David Cayley on Illich and Institutions
Episode description
Canadian radio broadcaster David Cayley pulls up a chair to discuss Ivan Illich, a renegade priest and professor who argued against schools, missionaries, and modern medicine. Cayley, author of Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, walks listeners through Illich’s thought and its applications to current tests like the pandemic.
Guest Host: Michael Sauter
Highlights
0:30 Murdock asks, “Storied thinker or Tolstoy story?”
2:15 David Cayley, a man of Ideas
3:00 Sauter conversation with Cayley begins
4:00 Cayley on cassette
8:00 Corruption of the best is the worst, the West in a nutshell
10:15 Charles Taylor in the secular amen corner
11:45 Place, Limits, and Liberty (and Illich)
12:45 Freedom and the Wackosphere
13:45 What is enough?
15:45 “Three Dimensions of Public Choice”
18:00 Technologies you can’t put down
21:00 Free-relatedness and dependency on others
22:15 The risk of birth
24:30 Doorways to nowhere
27:00 Computerized people and COVID
29:30 Cayley’s death cult
31:00 Apocalypse and revelation
33:30 Beware an institutionalized Incarnation
35:30 Illich and friends around the table
Resources
Full interview and Sauter review
Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey
Obituary in The Lancet