Max out challenges the status quo and the rules of what counts as a “new paradigm”
Upton Sinclair (1935): “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
When a new paradigm appears, it does not only run into confusion.
It runs into the programmed obsolescence of the experts already in place.
Max out makes visible what the system is already showing us: tools designed to liberate now function as maintenance tools, and therefore as fuel for exhaustion.
So why the silence?
Either it is a matter of time. People need to digest it. Accept it.
Or because validating this reading of reality, for the defenders of the old world (psychodynamics of work, QWL, the clinic of activity, and the “just listen” temples), means admitting something brutal:
Their tools of liberation have become tools of recycling. Tools to keep people going. Tools to accept one’s fate under what is grinding us down.
The obsolescence of the devices
If spaces for discussion no longer transform work but merely purge emotion so production can continue, then those who sell them are no longer emancipators. They are engineers of recycled suffering, managers of emotional waste facilities.
The obsolescence of the postures
If “listening” is used to validate a status quo where any “interference” is treated as morally suspect, then the benevolent expert becomes the involuntary accomplice of predation and capture.
Accepting Max out is not “learning a new concept”, and it is certainly not joining a new ideology. Max out is not built for that.
It means accepting that the system has digested critique and now feeds on it. It means thinking abuse and alienation, by the company, by management, and by the friendly pat on the shoulder from these pseudo saviors of our mental health.
It also means accepting that Dejours or Clot, as foundational and brilliant as their work is, were theorizing an era when the system mainly tried to silence us, and did not yet fully anticipate what we are facing now.
Today, we are told to speak. To produce a “creative response”. While the system metrics us down to the body, through wellness sessions that monitor your vital signs in relaxation chairs. Another post is coming. If you are in a hurry, it is already laid out in the Max out archaeology, open access.
Who will be the first to admit that yesterday’s solutions have become today’s problems?
When the future of your health at work is at stake, what will all these good Samaritans do when their livelihood is on the line?
Workers will decide. Those who feel in their bodies that “speaking” and “being heard” is no longer enough, and never changed anything over the long run.
Those who know that systemic alienation is not treated with relational band aids and benevolent listening.
Change will not come from the top.
It will come from the bottom, or it will not come.
Because for those who have spent a lifetime thinking work and building “solutions” up to now, this forces a conclusion that is hard to swallow: a life spent thinking and doing, and it made everything worse.
