Can “Mindfulness” Be a Path to Activism?
When I began this series of columns about religion and politics, I did not set out to proselytize on behalf of a specific set of beliefs, especially not ones of any spiritual variety. But I did hope to get at why we, as Americans, seem to have such a hard time these days coming to a moral consensus.
I have found myself circling one question: In today’s atomized digital world, is there a way for a community of faith to grow, not simply as individuals who identify as part of a religious group but truly as a community? Take, for example, a pastor who goes on TikTok and Instagram to build a following. You could argue that this is good for their church because they’re getting out the good word and meeting young people where they live, so to speak. But will that form of sermonizing create an actual community, or will it simply inspire individuals to believe in their own personal way?
The moral future of the U.S. does not rely on religious unanimity, of course. But I believe that for progressive ideas to have any shot of fulfillment, they must be connected to the church, much as they were during the civil-rights movement. (Today, faith organizations still work on humanitarian causes—as I’ve noted repeatedly, immigration and homelessness services are largely provided by Catholic charities—but they tend to perform that work quietly.) However, we have become so lonely, and spend so much time staring at our phones, and it sometimes feels impossible for anything—religion, art, recreation—to avoid being swallowed up by the gospel of personal optimization.
Thinking about this problem led me to Ron Purser, a Buddhist teacher, a professor at San Francisco State University, and the author of “McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality.” Mindfulness was once touted by the Vietnamese monk and activist Thich Nhat Hanh as a way to understand the “interbeing” between all forms of life; in one respect, the spread of the idea is a remarkable example of a religious concept taking hold in twenty-first-century American life.
But Purser’s book is a combative and compelling critique of everything that’s wrong with contemporary mindfulness as practiced in corporate H.R. departments, schools, and the military. “Mindfulness is nothing more than basic concentration training,” Purser writes. “Although derived from Buddhism, it’s been stripped of the teachings on ethics that accompanied it, as well as the liberating aim of dissolving attachment to a false sense of self while enacting compassion for all other beings. What remains is a tool of self-discipline, disguised as self-help. Instead of setting practitioners free, it helps them adjust to the very conditions that caused their problems. A truly revolutionary movement would seek to overturn this dysfunctional system, but mindfulness only serves to reinforce its destructive logic.”
This monomaniacal and thoroughly individualized focus turned mindfulness into yet another personalized optimization ritual. You can detach your way into a state of intense dispassion for the suffering of other people; you can meditate yourself into callous vanity and mistake “personal growth” for enlightenment. Purser’s critique operates at two levels: he believes McMindfulness is a purposeful corporate intervention that manages the stress levels of workers and teaches them to not care about what’s happening outside the office. This co-opting has been aided by a hack social science—“happiness studies” and the like—that confer authority upon supposed experts in mindfulness, who then build media empires around coaching management types on how to ignore their neighbors in a gentle way.
What Purser preaches, instead, is “social mindfulness,” which he believes can allow people to see just how atomized and alienated we have all become from one another. I talked to him about how things went wrong and whether it’s possible, at this point, for them to go right. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You write that mindfulness has been stripped of its ethical teachings and of the liberating aim of dissolving attachment to a false sense of self. How did the idea go from something countercultural and deeply philosophical to the thing you get a pamphlet about when you join a company?
Anytime Buddhist traditions have migrated from one geography to another, they’ve always morphed and adapted to the host culture. Chinese Zen is very different from Indian Buddhism. When meditation got to the West, it became psychologized, scientized, instrumentalized, and eventually commodified—though that didn’t happen until after the year 2000. At first, it was confined to the hospital clinic, with Jon Kabat-Zinn, as a therapeutic modality. Having the scientific community come into being with mindfulness is really the watershed moment. A Time magazine special issue in 2014, with a beautiful blonde blissing out, was the pivotal time when the mindfulness revolution really became mainstream.
What is it used for now?
It began with mindfulness-based stress reduction in the hospital clinic—a legitimate therapeutic method for chronic pain, anxiety, stress. Then psychotherapists began integrating it into their practice. But, after 2014, corporations became interested, particularly in Silicon Valley. The poster child was Google. Corporate mindfulness training took off. Now it’s A.I. companies—Sam Altman practices mindfulness. These programs are offered by H.R. departments or consultants who sell them to companies. After my book came out, Amazon got into the game—with those Amazon coffins in its warehouses, little booths where you go in and watch a little video about mindfulness, do a little two-minute practice, and then get back on the warehouse floor.
Why do you think these corporations were so interested?
It’s a form of psychopolitics—that’s a term from Byung-Chul Han. Neoliberal capitalism is trying to harness the psyche as a productive force. People are overworked and stressed, and it’s much easier to put the burden on the individual employee than to actually address the corporate causes of stress: structural issues, lack of job security, too many work hours. It’s easier to pathologize stress and view it as a maladaptive response to the environment. The benefit to corporations is that they can squeeze as much productivity out of the worker as possible by having them reduce their stress and then have less absenteeism, less burnout, less complaining.
The introduction of medical experts seems crucial—it gave this idea legitimacy among the management class who would ultimately get interested.
Medical and psychological professions function as a form of neoliberal discipline. We internalize that discipline ourselves. And it functions as what’s been called a disimagination machine—the problem and solution are inside our own heads, which forecloses the possibility of looking at structural change. Neoliberalism wants atomization, managing our own human capital. There’s no sense of solidarity or collective power or action with others. The problems are pathologized as individual problems, and then we get sold back solutions. Here’s a mindfulness app on your smartphone—three minutes and you’ll be fixed. Headspace, Calm—billion-dollar companies.
What has been stripped out? Someone could argue that mindfulness does work, it confers benefits. What’s the harm?
I got that question so many times. I’m not saying mindfulness has no therapeutic value. People need to manage their immediate distress. The problem is when it becomes the only solution offered, when it becomes a substitute for actually looking at what’s causing the distress in the first place.
The analogy I give is you have to take a painkiller if you have a broken leg. But if you don’t set the bone, you’ll feel better, but you’re not fixing the underlying problem. Even worse, the painkiller may numb you to such an extent that you’re still walking on the broken leg, making the injury worse.
That’s what’s happening with corporate mindfulness workplace programs. We’re numbing ourselves to intolerable conditions so we can keep functioning within them. And the whole framework is narcissistic—it’s all about me managing my reactions, me feeling better, me being more resilient. There’s never a question of whether the conditions themselves need to change, or whether I have any responsibility to other people who are suffering under the same conditions.
I spent a lot of my early twenties thinking about these ideas, working as a tree planter, reading Gary Snyder. The teacher I worked with—I think he trained as a monk—would always say that the whole point is to understand that everyone is there. You can’t give in to a type of spiritual vanity. So what’s been lost?
There’s a term I read that I find useful: spiritualized-neutrality trap. It’s similar to spiritual bypassing, but it’s political bypassing. Mindfulness becomes a way of sidestepping the world’s pain rather than engaging with it.
What’s stripped out at its core—and this is the deepest core of the contemplative traditions—is a non-dual realization of wisdom, an experience of oneness. That is really the reason for engaging in contemplative practices. But it gets turned into an instrumentalized technique rather than a spiritual path for realization of unity with your neighbor, with nature, with the cosmos. We’re sidestepping all of that for the benefit of becoming productive, just feeling a little bit better—a palliative.
We’re not stripping away the ego—we’re feeding it. We’re stripping away the juice, the demand of these practices, which is really a commitment to go beyond self-interest.
Traditional Buddhism is not about social activism if you look at it—it’s about individual awakening. But, as the result of individual awakening, one becomes engaged with the world, because one doesn’t feel separate from the world. That’s what’s lost. The modern version of mindfulness just reinforces separation. It tells you that you’re a separate self who needs to manage your separate experience better.
There was a similar dynamic in the sixties and seventies Zen movements—a deep vanity, really. You’re perfecting yourself while everybody else doesn’t exist. I think about Gary Snyder, who I admire, but there’s something off about looking at an axe in the woods while the world is exploding. How do you convince people that the whole point is to understand that other beings exist?
That’s the challenge. Mindfulness is one factor of the Eightfold Path, and those other factors are extremely important.
In Buddhism, they talk about shamatha and vipassana. Shamatha is calming; you need a stable mind to do the deep investigation, which is vipassana—seeing clearly. You can’t see clearly if you’re bouncing around reacting to everything. So meditation is often associated with sitting and calming the breath. But that’s just a preliminary. Mindfulness takes that preliminary and glorifies it into the be-all and end-all.
McMindfulness says the problem is in your head, the solution is managing your mental ruminations. What’s left out is calling into question whether both the self and world are even what they appear to be. We just stay at the level of, How do I feel less stressed so I can be more productive? The narcissism is built into the very structure of the question.
There’s a lot left out besides that—the ethical dimensions.
What about the ethical dimensions?
It’s not very different from other religious traditions. One big summary is: do no harm, in whatever form that takes. There’s an elaborate schema—anger, lust, the whole list—finding ways to discern and regulate. There is self-regulation going on in the initial stages of spiritual development, and this is where calming does come into play. If you’re always reacting to things, clarity is not accessible. So calming the mind is quite important, and that’s where there’s overlap with mindfulness. But it’s all for a means to a different end.
You write that “a truly revolutionary movement would seek to overturn this dysfunctional system” but “mindfulness only serves to reinforce its destructive logic.” What does that revolutionary movement look like?
I think it’s a revolution in consciousness first. Another way I’ve been thinking about mindfulness is as a modern form of social stoicism—having forbearance and accepting things we can’t change. The revolutionary nature of what I’m getting at is it’s a revolution in how we know. It’s a participatory knowing which transforms how we engage with what we think of as the world.
It’s not quietism, and it’s not anger-fuelled activism. What spiritual revolutionaries like Martin Luther King, Jr., embodied was something different—action that flows from clarity, from intimacy. Jesus Christ was all about love. There was an intimacy rather than an opposition. But he also threw over the tables in the temple.
Justice and compassion aren’t just moral duties that we impose from the outside. They grow out of a revolutionary change in consciousness—a recognition of interbeing, radical interdependence. When you really see that, you act differently. Not because you should, but because you can’t help it.
Churches have historically provided that infrastructure, that communal support for social movements. Then we see this privatization, this depoliticizing—religion got quarantined away from the public sphere, reduced to a purely private matter. That’s where mindfulness fits snugly: “spiritual but not religious,” a way of coping for people who have lost trust in institutions. But it’s coping that keeps you isolated. It never builds anything.
How has the internet changed this? So much of mindfulness is on phones now. It’s not just Buddhism—people have TikTok pastors with hundreds of thousands of followers giving two-minute sermons, or A.I.-avatar gurus. My sense is that the reason for this disconnect—the loss of power that faith traditions and philosophies once had to influence progressive movements—is that so much of it is digital now. The idea that we exist together, the idea of collective responsibility, is taken away when everything is mediated through a screen.
Right. The platform just lends itself to it—so much monetary potential. There’s the irony that you turn to your smartphone, which is telling you not to be addicted to it, to do an app. It just reinforces atomization, isolation. Meditation becomes a neutral tool for managing your own mental states. They use language like compassion, but it’s self-compassion—don’t get mad at yourself. There’s no solidarity. Compassion and wisdom become free-floating signifiers, detached from any actual relationship to other people, masquerading as something profound.
How do people get back to a more socially engaged form of this?
How do we move beyond the dichotomous choice between activist rage and meditative detachment? That’s where we’re stuck.
I’ll be impractical. It requires revisiting lost traditions, serious refamiliarization with the deepest forms of non-dual wisdom, of whatever tradition: Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, or even secular. It doesn’t matter.
What I mean is a new vision of reality. Do we have one that accentuates our common humanity? Our participation with our common home? Ecology means home. Right now we have a spiritual vacuum where the human being is conceived of as just a fragment, an island defending our territory because we feel at risk as such fragile, atomized individuals. That’s the pathos of modern Western neoliberal culture. That’s what mindfulness reinforces.
What I’m calling for is a way of knowing that’s not just rational and separatist. It’s embodied. It’s heart-centered. A way of knowing that has an intimate sense of contact with being. And being is inclusive of all beings.
You can’t think your way into this. You have to live it. But you can’t live it until you ground yourself in it, until you discover and nurture it with other people. ♦