How corporates co-opted mindfulness to make us bear the unbearable (2015)
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.<p>That&#x27;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.<p>I can at least take some comfort in the fact that articles like this still crop up and call the beast into question.