Daily Inspiration Quote by Ivan Illich

Illich’s line is a quiet grenade tossed into a culture that treats authority like a scoreboard. “Leadership does not depend on being right” isn’t an anti-intellectual shrug; it’s a diagnosis of how power actually moves. Being right is an epistemic claim. Leadership is a social relationship. Illich, the great critic of modern institutions, knew that once “rightness” becomes the entry ticket to legitimacy, you get a priesthood of experts and a public trained to outsource judgment.

The subtext is harsher: leaders often can’t afford the luxury of certainty, and followers rarely demand it. What they want is orientation, courage, a story that makes risk feel shared. “Right” can even be a liability, a way to shut down dissent and launder coercion as competence. Illich spent his career warning that systems built to serve people routinely end up defining what counts as need, health, learning, even morality. In that world, the person who is “right” is frequently the person most fluent in the institution’s language.

He’s also pushing back against technocratic morality: the idea that correct answers automatically produce just outcomes. Leadership, for Illich, is closer to stewardship than command - an ability to convene, to listen, to admit uncertainty without collapsing into paralysis. The punch is that it relocates responsibility. If leadership isn’t guaranteed by correctness, then citizens can’t hide behind experts either. You don’t get to be led out of accountability; you have to participate in the making of sense.