The industrial values originate inside the factory. Factories were created to answer the needs for products of mass populations . To do this, they must be as efficient as possible: using as little material as possible, producing as quickly as possible, and producing as much as possible. These are the values of more or less, standardization, efficiency, and growth.

But factory is not a standalone actor in the system. It depends on resources, capital, and labor to operate, and it depends on consumers to purchase its products. This is where the industrial values seep from the factory into resource extraction, consumption and our (human) way of life. Values that were originally for manufacturing force themselves on the whole society.

Everyone is Measured by Industrial values

We'll focus on how industrial values shape human life. Many of the institutions below are organized to serve the industrial production or have adopt the industrial value and use it to measure aspects of human life unrelated to the production system.

The education system aims to produce people who are as specialized as possible for the production system, much like increasingly specialized machines in a factory. It evaluates people according to the logic of more or less: Educated = values (for production), uneducated = less value. These "educated professionals" are granted privileges in the name of increasing productivity. In the process, people lose both the desire and the ability to learn for themselves.

Medical care becomes centered on maintaining the physical and mental health of professionals so they can work more. As medicine adopts industrial values, practitioners become more specialized and general practitioners without formal certification become illegitimate. People can no longer declare themselves sick; society accepts their claim only after it has been certified by medical professionals. People lose both the knowledge and the authority to care for themselves.

Transportation prioritizes speed to save the time of privileged professionals, so they can do more work, at the expense of the wider society. People are forced to abandon transportation modes that already suit their lives in favor of faster systems, in an excuse to integrate them into the global production network.

As a result, humans are now shaped and measured for their value to the industrial production system by the self-certifying professionals institutions acting as the enforcers (whom themselves also been shaped but benefit from the system). Those who cannot be measured become de-prioritize and Work That Cannot Be Measured Is Devalued.

Ultimately, the abstract value of society are reduce to just mechanical process.We confuse what can be measured as more or less with what is actually better suited to a purpose. We mistake the means for the ends.

There are Six ways industrial values threaten people of the world (especially the Radical Monopoly).

The alternative society might look like Convivial Society Enables People to Shape Their Own Environment

References

• Tools for Conviviality (1973) by Ivan Illich

All industrial institutions were passed through two watersheds. Education, the mails, social work, transportation, medical care. At first, new knowledge is applied to the solution of a clearly stated problem and scientific measuring sticks are applied to account for the new efficiency. Bu at a second point, the past achievements are used as rationale for the exploitation of society in the service of value which determined and constantly revised by self-certifying professional elites.