Ivan Illich was an Austrian Catholic pries, theologican and social critic. He had an idea that I can’t stop thinking about: He called it counterprodutivity.
Counterproducivity is the idea that institutions, pas a certain threshold of scale or complexity, begin to actively undermine the very purpose they were created to serve. He called it a “counterprodutive” threshold.
To say it another way: growing organizations cross a threshold where they actively product the OPPOSITE of what they exist to create.
Examples:
Schools that systematically prevent genuine learning.
Hospitals that produce more illness than they cure.
Transportation systems that (when you account for all the time spent earning money to afford a car) actually move people slower than walking.
The institution doesn’t just fail - it inverts.
Once an institution grows large enough, it must begin serving its own survival - its budgets, its brand, its internal hierarchies, its need to justify its existence. At that point, the people it was meant to serve become, functionally, the resource it consumes to keep running.
Illich called the end state a “radical monopoly.” Not just market dominance, but something more insidious: the colonization of imagination. The institution grows until people can no longer coneive of the need being met any other way. You stop asking “how do humans learn?” and only ask “how do we improve the school?” The category swallows the question.
It makes me think about economics - when do economic institutions begin to create economic inequality and collapse instead of prosperity?
Or politics - when does the political system pass a threshold where it begins to invert and creates the very polarization and dysfunction it exists to resolve?
Or media — when does the institution built to inform a democracy begin to manufacture confusion and outrage instead?
No wonder there is so much distrust of institutions in our time.
I think we are living in a time where the older generations remember when institutions were generally good and healthy for our society - a time of Walter Cronkite media and George Bailey banking and relatively helpful school systems. A time when institutions were, by and large, doing what they said they were doing. And so the older generation’s instinct is to defend them - to see the problem as one of attitude, or effort, or a generation that doesn’t want to do the hard work of participation.
But the younger generation isn’t disillusioned because they’re lazy. They’re disillusioned because they’re paying attention. They grew up inside institutions that had already crossed the threshold - and they felt it, even when they couldn’t name it. Both generations are right about different moments in time. One remembers before. The other has only known after.
How might this idea apply to the church?
The Christian tradition, at its core, exists to form people - to midwife a particular kind of inner transformation, a dying and rising, a reorientation of the whole self toward love.
How well does formation scale? Can it scale?
When do religious institutions - the ones with budgets to maintain and attendance figures to defend and brands to protect - quietly, often unconsciously, swap out formation for something that does scale: inspiration. Content. A weekly experience that feels meaningful, produces enough emotional resonance to bring people back, and asks nothing too costly of anyone.
I believe most of the people running these institutions are sincere. But sincerity doesn’t exempt anyone from structural logic. Once a church depends on hundreds or thousands of weekly attenders to function, it cannot afford to take formation as seriously - because real formation would thin the crows. It would surface conflict. It would ask people to sit with discomfort long enough that something actually changed. It would require the kind of intimate, mutual accountability that simply doesn’t work at scale.
And so the institution, past the threshold, begins to produce the opposite of its stated purpose. It generates spiritual consumers instead of disciples. It creates people who know the vocabulary of transformation without having undergone any. It mistakes regularity for formation, attendance for belonging, emotional experience for encounter with the living God.
Worse — and this is Illich’s radical monopoly point — it monopolizes the imagination. People who have been inside large religious institutions for years often cannot imagine what genuine spiritual community might look like. They know the product so well that the original need has become invisible. They don’t ask “how do humans grow toward God?” They only ask “how do we find a better church?”
The answer, I think, is not to abandon institutions wholesale — Illich wasn’t quite an anarchist, and neither am I. But it is to become ruthlessly clear about what scale actually permits. Large gatherings can inspire, resource, and connect. They cannot form. Formation happens in small, slow, accountable containers — where people know each other well enough to tell the truth, and stay together long enough for it to matter.
Illich believed this isn’t fixable through better management. Its structural. The container becomes the obstacle to the purpose.
It makes me rethink the value and importance of the small, local church. Maybe that is the size of community that is most leveraged (from a structural, design perspective) for real formation. Large enough to create diverse community and teach a path. Small and intimate enough to create real transformative relationships.
Sometimes it frustrates me that signposts on my path keep pointing me to the local church… :)