Exchanges with David Lucas, associate consultant of Gaeris
- David Lucas:
I hope your stay abroad was satisfactory, and now you enjoy a well deserved rest. I come to you for an article that begins to rage on Viadeo on the hub "Eco confluence to a new company." This is my post on "fun at work". I thought you could possibly help me to resist against the brotherhood of coaches
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-Remi Huppert:
I just returned fromChad after three weeks of hard work in the heat, dust, daily water, phone and internet cuts. On the roads in 2009, women wear on their heads loads of wood and some tubers with which they go to market. In the city ofN'djamena wandering unemployed youth, always tempted by the marauding and small trades, can be seen. Everyone is more or less sick, feverish, disabled etc ...In Chad, as elsewhere inAfrica, work is a blessing, but I'm not sure it is a pleasure. It is simply to survive and withstand all climatic, ecological, economic constraints. Rather than the pain of not working, people prefer by far the trouble to work to survive. Resist with dignity: in this field Africans have lessons to teach us. I think the "advanced" countries have lost sight of the harshness of life, the difficulty of meeting basic needs. I do know that in modern companies working conditions are difficult. But stop whining! They always were, they are everywhere, from the African bush to rice fields inAsia, if I refer to my memories.
Let us not take ourselves for victims. The West is no more victim than the South, as I know, given the current crisis and underdevelopment. "Happiness in one click" has deployed a smokescreen and deceived people: We lost the taste for effort (what an ugly word), courage, willingness to succeed, we lost dignity. Effort, courage, dignity has become a vocabulary totally inappropriate to those who prefer accents of lamentation and spleen. Coaches or demagogues love unfounded metaphors, and are ready to evade the essential (effort) and to believe that "fun" will fix everything.
-David Lucas
Your support has been invaluable to me, and I was also very touched. Your comments have some Nietzschean accents that made me think of a passage from “Beyond good and evil”. Few consultants will be willing to follow you, and I think it is also having traveled that transforms the look as well as sensitivity. It's finally here a simple matter of hardness of character. But I would like to add your comments do not contradict anything, and invite you to not underestimate the mental suffering which civilizations to the North. I even think that what we suffer benefits the rest of the world. My source material is a beautiful text from Tocqueville, who deserves a more careful reading. ...
-Remi Huppert:
You're right: I'm probably inclined to underestimate the suffering of Northern civilizations ... I only regret thatAfrica no longer interests many people. And I suffer, for once, a lot. Then maybe I need to make amends, soften my remarks and nuance them.
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