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Byung-Chul Han and the Burnout Epidemic Man Suffering from Stress at Work, September 2 2021, by CIPHR Connect, via Creative Commons. This theme is explored in detail in The Burnout Society , a short work dating from 2010. Han begins by introducing the idea of a society based on the language of immunology, with life revolving around the self and others, the familiar and the alien. What this meant is that in politics and society people acted very much as our bodies do when an infection is detected, isolating and annihilating the threat; as a result, anything not forming part of the whole is automatically part of this threat (here Han gives the example of Cold War rhetoric). You’ll note the use of the past tense here, and this is because the writer believes that this was a 20th-century concept and that we’ve moved on (to which I can only say Trump, Brexit, refugees on Manus Island … ). The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020) ISBN 1509542760 His wife, Marianne, later wrote that during this time he was “a chained titan whom evil, envious gods were plaguing”. He was irritable and depressed and felt useless; any work, even reading a student’s paper, became an unbearable burden. He ultimately took a two-year leave of absence from his university, after which he resigned and became an adjunct professor, loosely attached to academia, at age 39.
Juan David Almeyda Sarmiento: Hacia una ética del jardín. Estudios filosóficos sobre el pensamiento de Byung-Chul Han. Editorial Universidad Industrial de Santander. 2023. ISBN 978-958-5188-64-8
Spanish edition: La salvación de lo bello. Barcelona, Herder Editorial, 2015, ISBN 978-84-254-3758-8. We have had to live in the society of “Yes, you can”, a society that affirms that we can all go as far as we can just trying. We live in an era in which Positive Psychology has become popular and distorted, limited to a series of motivating phrases without much substance that convey a clear message: “You can!”. A. Capitalism really responds to the instinctive structures of man. But man is not only an instinctive being. We have to tame, civilize and humanize capitalism. That is also possible. The social market economy is a demonstration of it. But our economy is entering a new era, the era of sustainability. Yet this full freedom produces in the individual the anxiety of having to exploit his condition as a free man and the consequent sense of guilt when he lingers. In a nutshell: it makes him anything but happy. Psychologist Barry Schwartz explains this paradox in his book The Paradox of Choice and summarizes it in the eponymous 2005 TED Talk. The failure of animal laborans
On the contrary, “tiredness that inspires is tiredness of negative potency, namely of not-to”: I could do this and that, but I decide not to. To gain assurance of your election, then, you need to know you are being productive, enriching yourself and your community through labor. Slow down and learn to live in the present. Calmly enjoy each and every activity and every moment with the people around you. Practice mindfulness as a lifestyle. Positivity is in fashion today but it’s not always well understood. Of course, an optimistic attitude promotes good health and well-being. That said, we mustn’t make the mistake of becoming victims of this concept. A. We need information to be silenced. Otherwise, our brains will explode. Today we perceive the world through information. That’s how we lose the experience of being present. We are increasingly disconnected from the world. We are losing the world. The world is more than information, and the screen is a poor representation of the world. We revolve in a circle around ourselves. The smartphone contributes decisively to this poor perception of the world. A fundamental symptom of depression is the absence of the world.Handke preaches the need to return to a more conscious tiredness that unites and cures those who experience it. According to him, this is possible by re-evaluating the contemplative life devoted to not doing. Evading the pressing call of the world, renewing the barriers that delimit the ego does not mean being less free but more authentic.
Weber saw capitalism as “a monstrous cosmos”. In his view, capitalism was an all-encompassing economic and moral system, one of humanity’s most marvelous constructions. We who live in the system can rarely see it. We take its norms for granted, like the air we breathe. Everything you do, from going to the “right” preschool to laboring in a productive career to receiving medical care on your deathbed, you do because somewhere, someone thinks they can make money from it. The capitalist cosmos imposes a choice on you: adopt its ethic, or accept poverty and scorn. Burnout syndrome has 2 dimensions. The first is exhaustion, the physical and mental drainage caused by rapid expenditure of energy. The second is that of alienation, feeling like the work you’re doing is meaningless and it doesn’t really belong to you. With the expansion of the system of production comes an ever-increasing narrowness of functions to be filled by workers. This is the term used to describe the way we live in modern societies. We live in a time when there are no longer external pressures that enslave us and we’re apparently free to achieve self-realization.In a system where the Same predominates, one can only speak of immune defense in a figural sense. Immunological defense always takes aim at the Other or the foreign in the strong sense. The Same does not lead to the formation of antibodies. In a system dominated by the Same, it is meaningless to strengthen defense mechanisms. We must distinguish between immunological and nonimmunological rejection. The latter concerns the too-much-of-the-Same, surplus positivity. Here negativity plays no role. Nor does such exclusion presume interior space. In contrast, immunological rejection occurs independent of the quantum, for it reacts to the negativity of the Other. The immunological subject, which possesses interiority, fights off the Other and excludes it, even when it is present in only the tiniest amount. The Burnout Society certainly isn’t my usual fare, but I enjoyed it immensely, and its core message is one we should all consider. Han dips nicely into others’ ideas too, giving us a taste of other views on the subject. As with much popular philosophy, it’s hard to shake off a nagging feeling that Han’s ideas are simply common sense explained clearly; not a bad thing, of course, but perhaps meaning that there’s nothing here as clever as you might think on a first reading. Of course, it may just be that in the time since the book’s publication, what were once profound insights have now become fairly self-explanatory truths.