To Hell with Good Intentions

1
To Hell with Good Intentions
How did reading this make you feel?
2
Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

• llich was a priest who thought there were too
  many priests, a lifelong educator who argued for
  the end of schools an intellectual sniper from
  a perch with a wide view. He argued that
  hospitals cause more sickness than health, that
  people would save time if transportation were
  limited to bicycles that historians who rely on
  previously published material perpetuate
  falsehoods.
• His intellectual combination of anarchist
  panache, hatred of bureaucracy, Jesuitic
  argumentation, deep reverence for the past
  watered-down Marxism, was applied to many
  targets.
• Medical treatment is mistaken for health care,
  social work for the improvement of community
  life, police protection for safety, military
  poise for national security, the rat race for
  productive work.
• Deschooling Society
• www.eskimo.com/recall/bleed/1202.htm

3
What common ground do we have with rural Chinese?
What common good?

• There is no way for you to really meet with the
  underprivileged, since there is no common ground
  whatsoever for you to meet on.

4
What about the Problems in Our OWN Communities?

• Sentimental concern for newly-discovered poverty
  south of the border combined with total blindness
  to much worse poverty at home.
• If you have any sense of responsibility at all,
  stay with your riots here at home. Work for the
  coming elections You will know what you are
  doing, why you are doing it, and how to
  communicate with those to whom you speak. And you
  will know when you fail.

5
What is the difference between a volunteer and a
tourist or guests?

• Use your money, your status and your education
  to travel in rural (China.) Come to look, come to
  climb our mountains, to enjoy our flowers. Come
  to study. But do not come to help.

6
Are we projecting our world view on rural China?

• You are ultimatelyconsciously or
  unconsciouslysalesmen for a delusive ballet in
  the ideas of democracy, equal opportunity and
  free enterprise among people who havent the
  possibility of profiting from these.

7
What do villagers think of the volunteers? How
can we know what our presence really means to
them and how might it affect their lives?

• How odd that nobody ever thought about
  spending money to educate poor Mexicans in order
  to prevent them from the culture shock of meeting
  you?

8
What Problems Might We Help Create and Leave
Behind?

• At worst, in your community development
  spirit you might create just enough problems to
  get someone shot after your vacation endsand you
  rush back to your middleclass neighborhoods where
  your friends make jokes about spits and
  wetbacks.

9
Are there innate aspects of our volunteers which
are inherently oppressive to rural people?

• Can (you) imagine yourselves exactly the way a
  white preacher saw himself when he offered his
  life preaching to the black slaves on a
  plantation in Alabama? The fact that you live in
  huts and eat tortillas for a few weeks renders
  your well-intentioned group only a bit more
  picturesque.

10
Too High a Price?

• The best way of understanding that your
• help in the ghetto is neither needed nor
• wanted is to try, and fail. I do not agree with
  this argument. The damage which volunteers do
  willy-nilly is too high a price for the belated
  insight that they shouldnt have been volunteers
  in the first place.

11
Are there ways to reverse the roles of volunteers
and those whom the volunteers come to serve?