In 1973, writing Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich predicted that the catastrophe of the industrial system would become a crisis that would usher in a new era. “The total collapse of the industrial monopoly on production will be the result of synergy in the failure of the multiple systems that fed its expansion. … Almost overnight people will lose confidence not only in the major institutions but also in the miracle prescriptions of the would-be crisis managers. The ability of present institutions to define values such as education, health, welfare, transportation, or news will suddenly be extinguished because it will be recognized as an illusion. This crisis may be triggered by an unforeseen event, as the Great Depression … . People will suddenly find obvious what is now evident to only a few: that the organization of the entire economy toward the “better” life has become the major enemy of the good life. Like other widely shared insights, this one will have the potential of turning public imagination inside out. Large institutions can quite suddenly lose their respectability, their legitimacy, and their reputation for serving the public good.”
It is worth reflecting on the reasons and ways in which these substantially correct prophecies have not come true after nearly half a century (even though many symptoms seem to confirm their relevance). The industrial mode of production and the power that accompanies it continue to exist despite the loss of all respectability and credibility.
Illich could not imagine that a system could maintain itself precisely because of the loss of all credibility – that is, that people would continue to act according to models and principles they no longer believed in, that lack of faith, the fact of being oligopistos (Matthew 14:31), would become the normal condition of humanity (and it was certainly the Church, by transforming the closeness between the heart and the word referred to by Paul in Romans 10:6-10 into a set of dogmas, that made the loss of faith acceptable).
A system – such as the one we are confronted with – which starts from the principle that people no longer believe in it, which is therefore based precisely on apistia and lack of trust, is an adversary that is both fragile and particularly difficult to combat. Indeed, it constantly benefits from credit it does not have, just as the debts on which banks base their power are ultimately uncollectible.
Money works not because we believe in it, but precisely because it is the very form of lack of faith (as Marx foresaw, it is precisely this absence of faith that constitutes the theological character of commodities: one cannot have faith in what can be bought and sold). By replacing the Church, banks wisely and irresponsibly administer the lack of faith that characterises our world. They are the Levites and priests of humanity’s new irreligion.
How can we devise a strategy to deal with such an adversary? It is certainly futile to denounce its lack of credibility and legitimacy, because – as we have clearly seen during the so-called pandemic – it is the first to display and claim them. Its weakness lies not so much in its lack of faith as in the lies to which this lack of faith compels it. Indeed, only a power based on disbelief, which would decide not to speak and devote itself to silence, would be invincible. The powers that claim to govern us today do nothing but talk and pass judgement, thus contradicting their most intimate nature and seeming, in a way, to believe and demand faith.
In reality, something more complicated and subtle is at work here. For those who do not believe, all discourse is false, because the absence of faith corresponds only to silence. Like the character in [Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s] The Demons, they neither believe nor disbelieve. If, on the contrary, they believe, as seems to be the case everywhere today, in their own disbelief, they destroy the very foundation on which it rested. Believing in not believing is the worst of lies, in which the person who utters it can only remain imprisoned. And it is this lie – and not, as Illich suggested, the fact that people no longer believe in it – that will lead the system to its downfall.
Giorgio Agamben: To believe and not to believe
In 1973, writing Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich predicted that the catastrophe of the industrial system would become a crisis that would usher in a new era. “The total collapse of the industrial monopoly on production will be the result of synergy in the failure of the multiple systems that fed its expansion. … Almost overnight people will lose confidence not only in the major institutions but also in the miracle prescriptions of the would-be crisis managers. The ability of present institutions to define values such as education, health, welfare, transportation, or news will suddenly be extinguished because it will be recognized as an illusion. This crisis may be triggered by an unforeseen event, as the Great Depression … . People will suddenly find obvious what is now evident to only a few: that the organization of the entire economy toward the “better” life has become the major enemy of the good life. Like other widely shared insights, this one will have the potential of turning public imagination inside out. Large institutions can quite suddenly lose their respectability, their legitimacy, and their reputation for serving the public good.”
It is worth reflecting on the reasons and ways in which these substantially correct prophecies have not come true after nearly half a century (even though many symptoms seem to confirm their relevance). The industrial mode of production and the power that accompanies it continue to exist despite the loss of all respectability and credibility.
Illich could not imagine that a system could maintain itself precisely because of the loss of all credibility – that is, that people would continue to act according to models and principles they no longer believed in, that lack of faith, the fact of being oligopistos (Matthew 14:31), would become the normal condition of humanity (and it was certainly the Church, by transforming the closeness between the heart and the word referred to by Paul in Romans 10:6-10 into a set of dogmas, that made the loss of faith acceptable).
A system – such as the one we are confronted with – which starts from the principle that people no longer believe in it, which is therefore based precisely on apistia and lack of trust, is an adversary that is both fragile and particularly difficult to combat. Indeed, it constantly benefits from credit it does not have, just as the debts on which banks base their power are ultimately uncollectible.
Money works not because we believe in it, but precisely because it is the very form of lack of faith (as Marx foresaw, it is precisely this absence of faith that constitutes the theological character of commodities: one cannot have faith in what can be bought and sold). By replacing the Church, banks wisely and irresponsibly administer the lack of faith that characterises our world. They are the Levites and priests of humanity’s new irreligion.
How can we devise a strategy to deal with such an adversary? It is certainly futile to denounce its lack of credibility and legitimacy, because – as we have clearly seen during the so-called pandemic – it is the first to display and claim them. Its weakness lies not so much in its lack of faith as in the lies to which this lack of faith compels it. Indeed, only a power based on disbelief, which would decide not to speak and devote itself to silence, would be invincible. The powers that claim to govern us today do nothing but talk and pass judgement, thus contradicting their most intimate nature and seeming, in a way, to believe and demand faith.
In reality, something more complicated and subtle is at work here. For those who do not believe, all discourse is false, because the absence of faith corresponds only to silence. Like the character in [Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s] The Demons, they neither believe nor disbelieve. If, on the contrary, they believe, as seems to be the case everywhere today, in their own disbelief, they destroy the very foundation on which it rested. Believing in not believing is the worst of lies, in which the person who utters it can only remain imprisoned. And it is this lie – and not, as Illich suggested, the fact that people no longer believe in it – that will lead the system to its downfall.
Quodlibet, December 15, 2025