Self-exploiting "Spirituality"

Jane_the_Bane said:

Yoga, "mindfulness" exercises, meditation:
quite a few spiritual practices have become increasingly popular in recent years, many of them divorced from the religious world views that gave birth to them.
But what troubles me here is that they are used as a kind of symptom suppressant for systemic problems plagueing our society: like swallowing pills that will dull your pain and lower your fever to keep you functional, while not actually curing the ailment that caused these health concerns to begin with.

People use spiritual practices in order to avoid burnout or other job-induced mental (or physiological) issues: instead of pausing and saying "hey, we should not let ourselves be exploited in such a fashion", they are just looking for ways on how to wring even more efficiency out of their already overburdened psyche.

It's a kind of pop-spirituality, a calorie-free energy drink with artificial flavors and sweetener.

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Yeah, I think it could be like that for some. Often when you look in a yoga class though, for instance, you see people that have enough free time to go. The overworked aren't there as much. Except for some singles possibly. Those in a relationship and working harder or longer hours, and/or with more work at home don't have time even for this kind of class (many, not all), and try to just get a quick workout while watching TV or better while going outdoors for a walk or jog.

But, meditation though in contrast is so common once you see how many natural forms of it are used -- laying on the couch staring out the window, listening halfway to a long symphony, golfing where the score doesn't matter to the person, 'fishing' where catching fish -- did I even catch any?...hmmm, don't quite remember...., laying in the bathtub for a 'soak' and thinking of just...nothing....see, a lot of meditation happens just as a normal human thing. One doesn't have to be in a class or using a mantra at all.

Jane_the_Bane said:

Yoga, "mindfulness" exercises, meditation:
quite a few spiritual practices have become increasingly popular in recent years, many of them divorced from the religious world views that gave birth to them.
But what troubles me here is that they are used as a kind of symptom suppressant for systemic problems plagueing our society: like swallowing pills that will dull your pain and lower your fever to keep you functional, while not actually curing the ailment that caused these health concerns to begin with.

People use spiritual practices in order to avoid burnout or other job-induced mental (or physiological) issues: instead of pausing and saying "hey, we should not let ourselves be exploited in such a fashion", they are just looking for ways on how to wring even more efficiency out of their already overburdened psyche.

It's a kind of pop-spirituality, a calorie-free energy drink with artificial flavors and sweetener.

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I foresee pop spirituality getting bigger with the general diffusion of religion and the crushing weight of global capitalism both leaning in heavily on normal people; that's why I've taken strides to live out my spirituality in the way that matters most: direct action. I've become very politically involved especially in progressive and environmentalist causes as well as working more physically with the Earth to affect change. Meditation is nice and all but you have to be the change you want to see, nobody will do it for you! Not a god, not a guru.

Actually, the point of mindfulness exercises is to root out the source of disquiet and conflict and either strengthen your mind/body/spirit to challenge and remove it, or process/handle it in a way that doesn’t continue to cause problems.

i see what you're saying for sure. one of the reasons I really got into Jung and the unconscious is to discover what's really going on 'under the hood'. Easier to effectively treat the symptoms if you have a good understanding of the problem. I know why I would meditate, etc, instead of just meditating because it helped. Then at times I would lose sight of that however and would have to stop the meditation to let the problem 'surface' again to get a handle on the situation. kinda lead me to discover that we are just chasing our tails. it's not a bad thing, just the way it is.

Agreed that participatory escapes like yoga/religion are useful distractions to the rulers of the world but they are unstable. They can easily decay into dangerous subversive behaviors like the social gospel or noticing your leaders are corrupt or foolish, poisoned further by the belief that you should do something about it.

Even more useful are the purely observational escapes like sports fandom. Every moment spent obsessing over your favorite team is a win for the powers that be.

Carbon said:

Even more useful are the purely observational escapes like sports fandom. Every moment spent obsessing over your favorite team is a win for the powers that be.

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I used to talk trash about sports but last year I got into American football. I take delight in the experience of it all. I'm happy humans do such things over other things such as throwing their glass bottle on our driveway. >.<

I used to be happy in merely observing my coworkers talk about sports cause they enjoyed it and had camaraderie. Made them slightly inefficient at times, but I don't want humans to be mere cogs in a machine.

Everyone feels their way is best and perhaps they’re right. Its best for them. I’ve been on both sides of this topic. One person spends their time opining about this or that. Another chooses gratitude, meditation, yoga, or exercise. Some elect to write, create, or pursue other activities instead.

What is beneficial for you may be less so for me. Opining is detrimental to my mind and heart. But it may be a helpful release for others. I am bettered by activities that reinforce positive thoughts and peace. They’re immensely edifying to my spirit and that matters most.

While that doesn’t include yoga or meditation; it does involve positive psychology principles, daily exercise, gratitude practice, creative pursuits, and time with God.

Its unrealistic to expect each person to address life’s challenges in the same way. Our hardships are rarely the same. I don’t consider my practices pop-spirituality. They’re behaviors that foster a deeper sense of wholeness and peace.

I can’t immerse my mind in the world’s ails or find repose in politics or debate. I need calm, beauty, and tranquility. That’s how I manifest self-care in my world. Your approach may differ and rightly so.

Noxot said:

I used to talk trash about sports but last year I got into American football. I take delight in the experience of it all. I'm happy humans do such things over other things such as throwing their glass bottle on our driveway. >.<

I used to be happy in merely observing my coworkers talk about sports cause they enjoyed it and had camaraderie. Made them slightly inefficient at times, but I don't want humans to be mere cogs in a machine.

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Good to hear! NFL football is fantastic! Glad you are enjoying it.

Jane_the_Bane said:

Sports fandom is possibly the most harmless/least harmful manifestation of tribalism, but yeah: it is definitely a helpful tool of the powers that be.
Remember: football was heavily funded by 19th century industrialist, so exploited, slum dwelling factory workers would have an outlet for their pent-up frustration.
The term hooligan literally points to disenfranchised Irish immigrants beating each other to a pulp in the name of sports, instead of organising opposition to the cycle of oppression.
Panem et circenses.

Yet pop spirituality goes a step further. It's mostly stress relief, but without the benefit of generating change. People use it to keep things as they are without ruining their health in the short run.
How many people do you know who refused to participate in the hamster wheen after they participated in a mindfulness course? How many were excited about being able to increase their productivity?

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Fair points, I lean more towards sports fandom being a stable form of manufactured consent whereas mindfulness could go either way.

Follow the money. Take for example the NCCIH in the US. Formerly the Office of Alternative Medicine, the NCCIH funds research on uses of “complementary and integrative health”. To your point the focus is therapeutic and individualistic, rather than activist and social. One look at their What NCCIH Studies graphic -- which for goodness sakes even resembles your hamster wheel -- shows as much.





But the NCCIH budget is tellingly paultry, less than $200 million out of the total NIH budget of $29 billion. Exactly what you would expect from an organization whose purpose in the system -- leave aside the purpose in the minds of its employees -- is to direct funding toward branches of the CAM tree that don’t challenge the status quo which again, to your point, are therapeutic and individualistic. The key point is the focusing is necessary in the first place. If mindfulness was stable as a pain-killer for sheep, no direction would be needed. Just feed it more and more money, turn it into spectacle somehow.

Enter by way of comparison, American football. Construction of football stadiums alone costs taxpayers more than 100 times the budget for NCCIH. Even though stadiums are net monetary losses for their communities.

Sports don’t seem to easily decay into radical social action, to my eye sports fandom inevitably distracts you and me from caring about each other. Sports fans aren’t really even caring about the people on the team. Team locations and rosters change so frequently what exactly is the fan rooting for, a mascot?

Mindfulness on the other hand can go either way. It can insulate and anesthetize yes, but it can also de-individualize and raise awareness, helping focus your attention on whatever it is you want to change about the world. Mindfulness can be like the exorcism in Jesus’ story. The wayward citizen’s mind is swept clean and orderly, making him even more useful to the devil. The devil being dangerous subversive thoughts such as noticing you're running inside the hamster wheel.

Social justice and mindfulness do show some signs of coalescing in organizations such as the Centre for Mindfulness Studies, the Garrison Institute, and the Center for Contemplative Mind and Society. Even a smattering of journal articles on the topic, ex:

MINDFULNESS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE APPROACHES: Bridging the Mind and Society in Social Work Practice on JSTOR

Carbon said:

Sports don’t seem to easily decay into radical social action, to my eye sports fandom inevitably distracts you and me from caring about each other.

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It can be an egregore like anything else.

Sports fans aren’t really even caring about the people on the team. Team locations and rosters change so frequently what exactly is the fan rooting for, a mascot?

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Sports fans cheer for the team or organization. Nobody cares about the masot. Most teams have long term players that become the face of the 'franchise'. Fans usually rally around them.

TheOldWays said:

It can be an egregore like anything else.

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Assuming all egregores are all created equal which is the point in question.

TheOldWays said:

Sports fans cheer for the team or organization. Nobody cares about the masot. Most teams have long term players that become the face of the 'franchise'. Fans usually rally around them.

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Oh dear. Maybe I could've been a little more transparent with my snark. Point is, teams are emergent stories we tell ourselves. The team still lives on year after year even if every good player leaves every 1-2 years like American college football. So the worship of the team is fundamentally impersonal. Even when we root for a particular player it is impersonal, a player we likely never met and who is doubtless unaware of our existence.

Carbon said:

Assuming all egregores are all created equal which is the point in question.

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Another way to look at it is the amount of energy a person puts into an egregore. I find the key to navigating our existence in an efficient manner is to evaluate each egregore we come across and be aware of how much energy we give it.

Jane_the_Bane said:

Sports fandom is possibly the most harmless/least harmful manifestation of tribalism, but yeah: it is definitely a helpful tool of the powers that be.

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Not in Buenos Aires, it doesn't seem to be.

Interestingly, an Argentinian once told me that there was a point at which the country decided to broadcast the whole league on public television, which struck me as a strange decision when there were so many other problems to spend public money on, but on the other hand, not so much a strange decision, for the same reason. (Though they seem to have stopped doing that now.)

I'm really intrigued by Latin American football in general, though, since sometimes it seems to serve less as a tool of the powers that be, and more a fullblown battlefield. Some of the football related stories out of the Pinochet dictatorship, for example, are very strange: Playing under Pinochet: how Chile’s stars of the 1970s feared for their lives

Carbon said:

Oh dear. Maybe I could've been a little more transparent with my snark. Point is, teams are emergent stories we tell ourselves. The team still lives on year after year even if every good player leaves every 1-2 years like American college football. So the worship of the team is fundamentally impersonal. Even when we root for a particular player it is impersonal, a player we likely never met and who is doubtless unaware of our existence.

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I don't think this is always true. I follow Spanish football--my club is Valencia, and I've spent a fair amount of time in Seville as well watching the rivalry between Sevilla and Real Betis. This stuff is not really impersonal at all--I do have a relationship of sorts both with the city of Valencia and the club as an institution, despite being a foreign follower. For those who are born into an... afición... like that (I don't think we have a word in English that really captures "fanbase" in the same way), those sorts of relational ties are even stronger. Historic continuity is important, especially when dealing with the types of sports organizations that are tied into the identity (and sometimes even language and politics) of a community.

Let's remember things like the Football War between Honduras and El Salvador that killed a lot of people before we say that sports fandom is harmless. That was only in 1969. More recent matches between Egypt and Algeria have also led to violence (no deaths, as far as I can tell...this time), like in 2009 when 35 people were injured, including 11 police officers, in fighting following the meeting of the two teams in Sudan. From the BBC report at the time:


Swords! That is bananas!

Silmarien said:

I don't think this is always true. I follow Spanish football

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If you’ll pardon a slight digression from the OP...

It helps to ask “Who benefits?”

Silmarien said:

This stuff is not really impersonal at all--I do have a relationship of sorts both with the city of Valencia and the club as an institution

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Exactly. Sports fandom, because of how personal it feels subjectively, serves as a useful distraction for citizens who might otherwise spend their energies challenging their leaders or getting involved with neighbors in their local community, which are objectively personal. Being useful to the state in no way negates the subjective personal feeling of fandom, to the contrary the state directly benefits from the fact that ape brains project personhood on to collectives.

As you mention historical continuity is important too -- a good origin story strengthens the ties of fictive kinship and anthropomorphization needed for the fan to treat the organization as if it’s a person.

People are actually pretty smart, that’s why they have to be distracted especially in a democracy. Listen to a conversation between 2 educated sports analysts, often the level of debate matches that of an Ivy League political science debate in overall clarity of thought and mastery of data.

Who benefits from all this human brain power being siphoned off into comparatively trivial pursuits like obsessing over athletics? Simple, the current rulers of the world. I say this as an athletic person who has been involved in sports most of my life.

Every hierarchy has one fundamental goal: preserve the status quo. Any stable government, corporation, religion, or parent learns pretty quickly the value of shiny objects. The best way to handle annoying questions is to ensure it never occurs to the people under me to ask an annoying question. Circling back to the OP, impersonal and/or strictly therapeutic hobbies get the job done nicely.

Carbon said:

If you’ll pardon a slight digression from the OP...

It helps to ask “Who benefits?”

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From the fact that I follow Spanish football? Me, primarily.

Carbon said:

Exactly. Sports fandom, because of how personal it feels subjectively, serves as a useful distraction for citizens who might otherwise spend their energies challenging their leaders or getting involved with neighbors in their local community, which are objectively personal. Being useful to the state in no way negates the subjective personal feeling of fandom, to the contrary the state directly benefits from the fact that ape brains project personhood on to collectives.

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I don't see how a local community is objectively personal but a group of followers of a sports team is not. Both are social constructs of a sort--if a group of people regularly get together to watch a team, that is as much a social activity as any other interaction in one's local community can be. Obviously people can go crazy with it, but that doesn't mean that sports themselves necessarily distract people from community.

In any case, sports are not always useful to the state in any meaningful way. You can find clubs like Barcelona who, for better of for worse, has built up a reputation for resisting the state and is arguably fomenting separatist sentiments amongst its fans. I think your analysis here is far too simplistic, and honestly the way you're talking about hierarchies is pretty close to anthropomorphic as well.

Carbon said:

It helps to ask “Who benefits?”

Silmarien said:

From the fact that I follow Spanish football? Me, primarily.

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I can't explain why, but this made me laugh really hard.