[from: Ivan Illich: Toward a History of Needs. New York: Pantheon, 1978.]
"This text was first published in Le Monde in early 1973. Over lunch in Paris the venerable editor of that daily, as he accepted my manuscript,
recommended just one change. He felt that a term as little known and as technical as ``energy crisis'' had no place in the opening sentence of an
article that he would be running on page 1. As I now reread the text, I am struck by the speed with which language and issues have shifted..."
cogsci.ed.ac.uk
* THE ENERGY CRISIS
"The choice of a minimum-energy economy compels the poor to abandon fantastical expectations and the rich to recognize their vested interest
as a ghastly liability. Both must reject the fatal image of man the slaveholder currently promoted by an ideologically stimulated hunger for more
energy. In countries that were made affluent by industrial development, the energy crisis serves as a pretext for raising the taxes that will be
needed to substitute new, more ``rational,'' and socially more deadly industrial processes for those that have been rendered obsolete by
inefficient overexpansion. For the leaders of people who are not yet dominated by the same process of industrialization, the energy crisis serves
as a historical imperative to centralize production, pollution, and their control in a last-ditch effort to catch up with the more highly powered. By
exporting their crisis and by preaching the new gospel of puritan energy worship, the rich do even more damage to the poor than they did by
selling them the products of now outdated factories. As soon as a poor country accepts the doctrine that more energy more carefully managed
will always yield more goods for more people, that country locks itself into the cage of enslavement to maximum industrial outputs. Inevitably the
poor lose the option for rational technology when they choose to modernize their poverty by increasing their dependence on energy. Inevitably the
poor deny themselves the possibility of liberating technology and participatory politics when, together with maximum feasible energy use, they
accept maximum feasible social control.
The energy crisis cannot be overwhelmed by more energy inputs. It can only be dissolved, along with the illusion that well-being depends on the
number of energy slaves a man has at his command. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify the thresholds beyond which energy corrupts,
and to do so by a political process that associates the community in the search for limits. Because this kind of research runs counter to that now
done by experts and for institutions, I shall continue to call it counterfoil research. It has three steps. First, the need for limits on the per capita use
of energy must be theoretically recognized as a social imperative. Then, the range must be located wherein the critical magnitude might be found.
Finally, each community has to identify the levels of inequity, harrying, and operant conditioning that its members are willing to accept in exchange
for the satisfaction that comes of idolizing powerful devices and joining in rituals directed by the professionals who control their operation..." |
