Unplug in your own way and get out of the poverty of modernization.

 Unplug in your own way and get out of the poverty of modernization.

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Illich's critique of raising concerns about modernization, including the medical system, schools that monopolize the education system, and technology in general, including transportation systems, is quite persuasive.


Everyone is born, lives and dies. Death is a part of life. But how they die is different for each person.


The ancients or those who lived in the traditional society gained wisdom through the experience of death, but in modern society, the experience of sickness and death or the suffering caused by it is regarded as an object to be eradicated. Illich says that in the process of modernization, human autonomy is being decisively destroyed.


Dubai, which was called the miracle of the desert, was living with the indigenous way of life and wisdom in the past. But with the discovery of oil, upper-class people built state-of-the-art city-states in the middle of the desert and installed air conditioners beneath the hot sandy beaches. However, during the 2008 global financial crisis, Dubai also suffered a crisis and the miracle collapsed.


What will happen when the limited oil in Dubai is sold out? Can we go back to the past?


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"Grandma rides a camel, his father rides a bike, and a son rides a Rolls Royce."


It is said that it was a story that was floating around when Dubai's economy was booming. However, their descendants are at risk of riding camels again. Oil is a limited resource, and Dubai is now operating under debt in a financial market that does not exist in reality but exists only in numbers. After such a period passes, will Dubai be able to return to its traditional society?


In the traditional society, it was possible to live a humane way of life under the given conditions, but for those who are accustomed to the new life, it will be unbearable pain. Illich calls it 'modernized poverty'.


What is modernized poverty?


Indigenous peoples lived with their own 'indigenous values'. He showed the wisdom of self-sufficiency to live together by pioneering a way of life on his own under the given conditions. However, modernization made it seem as if there was no pain and could be eradicated, and made it possible to build a new world called Dubai. This modernized society degenerates humans into machines.


In a modernized society, the relationship between human beings is not even formed properly because the relationship is unnecessary. People ask for help from others when there is something they lack or suffer from, and the wonderful new world that modernity like Dubai is aiming for makes such a human experience fundamentally impossible.


The people of Dubai did not consider the traditional life unhappy and lived happily in their own way. However, when the modernized system is introduced, the traditional life that has been lived since then is felt inferior. People who used to live without Coke seem to have to drink Coke with ice when the weather gets hotter, and since Starbucks was established, they feel unhappy if they don't drink coffee there. will depend on it. All of this is not sustainable.


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The biggest problem of modernity, including the education system, medical system, transportation and technology, is that it does not allow humans to live autonomously as free people, but makes them enslaved by the modern system. Even in this situation, humans do not have any doubts. The people who live in the system, that is, the system, take these things for granted and live in the system without questioning it while suffering. It falls into the 'institutionalized error'.


When there is a problem with the system, I have to question the system itself and think about how I will act depending on where I am. We must be able to say 'NO' without submitting to today's institutions and the fantasies that they foster and promote.


'No' can only be said in their own unique voice at their own time and place.


Everyone has no choice but to unplug in their own way.

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