Ronald Purser

Anything that offers success in our unjust society without trying to change it is not revolutionary — it just helps people cope.

Stress has been pathologized and privatized, and the burden of managing it outsourced to individuals.

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.

more relevant question is what sort of mindfulness is actually on offer.

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.

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 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.

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.

When the individualized self bears sole responsibility for its happiness and emotional wellbeing, failure is synonymous with failure of the self, not external conditions.

it is wholly inadequate as a bigger-picture answer