The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies

This is a short volume intended as a post-script to one of the author’s other works. Here he puts forth the idea that society is over-run by purveyors of pre-packaged needs (be they educational, medical, edible, automotive etc), that are sold or forced upon people who act without real choice as to what they consume. This eventually disables individuals from being able to meet their own requirements by self-sufficiency (and removes the enjoyment they might have had from this process), creating a reliance on the providers of the packaged services. This causes a problem by over-inflating the involved industries, without benefitting consumers.

An example is the proliferation of mechanical transport (cars/trains etc), which though it show more initially allows us travel greater distances with ease, makes us reliant on these to get to work, see our family etc, as it becomes normal to live further away from everything. It creates a modern poverty, whereby transport by foot or bike (which aside from being good for us inherently, unlike driving a car) no longer is sufficient to fulfil the requirements of life created by a system of cars or trains. It thus creates a modern poverty of service addiction different and more insidious than the poverty of the past. This same principle applies to the growth of food, education, medical care, provision of housing etc. The process itself prevents people from being usefully employed in meeting their own needs directly, having to enter the labour market producing things that do not directly meet their needs (and only meet imagined needs of others) in order to be able to afford pre-packaged services that don’t properly meet their own needs. The real target of the author's venom is the professionals who create these systems, be they educators, doctors, lawyers, food or automotive professionals, or regulators of building standards, who create ever more complex, expensive, and wasteful systems that profit them, create service addiction, and take away autonomy and self determination from the user. These he calls “disabling professions”.

While some of his rhetoric is perhaps overblown in places, and a few of his targets of criticism unfair, in many places he has a very good point. Though this was published a few years ago now (1978), many of the points ring truer now than ever. On a similar topic, his volume "Deschooling Society" is somewhat more focused on this problem in the area of education, and is probably a better place to start with Illich. show less