The term “talent” has for some time replaced that of employee or employee, to the point of becoming the blessed word of the orthodox of right-thinking and the virtuous by profession! How to manage our talents? How to recruit talent? How to retain our talents, they trumpet with enthusiastic positivity and cheerful charity! The word “talent” enjoys such a presumption of leniency that no one ever questions it. However, it turns out to be unfortunate in several respects.
First of all, he is outrageously demagogic. Unless we fall into a fictitious lack of differentiation, individuals are not all talented. There are incompetents, untalented people, lazy people, idiots, impostors, but in the escalation of good feelings, egalitarian demagoguery prefers to erase the differences to align everyone on the same pedestal. When the pedestal becomes a commonly shared floor where employees are all indifferently designated as talents, no one is. If everyone is at the same level, there is no more level. If everyone is a talent, there is no more talent. Do users of this rewarding term realize that by elevating, they are demeaning?
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But who would have a dry heart not to see a talent in each of us? the most enthusiastic coaches in personal development will retort to me in an affected tone – I can already hear them. According to these good souls, everyone has a more or less hidden talent. Easy sycophantic recipe, indestructible psychological ointment… To call people talents is to flatter this pride, to cajole this point of vanity, the one that Freud called the narcissism of the small difference, consisting of attributing to oneself a little extra thing, a slight originality compared to the others.
Let us also remember that there is no merit in having a particular aptitude, a singular facility, a talent! It is from a very young age that we notice children who are particularly gifted for this or that activity. Talent has more to do with luck, the chance of birth and gift, than with work and effort. How curious, if not incoherent, to value in the places of work and effort that are companies, what precisely does not belong to them!
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Even more curious. “It feels good” to use this term, when it is not good in itself. Talent has no moral value. He can serve good or evil. If I am prodigiously strong, I can put this strength to the service of good and evil. If I am particularly intelligent, I can use my intelligence to serve both evil and goodness. To call someone a talent is therefore to remove all moral value from them to make them someone axiologically neutral. Trying to value individuals through this flattering term is only an artifice, a way of neutralizing beings, while valorizing oneself through the magnanimous use that one makes of it.
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Let’s try to save this expression by returning to its origin! But here again, if we take this word in its primary meaning which is that of the gospel, talenta meant silver coin. Comparing people to talents amounts to reducing them to a coin, to money that must bring in big returns! Capitalist contrition being the norm in our country, I doubt that companies are ready to accept such a mercantile version of their HR policy. Finally, let us recall that the parable of the talents of the gospel, and here I refer to Luc Ferry who devoted a certain number of analyzes to it, teaches us that no matter the sum of talents received at birth, it is this that we do which must be rewarded. In this sense, it marks the transition from Greek aristocracy to Christianity and the republic. It is indeed the aristocracy which makes much of talents and differences of birth. It is Christianity (in a religious version), and the Republic (in a secular version) which value merit. It is therefore aristocratic and anti-republican to favor talents rather than merit. The use of this word is basically nothing more than an aristocratic resurgence which believes itself to be progressive while being only demagogic.
* Julia de Funès is a doctor of philosophy
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2024-01-29 05:00:36
#Lets #stop #talents #work #Julia #Funès #LExpress
