According to its backers we’re in the midst of a “mindfulness revolution.” Jon Kabat-Zinn, recently dubbed the “father of mindfulness,” goes so far as to proclaim that we’re on the verge of a global renaissance, and that mindfulness “may actually be the only promise the species and the planet have for making it through the next couple hundred years.”
Really? A revolution? A global renaissance? What exactly has been overturned or radically transformed to garner such grand status?
The last time I watched the news, Wall Street and corporations were still conducting business-as-usual, special interests and political corruption were still unchecked, and public schools were still suffering from massive underfunding and neglect. The concentration of wealth and inequality is now at record levels. Mass incarceration and prison overcrowding have become a new social plague, while the indiscriminate shooting of African Americans by police and the demonizing of the poor remains commonplace. America’s militaristic imperialism continues to spread, and the impending disasters of global warming are already rearing their ugly heads.
Against this background, the hubris and political naiveté of the cheerleaders of the mindfulness ‘revolution’ is stunning. They seem so enamored of doing good and saving the world that these true believers, no matter how sincere, suffer from an enormous blindspot. They seem mindless of the fact that all too often, mindfulness has been reduced to a commodified and instrumental self-help technique that unwittingly reinforces neoliberal imperatives.
For Kabat-Zinn and his followers, it is mindless and maladapted individuals who are to blame for the problems of a dysfunctional society, not the political and economic frameworks within which they are forced to act. By shifting the burden of responsibility to individuals for managing their own wellbeing, and by privatizing and pathologizing stress, the neoliberal order has been a boon to the 1.1 billion dollar mindfulness industry.
In response, mindfulness has arisen as a new religion of the self, unencumbered by the public sphere. The revolution it proclaims occurs not out in the streets or through collective struggle and political protests or nonviolent demonstrations, but in the heads of atomized individuals. A recurrent message is that our failure to pay attention to the present moment - our getting lost in mental ruminations and mind-wandering - is the underlying cause of our dissatisfaction and distress.
Kabat-Zinn takes this one step further. He claims that our “entire society is suffering from attention disorder-big time.” Apparently, stress and social suffering are not the result of massive inequalities, nefarious corporate business practices or political corruption, but of a crisis inside our heads, what he calls a “thinking disease.”
In other words, capitalism itself is not inherently problematic; rather, the problem is the failure of individuals to be mindful and resilient in a precarious and uncertain economy. And not surprisingly, the mindfulness merchants have just the goods we need to be contented mindful capitalists.
Mindfulness, positive psychology and the happiness industry share a common core in terms of the de-politicization of stress. The ubiquity of individualistic stress rhetoric - with its underlying cultural message that stress is a given - should make us suspicious. As Mark Fisher points out in his book Capitalist Realism, the privatization of stress has led to an “almost total destruction of the concept of the public.”
Stress, we are told by the mindfulness apologists, is a noxious influence that ravages our minds and bodies, and it is up to us as individuals to ‘mindful up.’ It’s a seductive proposition that has potent truth effects. First, we are conditioned to accept the fact that there is a stress epidemic and that it is simply an inevitability of the modern age. Second, since stress is supposedly omnipresent, it’s our responsibility as stressed-out subjects to manage it, get it under control, and adapt mindfully and vigilantly to the thralls of a capitalist economy. Mindfulness targets this vulnerability, and, at least on the surface, appears as a benign technique for self-empowerment.
But in her book One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea, Dana Becker points out that the stress concept obscures and conceals “social problems by individualizing them in ways that most disadvantage those who have the least to gain from the status quo.” In fact, Becker has coined the term stressism to describe “the current belief that the tensions of contemporary life are primarily individual lifestyle problems to be solved through managing stress, as opposed to the belief that these tensions are linked to social forces and need to be resolved primarily through social and political means.”
Really? A revolution? A global renaissance? What exactly has been overturned or radically transformed to garner such grand status?
The last time I watched the news, Wall Street and corporations were still conducting business-as-usual, special interests and political corruption were still unchecked, and public schools were still suffering from massive underfunding and neglect. The concentration of wealth and inequality is now at record levels. Mass incarceration and prison overcrowding have become a new social plague, while the indiscriminate shooting of African Americans by police and the demonizing of the poor remains commonplace. America’s militaristic imperialism continues to spread, and the impending disasters of global warming are already rearing their ugly heads.
Against this background, the hubris and political naiveté of the cheerleaders of the mindfulness ‘revolution’ is stunning. They seem so enamored of doing good and saving the world that these true believers, no matter how sincere, suffer from an enormous blindspot. They seem mindless of the fact that all too often, mindfulness has been reduced to a commodified and instrumental self-help technique that unwittingly reinforces neoliberal imperatives.For Kabat-Zinn and his followers, it is mindless and maladapted individuals who are to blame for the problems of a dysfunctional society, not the political and economic frameworks within which they are forced to act. By shifting the burden of responsibility to individuals for managing their own wellbeing, and by privatizing and pathologizing stress, the neoliberal order has been a boon to the 1.1 billion dollar mindfulness industry.
In response, mindfulness has arisen as a new religion of the self, unencumbered by the public sphere. The revolution it proclaims occurs not out in the streets or through collective struggle and political protests or nonviolent demonstrations, but in the heads of atomized individuals. A recurrent message is that our failure to pay attention to the present moment - our getting lost in mental ruminations and mind-wandering - is the underlying cause of our dissatisfaction and distress.
Kabat-Zinn takes this one step further. He claims that our “entire society is suffering from attention disorder-big time.” Apparently, stress and social suffering are not the result of massive inequalities, nefarious corporate business practices or political corruption, but of a crisis inside our heads, what he calls a “thinking disease.”
In other words, capitalism itself is not inherently problematic; rather, the problem is the failure of individuals to be mindful and resilient in a precarious and uncertain economy. And not surprisingly, the mindfulness merchants have just the goods we need to be contented mindful capitalists.
Mindfulness, positive psychology and the happiness industry share a common core in terms of the de-politicization of stress. The ubiquity of individualistic stress rhetoric - with its underlying cultural message that stress is a given - should make us suspicious. As Mark Fisher points out in his book Capitalist Realism, the privatization of stress has led to an “almost total destruction of the concept of the public.”
Stress, we are told by the mindfulness apologists, is a noxious influence that ravages our minds and bodies, and it is up to us as individuals to ‘mindful up.’ It’s a seductive proposition that has potent truth effects. First, we are conditioned to accept the fact that there is a stress epidemic and that it is simply an inevitability of the modern age. Second, since stress is supposedly omnipresent, it’s our responsibility as stressed-out subjects to manage it, get it under control, and adapt mindfully and vigilantly to the thralls of a capitalist economy. Mindfulness targets this vulnerability, and, at least on the surface, appears as a benign technique for self-empowerment.
But in her book One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea, Dana Becker points out that the stress concept obscures and conceals “social problems by individualizing them in ways that most disadvantage those who have the least to gain from the status quo.” In fact, Becker has coined the term stressism to describe “the current belief that the tensions of contemporary life are primarily individual lifestyle problems to be solved through managing stress, as opposed to the belief that these tensions are linked to social forces and need to be resolved primarily through social and political means.”
by Ronald Purser, Open Democracy | Read more:
Image: Thai Ronald McDonald. Flickr/Daniel Grosvenor. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
