If it can be sold and used as a tool for subjugation humans will quickly determine and optimize the ways in which to do so.
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.
You are correct. Jean Baudrillard wrote a book about this called Impossible Exchange, that I recommend.
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.
> The issue I find with capitalism is that it attempts to swallow all other systems.
Don't mean to be "that guy", but that's also pretty common with most automata, including living organisms. Run the code till the wheels fall off, and then either find a different thing to consume, or adapt to the new situation, or die.
> It's like capitalism is an unconscious dogmatism that everyone participates in because...
Because it's the current dominant paradigm.
Back in the day, the dominant paradigm was pharaohs ruling the realm from giant stone palaces, and armies of slaves raising monuments for the glory of the god-emperor. Everyone participated in it, like it or not, because there was no real choice.
Same now. You could play within the system, or you could go off dancing with wolves.
Or you could try to change it, but that in reality is orders of magnitude harder than it seems - unless you happen to be the unwitting or semi-witting agent of the great currents of history.
> Same now. You could play within the system, or you could go off dancing with wolves.
That's the issue, though. You can't decide to opt-out of society without first playing into it. In ancient Egypt, with fewer people and more natural resources, maybe it was possible to leave your local village and go out into the wilderness. That doesn't seem possible today, both because "wilderness" is largely owned by private individuals or government.
Well said. Its hard to quantify it in an objective context, but there is something just viscerally disgusting about taking something so old and spiritually significant to humans and perverting it into a tool for efficiency.
So corporations find that mentally healthy employees are more productive/valuable so they promote mental fortitude. Somehow anti-capitalists spin even that into some deep evil. Ridiculous.
At least they're promoting mental health! If there is a natural law then what is in the best interest of the worker is in the best interest of lawful business. And since anything that goes against the natural law ultimately destroys itself, as Aquinas explains, a lawful business is the only kind of business you want.
Sorry, but that's total bullshit. The promotion of mental health stretches only to those with mostly-good mental health. A true focus on mental health is severely deprioritized in the workplace for legitimate mental health problems. Which, go figure - only makes mental health issues even worse.
I totally agree that capitalism can be a powerful force for positive change, and agree that if it makes businesses care about mental health, that's to be celebrated. However I also think it's important to acknowledge that there's no universal law connecting employee wellbeing and profit - right now that might be functionally the case but there's no reason the scales couldn't tip the other way, and so it's dangerous to unquestioningly embrace capitalism as an inherently positive model.
"
[M]any of the most important competitions / optimization processes in modern civilization are optimizing for human values. You win at capitalism partly by satisfying customers’ values. You win at democracy partly by satisfying voters’ values.
Suppose there’s a coffee plantation somewhere in Ethiopia that employs Ethiopians to grow coffee beans that get sold to the United States. Maybe it’s locked in a life-and-death struggle with other coffee plantations and wants to throw as many values under the bus as it can to pick up a slight advantage.
But it can’t sacrifice quality of coffee produced too much, or else the Americans won’t buy it. And it can’t sacrifice wages or working conditions too much, or else the Ethiopians won’t work there. And in fact, part of its competition-optimization process is finding the best ways to attract workers and customers that it can, as long as it doesn’t cost them too much money. So this is very promising.
But it’s important to remember exactly how fragile this beneficial equilibrium is.
Suppose the coffee plantations discover a toxic pesticide that will increase their yield but make their customers sick. But their customers don’t know about the pesticide, and the government hasn’t caught up to regulating it yet. Now there’s a tiny uncoupling between “selling to Americans” and “satisfying Americans’ values”, and so of course Americans’ values get thrown under the bus.
Or suppose that there’s a baby boom in Ethiopia and suddenly there are five workers competing for each job. Now the company can afford to lower wages and implement cruel working conditions down to whatever the physical limits are. As soon as there’s an uncoupling between “getting Ethiopians to work here” and “satisfying Ethiopian values”, it doesn’t look too good for Ethiopian values either.
Or suppose someone invents a robot that can pick coffee better and cheaper than a human. The company fires all its laborers and throws them onto the street to die. As soon as the utility of the Ethiopians is no longer necessary for profit, all pressure to maintain it disappears.
"
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.
>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"
The great part about this is that Smith himself, never mind his contemporaries and critics of his political economy (Marx and Engels) was concerned:
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." (From Smith's The Wealth of Nations)
Great misconceptions you mentioned indeed exist - this idea that capitalism is "people buying and selling", that capitalism is "natural", and that because it is "natural" it is therefore desirable or good.
This view generally depends on ignorance of various historical developments (such as enclosure in Western Europe) and what distinguishes capitalism from other earlier modes of production.
I've thought it strange that one might compare Smith's "invisible hand" to Hegel's "world spirit/geist", and lead to very different conclusions even by considering a force figured to be supernatural but effected through the agency of humans.
The capitalism that you deride with the Amazon/Bezos example is the same exact capitalism that allowed the mom and pop place to have ever sold anything in the first place. So you will need to expand your argument to be in opposition of them too.
Capitalism (and relatively free trade) is the only mechanism in history to have ever pulled large quantities of people out of grinding poverty. You lament the loss of the (capitalist) mom and pop shop, where's your lament for the loss of having to plow your own field just to avoid starvation? Where's your lament for having to dig coal out of the ground with a shovel and pick just to burn to keep your home warm in the winter?
I agree that we've lost a lot of social worth in the form of our real life social networks, but the primary culprit there is government. Government guarantees you a retirement fund, savings rates plummet, and people don't bother to have enough kids to make sure they're taken care of. Government guarantees your parents an income, so you don't have to take care of them. Government feeds the poor, so there's no need for you to be involved in your community to aid your neighbor. Government destroyed the family by subsidizing divorce and single motherhood, creating broken homes which are factories for poverty and misery. But sure, the real problem is Jeff Bezos is part of the machine that is improving the standard of living for all humanity.
You bring up good points, but there is such a thing as nuanced argument, and we can make distinctions between late and early capitalist models to avoid throwing out mom and pop with Jeff.
I'm not going to argue that capitalism does not bring benefits, it certainly does, I don't think anyone could deny that, but just because it has brought many benefits does not imply:
a.) That its negatives should be ignored or considered negligible by default. (I hear fascist states are highly organized and effcient, surely this benefit outweighs all the censorship, restrictions on freedom, etc. that often accompany this increased organization and efficiency?)
b.) That it is the only system that could bring such benefits.
c.) That there are no better models.
d.) That history is static and the model that works today is also sufficient for the future.
Because none of these hold I think it's worthwhile to call capitalism, and other systems, into question and see if we can envision alternatives.
As far as lamenting goes--since when was it a rule that I had to approach systems with an all or nothing mentality? So because I dislike one side effect of capitalism I have to dislike all of its side effects? Huh?
Doubtless Amazon is convenient, but you cannot deny that the Amazonian dominance (hah) has indeed erased the social relationships from early capitalism that I brought up. I'm pointing out that while we gain plenty from Amazon-- convenience, comfort, reliability--we also have to remain conscious of what we lose: the human quality (faint as it was) that used to exist in economics and the exchange of capital.
Hell, you don't even have to interact with your computer anymore to order toilet paper from amazon, you press a button and its done. Or, more eerily, you talk to Alexa and more or less accept whatever she orders for you--think of the interaction this is replacing. Consider a fur dealer; a detailed discussion with a domain expert about furs and what suits your particular needs is replaced by a technological interface that is assumed to preselect (more or less) the best available option for you without any sophisticated dialogue about it. Sure, someday Alexa will probably be an expert in furs as well--but we are losing something when companies are allowed to grow to incredible size at global scale. The world does become incredibly convenient--every purchase is an amazon purchase so the familiarity makes it near impossible to screw up or be cheated or surprised--but it also reduces individuality and choice.
Your concerns about the government are certainly not unfounded. Based on my anecdotal experience they seem a little overblown but you are right to call these things into question. I'm not sure it needs to be one or the other. It's quite likely both the big G and capitalism are contributors to the world's woes. Note however, that most of the issues stemming from big government you mention are intimately tied up with the flow of capital (retirement fund, saving rates, income...)
Amazon et. al. has not removed any of the interactions you've described, it's only changed shape. As fewer workers are needed to perform retail sales that labor is freed to perform other human interactive services. Many of those people now work in healthcare which is very hands on social interaction. There's more restaurants and bars, popular centers for social interaction. Lamenting the fall of mom and pop retail establishments is like lamenting the loss of the milk man. The new system is better and the milk man is now your masseuse, or physical therapist, or details your car, or provides some other valuable service for you.
People said it was "late stage capitalism" when Walmart destroyed the mom and pop.. and frankly that's who really did it. But that was a generation ago. Amazon is really just destroying Walmart. But more to the point whatever social fabric WalMart might have damaged it's nothing compared to the destruction of the family and social bonds that falls right at the feet of socialist policies that I've already mentioned. Capitalism is not the culprit here, socialism has been.
I used to teach meditation and yoga for a while. One of my teachers said that meditation should make you less resilient to stress and make you realize that need to change your life. So if someone credits their material success to meditation it's best to view this as an abuse or misunderstanding of the practice.
It took me a while to accept but now I agree with this viewpoint.
I have a long, long way to go, but some things are much easier, like being made to wait for things, or being contradicted on important issues. Most of the chaotic places I've worked at, I must admit they lasted a lot longer than the amount of time I was willing to invest in them. All of that energy I put into pushing water uphill was appreciated by some of my peers and subordinates, occasionally by my boss, but not one bit by anyone else.
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.
Much like the effect of psychedelics at sufficient doses: a useful tool for shining a spotlight on the things we keep hidden from ourselves.
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.
One of my teachers said that meditation should make you less resilient to stress and make you realize that need to change your life. So if someone credits their material success to meditation it's best to view this as an abuse or misunderstanding of the practice.
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.
I think the teacher's point was that meditation should make you more aware of bad influences and create a desire to fix them.
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.
One thing I've never quite understood - if you are teaching yourself to become more equanimous how do you avoid becoming less concerned about the things that really matter also?!
Language is a funny abstraction to describe these, or any, types of experiences :P But basically what maxxxxx said, one can aim to be equanimous and yet also be committed emotionally. It would be challenging (impossible?) to cultivate equanimity while also not cultivating compassion since one is trying to find peace with whatever they're dealing with.
I had an opportunity to attend a talk where a meditation teacher described his experience dealing with cancer. Prior to being diagnosed he said he had a mindfulness practice outside of formal practice where he would set the intention to be aware of mild discomfort throughout the day and try not to react to it immediately. He provided an example of becoming aware of an itch. Instead of reaching for it and scratching he would try to bring heightened attention to the sensations, discern their qualities (if they were manifesting over a large surface area or small, increasing in intensity or fading, etc.), and try to entertain mind states that had a "if this was going to be my experience for the rest of my life would I be able to make peace with it?" quality. After three breath cycles if the sensation persisted and if he wasn't able to let it just be then he would mindfully scratch an itch. He claimed that working this way, with trivial things like itches or mild joint pain, provided a reservoir of equanimity that he was able to draw from when experiencing chemotherapy and the rest.
I had a boss who didn't understand the difference between panic and urgency. Every 'pep talk' he tried to give us turned into a short day and drinks after work because we were so depressed or freaked out.
If your friend falls in the water or is about to be hit by a bus, getting excited about it doesn't help anybody. You have do something, and quickly, but with purpose and reason.
I think a lot of people think it's good to be super excited about everything. You have to be outraged, really angry, deeply offended and whatever. Everything has to be amplified to the extreme.
'The current translations of ancient mindful practices are also highly gendered. In a culture where women are much more likely to be encouraged to apply acceptance, silence, stillness and the relinquishing of resistance to their problems, the trap of mindfulness can be set to stun for those who may be much more in need of speaking up, resisting and taking space in the workplace.'
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?'.
I'd like to hear more about it, but maybe there is too much content behind it for the editorial. Are women more likely to accept a bad work environment? Are women more likely to be encouraged to keep quiet? Is being encouraged to keep quiet more likely to be effective on women than men?
> "If we truly become mindful of our existence then our recurrent anxieties become not just a wave we watch pass through our minds, not something to be mastered in order to be a better servant, but a call to take action in order to be more fully alive."
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.
I think your feelings on this will depend mostly on your relationship with your employer. Running programs during lunch makes sense as people have engagements before and after work that would be harder to break than changing lunch plans.
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.
Most wellness programs at work have to do with lowering medical insurance costs. Health insurance companies give discounts to the employer if they run these programs and enroll employees into them.
Yep, just how antidepressant manufactures co-opted research on social dominance to reverse some of the biochemical changes that happen when you are "ground down like a minion".
Funny enough, despite the deep sense of resentment in the original comment, it's actually kind of accurate.
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.
While there is truth to that, mindfulness provides the basis for authentic expression of the natural self. And often times, that will mean GTFO of an abusive situation.
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.
Interesting take. I could paraphrase this as a response to this sort of strawman, "It sucks that we have to pay [for xyz necessity], wait [in traffic for abc experience], and accept [toxic influencers on your life], but thats just part of the human experience".
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 ]".
I would say that most institutions that exist for moral edification -- religions, Boy Scouts, civic clubs -- do essentially the same thing which is align the attitudes of the weaker to the benefit of the stronger.
Much the same way that popular media has sold socially-acceptable prepackaged rebellion for the mollification of disgruntled adolescents (and adolescents-at-heart) for decades...
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.