WITH summer vacation already over and only a few days left now to summer itself, France is in deep havoc with its unemployment crisis. While the workers’ unions are panicky about the 9.5pc joblessness rate (twice as much as in Germany) and the government is working hard on a 3,500-page labour code, President Emmanuel Macron appears determined to put an end to what he calls “three decades of sickness because of our own laziness”.

Laziness? The most powerful opposition leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon is so upset by the accusation that he has asked his France Insoumise party members to organise nation-wide demonstrations on Sept 23 to show to the president they are not as lazy as he thinks. Labour unions are already going on strikes almost on a day-to-day basis.

Political observers are of the opinion that the unending street protests are in fact a sign of laziness, as they push employees away from hard work. They believe the communist ideology itself is a result of Karl Marx’s two-year stay in Paris from 1843 to 1845 and France has remained, for the last nearly two centuries, a society that could never be ‘de-marxised’ even after the dismantlement of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Luc Ferry, author of a number of philosophical oeuvres as well as a newspaper column writer and a constant presence on radio and TV programmes, suggests that the French workers should occasionally try ‘eutrapelia’ to conquer their challenges.

The word is of Greek origin meaning ‘wittiness’ and its practice was strongly advised by Aristotle in order to overcome the boring chagrins of everyday life.

Ferry says our quest for joie de vivre is akin to that of a little boy’s running after a balloon that wind has blown off his hand and has thrown onto the street. The child is so obsessed with getting back his toy that he wouldn’t care if a truck is coming from the opposite direction; he is blindly following the “principle of pleasure”.

The “principle of reality” however emanates from a different logic but without really being opposed to the principle of pleasure. An experiment tried by zoologists, continues Ferry, demonstrates clearly that some animals are instinctively gifted with the principle of reality while the others go, to their own detriment, after the principle of pleasure.

A long and narrow cage, totally transparent and made with crossing iron wires, was used in the experiment. While no escape was possible from the other three sides, the back end was kept totally open. A hen was entered into the cage and food was placed near the closed and narrow end. The animal tried for hours to reach the food by passing its neck through the wired squares until it collapsed with exhaustion and nearly died.

The same experiment was tried on a rat who totally abandoned its pursuit for food following a very short while of sniffing and pushing the wired grills with its claws; it stayed still for a few more seconds, eyes closed and apparently reflecting. Suddenly it took an about turn, ran towards the open end of the cage, came out and headed once more towards the food that this time awaited it without any further obstacles.

Like the little boy running after his balloon, the hen followed the principle of pleasure, says Ferry. Both wanted all and at once while the rat, though it never abandoned its quest for gratification, followed the principle of reality and took time to achieve its goal.

According to Ferry the morality of the experiment is clear: “Eutrapelia is an excellent philosophy as it makes us stick to reality by avoiding the thousand and one traps of pleasure; the best way to follow this principle is to work hard and abandon laziness.”

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, September 17th, 2017