A claim of spirituality doesn’t make the claimant ethical or moral. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:
“Leveraging Mindful Practices To Maximize Productivity”, reads a Forbes headline from last week.
“Using mindfulness to overcome financial stress”, reads another headline published a few days ago by Financy.
“The impact of mindfulness on businesses in the work from home era”, reads another by Business Review from last week.
Over the last few years we’ve seen a surge in the forceful mainstreaming of so-called mindfulness practices, a westernized iteration of various eastern meditative traditions emphasizing non-judgemental present-moment awareness which can, as a side effect, reduce stress levels. If you look at the headlines above, it’s not hard to see toward what end these practices are being promoted.
The way mindfulness is being so aggressively prescribed as a means to relieve the soul-crushing stress of meaningless labor under a meaningless system has been discussed at length in Ronald Purser’s 2019 book “McMindfulness“, which critiques the way “mindfulness has become a banal form of capitalist spirituality that mindlessly avoids social and political transformation, reinforcing the neoliberal status quo.” Are you experiencing financial stress from being ruthlessly exploited by your unfathomably wealthy employer? Mindfulness it away! Are you having trouble coping with the demands of empty gear-turning in an amoral corporate machine which benefits humanity in no discernible way? McMindfulness, baby!
