by a tehology of scarcity. Te skilthat count
today are know-how m the use of tools that were deige to
be scace. Tee tools produce gods or reder service that
everbody .wants but only a few c enjoy, and whch ony a
lited nuber of people know how to use. O
ny a few prv-
leged individuals out of the total number of people who have
a given disee ever beneft from the reults of sophisticated
medical tehnology, ad even fewer. doctors develop the skl to
use them.
The sme reults of meical reearch have, however, also
been employed to create a baic tool kit that perits ary and
navy mecs, with only a few months of training, to obtain
reults under battlefeld conditions that would have b n be
yond the expecttions of fll-fege doctor during World War
II. On an even simpler level, any pet girl could ler how
to diagose and treat most ifections if meical scientists pre
pare dosage and instrctions specically for a given ge
graphic area.
All thee exaple illustrate the fact that educational consid
erations alone sufce to demand a radical reduction of the
profesional strctue that now impee the relationship be
te the scientist ad the majorty of people who want acces
to science. If this demand were hee, all men could lear to
use yeterday's tools, rendere more efective and durable by
modem science, to crete tomorrow's world.
Unforunately, precisely the contrary trend prevals at pre
sent. Iknow a coatal ae in South America where most people
suppor themselve by fishing from small boat. The outboad
motor i cerainly the tool that ha chaged the live of thee
coatal fsheren most draatically. But in the are I have
sureye, half of all outboad motors that were purchae be
twe 1945 and 1950 are stil kept rnng by constnt tinker
ing, while hal the motor puchase i 1965 no longer rn
becuse they were not built to be repared. Tehnological prog
res provide the majority of peple with gadgets they cannot
a ord ad deprve them of the sipler tools they nee.
Metas, platic, and feroconcrete use in building have
greatly improve since the 194s and ought to provide more
peple the opporunity to create their own home. But while in
1948 more than 30 per cent of all one-family home in the
Unted State were owner-built, by the end of the 196 the
percntge of those who acte a their own contractor hd
dropp to les tha 20 per cent.
90
Te lowering of the skill level through so-caled economic
development has become even more visible in Latin Amerca.
Here most people still build their own homes from foor to roof.
Often they use mud in the for of adobe and thatchwork of
unsurpase utility in the moist, hot, and windy climate. In
other place they make their dwellings out of cadboard, oil
drms, and other idustrial refse. Instead of providing people
with simple tools and highly standadied, durable, ad eily
repaire components, all goverments have gone in for the
mas production of low-cost buildings. It is clear that not one
single countr can aford to provide satisfactory modem dwell
ing units for the majority of its people. Yet everhere this
policy makes it progresively more difcult for the majorty to
acquire the knowledge and skills they need to build better
house for themselve.
SELF-CHOSEN '"POVERT"
Educational considerations perit us to forulate a seond
fndamental charcteristic that any postindustrial society must
posses: a basic tool kt that by its very nature countercts
technocratic control. For eucational reons we must work
toward a society in which scientifc knowlege is incororate
i tools and components that c be used menigflly in units
small enough to be within the reach of all. Only such tools can
socialize acces to skills. Only such tools favor temporar as
sociations among those who want to use them on speifc oc
sion. Only such tools allow spcifc goals to emerge in the
proces of their use, as any tinkerer knows. Only the combina
tion of guaranteed access to facts and of lted power in most
tools render it possible to envisage a subsistence eonomy
capable of incororating the frits of modem science.
The development of such a scientifc subsistence eonomy is
unquestionably to the advatage of the overheling majorty
of the pople in poor countre. It i also the only alterative
to progive pollution, exploitation, and opaquenes in rch
countrie. But as we have see, the dethroning of GN cnnot
IN LIEU OF EDUCTION 91
be achieved without simultneously subverting GNEross
National Education, usually conceived as manpower capitiza
tion. An egalitarian economy cannt exist in a society in which
the right to produce is conferred by schools.
The feasibility of a moder subsistence economy doe not
depend on new scientifc inventions. It depends prmarly on the
ability of a society to agree on fundamental, self-chosen an
tibureucratic ad antitechnocratic retraint.
Thee retraints can take many fors, but they will not work
unless they touch the baic dimensions of life. (The decision of
the United State Congres against development of the super
sonic transport plane is one of the most encouraging steps in the
rght diretion.) The substance of thee voluntary social re
straints would bvery simple matters that could be fully under
stood and judge by any prdent man. (he issue at ste in
the SST controversy provide a good example.) All such re
straints would b chosen to promote stable and eual enjoy
ment of sientifc know-how. The French say that it take a
thousand yea to educate a pesat to deal with a cow. It
would not take two generations to help all people in Latin
America or Africa to use ad repair outboad motors, simple
crs, pumps, meicine kits, and feroconcrete machine if their
deign did not chage ever few yer. d sice a joy life
is one of constt meningful intercoure with other in a me
ingfl environment, equal enjoyment d0 translate ito equal
education.
At preent a consensus on austerty is difcult to imagine.
The reon uually given for the impotence of the majorty is
stated in ter of politicl or economic class. What is not
usually understood is that the new clas strcture of a schooled
soiety is even more powerlly controlled by vete interet.
No doubt an imperalist ad capitalist organiztion of society
provde the social strcture within which a minorty can have
disproporionate ifuence over the efective opinion of the ma
jorty. But in a tehocratic society the power of a minort of
kowledge capitlists c prevent the foration of tre public
opinion through control of scientifc kow-how Md the meia
of communiction. Constitutional gtee of fe speh,
92
fe p
res, and free asembly were met to ensure goverment
by the people. Moder eletronics, photo-fset preses, time
sharng computers, ad telephone have in prnciple provided
the hardware that could give an entirely new mening to thee
freeoms. Unfornately thee things are use in modem media
to incree the power of knowlege bankers to funnel their
program-package through interational chains to more peo
ple, insted of being use to increase true networks
.
that woud
provide equal opporunity for encounter among the member
of the maorty.
Deschooling the culture and social strcture require the use
of technology to make paricipator politics possible. Only on
the basis of a majort coalition can limits to secrey and grow
ing power be detenined without dictatorship. We need a new
environment in which growing up can be clasless, or we will
get a brave new world in which Big Brother educates us al.
4
TANTALIZING NEEDS
This essay reproduces the original text ofmy Encyclopaedia
Britnica lecture at the University ofEdinburh in early 1974.
In thi lecture I explored, in the mi"or ofmedicine, what options
are lef to a communit paralyzed in the gri ofits tool By
describing the obviously sickening power of the medical system,
I drew attention to the pardoxicaly counterproductive efective
nes ofour entirel commoditcentered culture. developed the
theme ofthi lecture through three succesive versions ofa book
Meical Nemeis: The Expropration of Health (London, 1974,
Pari, 1975, New York 1976). I preent the Edinburh lecture
here in the hope that it will remind the reader of Medical
Nemeis that the author' purpose in writing on medicine wa to
illustrate the political and institutonal inverion ofpresent-day
indutrial societ at lare.
Withn the last decade the medicl etblishment ha become
a major threat to heaf The depression, infection, disability,
and dysfunction that reult from its interention now cause
more suferng than a accident in trafc and industr. Only
the organic dage done by the industral production of food
ca rval the ill-helth induced by doctor. In addition, meical
practice sponsor sickes by the reinforcement of a morbid
societ which not only industraly preere its defective but
brees the therapist's client in a cyberetic way. Finally. the
sol e helth profesions have a indiet sickening power,
a strcturaly helth-denyng efet. They transfor pain, ill
nes, ad deth fom 8 personal challenge into a thnica
94
proble
m and thereby expropriate the potential of people to del
with their human condition in an autonomous wi
THE BACKLASH OF PROGRESS
This ultimate backlah of hygienic progres trascends all
tehnicl iatrogeneis; it exceeds the sum of proteted mal
practice, manageral negligence, and professiona callousnes
aganst which judicial redress ha become increaingly difcult;
it is rooted deeper than the maldistribution of resource for
which political remedies are still being tred; it is more global
than all diseses of medical trial and error. The profesional
expropration of helth care is the outcome of an unchecked
engineerng endeavor; it reults in the heteronomous mainte
nance of life on high levels of unhealth ad is experence a
a new kind of horror whch I cll medical nemeis.
Durng the last twenty yeas, the United State prce index
ha rsen by about 74 per cent, but the cost of medical cae has
ecalated by 330 per cent. Wile public expenditure for heth
care has incresed tenold, out-of-pocket payments for helth
serice have rsen threfold and the cost of prvate isurce
eighteenfold. Te cost of community hospitl has incree
50 per cent since 1950. The bill for patient ce i major
hospitals ha rsen even faster, trpling in eight yer. Admiis
trative expense have multipled by a factor of seven, laborator
costs by a factor of five. Building a hospita bed now costs
$65,0, of which two-thirds goe toward mechaical equp
ment wrtten of or made reundant within ten years or les. Yet
durg this same perod of unpreented infation, life expet
ancy for adult Amerca male ha declined.
The National Helth Serice in Englad ha had a compara
ble rt of cost infation, though it ha avoided some of the more
astonishing misallocations that fuel public crticsm in the
United State. Life expectancy i England ha not yet declined,
but the chonic disese of middle-age men have shown a
incree a they._did a dede elier in the Unt Stte. In the
Soviet Union, physicias and hospital days g cpita have
TANTALIZING NEEDS
95
trpled over the same perod. In Cna, afer a shor honeymoon
with modem deprofesionaliztion, the medical-tehnological
etablishment has reently grow even fater. The rate at which
peple beome dependent on physicians appers to ber no
relation to their for of goverent. These trends do not repre
sent declning marginal utilitie. They are an example of the
economics of addiction in which marginal disutilitie rse with
increing invetment. But. by itself, addiction is not yet neme
sis.
In the Unite State, central-nerous-system agents are the
fastest-growng sector of the drg market, making up 3 1 per
cent of total sale. Over the last telve years, the rise in per
capita consumption for liquor wa 23 per cent, for illegal opi
ate, about 50 per cent, and for precrbed tranquilizers, 290 per
cent. Some peple have tred to explain that this patter is due
to the peculiar way Unite State physicians recive their life
long in-service tra
n
ing: in 1970, United States drg companies
spent $4,50 in adverising per doctor to reach ech of the
350,00 practitioners. Surrsingly, the per capita use of tran
quilizer corelate with peronal income all over the world,
although in many countre the cost of the "scientifc euc
tion" of the doctor is not included in the price of the drug. But
serous a the rsing addiction to doctors ad drgs might be,
it is only one symptom of nemei.
Medcine canot do much for illnese associated with aging.
It canot cure cardiovacular disee, most cncers, arhritis,
multiple sclerosis, or advace cirhosis. Some of the pan the
aged sufer can sometime be lessened. Most tretment of the
old which require professional interetion not only heightens
their pain but, if it is sucs fl, aso protracts it. One is there
fore surrse to discover te extent to which reouce are
spent on the tetment of old age. While 10 per cent of the
United State population is over sixt-fve, 28 per cent of helth
cae expeditue ae made on behalf of this minorty. The old
are outgrowing the remainder of the population at a rte of
J per cent, while the per cpita cost of their care is rsing at a
rt of b per cnt. Gerontology te over the GN. This
mloction of mapower, reouce, ad social concer .ill
96
generate unspeakable pain as demands swell ad reources dry
up
. Y
et
it too is only a symptom, and nemeis transcends even
rtual
waste.
Since Nixon and Brezhnev agreed on scientifc cooperation
in the conquet of space, cancer, and hear disease, coronar
cae units have become symbols of peaceful progess and argu
ment for rsing taxe. They require thee times the equipment
and fve time the stneded for noral patent care; 12 per
cent of graduate nurse fnd jobs-in such units. They also dem
onstrate the meaning of profesionally conducte embezzle
ment. Large-scale studie that compare the reults of patient
care in these units with the home treatment of compaable
patients have not yet demonstrated any advantage. The thera
peutic value of hert-control stations is probably the same as
that of space fights: seen on television, both provde a rain
dace for millions, who le to trt science and ceae to care
for themselve. I happened to be in both Rio de Jaeiro ad
Lia when Dr. Chrstiaan Barard was touring there. In both
Brail ad Per, he wa able to fll the major football stadium
twice in one day with crowds who hysterically acclaime his
macabre ability to exchange human hears. Shortly aferards,
I sw well-documented tetimonie provng that the Braia
police have become the frst to use life-extension equipment in
the torure chamber. Inevitbly, when care or heng is trans
ferred to organizations or machines, therapy becomes a deth
centered rtual. But nemeis transcends even human sacrifce.
8ACKFtRtNGREMEDtE8
r
_
vention of sicknes by the interention of profesional
thrd parie ha beome a fad. Demad for it is growing.
Pregnant women, healthy children, workers, or old people are
submitted to periodic check-ups and incresingly complex diag
nostic proceure. In the proces, people are strengthene in
their conviction that they are machine whose durbility de
pends on socjal. .eign. Areview of two dozen studies shows
that thee diagnostic proceure have no ipact on morality
TANTALIZING NEEDS
97
and morbidity. In fact, they transfor helthy people into anx
ious patients, ad the health rsks associated with thee at
tempt at automated diagnosis outweigh any theoretical be
neft\ Ironically, the serous asymptomatic disorders which
. -- -^
this knd of screening alone can discover are frequently incura-
ble illneses in which early treatment aggravate the patient's
morbid condition. But nemeis transcends even terina tor
ture.
To a point, modem medicine was concered with therapeutic
engineerng-the development of strategie for surgcal, chemi
cal, or behavioral intervention in the lives of people who are
or
who might become sick. A it appears that thee interentions
do not become more efective just because they become more
costly, a new level of helth engineerng has been pushed into
the foreground. Health systems are now biased i favor of
curative and preventive meicine. New health systems are pro
posed that are biaed in favor of environmentl health manage
ment. The obsession with immunity give way to a nightmare
of hygiene. A the health-deliver system continually fails to
meet the demands made upon it, conditions now classifed a
illness might well soon be cla ied as crinal devianc. Im
pose mecl iteretion might be replaced by compulsor
re-eucation or self-crticism. The cnvergence of idividual
and . environmental hygienic enginerng now threates man
kind with a new epidemic in which constantly backfring coun
tereure are absorbed into the plague. This sickening syn
ergy of the technical and nontechnical functions of medicine is
what I c hygienic, meical, or tantalizing nemesis.
INDUSTRIAL NEMESIS
Much suferng has always been man-made: history is the
reord of enslavement and exploitation. It tells of war, and of
the pillage, famine, and petilence which come in its wake. War
betwen comonweths ad classe has so far been the main
planne agency of man-made mser. Tus, man is the only
aimal whose evolution ha been conditioned by adaptation on
98
two
fro
nts. If he did not succumb to the elements, he had to
cope vith use and abuse by others of his kind. To be cpable
of ths strggle on two frontiers, he replace instincts by char
acter and culture. A thrd frontier of possible doom has been
recognized since Homer, but common mortals were considered
immune to its threat. Nemesis, the Greek name for the doom
which thretened from this third direction, was the fate of a few
heroe who had fallen prey to envy of the gods. The common
man grew up and pershed in a strggle with nature and neigh
bor. Only the elite would challenge the limits set by nature for
man.
Prometheus wa not Everyman, but a deviant. Driven by
pleonexia, or radical greed, he transgressed the boundarie of
the human condition. In hubr, or meaureless presumption,
he brought fre from heven, and thereby brought Nemeis on
himself. He wa put into irons on a Caucaian rock. eagle
preyed on his liver, and hearlesly healing gods kept him alive
by regrafting his liver ech night. The encounter with Nemeis
made the classical hero an immortal reminder of inescapable
cosmic retaliation. He became a subject for epic tragedy, but
certly not a mode for everyday aspiration. Now Nemeis
ha beome endemic; it is te backlah of progres. Paradox
cally, it ha spread as far and as wide as the franchse, school
ing, mehanica acceleration, and medical cae. Everma has
fallen prey to envy of the gods. Ifthe specie is to survive, it can
do so only by learng to cope on this third frontier.
Most man-made misery is now the by-product of enterprse
orginally designe to protect the common man in hs strggle
with the inclemency of the environment and against waton
injustce inficted by the elite. The main source of pain, dis
ability, and death is now engneered-albeit nonintentional
haassment. The prevailing ailments, helplesnes, ad injustice
are now the side efets of strategies for progres. Nemeis is
now so prevalent that it is readily mistaken for par of the
human condition. Common to a previous ethics wa the idea
that the range of human action wa narowly circumscribed.
Techne was .a .meure trbute to necesit ad not the road
to manknd's chosen action. The deperate diability of contem-
TANTALIZING NEEDS
99
porar man to envisage an alterative to industrial aggression
upon the huma condition is an integral par of the curse from
which he sufers.
The attempt to reuce nemeis to a political or biological
proces frstrate any diagnois of the current institutional cr
sis. Any study of the so-caled limits-to-growth controversy
become ftile if it reduce nemeis to a thret which can be met
on the the to traditional frontiers. Nemesis does not lose its
specifc character simply because it has been industrialized. The
contemporar crsis of industrial society cannot be undertood
without distinguishing between intentionally exploitative ag
gresion of one class against another and the inevitable doom
implicit in any disproporionate attempt to transform the
huma condition. Our predicament cannot be understood with
out distinguishing between man-made violence ad the detrc
tive envy of the cosmos; betwen te seritude of man to man
and the enslavement of man to his gods, which are, of course,
his tools. Nemeis cnnot be reduced to a problem within the
competence of engineers or political qanagers.
Schooling, transporation, the legal system, modem agricul
tre and medicine sere equally wei' to illustrate how engen
dered fstration works. Beyond a cern point, the degrada
ton of leig ito the reult of intentional teaching inevitably
compounds a new kind of impotence of the poor majority with
a new kind of class strcture which discriminate against them.
Al fors of compulsor, planned leng have these implicit
side efets, no matter how much money, good will, political
growth, or peagogic rhetoric is expended in the proces; no
matter if the world is flled with classrooms or if it is itself
transfored into one.
Beyond a crtain level of energy, used for the acceleration of
any one peron in trac, the transporation industry immobil
ize and enslaves the majorty of nameles pasengers, and pro
vide only quetionable marginal advantages to an Olympian
elite. No new fuel, tehnology, or public control can keep the
rsing mobiliztion of society from producing incresed har
renes, paralysis, and ineuity.
Beyond a cerain level of capital investment in agrculture
100
and
food procesing, malnutrtion must beome perasive; the
geen illusion racks the liver of the consumer more efectively
than Zeus's eagle. No biologica engineering can prevent this
reult.
Beyond a certain point, the production and delivery of mei
cal care produce more ailment than it can heal. Social securty
guarantees painfl surival more democratically and efectively
tha the most pitiless gods.
Progres has come with a vengence which cannot be called
a price. The down payment was on the label and can b stated
in mesurable ters. The compound installments accrue under
fors of suferng that exceed the notion of "price." They have
led entire societie into a debtors' prison, in which increasing
torure for the majority overhelms and cancels out any possi
bility of returs that might still beneft a few.
The pesant who switche from weving his cloth, building
his home, and making his tools to the purchae of ready-made
clothe, cement bems, and tractors can no longer be satisfied
unles he contrbute to world-wide nemesis. His neighbor who
continues to tr to surive on traditional cloth, shelter, and
production can no longer live in a world i which industrial
nemeis ha come to prevai. This double bind is the issue I want
to explore. Exasperating geed ad blind boldnes have ce
to be heroic; they have beome par of the social duty of indus
tralized Everman. In enterng the contemporar market econ
omy, usually by tang the road through schooling, the citizen
joins the chors sumonig nemeis. But he also jois a horde
of frie unleashed upon those who remain outside the system.
The so-calle marginal paricipants who do not fully enter into
the market economy find themselve deprved of the traditional
mens of coping with natre ad neighbor.
At some point in the expansion of our major instittions,
their clients begin to pay a higher price every day for their
continued consumption, in spite of evidence that they will ievi
tably sufer more. At this point in development, the prevaent
behavior of society coreponds to that traditionally reognzed
i addict . . Decliing returs pale i comparson wth increa
ig margnal disutiltie. Homo economicus into Homo
TANTALIZING NEEDS
101
religiosus Hi expectations beome heroic. The vengeance of
economic development not only outweighs the price at which
this vengeance was purchased; it also outweighs the compound
tor done by nature and neighbor. Classical Nemeis was pun
ishment for the rash abuse of a priviiege. lndustn8lized nemesis
is retrbution for dutiful paricipation in society .
. Wa aad hunger, petilence and sudden death, torure and
madnes remain man's companions, but they are now shaped
into a new Getalt by the nemesis overarching them. Te
greater the eonomic progres of any community, the greter
the part played by industral nemeis in the pain, discrimina
tion, and death sufered by its members. Therefore, it seems that
the disciplined study of the distinctive charcter of nemeis
ought to be the key theme for reearch among those concered
with helt care, healing, ad consoling.
Industral nemeis is the reult of policy fonation and deci
sion-making which inevitably produce counterintuitive misad
venture. Uis the result of a management style which remains
a puzzle for the planers. As long as these misadventure are
decribed in the language of science and economics, they re
main odd surrse. The language for the study of idustral
nemeis mut stil be forged; it must be capable of decribing the
contradictions inherent in the thought procese of a society
which vaue operational verfcaton above intuitive evdence.
T HRS OF TANTALUS
Medical nemeis is but one aspect of the more general "coun
terntuitive misadventure" characterstic of industral society.
It is the monstrous outcome of a very specfc drem of reon,
naely "ttaizing" hubris. Tantalus was a famous king
whom the gods invited to Olympus to share one of their mels.
He purloined ambrosia, the divine potion that gave the gods
unending life. For punishment, he was made immoral in Hades
and condene msufer unending thirst and hunger. When he
bows toward the rver in which he stads, the water recede,
ad when he reche for the frit above his hed, the brache
102
m
o
ve out of his reach. Ethologists might say that hygienic
nemeis had programmed hm for compulsor cunterntuitive
behavior.
Craving for ambrosia has now spread to the common mortl.
Scientifc and political optimism have combined to propagate
the addiction. To sustain it, a prethood of Tatalus has orga
nized itself, oferng unlimited medical improvement of huma
health. The members of this guild pass themelve of as disci
ple of healing Asklepios, whie in fact they pedle ambrosia.
Peple demand of them that life be improved, prolonged, rend
ered compatible with machines and capable of suriving all
modes of acceleration, distortion, and stres. Aa result, health
has become scarce to the degree that the common man makes
health dependent upon the consumption of ambrosia.
Makind evolved only because ech of it individuals came
into existence protected by various visible and invisible co
coons. Ech one knew the womb from which he hd come, and
oriented himself by the stars under which be was bor. To be
human and to become humane, the individua of our speie
had to fnd his detiny in his unique strggle with nature and
neighbor. He was on his own in the strggle, but the wepons
and the rle and the style were given to hi by the culte in
which be grew up. Culture evolved, ech acording to its ow
viability; ad with culture grew people, ech leg V kep
alive in a common cocoon. Ech culture wa the sum of re
by which the individual came to ters with pain, sicknes, and
death, interreted them, and practiced compassion towad oth
ers faced by the same threts. Ech culture set up the myhs,
the rtuals, the taboos, and the ethical standards need to del
wth the fragility of life.
Cosmoplitan medica cvltion denie the need for ma's
acceptce of thee evils. Medical civtion is planned ad
organized to kill pain, to eliinate sicknes, and to strggle
against death. Tee are new goals, which have never before
been guideline for social life and which ae antithetical to ever
one of the culture that meical civiliation encoutr when it
is
dumped- -on the so-cae por as pa ad pacel of thei
eonomic progres. The heth-denying efet of mec civi-
TANTALIZING NEEDS
103
ztion is thus equally powerul in rch ad in poor countrie,
even though the latter are often spaed some of its more sinister
aspets.
The Kilng of Pain
For an experience to be pain in the full sense, it must fit into
a culture. Preisely beuse ech culture provide a mode for
sufering, culture is a paricular for of health. Te act of
suferng is shaped by culture into a quetion that can be stated
and shared.
Medical civiliztion replace culturally deterined compe
tence in suferng with a growing demand by each individual for
the institutional management of his pain. A myriad diferent
feelings, ech expresing some kind of foritude, are homoge
nized into the political presure of aestheia consumers. Pain
becomes an item on a list of complaints. Aa result, a new kind
of horor emerge. Conceptually it is still pain, but the impact
on our emotions of this valueless, opaque, and impersonal hur
is something quite new.
In this way, pain ha come to pose ony a technical question
for industral man: What do I ned to set in order to have my
pain maage or kl ed? If the pai continue, the fault is not
with the univere, God, my sins, or the devil, but with the
medica system. ufrng_is _a expresion_ofconsumer demand
for increaed meical output. By becoming unneesary, pain
amame mbable. Given this attitude, it now seems ratio
nal to fee pain rather than to face it, even at the cost of addic
tion. It also appears_reonable to eliminate pan, even at the
cost of helth. It sems enlightened to deny legtimacy to all
nontehnical issue that pain raise, even at the cst of disar
ing the victis of reidual pain. For a while it ca be argued
that the totl amount of pain anethetied in a society is greter
than that of pain newly generated. But at some point, rising
margina disutilitie set in. The new suferng is not only un
maageble, but it ha lost its referential character. It has be
cme megles, quetionles torure. Only the reovery of
the W ad abilty to sufer cn retore heth to pain.
104
The Elimination of 8icks
Medical interentions have not afected total mortality rate; at
best they have shifed surival from one segment of the popula
tion to another. Dramatic changes in the nature of disese
aficting Wester societie durng the lat one hundre yers
are well documented. Firt industrializtion exacerbate ine
tions, whch then subsided. Tuberculosis peke over a ffty-to
seventy-fve-year period and decline before either the tubercle
bacillus had been discovered or antituberculosis programs had
been initiated. It wa replaced in Brtain and the United States
by major manutrtion syndromes-rickets and pellagra
which peked and delined and were replaced by disease of
early childhood, which in tm gave way to duodenal ulcer in
young men. When that delined, the modem epidemics took
their toll: coronar hear disease, hyperension, cancer, arhri
tis, diabetes, and mental disorders. At least in the United State
deth rate from hyperensive hear diseae see to be declin
ing. Depite intensive reerch, no connetion can be demon
strated betwen thee change i disee patter and the pro
fesional practic of medicine.
The overhelming majorty of modem dagostic and thera
peutic interentions that demonstrably do more good than
har have to characterstics: the materal reource for them
are extremely cheap, and they can be packaged and deige for
self-use or application by faiy members. The tehnology that
is signifcantly hethfrhering or curative in Canadian me
cine costs so little that it could be made avaiable i the entire
subcontinent of India for the amount of money now squandere
there on modem medicine. On the other hand, the sklnee
for the application of the most generaly use dagostic ad
therapeutic aids are s simple that the caef obseraton of
instructions by people who personally care would guaantee
more efetive and reponsible use tha mecal prctice c
provde.
Neitler'a deline in any of the major epidec of k g
disese, nor major change in the age strcture of the popula
to
n,
nor falling ad risig absentesm at the workbnch m
TANTALIZING NEEDS
S
ben signifcatly related to sick-care or even to immuniztion.
Medical serice deere neither credit for longevity nor blame
for the thretening ppulation presure. Longevity owe much
more to the railroad and to the syntheis of ferilizers and
inseticides than it owe to new drgs and syrnge. Profes
sional practice is both inefetive and increaingly sought out.
This technicaly unwate rise in meical pretige can only
be explained as a magical rtual for the achievement of goals
beyond tehnical and politica rech. It can be countered only
through legislation and political action that favor the deprofes
sionalization of health care.
The profesionalization of medicine doe .. not imply and
sho
uld
not b red a implying negation of specialized he
a
iers,
ofc:ompeteice, of mutual ciitici_sm, or of public control. It does
imply a bia against mystification, against transnational domi
nance of one orhodox view, against disbarneit of healers cho
sen by their patients but not certifed by the guild. The deprofes
sionalization of medicine does not mea--denial of public fnds
for curative purose; it doe mean a bias against the disbure
ment of ay such fnds under the precrption and control of
guild members rather than under the control of the consumer.
Deprofesionaliation doe not men the elimination of moder
meicine, nor a obstcle to the invention of a new medicine,
nor nesy a retur to anciet programs, rtuals, ad de
vice. It means that no professional shall have the power to
lavish on any one of mpaients a package of curative reource
larger than that which ay other could claim on his own_ i:
nally, the deprofesionaliztion of meicine doe not mean !is-
regard for the speial nees that people manifet _
_
_ at sal
moment of their live: when they are bor, brek a leg,
_
mar,
give birh, beome crppled, or face deth. It only mens that
peple h
av
e a rght to live in an environ
net
hafiS'lospitable
to them at such high points in t
heir
exeneaee. `
+.&+ + . *
'"

~
The Str
ggle Against Death
The ultimate efet of medical_nemeis . i$_the_expropration of
detf-In--eer socie
i
he image of deth is th
e cu
l
t
.
uai
ly
co
n
di
tione anticipation of an uncertain date. This anticipation
106
det
erines a sere of behavioral nors durng life and the
strcture of cern institutions. Wherever moder medical civ
ilization has peetrated a traditional meical culture, a novel
cultural idel of deth has ben fostered. The new idel spreds
by means of technology and the professional ethos which corre
sponds to it.
In prmitive societie, death is always conceived a the inter
vention of an actor: a enemy, a witch, an ancetor, or a god.
The Chrstian and the Islamic Middle Age saw in each death
the hand of Go. Weter death had no face unti about 1420.
The Wester ideal of death which comes to all equally from
natural causes is of quite recent orgin. Only durng the autumn
of the Middle Ages does death appear as a skeleton with power
in its own right. Only during the sixteenth century did Euro
people develop the "are and crafe to knowe ye Will to
Dye." For the next three centure peasant and noble, pret and
whore prepared themselve throughout lfe to preide at thei
own death. Foul death, bitter death, became the end rather than
the. goal of living. The ide that natural deth should come only
i healthy old age appere only in the eighteenth century a
a class-specifc phenomenon of the bourgeoisie. The demad
that dotors strggle against death and kep valetudara
helthy ha nothing to do with their ability to provide such
serice: A m show tat the costly atempts to prolong
life appeae at frst only aong banker, whose power was
compounded by the yes they spent at a dek.
We cannot fully understand contemporar social organiza
tion unles we see in it a multifaceted exorcism of all fors of
evil death. Our major institutions constitute a ggantic defense
program wage on behalf of .. humanity" against all those peo
ple who can be asociated wth what i curently conceived of
as deth-deling soial inustice. Not only mecal agencie but
welfare, interatonal relief, and development programs are en
listed i this strggle. Ideological bureucracies of all color
joi the crsade. Even war has b n used to justif the defeat
of those who are blame for wanton tolerance of sicknes and
death. PrQ4:cing "natural death" for all me is at the point of
beomingan ultiate justifcation for soial control. Under the
TANTALIZING NEEDS 07
infuence of meical rtuals contemporary death is again the
rationale for a witch-hunt.
THE RECOVERY OF HEALTH
Rsing ireparable damage accompanie preent industrial
expansion in all sector. In medicine thee damage apper a
iatrogeneis. Iatrogeneis can be direct, a when pain, sicknes,
and death reult from meical care; or it c be indirect, as
when helth policies reinforce an industral organization that
generate ill-health: it can b strctural when medically spon
sore behavior and delusion retrict the vital autonomy of peo
ple by underining their competence in growing up, carng,
and aging; or when it nullifies the personal challenge arising
from their pain, disability, and anguish.
Most of the remedie propose for reducing iatrogeneis are
engineering interentions, therapeuticaly deigned in their ap
proach to the indivdual, the group, the institution, or the envi
ronmeni. These so-called remedie generate second-order iatro
genic ills by creting a new prejudice against the autonomy of
the citizen.
The most profound iatrogenic efets of the medical tehno
strcture reult from its nontehnical social functions. The sick
ening tehncal and nontechnical consequence of the institu
tionalization of meicine coalece to generate a new knd of
suferng: anethetized and solitary surival in a world-wide
hospital ward.
Medicl nemeis canot b operationally vere. Much les
can it be meaured. The intensity with which it is experenced
depends on the independence, vitality, and relatednes of ech
indivdual. a theretcl concept, it is one component in a
broad theor explaining the anomaies that plague helth-care
systems in our day. It is a distinct apect of an even more
general phenomenon which I have calle industrial nemeis,
the backlah of istitutionally strcture industrial hubrs.
This hubrs consists of a disregard for. the boundarie within
which the hua phenomenon remains viable. Curent re-
108
sea
r
ch is overhelmingly oriented toward unattainable "brek
throughs." What I have calle counteroil rerch is the dici
plined analysis of the levels at which such reverberations must
inevitably damage man.
The perception of enveloping nemeis leds to a social choice.
Either the natural boundarie of human endeavor must be e
timated, recognized, and translated into politiclly deterined
limit, or the alterative to extinction will be compulsory sur
vival in a planned and engineered hell.
In several nations the public is ready for a review of its
health-care system. The frstrations that have beome manifet
in prvate-nterprse systems and in socialized care have come
to resemble ech other frighteningly. The diference between
the criticisms by the Russians, French, Amercans, and English
have beome trivial. There is a serious danger that thee evaua
tions will b perfored within the coordinate set by post
Caresian illusions. In rich and in por coutrie the demand
for refon of national health cre is dominated by demads for
equitable acces to the wares of the guild, for profesional ex
pansion and subprofesionaiztion, for more truth in the ad
verising of progress, and for lay control of the temple of Tan
taus. Te public discusion of the heath crsis could esily be
used to channel even more power, pretige, and money U bi
omedical engineers and deigner.
There is stil time in the next few yers to avoid a debate
which would reinforce a frstratig system. The coming debate
can be reoriente by makng hygienic nemeis the centra issue.
The explaation of nemeis require simultaneus asse ment of
both the tehnical ad the nontehnical aspects of meicine,
and must focus on it as both industr and religion. The indct
ment of medicine a a for of institutiona hubrs exposes
precisely those personal illusions that make the crtic dependent
on health care.
The perception and comprehension of nemesis have therefore
the power ofleading us to policie which could brek the magic
circle of complaits that now reinorce the depndence of the
plaintif .on-the health enginerng and planning agence that
he sues. Recognition of neeis c provide the catharis to
TANT ALl ZINC NEEDS
l 09
prepare for a nonviolent revolution in our attitudes towad evil
and pain. The alterative to a war against thee ills is a search
for the peace of the strong.
Helth deignate a process of adaptation. It is not the result
of instinct but of autonomous and live reaction to an ex
perence reaity. It deignates the ability to adpt to changing
envonments, to growing up ad to aging, to heling when
damage, to sufering, ad to the peaceful expectation of death.
H
ealth embraces the future as well, and therefore include an
guish and the iner resources to live with it.
Man's consciously lived fagility, individuality, and related
nes make the experience of pain, of sicknes, and of death an
integral par of his life .. The ability to cope with this trio autono
mously is fundamental to his helth. To the degree that he
beome dependent on the maagement of his intimacy, he
renounce his autonomy and his health must decline. The tre
miracle of moder medicine is diabolical. It consists in making
not only individuals but whole populations surive on inhu
manly low levels of personal health. That health should deline
with increing health-serice delivery is unforeeable only by
the health manager, preisely bcause his strategies are the
result of his blindnes to the inalienability of heath.
The level of public health coreponds to the degree to which
the means and reponsibility for coping with illness are dis
trbuted among the total population. This ability to cope can be
enhace but never replaced by medical interention in the
live of people or the hygenic characterstic of the environ
ment. That society which reduces profe ional interention to
the minimum will provide the bet conditions for helth. The
greter the potential for autonomou adaptation to self and to
other ad to the environment, the les maagement of adapta
tion W be nede or tolerate.
The reovery of a heathy attitude towad sickness is neither
Luddite nor romantic nor utopian; it is a guiding ideal which
wil never be flly achieved, which c be achieved with mo
er device as never before in history, ad which must orent
politc to avoid encroaching nemeis.
5
ENERGY AND EQUITY
"EI silismo puee llega s61o e biciclet"
-Jos Antonio VieJ-Oalo
Ast Seretar of J urce
in the goverment of Salvador Allede
Thi text was fi rst publihed in Le Monde in early 1973. Over
lunch in Pari the venerable editor ofthat daily, a he accepted
my. manuscrit, recommended just one change. He felt that a
term as lttle known and a technical as .. ener cri" had no
place in the opening sentence ofan article that he would be
rnning on page 1. As I now reread the text, I am strck by the
speed with which language and is ues have shied in less than
fve years. But I am equall strck by the slow yet steady pace
at which the radical alterative to industrial societnamel,
low-ener, convivial moderithas gained defnder
In thi esay I arue that under some circumstance a technol
og incororates the value ofthe societ for which it wa invented
to such a degree that these values become dominant in ever
societ which applies that technolog. The material strcture of
production device can thus irremediably incorporate clas preju
dice. High-ener technolo, at least as applied to trafc, pr
vides a clear exmple Obviously, this thesi underine the
legitimacy ofthose profesional who monopolie the operation of
such technoloies It i paricularly irkome to those individual
within the profesion who seek to sere the publc by using the
rhetoric ofclas strggle with the aim ofreplacing the .. capital
its" who now contrl institutional policy by professional peer
and laymen who accept profes ional standards Mainly under the
infuence ofsuch "radical" prfssionals thi thesi has in only
f
ve years changed frm an oddit into a heres that ha pr
voked a barage ofabuse.
Te distinction prposed here, however, i not new. I oppose
ENERGY AND EQUIT 1 1 1
tools that can be appled in the generation ofuse-values to others
that cannot be used ecept in the production ofcommoditie.
Thi ditinction ha recently been re-emphasized by a great var
et ofsocial critics. The insitence on the need for a balance
beteen convivial and industral tool i, in fact, the common
ditinctive element in an emering conenus among groups en
gaged in radical politics A superb guide to the bibliography in
thi feld ha been published in Rdical Technolog (London
and New York 1976), by the editor ofUndercurents. I have
tranfered my own fles on the theme to Valentina Borremans,
who is now working on a librarans' guide to refrence materials
on use-value-orented modern tools scheduled for publication in
1978. (Preliminar drafs ofindividual chapter ofthi guide can
be obtained by writing to Valentina Borremans, APDO 479,
Cueravaca, Meico.) The specic arument on socially critical
ener threholds in transportation that I purue in thi esay has
been elaborated and documented by to coleagues, Jean-Piere
Dupuy and Jean Robert, in their two jointly written book, La
Trahson de !'opulence (Paris, 1976) and L Chronophage
(Pari, 1978).
+
T ENERGY LVbb
It has reently become fahionable to insist on an impending
energy crisis. This euphemistic tr concels a contradiction
and conserate an illusion. It masks the contradiction implicit
in the joint puruit of equity ad industrial growth. It safe
guards the illusion that machine power can indefnitely take the
place of manpowe. To reolve this contrdiction and displ this
illusion, it is urgent to clary the reaty that the language of
crsis obscure: high quanta of energy degrade social relatons
just a inevitably as they detroy the physical milieu.
The advoate of a energy crsis believe in and continue to
propagate a peuliar vision of man. According to this notion,
man is br into pertual dependence on slave which he must
paiflly le to mater. If he doe not employ prsoner, then
he nes machne to do moSt of m work. According to this
1
12
do
ctrne, the well-being of a society can be meaured by the
number of years its members have gone to school ad by the
nu
mber of energy slave they have thereby leaed to com
mand. This belief is common to the conficting economic
ideologie now in vogue. It is thretened by the obvious
inequity, harriedness, and impotence that appear everhere
once the voracious horde of energy slaves outnumber people
by a certain proporion. Te energy crsis focuse concer on
he scarcity of fodder for -these slave. I prefer to ask whether
free men need them.
The energy policie adopted during the curent decade wil
deterine the range and character of social relationships a
society will be able to enjoy by the year 20 . A low-energ
policy allows for a wide choice of life-styles and culture. If, on
the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its
social relations must be dictated by technocracy and W be
equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist.
At this moment, most societiepeially the por one
are still free to set thei energy policie by any of thre guide
lines. Well-being can be identifed with high amounts of per
capita energy use, with high efciency of energy transfora
tion, or with the least possible use of mehacal nergy by the
most powerul members of society. The fst approach would
stre tight management of scarce and detrctive fuels on be
half of industr, wherea the second would emphaize the re
tooling of industry in the interet of therodynamic thrf.
Thee frst two attitude necessarly imply huge public expendi
ture ad increase social control; both rationae the emer
gence of a computerzed Leviathan, and both are at preet
widely discusse.
The possibility of a third option is barely noticed. Whle
peple have begn to accept eologcal limits on maum per
capita energy use a a condition for physical survival, they do
not yet think about the use of minimum feasible power as the
foundation of any of varous social order that would b,e both
modem and deirable. Yet ony a ceiling on enegy use led
to social relations that ae chaacterized by high levels of eq
uity. Te one option that i at present negleted is the only
ENERGY AND EQUIT 113
choice within the reach of all nations. It i aso the only strategy
by which a politicl process can be used to set limits on the
power of even the most motorizd bureaucrat. Paricipatory
democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participa
tor democracy create the conditions for rational technology.
What is generlly overlooked is that equity and energy can
grow concurrently only to a point. Below a threshold of per
cpita watage, motors improve the conditions for socia prog
res. Above this threhold, energy grows at the expense of
equity. Furher energy afuence then means decresed distrbu
tion of control over that energy.
The widepread belief that clean and abundant energy is the
panace for social ills is due to a political fallacy, according to
which equity and energy consumption can be indefnitely cor
related, at lest under some ideal political conditions. Laborng
under this illuion, we tend to discount any social limit on the
growth of energy consumption. But if eologists are rght to
asser that nonmetabolic power pollutes, it is in fact just as
inevitable that, beyond a crn threhold, mechaical power
corpts. The threshold of social dis
.
integration by high energy
quant i independent from the threhold at which energy con
version produc physical detrction. Exprese in hore
power, it i undoubtely lower. This i the fact which mut be
thereticaly recognize before a political issue cn be made of
the per capita wattage to which a society will limit its members.
Even if nonpolluting power were_feaible
.
ad abundat, the
use .ofenergy on a masive scale acts on. society_ like
.
a drg that
is physicaly hares but psychically_enslayjng. A community
can choose betwn Methadone and "cold turkey" -between
maintg its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in pain
ful cramps-but no soiety c have
.
a population that H
hooke on progesively lager number of energy slave ad
whose member ae also autonomously active.
Rprevious discussions, I have shown that, beyond a cerin
level of per capita GN, the cost of social control must rse
fater than total output and beome the major institutiona
activity with a eonomy. Therapy administered by educa
tor, psychiatst, ad social worker must converge with the

deigns of planners, manager, and salemen, and complement
the serices of security agencie, the military, and the police. I
now want to indicate one reason why incresed afuence re
quire increased control over peple. ] argue
_
t

berond a
cerain median per capita energy level, tle political system ad
cultual _ _ context of any society must decay. O
n
c
e
--
t
he
.
ct
al
quatum of j
er
-
ca
i
i e
nergy
i
s surasse, eduction for the
abstract goals of a bureucracy must supplant the legal guara
tee of personal and concrete initiative. This quatum is the
limit of social order.
I will argue here that technocracy must prevail a soon as the
ratio of mechanical power to metabolic energy oversteps a def
nite, identifable threhold. The order of magnitude within
which this threhold lie is largely independent of the level of
technology applied, yet its very existence ha slipped into the
blind-spot of socia imagination in both rch and meium-rch
countres. Both the United Sttes and Mexico have passed the
critical divide. In both countre, further energy inputs increse
inequality, inefciency, and personal impotence. Although one
country ha a per capita income of $50 and the other, one of
nerly $5,00, huge vested interet in an industral infratrc
ture prods both of them to furher ecalate the use of energy.
As a reult, both North Amercn and Mexicn ideologue put
the label of "energy crisis" on their frustration, ad both coun
trie are blinded to the fact that the threat of social breakdown
is due neither to a shorage of fel nor to the watefl, polluting,
and irational use of available wattage, but to the atempt of
industre to gorge soiety wth energy quanta that inevitbly
degrade, deprve, and frtrate most people.
A people can be just a dangerously overowered by the
wattage of its tools as by the calorc content of it foods, but it
is much harder to confes to a national overdulgence in watt
age than to a sickenig diet. The per cpita wattage that is
crtica for social well-being lie within an order of magitude
which u far above the horsepower known to fou-fths o
(
hu
manity and far below the power commande by ay Volks
wagen d!ver. It elude the underconsumer and the overcon
sumer
alike. Neither i wlling to fac the facts. For the

ENRGY AN EQUITY
1 15
prmitive, the elimination of slaver and drdger depends on
the introduction of approprate modem technology, and for the
rich, the avoidance of an even more horrible degradation de
pends on the efective recognition of a threshold in energy
consumption beyond which tehnical procese begin to dictate
social relations. Clore are both biologically and socially
healthy only as long a they stay within the narow range that
separate enough from too much.
The so-called energ crsis is, then, a politically ambiguous
issue. Public interest in the quantity of power and in the distr
bution of controls over the use of energy can lead in two oppo
site directions. On the one hand, quetions can be posed that
would open the way to political reconstrction by unblockng
the sech for a postindustral, labor-intensive, low-energy and
high-equity eonomy. On the other hand, hystercal concer
with machie fodder can reinforce the present ecalaton of
cpital-intensive institutional growh, and carry us past the last
turof fom a hyperndustral Arageddon. Political recon
struction preuppose the recognition of the fact that there exist
critical per capita quanta beyond which energy ca no longer
be controlle by political proces. A universal social straitjacket
will be the inevitable outcome ofecological retraints on total
ener use imposed by industrial-minded planners bent on
keping indust production at some hypotheticl maximum.
Rch countre lke the United Stte, Japan, or France mght
never reach the point of chokg on thei own wate, but only
beause thei societie will have already collapse ito a sQcio
cultural energy coma. Countrie le India, Bura, and, for
another shor whie at least, China are in the inverse position
of being stlmucle-powere enough to stop shor of an ener_
stroke. They could choose, rgt now, to sty within those
limts to which the rch wibe forced back through a total loss
of their freoms.
The choice of a minimum-energy economy compels the poor
to abandon fantatical expectations and the rich to recogize
t
h
eir _xes te .inret_ a a ghastly liabiity. Both must reject the
fatal iage of man the slveholder currently promoted by an
idelogically stiulate hunger for more energy. In countrie
1
t
h
at were made afuent by industrial development, the energy
crsis seres a a pretext for raising the tae that will be needed
to substitute new, more "rational,'' and socially more deadly
industral proceses for those that have been rendered obsolete
by inefcient overexpansion . . For the leaders of people who are
not yet dominated by the same process of industraliztion, the
energy crsis sere a a hitorical imperative to centralize pro
duction, pollution, and their control in a last-ditch efor to
catch up with the more highly powered. By exporting their
crsis and by preaching the new gospel of purtan energy wor
ship, the rich do even more damage to the poor than they did
by selling them the products of now outdated factores. Asoon
as a poor country accepts the doctrine that more energy more
carefully managed wil aways yield more goods for more peo
ple, that country locks itself into the cage of enslavement to
maimum industral outputs. Inevitbly the poor lose the op
ton for rational technology when they choose to moderi
their povery by increing their dependence on energy. Inevit
bly the poor deny themselve the possibility of liberating teh
nology and paricipatory politics when, together with ma
mum feasible eergy use, they acept mamum feaible socal
control.
The energy crsis cannot be overhelmed by more energy
input. It can only be dissolved, along with the illusion that
well-being depends on the number of energy slave a man m
at his command. For this purose, it is necesar to identif the
threholds beyond which energy corpts, and to do so by a
political proces that asociate the communit in the seach for
limits. Because this kd of reserch runs counter to that now
done by expers and for institutions, I shall continue to cll it
counterfoil reearch. It has three steps. First, the ned for limits
on the per cpita use of energy must be theoretically recognized
a a social imperative. Then, the rage must be locte wherein
the critical magnitude might be found. Finaly, ech commu
nity has to identif the levels of ineuity, harying, ad operant
conditioning that its members ae willing to accept i exchange
for the stisfaction that come of idolizing powerl devic ad
joinng in rituals directed by the professiona who control thei
ope
ration.
ENERGY AND EQUITY 11T
The need for political reearch on socially optimal energy
quanta can be clearly and concisely ilustrated by an examina
tion of moder trafc. The United States puts between 25 ad
45 per cent of its total energy (depending upon how one calcu
lates this) into vehicle: to mae them, rn them, and cler a
rght of way for them when they rol, when they fy, and when
they park. Most of this energy is to move people who have been
strapped into place. For the sole purose of trasporing pe
ple, 250 ml ion Americans allocate more fuel tha is used by
. J billion Cee and Indians for all purpose. Amost all of
this fel is bured in a rain-dace of time-consuming accelera
tion. Poor countre spend les energy per person, but the per
centge of total energy devoted to trafc in Mexco or in Per
is probably greater tha in the Unite State, ad it benefts a
smaller percntage of the population. The size of this enterrse
make it both easy and sigfcant to demonstrate the existence
of socialy crtcal energy quata by the example of personal
mobiity.
In tf c, energy used over a speifc perod of time (power)
trslate into speed. U this cae, the crtical quatum will
apper a a spe limit. Werever this limit ha ben pase, the
baic patte of social degradaton by hgh energy quanta has
emerged. Once some public utility went faster than 15 mph,
eut declied and the scacity of both time and space in
creed. Motord transporation monopole trfc ad
blocke self-powered transit. In ever Weter countr, passen
ger milege on al type of conveyance increased by a factor of
a hundred within ffty yers of buildig the frst raiload. When
the ratio of their repective power outputs pase beyond a
cern vaue, mechanicl transforer of meral fels ex
clude peple fom the use of their metbolic energy and forced
them to beome captive consumer of conveyance. Tis efect
of sped on the autonomy of people is only marginally afected
by the tehnological chaacterstic of the motored vehicle
employed or by the persons or entitie who hold the legal title
to airline, buse, railroads, or c. High spe is the crtiCal
factor which make tsporation soialy detrctive. A tre
choice aong prctical polcie and of deirable soial relations
is possible only where speed is retrained. Paricipator democ-
1 18 TOWARD A HISTORY OF NEEDS
racy demands low-energy technology, and free people must
travel the road to productive socia relations at the speed of a
bicycle.
THE INUSTRIALIZATION OF TRAFFIC
The discussion of how energ is used to move people reuire
a foral distinction between transpor and transit the to
components of trafc. By trafc I men any movement of peo
ple from one place to another when they ae outside their
homes. By transit I mean those movements that put huma
metabolic energy to use, and by transport, that mode of move
ment which relie on other source of energy. These energy
source wil henceforth be mostly motors, sinc animals com
pete fercely with men for their food in an overopuate world,
unles they are thistle eaters like donkeys and caels.
As soon as people beome tributares of transpor, not just
when they trvel for severa days, but also on their daily trips,
the contradictions beteen social justice and motorized power,
between efective movement and hgher speed, between per
sonal freedom and enginered routing, become poiganty
clear. Enforced dependence on auto-mobile machine then de
'
nie a community of self-propelled people just those value
supposedly procured by improved transportation.
People move well on their feet. This prmitive means of get
ting around will, on closer anaysis, apper quite efective when
compared with the lot of people i moder citie or on idustr
alized fans. It wil appear paricularly attractive once it h
been understood that moder Americans walk, on the average,
as many mile a their ancestors-most of them through tun
nels, corrdors, parkig lots, and store.
1 sk abut tra c for the purse of illustrating the more gene pint of sly
optimal energ u and I retct myself to the loomotion of perns, includig their
p
eronal baggage ad the fe, materals, ad euipment use for the vehcle and the
road. I pursely abstin from the discussion of two othe t of tc: merchandie
and mes ge. A parallel agmet cn b made for bth, but this would reuire &
diferet lie of reoning, ad I leve it for aother oc on. AUOR's NO: Ti
note app in the orgna text. I wa the prepang two stde tat we t
cmpleent thi text: one on the histor of mail delve, the othe O C0 and lo
th
roughout histor. I reouce bth projet to wrte Medical Nemei
ENERGY AND EQUITY
119
People on their feet are more or less equal. People solely
dependent on their feet move on the spur of the moment, at
three to four mile per hour, in any direction ad to ay place
from which they are not legally or physicaly bared. An im
provement on this native degree of mobility by new transport
technology should be expeted to safeguard these values and to
add some new ones, such as greter rage, time economies,
comfort, or more opporunitie for the disabled. So far this is
not what has happened. Instead, the growth of the transporta
tion industry has everwhere had the reverse efect. From the
moment it machines could put more than a certain horepower
behind any one asenger, this industry has reduced equality
among men, retrcted their mobility to a system of industrally
defned routes, and creted time scarcity of unprecedented se
verity. As the speed of their vehicles crosse a threhold, citi
zens become transportation consumers on the daily loop that
brng them back to teir home, a circuit which the United
States Deparent of Commerce calls a "trp" as opposed to
the "traver for which Americans leave home equipped with a
toothbrsh.
More energ fed into the transportaton system meas that
more people move faster over a greater range in the coure of
every day. Everbodys daily radius expands at the expense of
being able to drop i on a acquaintance or walk through the
park on the way to work. Extreme of prvilege are creted at
the cost of universal enslavement. An elite packs unlimited
distance into a lifetime of pampered travel, while the majority
spend a bigger slice of their existence on unwanted trps. Te
few mount their magic carets to travel between distant points
that their ephemeral preence renders both scarce and seduc
tive, while the many are compelled to trp farther and faster and
to spend more tie preparng for and recovering from their
trps.
In the United States, four-ffhs of all man-hour on the road
ae those of commuters and shopper who hardly ever get into
a plane,

while four-fifhs of the mileage fown to conventions
ad reors is covere yer aer year by the same .3 per cent
of the population, usually those who are either well-to-do or
profesionaly trained to do good. The speedier the vehicle, the
1
lager the subsidy it gets from regesive taxation. Baely 0. 2
p
er cent of the entie United States population ca engage in
self-hosen ar travel more than once a yer, and few other
countres can suppor a jet set which is that large.
The cptive tripper and the reckles traveler become equally
dependent on tranpor. Neither can do without it. Occasional
spurts to Acapulco or to a pay congres dupe the ordinary
pasenger into believing that he ha made it into the shr
world of the powerully rshe. The oc ional chace to spend
a few hours strapped into a high-powered seat make hm an
accomplice in the distorion of human space, ad prompts hm
to consent to the deign of his countr's geography around
vehicle rather than around people. Man has evolved physically
and culturaly together with his cosmic niche. What for animals
is their environment he ha leared to make into his home. M
self-conciousnes reuire a its complement a life-space and
a lie-tme integrated by the pace at which he move. If that
relationship is determined by the velocity of vehicles rather
tha by the movement of people, man the architet is reduce
to the status of a mere commuter.
The model Amercan male devotes more tha 1,60 hour a
yer to his c. He sit in it while it goe ad while it stds
idlig. He parks it ad serche for it He es the money to
put down on it ad to met the monthly installments. He works
to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurace, taxe, and ticket. He
spends four of his sixten waking hours on the road or gathering
his resource for it. And this fgure doe not take into account
the time consumed by other activitie dictated by transpor:
time spent in hospitals, trafc cours .ad gaage; tme spent
watching automobile commercials or attending consumer eu
cation meetings to iprove the quality of the next buy. The
model Amercan puts in 1, 60 hour to get 7,50 me: le
than fve miles per hour. In countres deprived of a traspora
tion industry, people manage to do the same, walkig wherever
they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their
society's time budget to trafc instead of 28 per cent. Wat
distingu_ihes the trafc in rch countries from the tra c i por
countrie is not more milege per hour of life-time for the
ENERGY AND EQUITY
121
majority, but more hour of compulsory consumption of high
doses of energy, packaged and unequally distribute by the
transporation industry.
SPEED-STUNNED IMAGINATION
Past a cerin threhold of energy consumption, the transpor
tation industry dictate the confgurtion of social space. Mo
torays expand, driving wedges between neighbors and remov
ing felds beyond the distace a fan er c walk. Ambulance
take clinics beyond the few mile a sick child can be cared.
The doctor will no longer come to the house, because vehcle
have made the hospital into the rght place to b sick. Once
hevy trcks rech a village high in the Ade, par of the local
maket disappears. Lter, when the high school arrives at the
plaz along with the paved highway, more and more of the
young people move to the city, until not one family is lef which
doe not long for a reunion with someone hundreds of mile
away, down on the coast.
Equa speeds have equaly distoring efects on the perception
of space, tme, and persona potency in rch ad in poor coun
tre, however df erent the surface appearaces might b.
Everwhere, the ttansporation industr shape a new kind of
man to ft the new geography and the new schedules of its
making. The major diference between Guatemala and Kasas
is that i Central Aerca some provinces ae stiU exempt from
all contact with vehicles and are, therefore, still not degrade
by their dependence on them.
The product of the transporation industr is the habitual
pa enger He ha been boosted out of the world in whch
people still move on their ow, and he has lost the sense that
he stads at the center of his world. The habitual passenger is
conscious of the exasperating time scarcity that results from
daily recoure to the cars, trains, buse, subways,and elevators
that force him to cover an average of twenty miles each day,
frequently crss-crossing his path withn a radus of less than
fve mile. He ha been lifed of his feet. No matter if he goe
12
b
y subway or jet plane, he feels slower and poorer tha someone
el
se ad resents the shorcut taen by the privileged few who
c escape the frustrations of trafc. If he is crampe by the
timetable of his commuter train, he dreams of a car. lfhe drive,
exhausted by the rsh hour, he envie the sped capitalist who
drive against the trafc. If he must pay for his car out of his
own pocket, he knows full 'well that the commanders of corpo
rate feets send the fuel bill to the company and write of the
rented c as a busines expense. The habitual passenger is
caught at the wrong end of growing iequality, time scarcity,
and personal impotence, but he can see no way out of this bid
except to demand more of the same: more trac by transpor.
He stands in wait for technical change in the deign of vehicle,
roads, and schedule; or else he expect a revolution to produce
mass rapid tranpor under public control. In neither case doe
he calculate the prce of being hauled into a better fture. He
forgets that he is the one who wil pay the bill, either in fare
or in taxe. He overlooks the hidden cost of replacing prvate
cars with equally rapid public transpor.
The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of trafc baed
overhelmigly on transpor. His iherted perceptions of
space and time and of personal pace have been idutraly
defored. He has lost the power to conceive of hielf outside
the passenger role. Addicted to being cared along, he mlost
control over the physica, social, and psychic powers that reide
in man's fet. The passenger has come to ident tertor with
the untouchable landscape through which he is rshed. He has
become impotent to etablih his doman, mark it wth m
imprint, and aser m sovereignty over it. He ha lost conf
dence in his power to admit others into his presence and to
share space consciously with them. He can no longer face the
remote by himself. Left on his own, he feels imobile.
The habitual pasenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and
expectations Bhe is to feel secure in the strange world where
both liaisons and lonelines ae products of conveyance. To
"gather" for him mens Rbe brought together by vehicle. He
comes o.believe that politica power gows out of the capacity
of a transporation system, and i its absence is the reult of
ENERGY AND EQUITY
123
acces to the television screen. He takes freedom of movement
to be the same a one's claim on propulsion. He believe that
the level of democratic procs correlate to the power of trans
poration and communicatons systems. He has lost faith in the
political power of the feet and of the tongue. A a reult what
he wants is not more libery as a citizen but beter serice as
a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to spek
to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be infored by
media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from
seritude to it. It is vit that he come to se that the accelera
tion he demands is self-defeting, and that it must result in a
frther decline of equity, leisue, and autonomy.
NET TRANSFER OF LIFE-TIME
Unchecked speed is expensive, ad progressively fewer can
aford it. Each increment in the velocity of a vehicle results in
an increae in the cost of propulsion ad track construction and
-most draatically-in the space the vehcle devour while it
is on the move. Pat a cr threhold of energy consumption
for the fatest passenger, a world-wide clas strcture of speed
capitalists is crete. The exchage-vaue of time beome dom
inant, and this is refected in language: time is spent, saved,
inveted, wasted, and employed. As societie put prce tags on
time, equity and vehcular sped correlate inversely.
Hig speed cpitalize a few people's time at an enorous
rt but, paradoxcally, it doe this at a high cost in time for all.
In Bombay, only a ver few people own c. They c reach
a provicial cpital in one morg and make the trp once a
week. Two genertions ago, this would have been a week-long
trek once a yer. They now spend more time on more trips. But
thee same few also disrpt, with their cars, the trafc fow of
thousands of bicycle and pedicabs that move through down
town Bombay at a rate of efective locomotion that is still
superor to that of downtown Pars, London, or New York. The
compounded, trapor-related time expenditre within a soci
ety gows much fater than the te economie made by a few
1 2
4
p
eople on their speedy excursions. Trafc grows indefnitely
with the availabilty of high-speed transpor. Beyond a crtical
threshold, the output of the industrial complex

established to
move people costs a society more tie than it saves. The mar
.ginal utility of an increment in the speed of a smal number of
people has for its prc the growing .marginal disutility of this
acceleration for the great majority.
Beyond a critical speed, no one can save time without forcing
another to lose it. The man who claims a seat in a fater vehicle
insist that his time is worh more tha that of the passenger
in a slower one. Beyond a cerain velocity, passengers become
consumers of other people's time, and accelerating vehicles
become the means for efecting a net transfer of life-time. The
degree of transfer is measured in quanta of speed. This time
gab despoils those who are left behind, and since they are the
majority, it raises ethical issues of a more general nature tha
the lottery that asigns kidney dialysis or orga transplants.
Beyond a cerain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness
which they alone c shrnk. They create distance for all and
shrnk them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilder
ness brings the city withi view, but not within rech, of most
Brazian subsistence farers. The new expresway expands
Chcago, but it sucks those who are wel-wheeled away from a
downtown that decys into a ghetto.
Contrar to what is ofen claimed, ma's speed remained
unchanged from the Age of Cyrs to the Age of Steam. News
did not travel more than a hundred mile per day, no matter
how the message was carried. Neither the Inca's rners nor
the Venetian galley, the Perian horeman, or the mail coach
on regular rns under Louis XIV broke the barier. Soldiers,
explorers, merchant, and pilgrims moved at twenty mile per
day. In Valery's words, Napoleon still had to move at Cear's
slowness: Napolon va d Ia meme /enteur que Cesar. The em
peror knew that "public prosperty is meured by the income
of the coache": On meure Ia prosperite publque aux comptes
des digences, but he could barely speed them up. Fars
Touloue had requed about 20 hour in Roma time, and
the sche
(u
led stagecoach still took 1 5 8 hours in 17 +, before
ENERGY AD EQUIT 1
25
the opening of the new Royal Roads. Only the nineteenth cen
tur accelerated ma. By 1 830, the trp had been reduced to 1 10
hours, but at a new cost. In the sale year, 4, 1 50 stagecoache
overured i France, causing more than a thousand deaths.
Then the raiload brought a sudden change. By 1 855, Napoleon
III claimed to have hit 96 kilometers per hour on the tran
somewhere between Pars and Marseilles. Within one genera
tion, the average distance traveled ech yer per Frenchman
increed one hundred and thirty time, and Brtain"s railroad
network reched its greatest expansion. Passenger trains at
tained teir optimum cost calculated in ters of time spent for
their maintenance and use.
With further acceleration, trasporation began to dominate
trac, and sped began to eret a hierarchy of detinations. By
now, each set of detinations coreponds to a specifc level of
speed ad defne a cerin pasenger clas. Ech circuit of
terinal points degrades those pegged at a lower number of
miles per hour. Tose who must get aound on their own power
have been reefned as underdeveloped outsiders. Tell me how
fast you go ad I'll tell you who you are. If you can comer the
tae that fel the Concorde, you ae cernly at the top.
Over the lat to generations, the vehicle has become the sign
of cer achievement. just a the school ha become the sign
of staring advatage. At ech new level, the concentraton of
power mut produce its own knd of rationale. So, for exaple,
the reaon that is usually given for spending public money to
mae a man travel more mile in less time each yer H the still
greter invetment that was made to keep him more years in
school. His putative value a a capital-intensive production tool
set the rate at which he is being shipped. Other ideologcal
labels beide .. a good education" are just a useful for opening
the cabin door to luure paid for by others. If the Tougt of
Chaina Mao must now be rshed around China by jet, th
can only men that two clases ae needed to fel what his
revolution ha become, one of them living in the geography of
the mase ad the other in the geography of the cadre. The
suppresion of interediar levels of speed in the People's Re
public ha cerly made the concentration of power more
126
ef
cient and rational, but it also underscore the new diference
in
value between the time of the bullock driver ana the time of
the jet-drven. Acceleration inevitably concentrate horsepower
under the seats of a few and compounds the increing time
lack of most commuters with the further sense that they are
lagging behind.
The need for unequal prvilege in an industrial society is
generally advocated by means of an argument with two side.
The hypocrsy of this argument is clearly betrayed by accelera
tion. Privilege is accepted as the necessary precondition for
improving the lot of a growing total population, or it is adver
tised a the instrment for raising the standards of a deprved
minority. In the long run, accelerating transportation does nei
ther. It only creates a universal demand for motorze convey
ance ad puts previously unimaginable distaces betwen the
varous layers of privilege. Beyond a certain point, more energy
means less equity.
THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF ACCELERATION
It should not be overlooked that top speeds for a few exact a
diferent price than high speeds for m. Social classifcation by
levels of speed enforce a net transfer of power: the poor work
and pay to get lef behind. But if the middle clase of a speed
society may be tempte to ignore discrmiation, they should
not neglect the rising marginal disutilities of transporation and
their own loss of leisure. High speeds for al mean that ever
body ha les time for himself a the whole society spends a
growing slice of its time budget on moving people. Vehicle
rnning over the crtical speed not only tend to impose inequal
ity, they also inevitably establish a self-serving industr that
hides an inefcient system of locomotion under apparent tech
nological sophistication. I will argue that a speed limit is not
only necessary to safeguard equity; it is equaly a condition for
incresing the tota distace traveled within a society, while
simultne_q)sly decreing the sum total of lfe-time that trans
portation claims.
ENERGY AN EQUITY 127
There is little reserch available on the impact of vehicles on
the twenty-four-hour time budget of individuals and societie.
From transportation studies, we get satistics on the cost of time
per mile, on the value of time meaured in dollar or in length
of trps. But thee statistics tell us nothing about the hidden
costs of trasporation: about how trafc nibbles away at lie
time, about how vehicles devour space, about the multiplication
of trps made necessary by the existence of vehicles, or about
the time spent diretly and indirectly preparing for locomoton.
Furher, there is no available measure of the even more deeply
bured cost of traspor, such a higher rent to live in areas
convenient to the fow of trafc, or the cost of protecting these
areas from the noise, pollution, and danger to life and limb that
vehicles create. The lack of an account of expenditure from the
socil time budget should not lead us to believe, however, that
such an accounting is impossible, nor should it prevent our
drawig conclusions from the little that we do know.
From our limited inforation it appears that everyhere in
the world, afer some vehicle broke the speed barrier of 3mph,
time scarcity related to trafc bega to grow. After industr had
reached this theshold of per cpita output, transport made of
man a new kd of waf: a being constantly absent from a
detination he cannot rech on his own but must attan within
the day. By now, people work a substantial par of ever day
to e the money without which they could not even get to
work. The tie a society spends on transportion grows in
proportion to the spee of its fatest public conveyance. Japan
now leds the United State in both are. Life-time gets clut
tered up with activities generated by trafc as soon a vehcles
crash through the ba er that guards people from dislocation
and space from distortion.
Whether the vehicle that spee along the public freeway is
owned by the state or by an individual has little to do with the
time scarcity and overprogramming that rise with ever incre
ment in speed. Buses use one-third of the fuel that cars bum to
Sinc publiction or th text in l971,much reh b ben done ad publhe.
For H crtic gide to the literature b Jen-Pier Dupuy ad Jen km L
Chmoohaguam, l977}.
128
car one ma over a given distance. Commuter trains ae up
to
ten times more efcient than cars. Both could beome even
more efcient and les polluting. If publicly owned and ration
ally
managed, they could be so scheduled ad routed that the
prvileges they now provide under private ownershp ad in
competent organiztion would be considerably cut. But a long
a any system Ol vehicles imposes itself on the public by top
speeds that are not uder politicl control, the publc is lef to
choose between spending more time to pay for more people to
be carried from station to station, and paying less taxe so that
even fewer people ca travel in much les time much farher
tha others. Te order of magnitude of the top speed that is
peritted within a trnsporation system deterines the slice
of its time budget that an entire society spends on trafc.
THE RDICAL MONOPOLY OF INUSTRY
A desirable ceiling on the velocity of movement cannot be
useflly discusse without returing to the distinction between
self-powered transit and motorzed transport, ad comparng
the contrbution ech component make relative to the total
locomotion of people, whch I have cale trafc
Trnspor stands for the cpital-intensive mode of tr c, ad
transit idicate the labor-intensive mode. Transpor is the
product of an industry whose clients are pasengers. It is an
industrial commodity and therefore scace by deftion. Im
provement of transpor always takes place under conditions of
scarcity that beome more severe a the sped-and with it the
cost-f the seric increse. Confict about insufcient trans
p
or tends to take the for of a zero-su gae where one wins
only if aoter lose. At bet, such a confict allows for the
optimum in the Prsoner's Dilemma: by coperatig with their
jailer, both prsoners get of with less time W the cell.
Transit is not the product of an industry but the independent
enterprse of transients. It has use-value by defition but need
not hav .ay exchange-value. The abilty to engage i trit
is native to ma ad more or les equaly distrbuted among
ENERGY AND EQUITY
129
helthy people of the same age. The exercise of this ability can
be retrcted by depriving some clas of people of the right to
take a straight route, or because a population lacks shoes or
pavements. Confict about unsatisfactory transit conditions
tends to take, therefore, the form of a non-zero-sum game in
which everyone comes out ahed-not oniy the people who get
the rght to walk through a forerly walled propery, but also
those who live along the road.
Total trafc is the reult of two profoundly distinct modes of
production. These can reinforce each other haroniously only
as long as the autonomous outputs are protected against the
encroachment of the industrial product.
The har done by contemporary trafc is due to the monop
oly of transpor. Te allure of speed has deceived the pasenger
into accepting the promises made by an industry that poduce
capital-intensive trafc. He is convinced that high-speed vehi
cle have aowed him to progres beyond the limited autonomy
he enjoyed when moving under his own power. He has allowed
planed transpor to predominate over the alterative of labor
intensive transit. Detrction of the physical environment is the
let noxious efect of this concesion. The far more bitter re
sults are the multplication of psychic frustration, the growing
disutilitie of continued production, and subjection to an ine
quitable transfer of power-al of whch are maifettions of
a distored relationship between life-time and life-space. The
pasenger who agree to live in a world monopolized by trans
por become a harassed, overburdened consumer of distnce
whose shape ad length he can no longer control.
Every society that imposes compulsory speed submerge
transit to the profit of transport. Wherever not only privilege
but also elementar necesities ae denied to those who do not
ue high-spee conveyance, an involunt acceleration of per
sonal rhyth i imposed. Industr dominates trafc a soon as
daily life come to depend on motorzed trps.
This profound control of the transporation industr over
natural mobility constitute a monopoly much more pervasive
than either the commercial monopoly Ford might win over the
automobile maket, or the political monopoly car manufactur-
130
ers
might wield against the development of trains and buse.
Because of its hidden, entrenched, and structurng nature, I call
this a radical monopoly. Ay industry exercises this kind of
deep-
seated monopoly when it becomes the dominant mens of
satisfying needs that forerly occasioned a personal response.
The compulsory consumption of a high-powered commodty
(motorzed transport) retricts the conditions for enjoying an
abundant use-value (the innate capacity for trasit). Trafc
sere here as the paadigm of a general economc law: Any
industrial product that come in per capita quanta beyond a
given intenity eercises a radical monopoly over the satifaction
of a need. Beyond some point, compulsory schooling detroys
the environment for leaing, meical delivery systems dr up
the nontherapeutic source of health, and transportation
smothers trafc.
Rdical monopoly is fst etablished by a rerangeent of
society for the beneft of those who have acces to the larger
quata; then it 8 enforced by compelling all to consume the
minimum quantum in which the output is curently produced.
Compulsor consumpton wil_ take on a diferet apperace in
idustrial brache where inforation domiate, such a edu
cation or medicine, tha it Wi those brache where quat
c be measured in Brth theral units, such a housig,
clothing, or transpor. The industral packaging of value w
reach crtical intensity at di erent points with diferent pro
ducts, but for each major clas of outputs, the threhold oc u
within an order of magnitude that is theoreticly identifable.
The fact that it is possible theoretically to detere the rage
of sped within which transporaton develops a radical monop
oly over trafc doe not mean that it is possible theretically to
deterine just how much of such a monopoly any given society
w tolerate. The fact that it H possible to ident a level of
compulsory instrction at which lering by seeig and doing
decline does not enable the theorst to identif the specifc
pedagogical limits to the division of labor that a culture W
tolerate. Only recourse to jurdical and, above a , to political
proces can lead to the specc, though provisional, mesue
by
which
s
ee or compulsor education W actally b lim-
ENERGY AND EQUITY
J
ited i n a given society. The magnitude of voluntary limits is a
matter of politics; the encroachment of radical monopoly can
be pinpointed by social analysis. .
A branch of industry doe not impose a radical monopoly on
a whole society by the simple fact that it produces scarce pro
ducts, or by driving competing industries of the market, but
rather by virtue of its acquired ability to create and shape the
need which it alone can satisfy.
Shoe are scarce 8 over Latin Aerica, and many people
never wear then. They walk on the bare soles of their feet, or
wer the world's wdest variety of excellent sandals, supplied by
a range of artisans. Their transit is in no way restrcted by their
lack of shoe. But in some countrie of South America people
are compelled to be shod ever since access to schools, jobs, and
public serice was dened to the barefoot. Techers or party
ofcials defne the lack of shoes a a sign of indiference toward
"progess." Without ay intentional conspiracy between the
promoters of national development and the shoe industry, the
barefoot in these countries are now barred from any ofce.
Schools, like shoes, have been scarce at all time. But it was
never the small number of prvleged pupis that tured the
school ito a obstacle for lerig. Only when laws were
enacte to make schools both compulsory and fee did the
eucator asume the power to deny lering opporunitie on
the job to the underconsumer of educational therapies . . Only
when school atendance had become obligatory did it become
feaible to impose on all a progresively more complex arifcial
environment into which the unschooled and unprogrammed do
not ft.
The potenta of a radical monopoly is unmistakable in the
ce of trafc. Imagine what would happen if the transporation
industr could somehow distrbute it output more adequately:
a trafc utopia offree rapid transportation for all would inevita
bly lead to a frther expansion of trafc's domain over human
lfe. What would such a utopia look like? Trafc would be
organized exclusively around public transporation systems. It
would be fance by a progresive ta calculated on incme
ad on the proxity of one's reidence to the next terinal and
1 32
to
the job. It would b deigne so that everbody could occupy
a
Y set on a frst-come, frst-sered bais: the doctor, the vaca
tio
ner, and the preident would not be asigned any prorty of
pe
rson. In this fool's paadise, all passengers would b equal,
but they would be just as equally captive consumers of trans
port. Each citizen of a motorized utopia would be equally de
prived of the use of his feet. and equaly draft ito the seri
tude of proliferating network of transportion.
Cerain would-be miracle makers disguised a architects ofer
a specious escape from the paradox of speed. By their sta
dards, acceleration imposes inequitie, time loss, and controlled
schedule only because people do not yet live in those patters
and orbits into which vehicles can best place them. Thee ftur
istic architects would house and occupy people in self-sufcient
units of towers interconnected by tracks for hgh-speed cap
sules. Soler, Doxiadis, or Fuller would solve the problem
creted by high-sped transport by identifg the entire huma
habitat with the problem. Rather than aking how the earh's
surface can be preered for people, they ak how reerations
nOQ for the surva of people can be etablshed on an
earh that has been rehaped for the sae of industrial outputs.
THE ELUSIVE THRESHOLD
Paradoxically, the concept of a trafc-optimal top spee for
tranpor seems capricious or fanatical to the conf ed passen
ger, whereas it looks like the fight of the bird to the donkey
driver. Four or six time the speed of a man on foot constitute
a threshold too low to be deemed worthy of consideration by
the habitual pasenger and too high to convey the sense of a
limit to the three-uaer of humanity who still get aound on
their own power.
All those who pla, fnance, or engineer other people's hous
ing, traspration, or education belong to the passenger clas.
Their claim to power is derved from the value their employer
place on acceleration. Social scientists c build a computer
model 0trafc in Calcutt or Santiago, and engner c
deign monorail webs according to abstract notions of trafc
ENERGY AND EQUITY 133
fow. Since thee planers are tre believers in problem-solving
by industrial deign, the real solution for trafc congestion is
beyond their grasp. Their belief in the efectivenes of power
blinds them to the disproportionately greter efectiveness of
abstainng from its use. Trafc engineers have yet to combine
in one simulation model the mobility of people with that of
vehicle. The tansporation enginer cnnot conceive of the
possibility of renouncing speed ad slowing down for the sake
of peritting time-and-detination-optimal trafc flow. He
would never entertain the thought of programming his com
puter on the stipulation that no motorized vehicle wthin any
city should ever overke the speed of a velocipede. The devel
opment exper who looks down compasionately from his
Land-Rover on the Indian peasant herding his pigs to market
refses to acknowledge the relative advatage of feet. The ex
per tends to forget that this man ha dispensed ten others in
his village fom spending time on the road, whereas the eng
ner and every member of his family separately devote a major
pa of every day to trasportion. For a man who believe that
huan mobility. must be conceive in ters of indefnite prog
res, there c be no optimal level of trafc but only passing
consensus on a gven techncal level of trasporation.
Most Mexica, not to spe of Indias and Chinee, are in
a psition invere to that of the coned paseger. The crti
cal threhold is entirely beyond what albut a few of them know
or expect. They stil belong to the class of the self-powered.
Some of them have a lngerng memory of a motorzed adven
tre, but most ofthem have no personal experence of traveling
at or above the crtical speed. In the two typical Mexican state
of Guereo ad Chiapa, les tha one per cent of the popula
tion moved even once over ten mile in less tha one hour
dug 7. The vehicle into which pople in these ares are
sometime crowded render trc indeed more convenient, but
barely faster than the speed of a bicycle. The third-clas bus
doe not separate the farer from his pig, and it takes them
both to market without infictig ay loss of weight, but this
acquaintnc with motored .. comfort" doe not amount to
dependence on detrctive spe.
The order of magnitude in which the crtical threshold of
13
4
speed can be found is too low to be taken serously by the
passenger, and too high to concer the peaant. It is so obvious
it cannot be esily seen. The proposal of a limit to speed within
this order of magnitude engenders stubbor opposition. It ex
pose the addiction of industrialized men to ever higher doses
of energy, while it aks those who are still sober to abstan from
something they have yet to taste.
To propose counterfoil research is not only a scanda, it is
also a threat. Simplicity threatens the exper, who supposedly
understands just why the commuter train runs at 8: 15 and 8:41
and why it must b better to use fuel with cerain additives.
That a politica proces could identify a natural dimension,
both inescapable and limited, is an idea that lie outside the
pasenger's world of verties. He has let repect for specialists
he does not even know tum into unthinking submission. If a
political resolution could be found for problems creted by
expers in the feld of trafc, then perhaps the same remedy
could be applied to problems of education, medicie, or ubai
zation. If the order of magnitude of trafc-optimal vehcular
velocities could be deterined by laymen actively paricipatig
in an ongoing political proces, then the foundation on whch
the framework of every indutrial society is built would be
shattered. To propose such reech is politicaly subversive. It
calls in quetion the overarching consensus on the need for
more transporation which now allows the proponents of publc
ownerhip to defne themselve a political adversares of the
proponents of prvate enterprse.
DEGREES OF SELF-POWERED MOBILIT
A century ago, the ball-bearing was invented. It reduce the
coefcient of friction by a factor of a thouand. By applying a
wel-calibrated ball-berng between two Neolithic millstone,
a man could now grind i a day what took his acestors a week.
The ball-bearng also made possible the bicycle, alowing the
wheel-probably the lat of the gret Neolithc ivention
fnally to become useful for self-powered mobility.
ENERGY AND EQUITY
1 35
Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efciently. He
care one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes
by expending 0. 75 calorie. Man on his feet is therodynami
cally more efcient than any motorized vehicle and most ani
mals. For his weight, he perfors more work in locomotion
than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of
efciency man settled the world and made its history. At this
rate peasant societies spend les than 5 per cent and nomads less
tha 8 per cent of their respective social time budgets outside
the home or the encampment.
Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the
pedestrian, but uses fve times les energy in the process. He
care one gram of his weight over a kilometer of fat road at
an expense of only 0. 1 5 calories. The bicycle is the perect
transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance
of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the ef
ciency of not only all machines but al other animals as well.
The invention of the ball-berng, the tangent-spoked wheel,
and the pneumatic tire taken together can be compared to only
three other events in the history of transportation. The inven
tion of the wheel at the dawn of civiization took the load of
man's back and put it onto the barow. The invention and
siultaneous application, durng the European Middle Age, of
sti p, shoulder haress, and horsehoe increased the thermo
dynamic efciency of the horse by a factor of up to fve, and
chaged the economy of medieval Europe: it made frequent
plowing possible ad thus introduced rotation agrculture; it
brought more distant felds into the rech of the peasant, and
thus pertte ladowners to move from six-family hamlets
into one-hudre family village, where they could live around
the church, the square, the jail, and-later-the school; it al
lowed the cultivation of norher soils and shifed the center of
power into cold climate. The buildig of the frst ocengoing
vesels by the Portuguee in the fteenth century, under the
aegis of developing European capitalsm, laid the solid founda
tions for a globe-spanning culture and market.
The invention of the bal-bearng sigaled a fourth revolu
tion. This revolution was unlike that suppored by the stirrp,
136
which raised the knight onto his horse, and unlke that, sup
por
ed by the galleon, which enlarged the horzon of the kng's
captains. The ball-beang signaled a tre crsis, a true political
choice. It created an option between more freedom in equity
ad more speed. The beng is an equally fundamental ingredi
ent of two new type of locomotion, repectively symbolize by
the bicycle and the car. The bicycle led man's auto-mobility
into a new order, beyond which progres is theoretically not
possible. In contrast, the accelerating individual capsule ena
bled societies to engage in a rtual of progressively paralyzing
speed.
The monopoly of a ritual application over a potentially usefl
device is nothing new. Thousands of yers ago, the wheel took
the load of the carer slave, but it did so only on the Eurasian
land mass. In Mexco, the wheel was well known, but never
applied to traspor. It sered exclusively for the construction
of carriage for toy gods. The taboo on wheelbarows in Aer
ica before Cores Gno more puzling than the taboo on bicycle
in modem trafc.
It is by no meas necessar that the invention of the ball
beang continue to serve the icreae of energy use ad
thereby produce time scarcity, space consumption, ad class
prvilege. If the new order of self-powered mobility ofered
by the bicycle were protected against devaluation, paralysis,
and rsk to the limbs of the rider, it would be possible to
guarantee optimal shaed mobility to all people and put an
end to the imposition of maximum prvilege and exploit
tion. It would be possible to control the patter of ubai
zation d the organization of space were constrained by the
power man ha to move through it.
Bicycle are not only therodynamically efcient, they are
also chep. With his much lower salary, the Chnee acquire
hs durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an Aer
c devotes to the puchae of his obsolescnt c. Te cost of
public utilitie neede to facilitate bicycle trafc verus the prc
of an infrastrcture tailored to hgh spees is proportonately
even les _tan the prc diferental of the vehcle used i the
two systems. In the bicycle system, engneered roads ae ne-
ENERGY AND EQUITY
\37
sary only at crtain points of dense trafc, and people who live
fa from the suraced path are not thereby automatically iso
lated a they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The
bicycle ha extended man's radius without shunting him onto
roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot rde his bike, he can
usualy push it.
The bicycle also use little space. Eighteen bikes ca be
parked in the place of one ca, thiry of them can move along
in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three
lanes of a given size to move +, people across a brdge in
one hour by using automated trains, four to move them on
buse, twelve to move them in their cars, and only two lane for
them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all thee vehicles, only the
bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without
walking. The cyclist can rech new destinations of his choice
without his tool creting new locations from which he is barred.
Bicycle let people move with greter speed without taking
up signcant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They
can spend fewer hours on ech mle and still travel more miles
in a year. They can get the beneft of technologcal break
throughs without putting undue claims on the schedules, en
ergy, or space of others: They bome maters of their own
movements without blocking those of their fellows. Their new
tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy. Ever
increse in motorzed speed create new demands on space and
time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to
create a new relationship between their life-space and their
lifetime, between their tertor ad the pulse of their being,
without detroying their inherted balance. The advantages of
mode self-powered trafc are obvious, and igored. Tat bet
ter trafc rns faster is asered, but never proved. Before they
ask pple to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should
tr to display the evidence for their claim.
A gsly contest between bicycles and motors is just coming
to an end. In Vietnam, a hyperindustralized ary tred to
conquer, but could not overcome, a people organized around
bicycle speed. The leson should be clear. High-energ arie
can annhilate people-both those they

defend and those
J8
against whom they are launched-but they are of ver limite
use to a people which defends itelf. It remains to be seen if the
Vietnamese will apply what they leared in war to an economy
of peace, if they will be willing to protect the values that made
their victory possible. The dismal likelihood is that the victors,
for the sake of industral progress and increaed energy con
sumption, will tend to defeat themselves by destroying that
structure of equity, rationality, and autonomy into which
Aerican bombers forced them by deprving them of fels,
motors, and roads.
DOMINANT VERSUS SUBSIDIARY MOTORS
People are bor almost equally mobile. Their natural ability
speaks for the personal libery of each one to go wherever he
or she wants to go. Citiens of a society founde on the notion
of equity will demad the protection of this right agaist ay
abridgment. It should be irelevant to them by what mes the
exercise of personal mobility is denied, whether by iprson
ment, bondage to an etate, revocton of a paspor, or enclo
sure withi a environent that encroaches on a peron's na
tive ability to move in order to make him a consumer of
transpor. This inalienable rght of free movement doe not
lapse jut because most of our contemporae have strappe
themselve into ideological set belts. Man's natural capacity
for transit emerges as the only yardstick by whch to meure
the contrbution transport can make to trafc: there is ony s
much transport that trafc c bear. It remains to b outlied
how we ca distinguish those fors of transport that crpple the
power to move from those that enhance it.
Transporation can abridge trafc in thee ways: by breakg
its fow, by creting isolated sets of detinations, and by incre
ing the loss of time due to trafc. I have alredy argued that the
key to the relation between transport and trafc is the speed of
vehicle . . . Lhave described how, pat a cer threhold of
speed, trasport ha gone on to obstrct trafc in thee the
ENERCY AND EQUIT 139
ways. It blocks mobiity by cluttering up the environment with
vehicle and roads. It transfors geography into a pyramid of
circuits sealed of from one another according to levels of accel
eration. It exproprates life-time at the behest of speed.
beyond a crn threhold transpor obstrcts trafc,
te inverse is also tre: below some level of speed, motor
ized vehicles can complement or improve trfc by perit
ting people to do things they could not do on foot or on bi
cycle. A well-developed transportation system rnning at
top spee of 23 mph would have allowed Fi to chase Phil
e Fogg around the world in les than half of eighty days.
Motors c b used to transport the sick, the lame, the old,
and the just plain lay. Motor pulleys can lif people over
hils, but they can do so peacefully only if they do not push
the climber of the path. Trains ca extend the range of
travel, but c do so with justice only if people have not
only equal trasporation but equal fee time to come closer
to ech other. The time engaged in travel must be, as much
as possible, the traveler's own: only insofar a motorzed
transport remans limite to spees which leave it subsidia
to autonomou trasit c a trafc-optimal transporaton
system be developed.
A lmit on the power ad therefore on the speed of motors
doe not by itsel insure those who are weker against exploita
tion by the rch ad powerul, who can still devise mens to live
and work at better located addrese, travel with retinue in
plush carage, ad reserve a special lane for doctors and mem
bers of the cetra comtte. But at a sufciently lite ma
mum speed, this is a unaires which cn be reduced or even
corected by political mes: by grassroots control over taxe,
routes, vehicle, and thei schedules in the community. At un
lited top speed neither public ownership of the mens of
trasporation nor techncal improvement in their control can
ever eliminate gowing and unequal exploitation. A transpor
tion industr Hthe key to optimal production of trafc, but only
dit does not exercise it rdical monopoly over that personal
mobility which is intrically ad primariy a value in use.
140
UNDEREQUIPMENT, OVERDEVELOPMENT,
AND MATURE TECHNOLOGY
The combination of transporation and transit that consti
tutes trafc has provided us with an example of socially optimal
per capita wattage and of the need for politically chosen limit
on it. But trafc can also be viewed as but one model for the
convergence of world-wide development goals, and as a crte
ron by which to distinguish those countrie that are lamely
underequipped from those that are detrctively overdustral
ized.
A country can be classifed as underequipped if it canot
outft each citizen with a bicycle or provide a fve-speed trans
mission a a bonus for anyone who wants to pa other
around. It is underequipped if it cannot provide good roads for
the cycle, or free motorzed public transportion (though at
bicycle speed!) for those who want to travel for more than a few
hours in succession. No tehnical, economic, or ecological rea
son exists why such backwardness should be tolerated any
where in 1975. It would be a scandal i the natura mobity of
a people were forced to stagnate on a pre-bicycle level against
:u will.
A country can be classifed as overindustra whe its
socia life is dominated by the transporation industry, which
ha come to deterine its clas prvilege, to accentute its time
scarcity, and to tie its people more tightly to the tracks it has
laid out for them.
Beyond underequipment and overndustralization, there is a
place for the world of postindustrial efectivenes, where the
industral mode of production complements other autonomous
fors of production. Tere is a place, in other words, for a
world of techologicl maturity. In ters of trafc, it is the
world of those who have tripled the extent of their diy horizon
by lifting themselve onto thei bicycle. It is just a much the
world marked by a variety of subsidiar motor available for the
occasions when a bicycle is not enough and when a extra push
ENERGY AND EQUITY 141
will limit neither equity nor freedom. And it is, too, the world
of the long voyage: a world where every place is open to every
person, at his ow pleure and speed,. without hate or fer, by
means of vehicle that cross distances without breking with the
erh which man walked for hundreds of thousands of yers on
his own two feet.
Undereuipment keeps people frstrated by inefcient labor
and invites the enslavement of man by man. Overindustrializa
tion enslaves people to the tools they worship, fattens profe
sional herachs on bits and on watts, and invite the translation
of unequal power into huge income diferentials. It impose the
same net transfers of power on the productive relations of ever
society, no matter what creed the maagers profes, no matter
what rai-dance, what penitential rtua they conduct. Techno
logical maturty perit a society to steer a course equally free
of either enslavement. But bewarethat coure is not chared.
Tehnologcal maturty perits a varety of politcal choice
ad culture. The varety dishe, of coure, a a communit
allows industr to grow at the cost of autonomous production.
Resoning alone c ofer no preise measure for the level of
postindustrial efeivenes ad techologcal matuity appro
prate to a cncrete society. It c only indicate in dimensional
te the rage into which thee tehnologicl characterstics
must fit. It must be lef to a historca community engaged in
its ow politcal proes to decide when programming, space
distorion, tme scacity, and inequality cee to be worth its
whie. Reoning c identif speed as the crtical factor in
trafc. Reoning combined with experimentation can identify
the order of magitude at which vehicula speed turs into a
sociopoliticl deterinant. No genius, no exper, no club of
elites can set limits to industrial outputs that will be politically
feible. The ne for such limit a a alterative to disater
is the strongest argument in favor of radical technology.
Ony when the speed limit of vehicles refet the enlightened
self-interet of a political community can thee limits become
operative. Obviously this interet ca ot even be expressed in
a society where one clas monopolize not only transporation
but communicaton, medicie, educaton, ad wepons a well.
1 42
It does not matter if this power is held by legal owners or by
entrenched,managers of an industry that is legally owne by the
workers. This power must be reapproprated and submitted to
the sound judgment of the common man. The reconquest of
power starts with the recognition that exper kowledge blinds
the secretive bureucrat to the obvious way of dissolving the
energy crisis, just as it blinded
'
him to the obvious solution to
the war in Vietnam.
There are two roads from where we are . to technologcal
maturity: one is the road o
f
liberation from afuence; the other
is the road of liberation from dependence. Both roads have the
same destination: the social restrcturing of space that ofers to
each person the constantly renewed experence that the center
of the world is where he stands, walk, and live.
Liberation from afuence begins on the trafc islands where
the rich rn into one another. The well-sped are tossed from one
island to the next and are ofered but the company of fellow
passengers en route to somewhere else. This solitude of plenty
would begin to break down a the trafc islands gadually
expanded and people began to recover their native power to
move around the place where they lived. Thus, the impover
ished environment of the trafc island could embody the begin
nings of social reconstrction, and the people who now call
themselves rich would break with bondage to overefcient
transport on the day they came to treasure the horizon of their
trafc islands, now fully grown, and to dred frequent ship
ments from their homes.
Liberation from dependence stars at the other end. It brea
the constraints of vlage and vaey and leds beyond the bore
dom of narrow horzons and the stifing oppression of a world
closed in on itself To expand life beyond the radius of tradition
without scatering it to the wids of acceleration is a goal that
ay poor country could achieve within a few yeas, but it is a
goal that will be reche only by those who rejet the ofer of
unchecked industral development made in the name of an
ideology of indefite eergy consumption.
LiberatiQn
.
from the radical monopoly of the trasportion
industry is possible only through the institution of a political
ENERGY AND EQUITY 4J
proces that demystifes and disestablishe speed and limits
trafc-related public expenditure of money, time, and space to
the puruit of equal mutual acces. Such a process amounts to
public guardianship over a means of production to keep this
men from turng into a fetish for the majorty and an end
for the few. The political process, in tum, will never engage the
support of a vat majority unles its goals are set with reference
to a standard that c be publicly and operationally verifed.
The recognition of a socially critical threhold of the energy
quantum incororated i a commodity, such as a passenger
mile, provides such a standard. A society that tolerates the
transgresion of this threshold inevitably divers its reources
from the production of means that can be shared equitably and
transfors them into fuel for a sacrifcial fame that victimizes
the majorty. On the other hand, a society that limits the top
speed of its vehicles i accordance with this threshold fulflls a
nesary-though by no means a sufcient-ondition for the
political pursuit of equity.
Liberation which comes cheap to the poor will cost the rch
dear, but they will pay its prce once the acceleration of their
trnsportion systems grnds trafc to a halt. A concrete analy
sis of trafc betrays the trth underlying the energy crisis: the
impact of indutrally packaged quanta of energy on the social
envronment tends to be degrading, exhausting, and enslaving,
ad thee efects come into play even before those which
threten the polluton of the physical environment and the
extnction of the race. The crcial point at which these efects
cn be reversed is not, however, a matter of deuction, but of
deision.

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Copyright 1977, 1978 by Ivan Illich

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_ cumu_ti_aCcretion ofJhe_:ental excrement

TOWARD A HISTORY OF NEEDS

alike. Neither i wlling to fac the facts. For the

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