Mindfulness is the latest iteration of a capitalist spirituality whose lineage dates back to the privatization of religion in Western societies. This began a few hundred years ago as a way of reconciling faith with modern scientific knowledge. Private experience could not be measured by science, so religion was internalized. Important figures in this process include the nineteenth-century psychologist William James, who was instrumental in psychologizing religion, as well as Abraham Maslow, whose humanistic psychology provided the impetus for the New Age movement. In Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, Jeremy Carrette and Richard King argue that Asian wisdom traditions have been subject to colonization and commodification since the eighteenth century, producing a highly individualistic spirituality, perfectly accommodated to dominant cultural values and requiring no substantive change in lifestyle.18 Such an individualistic spirituality is clearly linked with the neoliberal agenda of privatization, especially when masked by the ambiguous language used in mindfulness. Market forces are already exploiting the momentum of the mindfulness movement, reorienting its goals to a highly circumscribed individual realm.
Privatized mindfulness practice is easily coopted and confined to what Carrette and King describe as an “accommodationist” orientation that seeks to “pacify feelings of anxiety and disquiet at the individual level rather than seeking to challenge the social, political and economic inequalities that cause such distress.”19 However, a commitment to a privatized and psychologized mindfulness is political. It amounts to what Byung-Chul Han calls “psycho-politics,” in which contemporary capitalism seeks to harness the psyche as a productive force.20 Mindfulness-based interventions fulfill this purpose by therapeutically optimizing individuals to make them “mentally fit,” attentive and resilient so they may keep functioning within the system. Such capitulation seems like the farthest thing from a revolution and more like a quietist surrender.
Mindfulness is positioned as a force that can help us cope with the noxious influences of capitalism. But because what it offers is so easily assimilated by the market, its potential for social and political transformation is neutered. Leaders in the mindfulness movement believe that capitalism and spirituality can be reconciled; they want to relieve the stress of individuals without having to look deeper and more broadly at its social, political and economic causes.
Some might wonder what is wrong with offering mindfulness to corporate executives and the rest of society’s dominant 1%? Aren’t they entitled to the benefits of mindfulness like anyone else? The more relevant question is what sort of mindfulness is actually on offer. Corporate executives get the same product as anyone else, and what it provides is an expedient tool for assuaging stress without wisdom and insight about where it comes from.
A truly revolutionary mindfulness would challenge the Western sense of entitlement to happiness irrespective of ethical conduct. However, mindfulness programs do not ask executives to examine how their managerial decisions and corporate policies have institutionalized greed, ill will and delusion, which Buddhist mindfulness seeks to eradicate. Instead, the practice is being sold to executives as a way to de-stress, improve productivity and focus, and bounce back from working eighty-hour weeks. They may well be “meditating,” but it works like taking an aspirin for a headache. Once the pain goes away, it is business as usual. Even if individuals become nicer people, the corporate agenda of maximizing profits does not change. Trickle-down mindfulness, like trickle-down economics, is a cover for the maintenance of power.
Mindfulness is hostage to the neoliberal mindset: it must be put to use, it must be proved that it “works,” it must deliver the desired results. This prevents it being offered as a tool of resistance, restricting it instead to a technique for “selfcare.” It becomes a therapeutic solvent — a universal elixir — for dissolving the mental and emotional obstacles to better performance and increased efficiency.21 This logic pervades most institutions, from public services to large corporations, and the quest for resilience is driven by the dictum: “Adapt — or perish.”22 The result is an obsessive self-monitoring of inner states, inducing social myopia. Self-absorption trumps concerns about the outside world. As Byung-Chul Han observes, this reinvents the Puritan work ethic:
Endlessly working at self-improvement resembles the self-examination and self-monitoring of Protestanism, which represents a technology of subjectivation and domination in its own right. Now, instead of searching out sins, one hunts down negative thoughts.23
The marketing success of mindfulness often makes it seem seductively innocuous. Besides, it appears to be helpful, so why pick holes? Isn’t a little bit of mindfulness better than none? What’s wrong with an employee listening to a three-minute breathing practice on an app before a stressful meeting? On the surface, not much, but we should also think about the cost. If mindfulness just helps people cope with the toxic conditions that make them stressed in the first place, then perhaps we could aim a bit higher. Why should we allow a regime to usurp mindfulness for nefarious corporate purposes? Should we celebrate the fact that this perversion is helping people to “auto-exploit” themselves? This is the core of the problem. The internalization of focus for mindfulness practice also leads to other things being internalized, from corporate requirements to structures of dominance in society. Perhaps worst of all, this submissive position is framed as freedom. Indeed, mindfulness thrives on freedom doublespeak, celebrating self-centered “freedoms” while paying no attention to civic responsibility, or the cultivation of a collective mindfulness that finds genuine freedom within a cooperative and just society.
Of course, reductions in stress and increases in personal happiness and wellbeing are much easier to sell than seriously questioning causes of injustice, inequity and environmental devastation. The latter involves a challenge to the social order, while the former plays directly to its priorities, sharpening people’s focus, improving their performance at work and in exams, and even promising better sex lives. Pick up any issue of Mindful, a new mass-market magazine, and one finds a plethora of articles touting the practical and worldly benefits of mindfulness. This inevitably appeals to consumers who value spirituality as a way of enhancing their mental and physical health. Not only has mindfulness been repackaged as a novel technique of psychotherapy, but its utility is commercially marketed as self-help. This branding reinforces the notion that spiritual practices are indeed an individual’s private concern. And once privatized, these practices are easily coopted for social, economic and political control.
As originally argued in “Beyond McMindfulness,” this is only the case because of how modern teachers frame the practice:
Decontextualizing mindfulness from its original liberative and transformative purpose, as well as its foundation in social ethics, amounts to a Faustian bargain. Rather than applying mindfulness as a means to awaken individuals and organizations from the unwholesome roots of greed, ill will and delusion, it is usually being refashioned into a banal, therapeutic, self-help technique that can actually reinforce those roots.24
This book explores how that occurs, and what might be done about it. There is no need for mindfulness to be so complicit in social injustice. It can also be taught in ways that unwind that entanglement. This requires us to see what is actually happening, and commit ourselves to trying to reduce collective suffering. The focus needs to shift from “me” to “we,” liberating mindfulness from neoliberal thinking.
To that end, the critique that I offer is uncompromising, intolerant of unfairness, selfishness, greed, and the delusions of empire. It seeks to bring to light the unmindful allegiances in the mindfulness movement that obscure the relationship between personal stress and social oppression. It provides a much-needed critical counterbalance to the celebratory and self-congratulatory presentation of mindfulness by its boosters. I seek to illuminate, and thereby bring to mind, a shadow side that has been buried under the hype and anti-intellectual sentiment of much of the mindfulness movement. Thi
s process combats the social amnesia that leads to mindful servants of neoliberalism. The true meaning of mindfulness is an act of re-membering, not only in terms of recalling and being attentively present to our situation, but also of putting our lives back together, collectively.
chapter two
Neoliberal Mindfulness
For a couple of years, the New York Times business reporter David Gelles had a regular column on “Meditation for Real Life.” Having written a book about Mindful Work, he dished out Hallmark card-like platitudes, covering “How to Be Mindful When Doing Your Taxes,” “How to Be Mindful at the Gym” and “How to Be Mindful at the Doctor’s Office.” One such offering, “How to Be Mindful on the Subway,” is too much fun to pass up. Imagine a New Yorker in a crowded subway following Gelles’ advice:
Take a few deep breaths, turn your lips up into a half-smile, softly gaze at another person on the subway car. Notice the thoughts or feelings that arise as you consider this person. Try to adopt a gaze of warmth and kindness, perhaps by imagining that this person is a friend of yours.1
This version of mindfulness is stoic self-pacification. Never mind what might cause your anxiety, just be mindful of what’s in front of your face, and do your best to feel fuzzily warm (presumably hoping that the person you stare at does the same)!
The aim, says mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn, is to get better at “living in harmony with oneself and with the world.”2 By practicing mindfulness, people can learn to manage their emotional reactions and impulses, racing thoughts, stresses and worries, providing an oasis of relief. Beneficial as this may sound, it has hidden consequences. Firstly, it promotes a focus on oneself and the mind’s inner workings, deflecting attention from sources of stress in modern society’s massive inequalities, austerities, and injustices. As a result, it reinforces some causes of suffering. Secondly, and more specifically, living in harmony with the world means accepting capitalism as a given. No radical critique or vision of social change is needed. With a breezy shrug from his well-paid position at the New York Times, Gelles assures us: “We live in a capitalist economy, and mindfulness can’t change that.”3
Well, it certainly won’t if sold in those terms. Its presentation as a market-friendly palliative explains its warm reception in popular culture. It slots so neatly into the mindset of the workplace that its only real threat to the status quo is to offer people ways to become more skillful at the rat race. Modern society’s neoliberal consensus argues that those who enjoy power and wealth should be given free rein to accumulate more. Those mindfulness merchants who accept market logic are an unsurprising hit with CEOs at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where Kabat-Zinn has no qualms about preaching the gospel of competitive advantage from meditative practice.4
Over the past few decades, neoliberalism has outgrown its conservative roots. It has hijacked public discourse to the extent that even self-professed progressives, such as Kabat-Zinn, think in neoliberal terms. Market values have invaded every corner of human life, defining how most of us are forced to interpret and live in the world.
The mindfulness movement took shape under neoliberal leadership. It began in 1979 with the founding of Kabat-
Zinn’s Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. This was the same year that Margaret Thatcher became the prime minister of the UK, to be joined soon after by Ronald Reagan as US president. Both advanced a neoliberal program — “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul,” Thatcher said.5 Could mindfulness be doing something similar, rewiring us to serve the requirements of neoliberalism? The mindfulness industry’s market-friendliness should make us suspicious.
Me, Inc.
Perhaps the most straightforward definition of neoliberalism comes from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who calls it: “A program for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic.”6 That goes further than a set of policies doled out by governments, central banks or global elites at the IMF. Rather, neoliberalism is a complex form of cultural hegemony. In its insidious worldview, human beings are best understood as entrepreneurs running their own private personal enterprise — the business of Me, Inc. — in competition with others. Textbooks talk about rational economic actors, but the effects of this in practice are stark, remaking the species as a dollar-hunting animal: homo economicus. The marketing mentality is easy to see on modern social media, where profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn promote a curated personal image. We are generally conditioned to think that a market-based society provides us with ample (if not equal) opportunities for increasing the value of our “human capital” and self-worth. And in order to fully actualize personal freedom and potential, we need to maximize our own welfare, freedom, and happiness by deftly managing internal resources.
Since competition is so central, neoliberal ideology holds that all decisions about how society is run should be left to the workings of the marketplace, the most efficient mechanism for allowing competitors to maximize their own good. Other social actors — including the state, voluntary associations, and the like — are just obstacles to the smooth operation of market logic, and they ought to be dismantled or disregarded. In theory, at least, neoliberalism promotes entrepreneurship by providing the defense of private property rights and upholding market freedoms. In practice, some economic actors — such as banks deemed “too big to fail” — get to game the system, while others — such as people on welfare — are demonized as scroungers.
Let’s see how this plays out. Suppose your instincts lean vaguely leftwards, and that you therefore reject most neoliberal policies, but unwittingly share the basic outlook behind them. Suppose that at the same time you are firmly convinced of the value of mindfulness and making it widely available. These two orientations line up closely, supporting the promotion of a capitalist practice. For an actor in neoliberal society, mindfulness is a skill to be cultivated, or a resource to be put to use. When mastered, it helps you to navigate the capitalist ocean’s tricky currents, keeping your attention “present-centered and non-judgmental” to deal with the inevitable stress and anxiety from competition. Mindfulness helps you to maximize your personal wellbeing.
All of this may help you to sleep better at night. But the consequences for society are potentially dire. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has analyzed this trend with great acuity. As he sees it, mindfulness is “establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism,” by helping people “to fully participate in the capitalist dynamic while retaining the appearance of mental sanity.”7 No wonder Wall Street traders and hedge fund managers now use the practice to fine-tune their brains, up their game and gain an edge.
By deflecting attention from social, political and economic structures — that is, material conditions in a capitalist culture — mindfulness is easily coopted. Celebrity role models bless and endorse it, while “cool” Californian companies — including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Salesforce, Apple, and Zynga — have embraced it as an adjunct to their brand. Google’s former in-house mindfulness czar Chade-Meng Tan had the actual job title Jolly Good Fellow. “Search inside yourself,” he counseled colleagues (as well as readers of his bestselling book), for there — not in corporate culture — lies the source of your problems. Applied in this way, mindfulness becomes a form of capitalist spirituality, perfectly attuned to maintaining the neoliberal self.
A Technology of the Self
How is mindfulness presented to the public? Googling a wide range of terms — such as mindfulness in schools, corporations, hospitals, government, prisons, and even the military — typically leads to the same generic image: a lone individual in a meditative posture with their eyes closed, blissfully detached from the outside world. This subjective activity effectively internalizes neoliberal edicts: each individual should take charge of their own “self-care” to remain employable. The dismantling of social protections along with market deregulation leaves
people reliant on self-governance to manage their stress and help them thrive. Mindfulness delivers the message with a velvet glove, but it still contains the iron fist.
Around the same time as Jon Kabat-Zinn invented MBSR, and Margaret Thatcher won power vowing to “liberate those who create wealth,”8 Michel Foucault identified the “neoliberal turn.” In this cultural shift, the French thinker explained, there is a dual style of government, extending far beyond political activity. Foucault refers to this concept as “governmentality,” which links power relations to processes of subjectification — or what he described as the “conduct of conduct.” In other words, neoliberal institutions exercise micro-levels of power, reformulating what it means to be a person, self and identity. Foucault’s critique and historical account, described in his 1978-79 Collège de France lectures, focused on exposing how this works. Governmentality explores how knowledge, expertise, and practices are developed to guide voluntary conduct.
Foucault distinguishes between two different modes of power: “techniques of domination,” administered from outside, and “techniques of the self,” by which the individual acts upon itself. Both are instrumental for the formation of selfhood as a neoliberal subject. They also influence each other. As Foucault explains: “The contact point, where the way individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves, is what we can call government.”9
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