McMindfulness Quotes

“Anything that offers success in our unjust society without trying to change it is not revolutionary — it just helps people cope.”
― Ronald Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality

“The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has analyzed this trend with great acuity. As he sees it, mindfulness is “establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism,” by helping people “to fully participate in the capitalist dynamic while retaining the appearance of mental sanity.”
― Ronald Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality

“it says the causes of suffering are disproportionately inside us, not in the political and economic frameworks that shape how we live.”
― Ronald Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality

“Individual happiness seems hollow unless all human beings are free of oppression, poverty, and violence — as well as free to speak and act in the public sphere. This doesn’t mean we have to be miserable in the meantime. We can’t help each other if we don’t help ourselves. But we have to go further than the smiley face rhetoric of commoditized mindfulness. Dissatisfaction and unhappiness are not impediments to revolution; they are its fuel.”
― Ronald Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality

“Around the same time as Jon Kabat-Zinn invented MBSR, and Margaret Thatcher won power vowing to “liberate those who create wealth,”8 Michel Foucault identified the “neoliberal turn.” In this cultural shift, the French thinker explained, there is a dual style of government, extending far beyond political activity. Foucault refers to this concept as “governmentality,” which links power relations to processes of subjectification — or what he described as the “conduct of conduct.” In other words, neoliberal institutions exercise micro-levels of power, reformulating what it means to be a person, self and identity.”
― Ronald Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality