Joe Clement talks with Ron Purser about his new book "McMindfulness: how mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality". This is mindfulness meditation as a commercialized, colonized, corporate version of Buddhist practice promoted for stress reduction and concentration, as a way to be calmer, and a cure-all technique. Purser doesn't argue that it's not genuinely helpful for many, but he points out how it contradicts the ethical framework it is appropriated from. It's a billion dollar market of research, programs, courses, and pseudo-spiritual products steeped in neoliberal ideology about the sources of stress, personal vs. collective responsibility, self-management, and productivity, that must be reformed or rejected. How can mindfulness be liberated?
Ronald Purser is a professor of management at San Francisco State University, an ordained Buddhist teacher in the Korean Zen Taego Order, and the cofounder with David Forbes of the podcast The Mindful Cranks. His essays and cultural criticism have appeared in the Huffington Post, Salon, Alternet, Tikkun, and Tricycle magazine.
- KBOO