My own “great replacement”

Dear reader,

All men should take a (long) paternity leave. And if you’re afraid I’m about to get on my feminist high horses – because yes, for a while now, paternity leave has been a key measure to rebalance career inequalities between men and women –, worry not. As you will see, I’m about to push the idea for a very different reason.

Whilst on maternity leave, I recently experienced something which might be unpleasant to some: I was replaced. And by someone competent, moreover! In this case, I was replaced by the brilliant Apolline Guillot, who took over as chief-editor of Philonomist. But what a nightmare: I thought I was unique, endowed with an intimate understanding of our media, indispensable to the meeting of deadlines and so on. And then lo and behold, an outsider strolls in, starts giving orders to my troops and signing editorials instead of me (and good ones too)! I had to accept that no-one – and least of all, myself – is truly irreplaceable. But is it really a problem?

The philosopher Cynthia Fleury dedicated an essay to this question, titled The Irreplaceables. According to her, no-one should ever believe that they can be easily replaced, because doing so can lead to the loss of all sense of responsibility. The first act of courage is the “silent claim to the subject’s irreplaceability,” she writes. Without it, we’re just a cog in a machine and we remain incapable of taking ownership of our decisions. In the cruel world of business, who has never done an ethically dubious deed using the pretext that “if I don’t do it, someone else will”? This harmful logic can lead to the moral degeneration of the company. If you start to feel interchangeable, it’s a bad sign: either you’ll be bored to death, or you’ll take measures you’ll one day be ashamed of.

‘Almightiness has no claim to the virtue of irreplaceability’
—Cynthia Fleury, philosopher

On the other hand, it’s also dangerous to think you’re indispensable. Fleury takes the mythological example of Medeus who kills her children in a fury after Jason leaves. Her folly is to refuse for them to exist without her. “Almightiness has no claim to the virtue of irreplaceability,” Fleury writes. Don’t worry, I’m not planning to take out my rivals or try to sabotage projects I believed to be my own. But more prosaically, we can draw some lessons from this line of thinking in order to improve the world of work.

In The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (1963), Michel Crozier – a sociologist and father of strategic analysis – explains how the most dynamic companies become rigid through absurd rules. Everyone ends up carving out an area in which they alone can evolve – a “zone of uncertainty” which they can control and which confers an advantage to them when they need to assert their status, protect their job, or negotiate their salary. This margin of liberty is needed in order for people to take ownership of their job, but it can lead to outlandish situations.

Because mastering an area of uncertainty isn’t necessarily related to the possession of particular skills. It can rest on the knowledge of organisational rules, for example. This is the prerogative of corporate courtesans – people who know how to obtain advantages and whom to impress. They make themselves indispensable in the bad sense of the term: everything goes through them, and their savvy understanding of relationships ends up rotting the whole social construction that constitutes the company: the latter is then reduced to a court where the apparent neutrality of processes disguises all kinds of intrigues and trickery… Generally, these people end up becoming tyrants, whether they work in accountancy or HR.

And here’s the thing: if there’s one lesson you learn when you leave the workplace for several months, especially to look after a new-born, it’s that we cannot and should not try to be in control of everything – in life and at work. After a well-deserved break, we return with a certain distance. We realise, sometimes with sadness but mostly with joy, that ways of doing things which we held to be unavoidable aren’t necessarily so, and that people can get on nicely without us having to get involved. In short, we learn to become replaceable. And this is a good argument for making paternity leave obligatory, as it would have the collateral perk of neutralising the despotic tendencies of dominant male figures. Gentlemen, please give it a try: there’s nothing more satisfying than disappearing for a while and then tip-toeing back. That said, there’s no need to procreate in order to experience this: you can also elope to pursue a personal project or travel the world: all that matters is that no-one hears from you while you’re gone; and that you learn to put your ego to one side!

Anne-Sophie Moreau

Picture © Martin Barraud / iStockphoto