Psycho-Politics

“McMindfulness – How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality,” by Ronald E Purser, 2019

Purser is an orthodox Buddhist and also a management professor, but he opposes neo-liberal capitalism and its use of ‘mindfulness’ as an individual mental control tactic.  So he partly parallels an anti-capitalist view but from an ‘ethical’ Buddhist perspective that sees social issues as paramount.   A strange bedfellow here.  He quotes another orthodox Buddhist who calls mindfulness psycho-politics “in which contemporary capitalism seeks to harness the psyche as a productive force.”  I.E. a form of bourgeois cultural hegemony. 

 

The book is very repetitive.  It includes sections on the use of mindfulness training in corporations, the military and schools, along with its growth as a private self-help industry associated with flawed university studies and breathless media promotion.  Purser goes into mindfulness’ philosophic and religious roots, its role as an ersatz ‘medical’ treatment and its effect in individualizing social misery. The key player in mindfulness in the U.S. is Ph.D Jon Kabot-Zinn, the inventor of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in 1979, which now has 600 clinics world-wide.  Since then mindfulness has been promoted by celebrities like Goldie Hawn, Oprah and Arianna Huffington, pushed at Davos and politicians like Ohio’s Tim Ryan and used by corporations like Google, KFC, Salesforce, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Monsanto, Aetna, Ford and Yahoo.  Google even had a resident ‘jolly good fellow’ who pushed mindfulness on their stressed and over-worked staff.  The U.S. National Health Institute has spent $100M on mindfulness and one program at the University of Wisconsin got $7.5M.   No shit.  

Mindfulness is supposed to promote ‘non-judgmental and present-centered’ experience… the zombiefied calming of stressed individuals or making managers more efficient.  It is a quietist and anti-intellectual practice involving ‘watching’ the body, feelings, mental states and things. It comes out of Buddhism but Kabot-Zinn turned it into an ostensibly secular practice in order to adapt to U.S. capitalism.  In spite of that Purser notes its’ practitioners code-switch between that and the Buddhist dharma – a practice called ‘Trojan Horse’ Buddhism – depending on the audience or buyer. 

Purser is not against mindfulness as a practice itself, but when it is disassociated from social change it becomes something else. Stress is defined by it as always an individual problem, not a social one. Mindfulness is the latest iteration of the happiness industry; the positive psychology movement; the prosperity gospel; Transcendentalism as practiced by Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman and James, corporate wellness programs, Transcendental Meditation© and therapeutic ‘white savior’ liberalism.  It claims to transform society when in fact it only acclimates individuals to be more productive employees and obedient citizens. 

Kabot-Zinn replaced religious language with bio-medical terms to secularize it.  The mindfulness industry uses many academic studies based on ‘science’ to prove it works, but these studies have many flaws noted by other researchers, as only 0.25% of them were deemed accurate.  Purser calls it another ‘sciency’ fad like diets or exercise regimes, but its embrace by the powers-that-be makes it more than just a fad. 

Kabot-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness Inc.

Purser attends sessions, employee training, conferences and sales events for mindfulness and these are illustrative.  He notes in the 8 week session he attended that all the sad participants were suffering from unemployment, harried schedules, child-rearing, overwork and other social problems and they were mostly women.  The Google employee seminars were about adding to your emotional or mental ‘capital,’ as employee disengagement or burnout are threats to productivity.  As in the past, opposition to the boss is implied as a psychological problem.  The sales meeting about how to start clinics in a $542M industry was full of the typical entrepreneurial deceptions and verbiage.  After all, it’s all based on profit.

In schools Purser suggests mindfulness programs like Quiet Time violate church and state divisions and can have actual negative effects.  He also looks into mindfulness as a technique in the U.S. military developed by the University of Miami to “optimize warrior performance.”  The military spent $7M on that program while overall it has spent $125M on various programs to create resilient soldiers, including $31M to the University of Pennsylvania – all including mindfulness.  Kabat-Zinn, a former opponent of the Vietnam War, now peddles his kamikaze/Samurai ‘Zen’ skills to the military too.  Andres Breivik, the Odin-worshipping fascist who killed dozens in Norway, practiced mindfulness.  Psychopaths and snipers can be mindful. 

As an atheist I have my doubts about the social uses of ‘orthodox’ Buddhism, as they seem quite invisible.  Nor do the pogroms in Myanmar and Sri Lanka by Buddhists against Muslims and Hindus shed happy thoughts on this religion.  But nevertheless Purser does a good if repetitive job detailing the negative effects of U.S. and U.K. mindfulness programs in the context of corporate capitalism.  If you are interested in the system’s psycho-logic hegemony, buy this book!

Other prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left: “Psychology and Capitalism” and "Capitalism on Campus ( Both by Roberts), “The University in Chains” (Giroux), “The Happiness Industry,” “Lost Connections” (Hari).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 6, 2020 

Celebrate D-Day and the crushing of the Nazis on the western front.