The lair of modern management is made of neutrality, benevolence, and a “clean” posture.

I pick up here on a point that Julia de Funès articulated with striking conceptual density and accuracy:

“Neutrality coddles those who fear being wrong and seduces those terrorized by the responsibility of judgment. It struts, believes itself superior while it flees under the weight of its own cowardice, and installs pasteurized consciences in an intellectual spa where one lounges sheltered from any sharply defined idea.”

I lean on this because I share the diagnosis, but I want to push one targeted, contextual consequence about the manager’s stance when immersed in contradictory injunctions: “be benevolent but hit the targets,” “listen but decide,” “empower but control.”

When a company recodes work into a system that demands proof of buy in, engagement becomes a virtue, and the “right posture” becomes both a duty and a lever of legitimacy. “If I don’t behave like that, I won’t be listened to and I won’t be respected,” the manager may tell himself.

What this does to the role: it turns the manager into an actor of “form” rather than “effects.”

That is exactly the terrain where neutrality becomes a comfortable stance, because it allows one to never decide on real effects while keeping a monopoly on “the good,” even on “care.” Especially within this culture of pseudo “inoffensive” posture, the one that aims to “alter” nothing.

Translation: he learns to speak impeccably, to alter nothing, to never assign responsibility. He secures the climate, protects the values, avoids sharp edges. And while he does that, real effects continue. The load does not disappear. It shifts.

This posture looks moral, so it becomes untouchable. And the moment we can no longer name what constrains, we stop steering work and start steering perceptions.

The consequences are often identical for the employee: if the manager avoids dealing with effects, work still imposes them.

So the company begins to steer differently, indirectly, through a virtue: engagement.

That precise moment, when the company instrumentalizes engagement, is the starting point of Max out. Engagement becomes a raw material. From it, the company extracts availability, silence, continuity, self denial… and the subject ends up forgetting the obligation because what is expected is never formulated as a demand.

Would talking, listening, hearing solve it? No, because the real problem is invisibility.

This capture does not look like a constraint, so it does not enter the realm of thinkable, speakable real work. It looks like a quality wrapped in moral language, so it exits the field of discussion.

Real work would be what is done on top of what is prescribed. But how do we think the displacement? Regulation happens outside the walls: private recovery, evening catch up, emotional management at home, sleep organization, micro rituals to hold on, constant self regulation. In reality, real work has undergone such redeployment and fragmentation that it becomes indefinable except as the total emotional cost of maintaining the identity of the “good worker,” and of everything the subject convinces himself he must do as self evident.

This normalized form of identity capture, which escapes vigilance precisely because it operates through socially valued components today and is widely relayed, is all the more impermeable to critique because it neutralizes critique from the inside, sheltering behind ideals that have become untouchable: fulfillment, benevolence, moral correctness, personal development, autonomy.

This is not a vocabulary debate. It is a reading grid that cuts through the filters of ambient storytelling.