Current Affairs

"When the individualized self bears sole responsibility for its happiness and emotional wellbeing, failure is synonymous with failure of the self, not external conditions.” — Ron PurserRonald Purser is a Professor of Management at San Francisco State University and the author of McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Prof. Purser’s book exposes how corporations have pushed pseudo-Buddhist “mindfulness” training to shift the burden of dealing with stress to employees without having to address the toxic work conditions that create that stress in the first place. Today, Prof. Purser joins to discuss how mindfulness became a “therapeutic solvent” meant to help individuals cope with their problems but how it ultimately ends up obscuring the systemic causes of those problems and shifting responsibility for dealing with them. Prof. Purser is not an opponent of mindfulness practice, which he believes offers some benefits, but he is highly critical of the way mindfulness is presented as