Thomas Meyer

1. Submission as Freedom: Happiness in the “Best of All Worlds” (Candide/Voltaire)

In the neoliberal regime, people are forced to see themselves as entrepreneurs of their own labor power so that they can properly satisfy the imperatives of the market, with the ultimate aim of “self-determined” submission to the capitalist valorization process and its constraints. In Western democracies, such self-enslavement is understood as freedom. Here democracy, of course, means nothing other than that everyone is formally subjected to the same coercive freedom. Neoliberalism was only the most recent form taken by the “cage of bondage” (Max Weber) that capitalism has always been (cf. Kurz 1999). In the “commodity-producing patriarchy” (Roswitha Scholz), one’s freedom of personality is about as free as a corset. You are supposed to fit in perfectly to the demands of the market, while of course reserving the freedom to tie your own noose however you would like. Everyone has the freedom to strive for their own happiness, which implies nothing less than the fact that failure and falling behind are also one’s own responsibility. Success and failure, suffering and stress are privatized. Subjectivization in neoliberalism throws the individual back on themselves. Social structures are ignored, while collective thinking and action are denied or suppressed. Collective struggle and solidarity seem impossible. Being flexible and remaining resilient is the type of freedom forced upon every individual (see Graefe 2019). Bad health becomes private guilt. Unhealthy people have allegedly eaten the wrong food and exercised too little. According to neoliberal propaganda, this is also the sole responsibility of the individual and is not due to the stress caused by work or the restriction that having a low income places on one’s “freedom of choice” (cf. Mayr 2021). Diseases are becoming a purely medical problem. The so-called diseases of civilization, such as cardiovascular diseases, have a lot to do with the fact that many people are permanently “in overdrive,” or must be, which physiologically results in higher blood pressure. The long-term consequences of higher blood pressure are damage to the blood vessels, which contributes massively to cardiovascular diseases (see Cechura 2018). Furthermore, mental illnesses also become a privatized ailment. Their causes are supposedly located in one’s own brain, and not in the circumstances of life, so that the cure, according to neuroscientific vulgar materialism, is the consumption of psychotropic drugs (cf. Schleim 2021 & Hasler 2023).

This “musical chairs” that everyone is exposed to in varying degrees in the capitalist regime, which is sold as freedom by the dominant propaganda, does not have to end in a psychiatric hospital or a morgue. However, universal competition leads to more and more people being crushed by it, which has negative socio-psychological and health consequences. Those affected by capitalism, especially those who are lonely and isolated, nevertheless try to “somehow” process what is happening to them. There are plenty of self-help books and paid courses that help individuals cope with themselves and the world: You just have to believe in yourself, think positively, be optimistic, change your diet, accept economic or personal crises as opportunities, discover unrecognized potential in and beside yourself, etc. It is a mixture of adaptation to the market, denial of reality and self-abuse. Those who are “realists” transfigure reality and subordinate themselves to it. Esotericism is also part of this context of individual self-optimization. Esotericism promises many people meaning and direction in their lives, seemingly offering a holistic perspective much different from the “cold rationality” of objective science (or medicine). However, instead of placing life crises in a social context and enabling a collective defenseagainst capitalism’s impositions (e.g. through strikes and sabotage), esotericism serves as an opportunity to constantly reinvent oneself as a neoliberal subject through withdrawal into the private sphere and inwardness, through passivation and gobbledygook, through “wholeness” and health, or it helps one endure the stress (cf. Barth 2012). Esotericism often appears to be harmless promotion of the self, but it has always been and still is linked to reactionary and fascist thinking (cf. Kratz 1994, Speit 2021). Of course, esotericism here has nothing to do with its original meaning from antiquity, namely secret or hard-to-access knowledge that not everyone can or should share. What I mean here is the esotericism that is a billion-dollar business. Naturally, elements or aspects of various religious or philosophical traditions are exploited for this purpose and instrumentalized for neoliberal propaganda and self-indoctrination.

2. Meditation as the “Opium of the Masses” (Marx)

A few years ago, Zen Buddhist and management professor Ronald Purser criticized the neoliberal instrumentalization and exploitation of Buddhist meditation practice in his book McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Spirituality of Capitalism[1] (Purser 2021). In Western countries, so-called mindfulness has become a widespread fad. Mindfulness, which can be achieved through a certain form of meditation practice, is primarily intended to reduce stress and strengthen concentration. This meditation practice is called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). A key agitator and preacher of this method is Jon Kabat-Zinn, who Purser repeatedly refers to in the book. This practice says that you should do things like stay in the here and now, not be attached, not judge, have neither negative nor positive feelings, breathe in and out constantly, eat a raisin mindfully, etc. Corresponding courses are used and offered almost everywhere: at schools, at universities, for stressed managers, for stressed employees, for entrepreneurs, at all kinds of conferences, in Davos, and even in the military (so that the soldiers take a deep breath beforehand and don’t fire at random). The mindfulness preachers claim that if everyone just practiced mindfulness, the world could be changed and everything would be fine. Everything is therefore up to the individual. Nothing else needs to be done (such as getting involved in politics, trade unions or, above all, social critique). Just stay mindful in the now. Do Kabat-Zinn & Co really believe their own propaganda? Either way, this idea is based on a bottomless ignorance that doesn’t have or want to have a clue about how the world really works, how other people really live, or the problems marginalized people face. The mindfulness apostles “assume a false unity of human experience” (ibid., 249) and apparently do not even realize from what social filter bubble they are arguing. On the one hand, the mindfulness preachers emphasize that the meditation practice they offer has nothing to do with Buddhism, but is secular (and therefore legal in U.S. public schools), and that its effectiveness is supposedly (neuro)scientifically proven (the evidence, however, as Purser summarizes, is rather thin, statistically insignificant, indistinguishable from placebo or simply non-existent). On the other hand, the same people emphasize, depending on the occasion and situation – which further underlines the instrumental and intellectually dishonest character of the whole thing – that MBSR is supposedly the essence of the Dharma, i.e. fundamentally and essentially related to Buddhism, and that everything else that makes Buddhism Buddhism is more or less superfluous or nonsense. A certain western-white arrogance comes through here. Buddhism is devalued, and there is no serious engagement with it, since this would apparently be detrimental to the commercialization of meditation in the neoliberal regimes of the West. The title of the book was not chosen by chance: McMindfulness.

According to Purser, none of this really has anything to do with Buddhism. It’s not really accurate to say that a Western school of Buddhism is emerging here (just as Chan Buddhism, for example, gave rise to an independent Chinese Buddhism). On the contrary: the mindfulness programs are a product of neoliberal U.S. society; they are therefore situated in a specific context that is not usually made obvious. Mindfulness, on the other hand, as Purser makes clear, is just one aspect of Buddhist practice that cannot be isolated and certainly cannot be seen as a panacea. Purser therefore has no objections in principle to mindfulness and the meditation practices that cultivate it. The decisive factor, as he always emphasizes, is the social context and the objective to be achieved. Meditation is instrumentalized because it is stripped of its context, because the ethical foundations on which it is based and the goal it strives for are excluded (this is what makes its use in the military possible in the first place).[2] Mindfulness is not solely and certainly not primarily about reducing stress and passively breathing in the now; rather, meditation is part of a cultivation of ethics (sila). Right mindfulness as part of the eightfold path has as its goal compassion, a widening of the gaze and not a narrowing of this gaze and fixation on oneself. It is not the individual as an individual who becomes mindful and “compassionate,” but as part of a community (sangha). Mindfulness, stripped of its ethical context and reduced to the sole purpose of coping with stress, ties in perfectly with the neoliberal ideology mentioned above. Buddhism reduced to the consumption of fast food as a means of coping with stress in the neoliberal regime is, as Adorno would probably say in horror, not even “Halbbildung.” Instead of looking for the causes of stress, such as working conditions that we could fight against together, stress is individualized and turned into a private problem. The aim of reducing stress is to remain or become a productive worker and to simply cope better with stress, to simply endure it and to fit in ina good mood and relaxed manner. The purpose of this is to keep the capitalist machinery running smoothly. Lenin is definitely to be agreed with here when he writes that “religion […] is a kind of spiritual fusel in which the slaves of capital drown their humanity and their claims to a halfway decent life” (Lenin 1974, 7). The booze with which reality is drowned here consists of sucking on a raisin for minutes on end and allowing yourself to be persuaded that your problems could be solved or your life improved by focusing on the here and now. The aim of “mindfulness-based stress reduction” is not to criticize stress and its causes, but to adapt to working conditions and life circumstances. Of course, this also has nothing to do with socially committed Buddhism (such as that of Thich Nhat Hanh). And certainly nothing to do with a critique of capitalism. Mindfulness agitators such as Kabat-Zinn are, so to speak, among the priests of neoliberalism.

3. Critique & Solidarity Instead of Self-Anesthetization

Just as one can find content in the Judeo-Christian tradition that supports a critical stance toward capitalism and its ideology, content that makes it possible to spark collective solidarity against the impositions and presumptions of capitalism (see Böttcher 2023 & 2022, Ramminger; Segbers 2018 & King 2022), a properly understood Buddhism has the potential to also contribute to the practical and theoretical critique of capitalism. If mindfulness as a moment of Buddhist practice is not instrumentalized and vulgarized for neoliberal propaganda and used as a wellness narcotic for resilience and the suppression of reality, so that through it “oppressive systems work more gently” (Purser 2021, 237), i.e. if it is not reduced to making the individual more resilient and compliant, a proper mindfulness can broaden our view and help us to stand firm, clear-minded, and of good heart together. In the words of Ronald Purser: “Because liberation is a systemic process, it cannot rely on individual methods. Social mindfulness starts with the widest possible lens, focusing collective attention on the structural causes of suffering. Groups work together to establish shared meanings and common ground, developing a socially engaged motivation before turning inwards. Clearly, this is different to an eight-week program in a boardroom. It goes much deeper and has longer-term objectives, combining resistance with meditative practice. The aim is not to de-stress for more business as usual. It’s to overcome alienation by working with others in a common struggle, using inner resources to seek social justice, resisting unjust power both to liberate oppressors and oppressed” (ibid., 254.).

However, a critique of neoliberalism will hardly suffice to adequately grasp and criticize capitalism as a “concrete totality” (Scholz 2009) with its fetishistic valorizing movement M-C-M’ and the gender-specific bourgeois subject form as well as the manifold manifestations of crisis (cf. e.g. Jappe 2023, Kurz 1999 & Scholz 1992). Nevertheless, Purser’s contribution to a critique of neoliberal ideology in the form of “mindfulness” is no minor matter, as the size of the esoteric and self-optimization scene shows. As is well known, the Christian churches also have esoteric self-management in their “pastoral offerings” (cf. Böttcher 2022, 73ff.). Naturally, the church does not want to miss out on any potential market share, which is why it is chumming up to the prevailing zeitgeist. Without a collective solidarity that liberates the individual from their lethargy and isolation and their futile attempts to cope using all kinds of psycho-techniques and medication, any attempt to defend themselves against the anti-social impositions and the terror of the economy is doomed to failure. Religious or pseudo-religious practices that confirm the individual in his isolation and do not even dream of having the “whole” in view are not an alternative to the “cold rationality” of capitalism, but its realization.

Literature

Barth, Claudia. 2012. Esoterik – Die Suche nach dem Selbst: Sozialpsychologische Studien zu einer Form moderner Religiosität. Bielefeld: transcript.

Böttcher, Herbert. 2022. “Auf dem Weg zu einer ‚unternehmerischen Kirche’ in Anschluss an die abstürzende Postmoderne.” Available online at: https://www.oekumenisches-netz.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Druck_Unternehmerische-Kirche.pdf.

Böttcher, Herbert. 2023. “Weltvernichtung als Selbstvernichtung: Was im Anschluss an Walter Benjamin ‚zu denken’ gib.” In: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft 20: 159-207.

Cechura, Suitbert. 2018. Unsere Gesellschaft macht krank: Das Leiden der Zivilisation und das Geschäft mit der Gesundheit. Baden-Baden: Tectum Wissenschaftsverlag.

Graefe, Stefanie. 2019. Resilienz im Krisenkapitalismus: Wider das Lob der Anpassungsfähigkeit. Bielefeld: transcript.

Hasler, Felix. 2023. Neue Psychiatrie – Den Biologismus überwinden und tun, was wirklich hilft. Bielefeld: transcript.

Jappe, Anselm. 2023. The Adventures of the Commodity: For a Critique of Value. London: Bloomsbury.

Kratz, Peter. 1994. Die Götter des New Age: Im Schnittpunkt von “Neuem Denken,” Faschismus und Romantik. Berlin: Elefanten.

King Jr., Martin Luther. 2022. I have a dream. San Francisco: HarperOne.

Kurz, Robert. 1999. Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus. Frankfurt: Eichborn.

Lenin. 1974. On Religion. Moscow: Progress Publishers

Mayr, Anna. 2020. Die Elenden: Warum unsere Gesellschaft Arbeitslose verachtet und sie dennoch braucht. Berlin: Hanser.

Purser, Ronald E. 2019. McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Spirituality of Capitalism. London: Repeater.

Ramminger, Michael and Franz Segbers. 2018. “Alle Verhältnisse umwerfen… …und die Mächtigen vom Thron stürzen” – Das gemeinsame Erbe von Christen und Marx. Hamburg.

Schleim, Stephan. 2021. Gehirn, Psyche und Gesellschaft – Schlaglichter aus den Wissenschaften vom Menschen. Berlin: Springer.

Scholz, Roswitha. 1992. “Der Wert ist der Mann – Thesen zur Wertvergesellschaftung und Geschlechterverhältnis.” In: Krisis – Beiträge zur Kritik der Warengesellschaft 12:19-52.

Scholz, Roswitha. 2009. “Gesellschaftliche Form und konkrete Totalität – Zur Dringlichkeit eines dialektischen Realismus heute.” In: exit! – Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft 6: 55-100.

Speit, Andreas. 2021. Verqueres Denken – Gefährliche Weltbilder in alternativen Milieus. Berlin: Ch. Links.

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[1] For reasons of space, page references and citations are largely omitted in the following.

[2] This also applies to the neoliberal use of ancient philosophy, such as the Stoa or Plato.

Originally published on Ökumenisches Netz in 10/2024.