Purser - McMindfulness

McMindfulness

How Mindfulness Became the

New Capitalist Spirituality

McMindfulness

How Mindfulness Became the

New Capitalist Spirituality

RONALD E. PURSER

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE:

What Mindfulness Revolution?

CHAPTER TWO:

Neoliberal Mindfulness

CHAPTER THREE:

The Mantra of Stress

CHAPTER FOUR:

Privatizing Mindfulness

CHAPTER FIVE:

Colonizing Mindfulness

CHAPTER SIX:

Mindfulness as Social Amnesia

CHAPTER SEVEN:

Mindfulness Truthiness Problem

CHAPTER EIGHT:

Mindful Employees

CHAPTER NINE:

Mindful Merchants

CHAPTER TEN:

Mindful Elites

CHAPTER ELEVEN:

Mindful Schools

CHAPTER TWELVE:

Mindful Warriors

CHAPTER THIRTEEN:

Mindful Politics

CONCLUSION:

Liberating Mindfulness

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

chapter one

What Mindfulness Revolution?

Mindfulness is mainstream, endorsed by celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Goldie Hawn and Ruby Wax. While meditation coaches, monks and neuroscientists rub shoulders with CEOs at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the founders of this movement have grown evangelical. Prophesying that its hybrid of science and meditative discipline has the potential to ignite a universal or global renaissance, the inventor of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Jon Kabat-Zinn, has bigger ambitions than conquering stress. Mindfulness, he proclaims, may actually be the only promise the species and the planet have for making it through the next couple hundred years.

So, what exactly is this magic panacea? In 2014, Time magazine put a youthful blonde woman on its cover, blissing out above the words: The Mindful Revolution. The accompanying feature described a signature scene from the standardized course teaching MBSR: eating a raisin very slowly indeed. The ability to focus for a few minutes on a single raisin isnt silly if the skills it requires are the keys to surviving and succeeding in the 21st century, the author explained.

I am skeptical. Anything that offers success in our unjust society without trying to change it is not revolutionary it just helps people cope. However, it could also be making things worse. Instead of encouraging radical action, it says the causes of suffering are disproportionately inside us, not in the political and economic frameworks that shape how we live. And yet mindfulness zealots believe that paying closer attention to the present moment without passing judgment has the revolutionary power to transform the whole world. Its magical thinking on steroids.

Dont get me wrong. There are certainly worthy dimensions to mindfulness practice. Tuning out mental rumination does help reduce stress, as well as chronic anxiety and many other maladies. Becoming more aware of automatic reactions can make people calmer and potentially kinder. Most of the promoters of mindfulness are nice, and having personally met many of them, including the leaders of the movement, I have no doubt that their hearts are in the right place. But that isnt the issue here. The problem is the product theyre selling, and how its been packaged. Mindfulness is nothing more than basic concentration training. Although derived from Buddhism, its been stripped of the teachings on ethics that accompanied it, as well as the liberating aim of dissolving attachment to a false sense of self while enacting compassion for all other beings.

What remains is a tool of self-discipline, disguised as self-help. Instead of setting practitioners free, it helps them adjust to the very conditions that caused their problems. A truly revolutionary movement would seek to overturn this dysfunctional system, but mindfulness only serves to reinforce its destructive logic. The neoliberal order has imposed itself by stealth in the past few decades, widening inequality in pursuit of corporate wealth. People are expected to adapt to what this model demands of them. Stress has been pathologized and privatized, and the burden of managing it outsourced to individuals. Hence the peddlers of mindfulness step in to save the day.

But none of this means that mindfulness ought to be banned, or that anyone who finds it useful is deluded. Its proponents tend to cast critics who hold such views as malevolent cranks. Reducing suffering is a noble aim and it should be encouraged. But to do this effectively, teachers of mindfulness need to acknowledge that personal stress also has societal causes. By failing to address collective suffering, and systemic change that might remove it, they rob mindfulness of its real revolutionary potential, reducing it to something banal that keeps people focused on themselves.

A Private Freedom

The fundamental message of the mindfulness movement is that the underlying cause of dissatisfaction and distress is in our heads. By failing to pay attention to what actually happens in each moment, we get lost in regrets about the past and fears for the future, which make us unhappy. The man often labeled the father of modern mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn, calls this a thinking disease. Other sources of cultural malaise are not discussed. The only mention of the word capitalist in Kabat-Zinns book Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness occurs in an anecdote about a stressed investor who says:

We all suffer a kind of A.D.D.

Mindfulness advocates, perhaps unwittingly, are providing support for the status quo. Rather than discussing how attention is monetized and manipulated by corporations such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple, they locate the crisis in our minds. It is not the nature of the capitalist system that is inherently problematic; rather, it is the failure of individuals to be mindful and resilient in a precarious and uncertain economy. Then they sell us solutions that make us contented mindful capitalists.

The political naivet involved is stunning. The revolution being touted occurs not through protests and collective struggle but in the heads of atomized individuals. It is not the revolution of the desperate or disenfranchised in society, notes Chris Goto-Jones, a scholarly critic of the movements ideas, but rather a peaceful revolution being led by white, middle class Americans.

The goals are unclear, beyond peace of mind in our own private worlds.

By practicing mindfulness, individual freedom is supposedly found within pure awareness, undistracted by external corrupting influences. All we need to do is to close our eyes and watch our breath. And thats the crux of the supposed revolution: the world is slowly changed one mindful individual at a time. This political philosophy is oddly reminiscent of George W. Bushs compassionate conservatism. With the retreat to the private sphere, mindfulness becomes a religion of the self. The idea of a public sphere is being eroded, and any trickle-down effect of compassion is by chance. As a result, notes the political theorist Wendy Brown, the body politic ceases to be a

Mindfulness, like positive psychology and the broader happiness industry, has depoliticized and privatized stress. If we are unhappy about being unemployed, losing our health insurance, and seeing our children incur massive debt through college loans, it is our responsibility to learn to be more mindful. Jon Kabat-Zinn assures us that happiness is an inside job that simply requires us to attend to the present moment mindfully and purposely without judgment. The so-called mindfulness revolution meekly accepts the dictates of the marketplace. Guided by a therapeutic ethos aimed at enhancing the mental and emotional resilience of individuals, it endorses neoliberal assumptions that everyone is free to choose their responses, manage negative emotions, and flourish through various modes of self-care. Framing what they offer in this way, most teachers of mindfulness rule out a curriculum that critically engages with causes of suffering in the structures of power and economic systems of capitalist society.