++Mindfulness without worker power is capitalism at its worst. +
++It has been over a decade since the psychotherapist Miles Neale coined the term “McMindfulness,” which quickly became the buzzword for critiquing a kind of fast food mindfulness training that was marketed as a panacea for stress by everyone from corporations and schools to prisons and governments. +
++The rise of McMindfulness spawned a question that continues to fracture the meditation community: Is spreading meditation always a good thing, whatever its purpose? For Neale, marketing departments and the profit motive geared mindfulness toward its most superficial potential, “like using a rocket launcher to light a candle.” +
++Ronald Purser, a professor of management and an ordained Zen teacher, has gone further, calling McMindfulness “the new capitalist spirituality.” +
++In his account, mainstreaming mindfulness hasn’t just missed the point and given rise to another $300+ million industry. By harnessing mindfulness to mitigate the stress of exploitative corporate practices or steady the aim and focus of military operatives, it has become counter-productive to the original ethical frameworks from which meditation derives. +
++In his 2019 book on the subject, Purser argues that McMindfulness pacifies and fractures the collective discontent that could otherwise be organized to achieve changes in the workplace, like unions, or ultimately, in the economy at large. Instead of fueling the energy for collective struggle and reform, “it just seems like it’s become a lubricant for capitalism,” he noted in an interview with Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. +
++As someone who devotes a fair bit of my life to sitting quietly and doing nothing, I’m on board with the Buddhist idea that there are sources of stress and suffering built into the mind’s habitual ways of operating, and meditation can help unravel them no matter the external conditions. +
++If companies want to help unwind that stress and suffering, I’d prefer a shorter workweek or a raise, rather than a subscription to a mindfulness app like Calm Business. (Though you can see why the latter might appeal to CEOs — one year of the app for a 100-person team costs the company about $5,400 per year, equivalent to just a $54 annual pay bump per employee.) +
++Still, employers offering the apps isn’t in itself a huge deal. My concern is that the rising interest in corporate mindfulness programs will pave the road for businesses to take even more of an active interest in the mental life of their employees. With a new era of neurotechnologies just around the corner that will likely offer unprecedented degrees of surveillance and influence over the mind, it’s worth asking where that road could lead. +
++Corporations aren’t the ideal stewards of mental health +
++During the third quarter of the 1984 Super Bowl, Apple — still an insurgent startup, not yet the largest company in the world — aired a commercial depicting an Orwellian society of total conformity. Apple was shown as the hero, the rebel that would free human mind-slaves from the surveillance state. +
++In his 2014 book Psychopolitics, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han points out the irony: Apple “did not signal the end of the surveillance state so much as the inception of a new kind of control society — one whose operations surpass the Orwellian state by leaps and bounds.” +
++The corporate interest in mental health carries an eerie resemblance. At a moment when depression is at record highs, burnout is widespread, and employee engagement hovers around just 30 percent, here comes workplace mindfulness, framed as the hero to free us from our ailments. +
++Already, more than 20 million employees across 3,000+ organizations reportedly use Calm’s business software, complete with a dashboard that provides analytics on employee use of the app and resources designed to encourage uptake. (I can imagine a near future where meditation analytics become resumé candy.) +
++But the nature of a society where corporations take a deep interest in the mental lives of their workers and employ a suite of apps and programs designed to fine-tune consciousness for the better will be shaped by what mental health means to a business. And since the business of business is business, not well-being for well-being’s sake, the corporate vision of mental health is necessarily bound by productivity. +
++This creates a few knots because the drive for productivity can itself be a source of worker distress. Amazon, for example, implemented tiny “ZenBooths” for employees to watch videos about mindfulness, nestled within a company culture that drives employees to skip bathroom breaks for fear of losing their jobs. At its worst, McMindfulness can urge us to look inward for the sources of stress, which can blind us to their true location in the external world. +
++Part of the tension the McMindfulness critique gets at is this: The Buddha urged an understanding of the root causes of stress. For him, that meant the craving and attachment that belief in an illusory, permanent self hitches our minds to. But what about when, to a non-trivial degree, the root cause of stress is work itself? What if the real road to better mental health involves letting productivity fall? Or letting the companies who pay for our mindfulness apps wither away? +
++In early 20th century America, this was almost conventional wisdom. The economist John Maynard Keynes believed that the necessity of labor was at odds with human virtue. As economic growth carried on, we’d progressively free ourselves from work and use our “freedom from pressing economic cares” to learn how we might “live wisely and agreeably and well.” +
++That isn’t what happened. The length of the average workweek has hardly budged for the better part of a century. Even today, as the movement for shorter workweeks is springing back to life, they’re mostly on the table for industries where they won’t harm productivity. A boost in mental health isn’t enough; employers must be convinced that it’s good for business, too. +
++Mindfulness, voice, and exit +
++Coming back to the original question of whether it’s always good to have more meditation no matter the means, I think Neale got it basically right: “[T]he more mindfulness practiced by anyone, anywhere, the better off we all are.” But to really practice mindfulness and get to the root causes of stress, we should remember that even in Buddhism, mindfulness was only one part of an eightfold path that covered everything from how one makes a living to nonviolence toward all living beings to avoiding rude language. +
++As neurotechnologies bring consciousness increasingly into the sphere of business interests, it’s crucial that workers have at least two things to go along with their mindfulness subscriptions: representation in corporate governance and safety nets that provide real exit options. +
++Voice and representation — through institutions like unions, sectoral bargaining, or codetermination — will ensure workers have a say in how new neurotechnologies or mental health protocols are integrated into the workplace. That means workers won’t just be subject to the corporate vision of mental health, but they can help shape it. +
++Reweaving the social safety net could mean that anyone, even and especially the lowest-paid, most-precarious workers, can quit a situation that causes them too much stress and go off in search of a job that better aligns with their values. Reforming unemployment insurance, implementing a guaranteed income, or disconnecting health care from employment could all go a long way. But if you look at the anthropologist David Graeber’s survey of Bullshit Jobs, you’ll find that even when the pay is good, the stress of a shitty job can be corrosive to mental health. +
++Calm Business’s landing page reads: “The future of work relies on a mentally healthy workforce.” What if a mentally healthy workforce isn’t a workforce at all and people were simply free to do something other than exchange most of their lifetime for work they don’t particularly enjoy? Maybe the future of mental health relies on freedom from work. +
++A version of this newsletter originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here! +
++Could this save democracy from a dangerous threat? Or would it imperil democracy further? +
++Should Donald Trump even be allowed on the ballot in 2024? +
++Some of the country’s most prominent legal experts, and a small number of activists and politicians, argue he shouldn’t — and some have filed lawsuits trying to strike Trump’s name from ballots. +
++Yet most in the Democratic Party are keeping a wary distance from the effort. And other experts argue that such actions, intended to save American democracy, might in fact imperil it even further. +
++The argument for disqualifying Trump hinges on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, and its proponents argue that its plain language disqualifies Trump, who they say engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution, from holding office again. +
++Some go so far as to argue that secretaries of state should simply declare Trump ineligible and take him off their ballots — but so far, none have been willing to do so. Instead, then, the hunt is on to find a judge who will do it. +
++To be clear: It seems extremely unlikely that Trump actually will be disqualified, since the Supreme Court will get the final say over any challenge, and they’ll likely nix this whole endeavor. +
++Yet the very existence of the effort raises difficult questions about how a democracy should deal with the threat of a candidate like Trump, who retains a good deal of popular support, but who attempted to steal the 2020 election and talks constantly about having his political opponents imprisoned. +
++A Trump win in 2024 would be deeply dangerous for American democracy. Yet taking away voters’ option to choose him would pose its own perils. It would inevitably be seen as blatant election theft by much of the country — which would trigger responses, both from Republicans in office and Trump supporters on the ground, that could degrade democracy even more severely. +
++How the effort to use the 14th Amendment to disqualify Trump gained steam +
++The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, just after the Civil War, and was meant to deal with its fallout. Some of its provisions were later used as the foundation of modern civil rights law. Section 3 is about a different topic: whether former insurrectionists can hold public office. Its relevant text is as follows: +
++++“No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States … who, having previously taken an oath … as an officer of the United States … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” +
+
+Days after the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, some law professors began suggesting that this meant that Trump, and other Republicans whom they viewed as complicit in the insurrection, should be barred from office. +
++Liberal advocacy groups took up the charge in 2022, suing unsuccessfully to try to get Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and three Arizona Republican candidates taken off the ballot. Their arguments did prevail in one case, though: A New Mexico judge removed County Commissioner Couy Griffin from his post. (Unlike Greene, Griffin had unlawfully entered the Capitol on January 6 and had been convicted of trespassing.) That marked the first successful use of Section 3 since 1919. +
++This was all warmup to taking on Trump. This August, law professors William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen released a 126-page forthcoming law review article on Section 3. They concluded, after a year of studying the topic, that Section 3 sets out a “sweeping” disqualification standard that excludes Trump “and potentially many others” from holding office. +
++The article got enormous attention, in part because Baude and Paulsen are conservatives, and because it was quickly endorsed by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe and conservative former judge J. Michael Luttig, two of the country’s biggest legal names. Steven Calabresi, a founder and co-chair of the board of the Federalist Society, also initially said he was convinced — though he changed his mind a month later. +
++Baude and Paulsen also raised eyebrows for arguing that, per their legal analysis, state election officials should act to take Trump off the ballot now — rather than waiting for Congress or judges to do it. Section 3 is “self-executing,” they argue, so state officials need to obey it. +
++Democrats have been hesitant to push for Trump’s disqualification — but lawsuits are now moving forward in the courts +
++Democratic secretaries of state have not taken the initiative, though, saying this is a matter for the courts. And with a few exceptions — Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) recently opined that Trump is disqualified from running — most Democratic politicians have kept a wary distance from this effort. +
++As much as the party fears and loathes Trump, there is an evident concern that striking him from the ballot would be going too far. Either due to a commitment to democracy, a fear of the explosive backlash that would follow such a move, or a desire to make the effort look less partisan, Democrats like Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson are saying that it’s out of their hands, try the courts instead. +
++So now the hunt is on to find a judge who will declare Trump ineligible to be president. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a longtime progressive advocacy group, has filed suit in Colorado, where a judge has said she hopes to rule on Trump’s eligibility by Thanksgiving. Free Speech for People, another progressive advocacy group, has filed suit in Minnesota. +
++Even before this came lawsuits from Texas tax attorney John Anthony Castro, who is, at least officially, a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. Shortly after he registered to run, he filed a lawsuit citing Section 3 to try and get Trump taken off the ballot. He’s since filed similar suits in more than a dozen other states, and constantly hypes up his effort on the website formerly known as Twitter (“They finally realized I’m not fu**ing around. Too late, beta boys,” he wrote recently). The Supreme Court recently declined to take up one of Castro’s appeals, but his other suits are still alive for now. +
++Still, the Supreme Court is the ultimate destination for all of this wrangling, and it has a six-justice conservative majority, three of whom were appointed by Trump. Even before getting into the legal specifics, that’s enough reason to be deeply skeptical that the Court would ban Trump from running again. +
++The case for disqualifying Trump +
++The legal debates here can be abstruse. They feature attempts to divine the intent of politicians during the 1860s, discussions on how seriously to take an 1869 circuit court opinion by Chief Justice Salmon Chase, and slippery slope hypotheticals about how disqualification could later be abused in different situations. +
++So let’s zoom out and ask the real question at the heart of all this: Would disqualifying Trump from the ballot in this way be a good idea, or would it be its own sort of affront to democracy? +
++Many democracies have struggled with the question of how to deal with a threat to democracy rising through the electoral system, and there are no easy answers. I spoke with Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who just co-authored a book, Tyranny of the Minority, on the US’s democratic crisis, about the options. +
++Ziblatt noted Hans Kelsen, an Austrian legal theorist in the 1930s, who he said “made the case that if you really believe in democracy, you have to be willing to go down on a sinking ship and come back another day.” In Kelsen’s view, the only defensible solution to authoritarians rising in the democratic system is to beat them at the ballot box. +
++With the rise of the Nazis, that thinking obviously didn’t age well, said Ziblatt. “I think that’s naive,” he said. “This idea that we need to just stand by and let our democracy come under assault and hope everything will work out — it turned out not to work out.” +
++So the post-World War II German constitution set up a procedure and a legal framework by which certain politicians or parties deemed dangerous to the constitution could be restricted from running for office. “It’s a very complex and highly regulated procedure,” said Ziblatt — involving federal and state offices, a bureaucracy, court approval, and necessary legal steps — because disqualification is such a “potentially dangerous and powerful device.” +
++Other countries have adopted similar approaches, which are known as “militant democracy” or “defensive democracy.” The idea is to protect democracy by excluding the threats to it from the political scene. +
++The thinking is: Trump tried to destroy American democracy in 2020. If he’s allowed to try again, there’s good reason to suspect he’ll do more damage. So why not stop him now? Supporters of disqualifying Trump, like Luttig, argue that he disqualified himself. The Constitution says insurrectionists can’t hold office, and we have a duty to uphold the Constitution, they claim. +
++The case against disqualifying Trump +
++But the problem with the 14th Amendment option, both Levitsky and Ziblatt told me, is that the US did not establish a consistent procedure or institutional authority for excluding candidates after the Civil War. “We have no agreed-upon institutional mechanism in place, no electoral authority, no judicial body with precedent and practice that all the major political forces agree should be empowered to make this decision,” Levitsky said. +
++Long-standing institutions and procedures provide credibility; ideally, they help assure the nation that these decisions aren’t ad hoc, arbitrary, and politicized — as they are in many countries. In Latin America, Levitsky says, disqualification is often “badly abused” to exclude candidates the powers that be simply don’t want to win. +
++In Trump’s case, what would look to some like dutifully standing up for the Constitution would look to many others like an unprecedented intervention by elites into the electoral process, based on a disputed interpretation of a 155-year-old, rarely used provision — with the clear underlying motivation of preventing voters from making a particular person the president. +
++Both professors blanched at the idea of partisan secretaries of state taking Trump off the ballot on their own. Levitsky called this “deeply problematic,” and Ziblatt said it would be “very fraught and dangerous” and likely to lead to “escalation.” +
++Pro-Trump secretaries of state would surely respond with their own disqualifications of Democratic candidates in reprisal. Indeed, Trump’s supporters already caused chaos at the Capitol when they wrongly believed the election was being stolen from him, and they’re already disenchanted with American institutions. What if Trump truly was prevented from even running by questionable means? Things can always get worse and more dangerous. Legal commentator Mark Herrmann compared secretaries of state disqualifying Trump to opening Pandora’s Box. +
++Given the lack of precedent, the much “healthier path,” Levitsky said, would have been if the Republican Party had managed to self-police by convicting Trump during his second impeachment trial and blocked him from running again. They didn’t — and that’s why we’re in this mess, debating whether democracy can even survive another Trump presidency. +
++The jailed activist’s Nobel is also a reminder of Iran’s momentous protest movement. +
++Narges Mohammadi, an Iranian women’s rights and anti-death penalty advocate currently incarcerated in one of Iran’s most notorious prisons, has been awarded the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize. +
++Mohammadi’s win comes after a year of protest in the country following the murder of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who died in police custody after being detained for improperly wearing her headscarf. Though Mohammadi was behind bars during these protests and couldn’t participate directly, she has worked as an advocate for related causes for decades, and continues to document human rights abuses within prison. +
++Mohammadi’s win, though a significant symbolic and political move on the part of the Nobel committee, is unlikely to change Iran’s stance on the protests or its human rights violations. Nor is it likely to free Mohammadi or materially change her condition, though the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee Berit Reiss-Andersen said in her speech announcing the prize that she hoped the Iranian authorities would release Mohammadi so she could attend the awards ceremony in December, the Associated Press reported. +
++The award is an explicit recognition of Mohammadi’s decades of work and of the ongoing struggle of women in Iran. +
++“This year’s Peace Prize also recognises the hundreds of thousands of people who, in the preceding year, have demonstrated against the theocratic regime’s policies of discrimination and oppression targeting women,” the committee wrote in a press release Friday. Iranian women who spoke with the Associated Press, like 22-year-old chemistry student Arezou Mohebi, echoed that statement, calling the prize “an award for all Iranian girls and women” and Mohammadi herself “the bravest I have ever seen.” +
++Mohammadi has been fighting for human rights for decades +
++Mohammadi, an engineer by training, has long been an active and important part of the Iranian struggle for human rights, working in particular on behalf of women and incarcerated people and against the death penalty. In 2003, she began working with the now-banned group Defenders of Human Rights Center, founded by Iran’s other Nobel Peace Prize winner, lawyer Shirin Ebadi. +
++Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, a historian of the modern Middle East at the University of Pennsylvania, told Vox that within Iran, Mohammadi “is very highly respected and admired for her unflinching commitment to freedom, women’s rights, and human rights, as well as for her personal sacrifices in realizing these ideals. People in Iran are rejoicing over this prize.” +
++Mohammadi was first arrested in 2011 for her work advocating for incarcerated human rights activists and their families; while out on bail in 2015, she was again arrested and imprisoned for her campaigning against Iran’s use of the death penalty. In Iran, the death penalty is often used for drug-related offenses or crimes like blasphemy or sowing “corruption on earth” — a charge that can be applied to a variety of activities, such as protesting the government or being LGBTQ. +
++Last year there were around 580 executions in Iran, according to UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk. Executions have continued apace in 2023; many of those were for drug-related offenses, and many of those executed came from minority populations, according to UN data. “In Iran, authorities use the death penalty and execution as a tool of political repression against protesters, dissidents and minorities” after subjecting the accused to show trials, according to a report this year by a UN body of experts. +
++This is true, too, for the Iranians protesting over the last year. After Amini’s death in September 2022, Iranians of all ages, ethnic groups, and sectors of society engaged in mass demonstrations across the country against the government. Thousands of people flooded the streets night after night — often peacefully, with women whipping off their hijabs and lighting them on fire, or cutting their hair in not just a show of solidarity with Amini, but also an expression of broader economic frustrations and outrage with political repression. +
++This was a woman-led movement — particularly meaningful in a society that specifically restricts women’s access to basic rights like education, jobs, and participation in public life based on whether they comply with compulsory hijab laws, as a June Human Rights Watch report explains. +
++“It’s really touching and kind of unprecedented even, perhaps, globally, this kind of feminist angle, and it is real,” Borzou Daragahi, an Iranian-American journalist, told Vox in November at the height of the protests. “The men supporting the women, the schoolgirls going out and protesting by day, the schoolboys going out and rioting against the police at night, people backing each other up, people cheering on the women as they take off their hijabs and so on. This whole feminist angle of it is quite singular, for a political revolution in any country.” +
++That movement came to be known by its chants of “Woman-Life-Freedom,” and, though Amini’s death ignited it, it built on years — and even decades — of protest and feminist activism by people like Mohammadi. And after years of protest movements, including in 2009 and 2019, Woman-Life-Freedom was one of the most serious challenges to regime power since the 1979 revolution. +
++Iran’s Basij, a paramilitary police force under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), cracked down on the uprising, injuring the eyes of hundreds of protesters with rubber bullets and metal pellets and killing or injuring others when they fired on crowds with lethal force. Ultimately, Iran’s government detained about 20,000 protesters and sentenced many to death. At least 209 people had been executed by May of this year, according to UN reports. +
++Though Mohammadi has been in and out of prison since 2015, she has continued to organize while incarcerated, fighting against inhumane conditions, including allegations of systematic torture and sexual violence. Mohammadi also participated in the Woman-Life-Freedom mass protests in her own way, according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, expressing her support for activists on the street and organizing solidarity actions among her fellow prisoners. +
++That, however, led to more brutal crackdowns from prison authorities; Mohammadi was barred from receiving phone calls or visitors. She has not seen her husband, Taghi Rahmani, who lives in exile in Paris with their 16-year-old twins, in 11 years. +
++“The global support and recognition of my human rights advocacy makes me more resolved, more responsible, more passionate and more hopeful,” Mohammadi wrote in a statement to the New York Times. “I also hope this recognition makes Iranians protesting for change stronger and more organized. Victory is near.” +
++However, it’s possible that Mohammadi’s win and the international recognition for her work will bring more strife and more crackdowns for her and for Iranian society at large. Regime-linked news agencies dismissed the prize; The Islamic Republic News Agency stated it had become a tool “to satisfy the political desires of the Western countries,” and Fars claimed it honored someone who “persisted in creating tension and unrest and falsely claimed that she was beaten in prison.” +
++Over the past year, the protests have garnered less media attention, and the regime has cracked down on society by purging academics from universities and arresting activists and journalists. Although the protests did not topple the government, it does seem to have caused an enduring fracture between the regime and society. That’s partly a result of the multiple crises — economic, political, and social — that Iran is currently facing, but it also speaks to the strength of the protest movement. +
++Now, Kashani-Sabet said, “Mohammadi’s Nobel Prize will keep the embers of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement burning and alert the world that Iranian women and the Iranian people have not abandoned their resolve to usher in a free and tolerant Iran.” +