“A slight oscillation” by Clément Baudouin: dehumanization of society

Thomas Dutertre, a senior ANPE executive forced to apply dehumanized methods to reduce the number of job seekers, cracks under the pressure. A novel that speaks of the merchants of spirituality and the logic of performance to the detriment of the human.

Thomas Dutertre arrives in a center which strangely resembles an Indian ashram or a Tibetan lamasery, he has promised his wife to follow with attention and application the meditative retreat which should pull him out of the deep depression into which he sank after having had serious professional problems. In this center, Arnaud, the one who acts as guru, and his team organize courses in Vipassana, a Tibetan meditation practice imported by an Englishman who picked it up from some Rempoche, in Tibetan esoteric stories, there always has a Service Refill.

A_slight_wobble-cover Thomas enters the game without enthusiasm and quickly realizes that the method applied is only a booby trap intended to extract the maximum amount of money from suckers who are too credulous and not poor enough to question the merits of this retirement. He quickly discovers the various subterfuges used by the guru in a decorum intended to put the too credulous patient in the best conditions to swallow everything he offers them. He considers this retirement as a real abuse of weakness towards psychologically fragile people. Leading his own reflection, he concocts a plan to escape from this sinister place nestled in the Ardèche mountains and weaves a diabolical machinery to solve his professional problems without worrying about the consequences for his person.

He held senior positions at the Regional Agency of the ANPE in Toulouse when a new regional director arrived at the same time as new orientations and new objectives. It was necessary to drastically reduce the number of unemployed and for this the new director imported his new management methods, the same as those used by all those who, like me, worked in the eighties and nineties. had to undergo. Methods based on figures, percentages, curves, averages, standard deviations, etc., and a productivist methodology with no more regard for recipients than for Agency employees. The infernal machine made more than one crack, including Thomas. This one decides to rebel and to destroy the system which demolished it.

In this novel which could almost be a testimony, Clement Baudouin describes with great precision the exploitation of human credulity by penny-mongers of spirituality and the equally perverse use of the employees of a national agency for economic but above all political ends. The explanation is simple, clear, limpid, one has the impression that Clément worked in this agency at that time and that he made this bogus retirement himself. I will add that I noted many rare words in this text, this demonstrates the beautiful erudition of the author.