energy addiction

[John Verity]

Ivan Illich, in "Energy & Equity" (1973): 

...  Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of 
energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically 
harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between 
Methadone and ``cold turkey''---between maintaining its addiction to 
alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps---but no society can have a 
population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy 
slaves and whose members are also autonomously active. 
   ... beyond a certain level of per capita GNP, the cost of social 
control must rise faster than total output and become the major 
institutional activity within an economy. Therapy administered by 
educators, psychiatrists, and social workers must converge with the 
designs of planners, managers, and salesmen, and complement the services 
of security agencies, the military, and the police. I now want to 
indicate one reason why increased affluence requires increased control 
over people. I argue that beyond a certain median per capita energy 
level, the political system and cultural context of any society must 
decay. Once the critical quantum of per-capita energy is surpassed, 
education for the abstract goals of a bureaucracy must supplant the legal 
guarantees of personal and concrete initiative. This quantum is the limit 
of social order. ...



full essay here:

  
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/texts/energy_and_equity/energy_and_e
quity.html

John______________________________________________________________
                            J W Verity   TECHNOLOGIC PARTNERS, NYC
                                         212-343-1900 x258