Similar to fitness-tracking apps that count daily steps, Headspace also monitors progress. Users are encouraged to share their progress with friends on social media, and to turn on regular reminders throughout the day to “take a pause.” A skeptical reporter for the Financial Times got quite annoyed by the digital prodding. “Miss your scheduled dose of micro-meditation and mindfulness apps do not, of course, do blame or make recriminations,” the FT’s Hattie Garlick writes:
The passive aggression they can level at you is infinitely more powerful. ‘We haven’t seen you in a while,’ they might say, when you finally lock yourself in the loo to secure the requisite few minutes. It is the karmic equivalent of: ‘I’m not cross, just disappointed’.16
Headspace vows to simplify meditation, as do its peers. Their bite-sized programs help to standardize mindfulness for ease of consumption and “scaling up” revenues. This process follows George Ritzer’s sociological theory of “McDonaldization.”17 The first mark of commoditization is efficiency, which allows for mass production and delivery. The second is calculability, quantifying offerings and measuring outcomes — as seen in “tracking” features on mindfulness apps and new wearable products like Muse, a “brain sensing headband” that helps access calm (with the tagline “meditation made easy”). The third step, predictability, is essential. Provision of service has to meet expectations. The fourth aspect, control, helps ensure this, responding to feedback so products are honed.
The classic model for this, of course, is the Big Mac. Ritzer argues that when everyday experiences are McDonaldized, the results can be irrational. The commoditization of “McMindfulness” has sought to make meditation more efficient, calculable, predictable, and controlled. But this has led to the opposite outcome, creating an uncontrollable consumer commodity that devalues mindfulness. Downloading an app as a digital detox is irrational. Mindful merchants don’t care. They seem to be proud of creating a global branded product, accessible to anyone, anywhere — like a Big Mac.
chapter ten
Mindful Elites
Mindfulness made its debut at Davos in 2013. The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), a week of parties and panel discussions in a sleepy Swiss ski resort, is a schmooze-fest for the global economic elite. The WEF attracts CEOs, fund managers, venture capitalists, heads of state and politicians, economists, representatives of NGOs, and a handful of token artists and celebrities. The 2013 gathering included such luminaries as the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the former British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron, the Chairman of J. P. Morgan Chase, Jacob Frenkel, and “William H. Gates III,” the former CEO of Microsoft. Billing itself as a quest for ways of “restructuring economies and companies so that they grow sustainably and responsibly,” the 2013 program had the overarching theme of “Resilient Dynamism.”
On the forum’s first morning, Janice Marturano, a former lawyer for General Mills, led an oversubscribed workshop on “The Mindful Leadership Experience.” This drew on her own experience of discovering mindfulness and learning to teach it to fellow executives, as she instructed world leaders and stewards of capital to take “purposeful pauses” and cultivate “presence.” Naturally, she assured them that mindfulness was grounded in science, and neither New Age nor religious. To assuage any doubts, her teaching partner had impeccable scientific and scholarly credentials: Professor Mark Williams from the Oxford Mindfulness Centre.
Mindful leaders, Marturano explained, need to master emotional self-regulation. Pure emotions are generally forbidden in the workplace; they threaten order, stability and the smooth operation of corporate machines. Their raw dimensions — such as anger, rage, resentment and contempt — are labeled “destructive,” and the balm of mindfulness is offered as an antidote. Its non-judgmental acceptance helps to smother dissent, so the straight and narrow path of corporate etiquette can be trodden more mindfully. As well as increasing productivity at work, it is also a tool for maintaining unequal power relations. And if ever there were a captive audience for such ideas, it would be the WEF in Davos.
Marturano was certainly impressed. “Nowhere is the desire to see the big picture and to influence it in a positive way more apparent than at the World Economic Forum,” she reflects in her book, Finding a Space to Lead.1 Since her appearance in 2013, the global elite has latched onto mindfulness. Its purveyors in these rarefied settings work like corporate takeover specialists, stripping acquisitions of assets that might prevent a sale to the highest bidder. As a result, the new mindful jet-set reassure their overlords that what they are getting is a “science-based program” that delivers results, unbundled from unwanted detritus like teachings on ethics. However, the language of spiritual tradition can be subtly reframed to build a brand. At least in the context of the WEF, and related events, a “business mindfulness guru” is not an oxymoron.
So-called “Mindful Leaders” become anointed with pseudo-spiritual authority, acquiring the rhetoric of wisdom, compassion and empathy that helps secure complicity with corporate objectives. Mindful leadership depends on these narratives to cloak and humanize coercion, persuading managers to fulfill a noble mission of reducing suffering in the workplace. Employees can then be induced to consume standardized mindfulness programs, appealing to their sense of autonomy while shaping their experience in ways that are helpful to corporate goals. An echo of liberating doctrine helps legitimize this.
Mindful Courtiers
High on her own PR, Marturano believes that sharing mindfulness with the elite will create a “very big ripple effect” in the world.2 As she blogged from Davos: “Imagine the possibilities!!!”3 However, her workshop was typically bland. The usual themes were covered: the stresses of constant distraction, the inadequacies of multitasking, and the general malaise of having too much to do and too little time. However, there was no serious systemic inquiry into the causes of these symptoms. Instead, the diagnosis was simple: personal failure to be mindful and fully present while performing tasks.
As Marturano’s book puts it: “We know that working very hard without really paying attention fully to what we are doing, and who we are doing it with, simply leaves us feeling empty.”4 Whatever the merits of this stoic injunction to be more mindful in all one’s chores, blaming individuals deflects attention from the political economy of stress, and the structural dysfunctions that sustain it. This neoliberal ju-jitsu is similar to how victims of predatory subprime mortgage lending were demonized for taking on too much risk. Corporate moral failings are externalized and personalized. Employees are at fault if they fail to manage stress, not the system that caused it.
Another Davos acolyte, the MIT management theorist Otto Scharmer, runs an organization called The Presencing Institute, providing cover for elites: “The root cause of our current economic and civilizational crisis is not Wall Street,” he says, “not infinite growth [and] not Big Business or Big Government.”5 No, the root cause, according to Scharmer is “between our ears.” He was one of the courtiers at the 2014 WEF, chatting about how to be mindful like Nelson Mandela.6 Following the lead of Marturano, there has been a steady procession of mindfulness teachers, Buddhist monks, neuroscientists, and celebrities spreading the postmodern prosperity gospel. At the 2014 annual meeting, the actress Goldie Hawn promoted her MindUP™ program for children, leading a session on how mindfulness training and social-emotional learning can change the world. While she spoke, the main hall was in thrall to President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, leader of one of the most repressive regimes in the world. Hawn’s talk was preceded by a meditation led by Matthieu Ricard, a French-born Tibetan monk who occasionally translates for the Dalai Lama. Ricard has been labeled “the happiest man in the world,” on account of the scans of his meditating brain by neuroscientists.
The following year at Davos reached peak mindfulness. The inventor of MBSR, Jon Kabat-Zinn, made a cameo appearance, leading daily early morning meditations. The Harvard Business Review even hosted a “mindfulness dinner.” At a
two-hour panel on “Leading Mindfully,” Kabat-Zinn made some trademark wisecracks: “The first thing we notice when we practice mindfulness is how mindless we are,” he told the packed room. Alongside him, Arianna Huffington trotted out other standard lines. “Modern science is validating ancient wisdom,” she said. “We are living through a major tipping point.”7
Getting down to business, fellow panelist William George — a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School who sits on several executive boards and once ran Medtronic — underlined the benefits. “The main business case for mindfulness is that if you’re more focused on the job, you’ll become a better leader,” he said. “Even Goldman Sachs is doing it.” It remains unclear how this has changed an investment bank once likened to “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”8
George is a director of Goldman Sachs.
A few years earlier, the Buddhist scholar and teacher David Loy challenged George’s advocacy of mindfulness to managers. Loy wrote an open letter, asking George if his meditative practice had any impact on corporate social responsibility, or his role in demanding it from fellow board members at Novartis, ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs.9
Loy’s letter included a list of the unethical practices of these companies. “I would like to learn how, in light of your meditation practice, you understand the relationship between one’s own personal transformation and the kind of economic and social transformation that appears to be necessary today, if we are to survive and thrive,” Loy wrote.
George never replied, despite several follow-ups. His silence speaks louder than words. As observed by Daniel Anderson, a cultural studies scholar, owning up to the contradictions between his rhetoric and actions would expose the charade of “mindful leadership,” which amounts to “the remaking of class power moment-by-moment.”10 For mindful capitalism to succeed, such inconsistencies must be concealed. Matthieu Ricard was also present for the 2015 Davos meeting. His bright red Tibetan monastic robes were quite conspicuous, a contrast to George’s embodiment of capitalist power. Ricard serves as a helpfully “aspirational image,” Anderson writes, “the ‘Oriental Monk’ revealed in MRI scans to have singularly-developed brain structures.” What better way to brand our subservience to capital than with scientifically sanctioned Buddhist symbols?
The invocation of science at Davos 2015 included a dialogue between Richard Davidson — the neuroscientist who studied Ricard’s brain — and Tom Insel, who runs the National Institute of Mental Health, a federal agency that funds research on meditation. Again, Davidson’s inclusion was strategic. As the pioneer of contemplative neuroscience, he had colorful anecdotes of his encounters with Buddhist adepts, and how this inspired him not only to study meditation, but also to practice it himself. This process started in 1992, when he met the Dalai Lama at the Mind & Life Institute. Davidson had spent most of his career studying the neural mechanisms of anxiety, fear and depression. The Dalai Lama challenged him to investigate positive qualities, which led to brain scans of monks.
The cultural currency of neuroscience made the WEF crowd especially receptive to Davidson’s message. Their increasing interest in mental health and wellbeing is logical — as we have seen, mindfulness is used to alleviate employee disengagement. And since wellbeing is an economic factor of production, the emerging science of happiness seeks to explain how to bolster resilience. However, it functions via surveillance. Neuroscience offers more sophisticated technologies for measuring and quantifying internal states, and positive moods and feelings can be reproduced through mindfulness training.
Davidson’s research into the neural mechanisms behind such states as compassion, empathy, resilience, and gratitude thus has tremendous neoliberal value. The calculated management of life, a quest among utilitarian thinkers dating back to Jeremy Bentham, is made possible by mindfulness, with its intent of producing contented employees. Going beyond mere disciplinary power, the findings of neuroscience help develop subtler ways to shape the mind — what Byung-Chul Han calls “neoliberal psycho-politics.”11
Corporate Mind Control with a Happy Face
Corporate mindfulness programs perpetuate the myth that individuals are simply “free to choose” between stress and misery or wellness and happiness. The seductive lure of libertarian “freedom” is precisely why these new forms of thought-control are different from covert brainwashing. They enlist the supposedly autonomous individual subject in self-discipline, instilling neoliberal assumptions in the name of liberation. As such, note Jeremy Carrette and Richard King in Selling Spirituality, “psycho-physical techniques described in terms of ‘personal development’ seek 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.”12
Instead of paying attention to what our thoughts and feelings may be trying to tell us about our experience — including questionable corporate practices — Jon Kabat-Zinn instructs us to “drop into the being mode,” to let go of our “mental chatter.” And rather than listening to internal voices of dissent, or our reasons for frustration with bad bosses, social injustices or pointless tasks, we are taught to self-monitor internal states so we become more skilled at riding the waves of competitive enterprise.
“It’s best to think of happiness as a skill,” Richard Davidson tells us, something not dependent on external circumstances, but on our ability to face them as they are. One can learn to endure all sorts of horrors, but it’s a strangely defeatist form of freedom. It also ignores the important role of external factors in being comfortable enough for such views — from socio-economic status, to access to healthcare and stable employment. Presenting mindfulness as a skill — particularly one leading to happiness — helps to rationalize the neoliberal need for autonomous selves, while discouraging them from resisting the status quo. Sam Binkley sums up the problem in Happiness as Enterprise: “Happiness has been rendered a depthless physiological response without moral referent, a biological potential of the individual that makes no recourse to psychic interiority, biography, or social relationships of any kind, however sublimated.”13
The Davos crowd, already well versed in managing assets, tends to view human behavior in terms of economic motivations. Mindfulness framed as a skill just becomes a new way to invest in human capital. The entrepreneurial self is encouraged to make this wise investment so as to gain a competitive edge as an economic actor. This reduces the self to a “collection of assets that must be continually invested in, nurtured, managed and developed,” warns Wendy Brown in Undoing the Demos, making resistance far less likely.14 It can be hard to see out of the box if the system that builds it is reinforced by mindfulness, suggesting we can thrive if we only let go of awkward questions.
Let Me Know If I Fuck Up
One frigid November morning in Boston, I ran my own conference workshop, titled “Search Inside (and Outside) Yourself.” Just a few seconds into my presentation, after showing a slide with a Wall Street Journal photo of Chade-Meng Tan, the man himself took a seat at the back of the room. Afterwards, Google’s Jolly Good Fellow — as he was still titled at the time — approached the podium. He looked very serious. “I agree with you that the track record for effecting large-scale organizational transformation is dismal,” Meng said. “But that’s because the executives weren’t trained in mindfulness.”
A couple of my colleagues began to eavesdrop. Meng continued: “I fully agree with my good friend Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos that the pursuit of mindfulness and the pursuit of corporate profit are completely compatible.” Becoming more animated, he reached for my hand. “I am going to tell you a secret that I often don’t share,” he said.
“My mission in life is to democratize enlightenment and bring one million people to stream-entry before I die.” My colleagues gawped in disbelief. “If commercial success ever gets in the way of mindfulness, I’ll let go of
commercial success.”
This seems unlikely. Meng goes out of his way to feel the pain of millionaires. “Fundamentally, I think it comes down to the compassion in recognizing that even the rich suffer,” he once told an interviewer:
Their suffering causes more suffering to the people around them precisely because they have wealth and power. By addressing that population, I can limit the damage it does to the world. If a poor guy suffers, he suffers and maybe his wife does, too. If a rich guy suffers, everyone around him suffers: his butler, his employees, his thousand people.15
A few years after our encounter in Boston, Meng retired from Google, aged forty-five. Did he leave because commercial success had impeded mindfulness? He certainly left a very wealthy man. Towards the end of our conversation, Meng conceded that corporate mindfulness had neglected compassion and social justice. As we parted, he said sincerely: “Let me know if I fuck up.”
Arrogance 2.0
The year before he retired, Meng was part of a major fuck-up in San Francisco. The Wisdom 2.0 conference is an annual gathering of elites from Silicon Valley, tech hipsters who work for them, and a bazaar of hucksters hawking apps, executive coaching, and brain-stimulation gadgets. Oh, and corporate mindfulness teachers — such outmoded traditions as Buddhism clearly need upgrading from Wisdom 1.0. The general mood is a mix of libertarianism and New Age spirituality. Each year’s line-up combines celebrities with the usual suspects from the mindfulness industry — Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Joan Halifax, Eckhart Tolle, Anderson Cooper, Arianna Huffington, Goldie Hawn and the mindful Congressman Tim Ryan, to name just a few. Corporate sponsors have included Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and MailChimp. The conference is the brainchild of Soren Gordhamer, a tall thin man who looks like he runs marathons. With five stages and five thousand mindfulness fans, Wisdom 2.0 is a festival of spiritual capitalism.
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