Global and social approach 14/05/2014

GLOBAL BURN-OUT – CONFERENCE

Pascal CHABOT

Professor in Philosophy

Institut des Hautes Etudes en Communications sociales Brussels

It was necessary to establish this fact: before being an individual problem, burn-out is primarily a disease of civilization. Marked by the ac-celeration of time, the thirst for profit, tensions between the technical system and disoriented human beings, postmodernism has become a trap for some people too dedicated to a system from which they vainly seek recognition.

Burn-out is a tragedy of the modern world : an internal collapse that consumes the individual leaving only ashes. An unexpected effect of technological frenzy and the intoxication of productivity in all its forms, it affects the most suitable, most integrated, the most conscientious intellectual workers.

With his book Global Burn-Out, the philosopher Pascal Chabot offers a clear and thorough analysis of what he sees as the new evil of the century. The successor of melancholy and neurasthenia, burn-out could represent the breakdown of a person facing an era that imposes a model which is alien to his deep humanity. “Professional exhaustion” to use medical terminology, is much more than a burn-out or loss of motivation: it burns of the soul of those who commit themselves without thinking to the logic of a socio-economic system which methodical-ly grinds them down.

This trap is not however, inevitable. Pascal Chabot, apart from analysing it, offers interesting possibilities for change which are up to both the individual and the company / or society as a whole to draw out and build.

Please watch our webstreaming of the conference and the  handout of the event.