“The growth and prosperity of a consumerist economy have become goals in conflict with the new ecological morality”

VSHow, in a country obsessed with unemployment statistics to the point that the word “employment” has replaced that of “work”, have we come in a few months to worry about the difficulty of companies to recruit employees as well as to limit their resignation? “Employment”, “collaborator”, the words are indeed heavy with meaning.

Because it is a question, in our consumerist modernity, of being “used to collaborate” in the growth of an economy based on the production of objects, the “system of objects” described by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929- 2007), the purpose of which is to be consumed and therefore quickly destroyed to be replaced by new ones.

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A cycle condemned today by the ecological emergency which calls for limiting the exploitation of raw materials, the consumption of energy and the production of waste. In this context, and faced with the onslaught of new challenges that our humanity must take up no longer simply to prosper but to try to survive, scientific and technological progress is finding it very difficult to continue to impose itself as the only solution while we were living with the certainty that the latter would generate its own antidote to the disorders it would have caused and would find solutions for all the others.

A sense of distrust of technological progress

A vision of progress that will go so far as to take on the appearance of belief in the XX^e century, science coming to replace religiosity and which is now at its peak with the solutionist discourse of Silicon Valley companies for which it is technology, and technology alone, that can solve all the problems of this world.

Faced with disillusions commensurate with the hopes it generated, science and its corollary, technological progress, are today faced with an unprecedented feeling of distrust which not only keeps workers away from jobs deemed unethical or even from qualified as bullshit jobsbut also students in science and technology courses, investors in certain industrial sectors and consumers of products resulting from scientific engineering.

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Thus and in this context, what is called the “great resignation” or the “disaffection for work” is perhaps not the simple effect of the health crisis, an overly protective social policy or an epidemic of laziness, but seems to be part of a fundamental movement associated with a collective awareness of the need for a radical change in the model of society.

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