That's the beauty of capitalism--or possibly even economics in general--it acknowledges and respects nothing that falls outside of its own scope. No matter how ancient, sophisticated, sacred, or meaningful a practice may have been--no matter what reverence our ancestral betters may have applied to it, capitalism will find the most effective way to utilize it as a strictly economic material and convert it into profit. For the true capitalist there is no extra or supra-capitalism. Capitalism envelops the world. It swallows and defuses all meaning and translates it into the small subset of meanings it understands. All is reduced to pure economic terms--it is no longer a question of interfacing with the practices of your ancestors, respecting history or engaging in spiritual practice--the meditation is only understood and useful insofar as it has an assignable quantity related to productive increase or related directly to profit.
I can at least take some comfort in the fact that articles like this still crop up and call the beast into question.
I would like to point out that this is a truism.
To a hammer, everything is a nail.
To an earthworm, everything is dirt.
To gray goo, everything is prime material for making more gray goo.
To capitalism, everything is whatever capitalism needs to consume in order to make more and more of whatever it is it wants to produce.
Systems of not-infinite scope are, well, limited.
The issue I find with capitalism is that it attempts to swallow all other systems. For instance, consider another system religion--it is not uncommon for this system to have, overlaying it, a role in the capitalist system--the capitalist system's operation and the religious system's willingness to participate becomes prerequisite to the religious systems being able to operate or function at in the first place--just as the earthworms continual existence is secured only in so far as the dirt isn't suddenly translatable into economic value and consumed for profit. It's like capitalism is an unconscious dogmatism that everyone participates in because...and that why remains fuzzy.
I just don't appreciate the way capitalism, when interfacing with other domains, effaces all their values and meaning--though I suppose you could levy such criticism against any system, i.e. a closed religious system presumably wouldn't read any meaning into your available capital (ah, but so many of them do!), just as capitalism wouldn't read any value or meaning into your practiced religion. Though of course these things are not clearly demarcated and manipulate each other.
Thanks for pointing this out. It has helped me consider this further--as always, surprise surprise, things are more complicated than I'd first thought.
What percentage of the US population do you believe falls into this category?
I mean it less a concrete instantiation and more as an abstract type that rises as a side effect of the system.
Jeff Bezos, to unfairly use him as an example, I doubt has any desire to efface the significance of historical human practice. I doubt he has a vendetta against the subtle social dynamics and sphere of relationships that are established between localized mom and pop shops and customers and that often begin to humanize, at least to a minimum extent, the otherwise emotionless and inhuman process of transaction--bartering, recollection of past trades and successes, allowing a purchase on one's word, trust--all of these cultural (an instance where we can still find something identifiable as human in capitalist practice) dynamics are snuffed by Amazon's enterprise. Amazon's mission is not to kill off this whole space of human practice--its simply dedicated to the capitalist game, and once Jeff is playing there's really no way for him to stop--abiding as he is to the logic of capitalism--the rules of the game. It is a logic that reduces all to one vector--profit. So long as increased profit is the result of an action it is encouraged by capitalism--capitalism itself provides no moral system--it selects a single quantity and hopes to maximize it abstracted from all the details and context--worse, it is assumed justified as natural human behavior (this is the sinister underside of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand"--there's no need to worry about economy because it will "regulate itself" because it is predicated on trade a "natural phenomena" and set of behaviors--all of a sudden the argument for capitalism turns to putting it forward as a naturalism and not the construct and theory that it is--nothing in nature says that man has to maximize his profits, aka his excess--nature only needs you to break even--it only demands you survive. Capitalists would rather have you believe the will to excess is natural because now the system suddenly has some outside justification).
Luckily living breathing human beings aren't influenced only by capitalism--other stuff has stuck around, which curbs anyone from becoming the 'true capitalist' which is just a manifestation of a capitalist system operating at full efficiency and only under its own logic--i.e. other value judgments don't mix in, as they do with actual human beings--giving pause to what would be the logical solution for increased profits in the capitalist game (i.e. not giving a damn about the shuttering local store and all the people and relationships this closure displaces, not giving a damn about environmental side effects, etc. etc.).
Capitalism lends itself to a sort of Machiavellianism in the name of profit--the reason this is something that's dangerous and that we ought to pay attention to is because, like all dangerous phenomena, it is subtle. People buy into systemic structures without fighting against them because the scale is nigh insurmountable, especially once the phenomena reaches a global level, and sometimes people don't even realize they are participants. Jeff Bezos for instance, is not going to stop the Amazon gravy train just because a few thousands if not millions of other people have been negatively impacted by Amazon. Not only the economic sense, but the social and cultural effects too--death of the small shop owner, death of local shop apprenticeships, death of plurality(suggestions from different employees at your local store are changed into the one monolithic suggestion feed of amazon--polyphonic and eclectic curation and division of tastes decays, individuals transform into collectives, fans into fanbases, group think develops)--in general the gradual reduction of types of relationships to those only manageable and congenial to the notion of exchange, and furthermore, exchange that can be mediated or enhanced through the use of technology.
It took me a while to accept but now I agree with this viewpoint.
But what's downright alienating is not participating in the faux existential crises that often happen at work and that are pervasive in media.
A bad boss that is used to flogging people to action with mind games (whether they realize what they're doing or not) will simply label you as a problem for not freaking out when they want you to. For going home to your friends and family on Friday because you know the problem is still going to exist on Tuesday, at the earliest, no matter what you do.
On the flip side (and more commonly), we consume things and have practices that numb us to reality and make it easier to carry on in spite of internal dissonance.
That doesn't sound accurate. Are you suggesting that one would be less resilient to stresses linked to livelihood or stress in general?
Over time meditation and yoga practices should help develop equanimity extensively, a factor that helps deal with stressful situations with more grace and emotional balance.
Let's say you constantly do harmful things to other people or yourself. You can meditate and maybe get some benefit but the ultimate realization should be that you need to change your ways. That will be the only path to real happiness.
Same with the modern lifestyle. This lifestyle is ultimately unhealthy. You can build up some resilience with meditation but if you don't change the lifestyle you can't make real progress.
I would compare it people who eat too much junk food. They can switch to organic and gluten free junk food and will do a little better. But in the end real progress can be only made by removing the junk food.
Does this make sense? I don't want to pretend having deep insight. This is just my (limited) understanding.
Agreed. The whole point behind meditation and mindfulness is to create a more well rounded spiritual life/existence. Not to ignore the things that cause you distress or pain, but to identify them clearly and untangle issues to figure out how to get past them.
My current company offers a whole slew of "wellness programs" - yoga, meditation, running clubs, etc. Great in theory, but they all take place during "lunch break", are limited to 20 mins or so, and charge (albeit, a small fee). None of these, I believe, are to benefit the lives of the employees but to create a sense of "forward thinking" in the company to encourage productivity.
Want my stress and anxieties to disappear at work and get me to be more productive? Pay more and ask for less working hours.
Some employers really do want to do things to help employees, and some of them cannot pay more just by waiving a magic wand. Of course, since the employee is usually the one with less power, the employer's motivations can feel perverse, even if they aren't.
Regarding mindfulness meditation classes at work, I think it is mostly a good thing, as it's something that can be used outside of the office just as well as in the office. However, I don't think it's okay to require employees to take such classes.
Lower social standing is often associated with changes in cytokine expression mediated by cortisol signalling, and changes in cytokine expression and cortisol signalling are closely linked to depression (it looks more and more like at least some cases of depression are immunological in nature). There's a possible evolutionary advantage to inhibiting cortisol downregulation through glucocorticoid resistance (this is linked to depression) in situations where individuals would be in "defeated social positions." However, the theory goes that those situations and the related glucocorticoid resistance are not meant to be long term systemic changes, merely short term ones, and long term use of this feedback mechanism results in depression. I am hungover and running purely on modafinil at the moment, so I am unable to eloquently explain and I'll link a paper.
So, to the extent that anti-depressant drugs are based on observed changes to molecular signals in the brain (that's how SSRIs came about), and that those changes in the molecular signals are due to essentially a miswired social cue, the original comment is correct.
Here are some papers:
glucocorticoid resistance, depression, cytokines (this is a great paper): http://www.europeanneuropsychopharmacology.com/article/S0924...
evolutionary perspective on cytokines and depression: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471490605...
I am having a hard time coming up with an example of this.
This seems completely back to front to me. Surely it's men that have greater societal expectations of stoicism, toughness etc. than women, and fewer options for social support. I'm sure we all know about higher rates of suicide in men. These are often linked to the types of pressures I mention.
Apart from that I generally agree that this trend is pretty insidious. One of their latest wheezes is 'resilience', which from my reading boiled down to 'hey there x, what's your major malfunction that you can't cope with the soul destroying drudgery and corporate psychopathy like y? Perhaps you should read our piece about resilience to learn how to become a good drone again. We wouldn't want to have to lose you would we?'.
How you know whether it really is authentic and not simply a story is that it arises naturally, spontaneously, and effortless. It will have a "deep" marker to it. There is an active test you can apply: try to poke at the action. If it resists, comes up with any excuses, rationalizations, or justifications in order to stay attached to it, then it is still a story, albeit, coming from a very deep place inside of it.
If in poking it, it stays silent and it feels like it is expressed unsupported by any narrative, then that is coming from your authentic self. In other words, it doesn't need your approval or disapproval, or anyone else's, including social norms and corporate policy.[1]
Note: the Buddhist notions don't have a notion of "true self" (or rather, it moves from "no self" -> "true self" -> "no self"). I'm drawing from classical, transcendental non-dual Shaiva Tantra[2] (which inspired and cross-polinated with tantric Buddhist), and it goes with "true self" -> "no self" -> "true self".
The point of mindfulness is your freedom and your state of mind. It's fine if you are inspired to practice it because corporations made space for it (or more cynically, make you do it in order to tolerate bad situations). Your mind is your own, whether you want to be happy or miserable. There _are_ people who will mindfully tolerate bad working conditions as expressed from their authentic self ... and there are many others who won't. You won't know until you have cleared enough of your own obscurations to find out.
[1] The followup is: in tantra, someone's natural, authentic self may be an asshole. If you don't like what your natural, authentic self is, tantra provides the tools for transformation into a different natural, authentic self. However, it is not as simple as changing the narrative, since a change in narrative is merely a change in narrative and not a change in your natural, authentic self.
[2] Christopher Wallis. Tantra Illuminated
I think its an acceptable strawman, as often we do need to remind ourselves that, "No one but me is actually forcing me to [live here / work here / see these people ]".
