The Mindful Retreat… From What Really Matters
How the mental health industry distracts you from the real world
An extract from Jesus Farted
Christians have a sordid habit of stealing decontextualised bible verses that contain uplifting fluff memes, adding them to a scenic or cute photographic background, printing them on a poster and hanging them in their restrooms. I mean, look at this random example:
Uncopyrighted picture from some well-meaning mainstream christian blog
One of the finest examples I recall loomed above the toilet of a childhood friend – whose parents had found a gloss-paper reddened sunset reflecting onto a beautiful lake to turn the still waters into liquid gold. The calming scenery was laced with the words, ‘Peace I leave with you. My peace I give you (John 14:26)’. Any male stood emptying his bladder into the porcelain toilet bowl whilst facing those words, might half-expect to look down into the golden-piss-filled pan and read the words, ‘Well, thank you very much’.
There are many kinds of peace. The infamous Roman Peace (the ‘Pax Romana’) was a pacification ensuring that resources would flow freely from unpersons to elites – a notion that might better be described as ‘order’. In ancient Hebrew thought, peace was that state of affairs when society is working properly and healthily – a notion that might better be described in terms of ‘right-ness’. It was this state of peace or ‘shalom’ that enabled social justice to flourish. When this Hebrew grasp of peace penetrates the human heart and bowels, it suggests not ‘order’ but a deep-seated state of personal, relational, societal health. Patterns of – gulp – ‘wellbeing’ that have saturated the market today are more closely aligned with Roman notion of order rather than Hebrew notions of shalom.
Two first century Roman generals (Vespasian and his son, Titus) who – in order to impose order – invaded Judea and destroyed Jerusalem, both went on to become emperors. After a year of imperial disorder in Rome, Vespasian needed to raise funds in order to restore the Pax Romana. The most ingenious tax he raised was on the processed contents of human bladders – which was very widely recycled for the purposes of cleaning, bleaching, and tanning leather. When Titus criticised his father for imposing such a ridiculous tax, Vespasian was said to have shoved a coin under his nose and asked him whether it smelt bad. When his son answered, ‘No’ the father replied, ‘Yet it comes from urine.’ This is the origin of the phrase, ‘money does not stink’ (pecunia non olet). The imperial authorities were literally, taking the piss. But they were not the first.
A failed attempt to impose piss-tax was first made by Vespasian’s predecessor, the infamous Emperor Nero. Ruling from 54-68CE, Nero was widely regarded a neurotic, despotic, psychotic, carnalised blend of mental health disorders. Many suspected him of starting the Great Fire of Rome (64CE) in order to clear ground for his new building projects – although Nero himself laid blame for the disaster at the door of a young and radically subversive movement known as ‘Christians’. According to Tacitus, as the hungry flames engulfed two thirds of the sun-baked city (whose fires roared for six days) Nero himself soothed his soul by playing his violin or ‘fiddle’. Hence the phrase, ‘fiddling while Rome burns.’
Regardless of whether the Nero story is true, the tradition has come to represent the insanity of engaging in frivolous self-indulgence in the midst of a crisis that screams for your attention. It is this precise brand of insanity that today is carefully packaged and marketed by the mental health industry. Via commodified forms of ‘mindfulness’, off-the-shelf models of counselling, and myriad other programmes for wellbeing, those suffering the effects of globalized socio-political arson today are encouraged to retreat from a combusting social world into the safe space of individual self-reflection. The most articulate critic of this so-called ‘revolution’ is Ronald Purser, who laments what happened to mindfulness techniques once they were severed from the ethical framework of their Buddhist origins:
What remains is a tool of self-discipline, disguised as self-help. Instead of setting practitioners free, it helps them adjust to the very conditions that caused their problems. A truly revolutionary movement would seek to overturn this dysfunctional system, but mindfulness only serves to reinforce its destructive logic… by failing to address collective suffering, and systemic change that might remove it, they rob mindfulness of its real revolutionary potential, reducing it to something banal that keeps people focussed on themselves… (Purser, McMindfulness, 2019)
As we enter what may be the final century of human life on our planet, it is hardly surprising that the ecological and economic doom we have created for our successors are manifesting themselves in a mental health pandemic. And whilst various forms of mindfulness and self-reflection are essential in addressing this crisis, they are all-too-easily commodified and turned into profiteering ventures. Are our economic puppet masters, their PR machines and their politicians railroading us into oblivion? In any sane world, a healthy response would be to face this unholy Trinity head on and demand change. Our leaders are training us instead to sooth our souls as Nero soothed his: by self-reflection, withdrawal from the world of politics, abandoning our negative thoughts and ridding ourselves of righteous anger. In other words, we are learning to fiddle while Rome burns. And we are deluded enough to call this mindless retreat from reality, ‘mindfulness.’
I am not saying that all forms of mindfulness, counselling, and wellbeing strategies are useless – far from it. Only that, like anything of value in a world that favours profit over people, they have been turned against those they were designed to help. Corporate mindfulness rackets now sink a tranquillizer into the psyche of people whose political anger might otherwise unsettle the status quo. As Purser continues,
Mindfulness, like positive psychology and the broader happiness industry, has depoliticized and privatized stress. If we are unhappy about being unemployed, losing our health insurance, and seeing our children incur massive debt through college loans, it is our responsibility to learn to be more mindful… The so-called mindfulness revolution meekly accepts the dictates of the marketplace. (Purser, 2019)
Seeking ‘inner peace’ while your external world crumbles is the worst kind of societal mental disorder. This is precisely how profiteers, corporations and investors protect their interests and defend the Pax Romana: by pacifying you. How? By moving your attention from the actions of the grotesquely unjust profit-making death-machine that rules the world, and into your own soul. Do you feel bad that our species is microwaving itself out of existence? Then the fault is yours, and you should jettison such negative thoughts. Ignore what’s happening out there in the real world (unless the real world is failing to offer mindfulness courses).
Take the welfare provision offered by the University of Cambridge. It should hardly come as a surprise that Goldman Sachs are helping fund the mindfulness courses offered to students and staff of the university. It is crucial, after all, to train future employees to cower beneath the inhuman forces crushing the humanity out of the human condition. Your role – as a modern, enlightened, open-minded citizen – is to conform to the world as it is, not to challenge it. Is your world burning? Here, take this violin!
Jesus was a prophet who lived in the last generation of his people’s existence as a Temple-focussed nation. But he did not offer them ‘inner peace’. As he prepares to enter Jerusalem, he knows that his message will most likely be rejected and he himself will be executed as a terrorist. But within that apparently hopeless strategy of throwing his life against the unstoppable death machine of his day – he nevertheless offers his followers peace. Not a tranquillizer, the Pax Romanic sedative. That is, the ‘inner order’ where your personality is twisted into the inhuman shape of the empire that crushes you. He offers ‘shalom’, a peace that can be experienced only alongside others who, in actively and collectively resisting the omnipotent and oppressive gods of their age, encounter something that transcends their own short lives. That unspeakable, unmarketable ‘something’ is what he offers.
By any biblical standard, the global investment banks and major corporations of our own day constitute immortal, omnipotent, dehumanising gods that demand to be worshipped by the masses. And by kindly offering us mindfulness courses and narcissistic mechanisms for coping with the suffering they continue to impose – those gods are merrily pissing down our throat. As they empty their benevolent bladders into us, we can hear them smile, ‘My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you.’
Worse still – by drilling mindfulness philosophy into our psyches – they have trained us to respond, ‘Well, thank you very much’.
