another view on crisis

Crisis has come to mean that moment
when doctors, diplomats, bankers, and
assorted social engineers take over and
liberties are suspended. Like patients,
nations go on the critical list. 'Crisis',
the Greek term that has designated
"choice" or "turning point" in all modern
languages, now means "driver, step
on the gas." Crisis now evokes an ominous
but tractable threat against which money,
manpower, and management can be
rallied. Intensive care for the dying,
bureaucratic tutelage for the victim of
discrimination, fission for the energy glutton,
are typical responses. Crisis, understood
this way, is always good for executives
and commissars, especially those scavengers
who live on the side effects 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 thrive on the distribution of
welfare which, in the first instance, was
financed by those assisted. Crisis understood
as a call for acceleration not only puts more
power under the control of the driver, while
squeezing the passengers more tightly into
their safety belts; it also justifies the
depredation of space, time, and resources
for the sake of motorized wheels, and it
does so to the detriment of people who want
to use their feet.

-- Ivan Illich, "Useful Unemployment and its
Professional Enemies", in "Toward a History
of Needs".