Global Burnout by Pascal Chabot;

Author:Pascal Chabot; [Chabot, Pascal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501334399
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2017-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

Postmodern Malaise

Theory of a mirror disorder

Included among the pathologies of civilization are the various types of ill-defined malaise experienced by certain individuals as a response to social conditions they cannot tolerate. It matters little whether those afflicted are inveterate contrarians or, on the contrary, faithful representatives of the status quo. What matters is that they experience an episode of secession from their situation. Their state of mind reflects the dysfunctionality of the system to which they belong, and the form that their renunciation takes is influenced by the values to which they had previously subscribed. Such diseases of civilization are, in essence, mirror disorders, reflecting the aspects of a society that are accepted with the greatest difficulty.

Burnout is the current name for this type of condition. An illness that arises as a response to excess, overload, stress, loss of meaning, the dictates of the profit motive, and the strain of upholding humanist values within a technocratic system, it reveals the darker aspects of modern corporate culture. In this respect, it is more a reactive disorder than an endogenous illness: its causes are often external to the individual, originating from his or her interactions with a professional environment.

A secret, shared lineage connects all the symptoms of malaise induced by civilization, just as it unites the sensitive people from every age in history who longed to see their contemporaries behave with more reason and dignity. Condemnation of the system is the hallmark of those states of mind in which the individual concludes—after careful consideration and a certain amount of soul-searching—that while he or she may not be beyond reproach, the world, for its part, deserves to be judged critically. In order to express such malaise, new language was created. Often, this was as much a matter of self-preservation as it was self-expression: artistic and intellectual pursuits have always provided an outlet and a refuge for those enlightened souls who might otherwise have turned to self-destruction. New words were coined, each bearing the imprint of the era that gave rise to it, since mirror disorders, by their very nature, must be historically specific, functioning as a way for those afflicted to gain distance from a particular situation. It is important to trace the history of these maladies of civilization and to situate burnout within a modern tradition of expressions of dissent, in order to recognize it in its postmodern form.

Acedia, as we have already discussed, was a way of seceding from monastic life, its constraints, and the fate it reserved for those who doubted its tenets. The condition endured beyond its ecclesiastical incarnation, but in the course of this transformation, it was bestowed with a new name. It became spleen, in the Baudelairean sense. The affective states that characterize both conditions are essentially the same: sadness, ennui, hopelessness and melancholy seem to traverse time, more or less unchanged. In a little-known essay, Aldous Huxley explicitly identifies the ennui of the nineteenth century as a direct descendant of the acedia experienced by monks:

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