“Or even that the best way of understsning that your help in teh ghetto is neither needed nor wanted is to try, and fail. I do not agree with this argument. The damage which volunteers do willy-nilly is too high a price for the belated insight that they shouldn’t have volunteered in the first place…I am here to suggest that you voluntarily renounce excercising the power which being an American gives you.”

Toward the end of Ivan Illich’s “To Hell With Good Intentions,” Illich makes an interesting arguement that enhances the of the meaning of to pay interest on, one of the many definitions of service. He makes a point to show that by not understanding the consequences of volunteering without understanding the context of the situation, we ultimately worsen the lives of those we are helping. We ultimately pay an interest for the damage we do- our price is realizing that our help was neither wanted nor good. Illich claims that the price we pay for gaining this “insight” is too high for his people and his country. The damage we do cannot even be compenstated by the little interest we pay, which is gaining this insight. Illich implies that the greatest interest we can pay on the debt of the damage we’ve already done is to “voluntarily renounce excercising the power which being an American gives [us].” By doing this, we can hopefully start undoing the damage caused by the “good intentions” of volunteers before us.