The article purports to relate the results of research which is supposed to be controversial and attention-grabbing. Surprise: meditation makes workers less motivated to make more money for their employers (and themselves), not more!
Of course, anybody familiar with meditation and other mindfulness practices would not be surprised by this conclusion.
The article is thought provoking, though, but not for the reasons the author thinks.
The article takes it as a given that the sole measure of the legitimacy of any worker’s activities is whether it contributes to an employer’s “bottom line”.
Now, anyone can easily think of rebuttals to such an argument. Doesn’t an employer care about whether that worker can get along with others in a harmonious way? Can’t a person who enjoys greater serenity and confidence around others contribute to an employer’s bottom line in other ways, not as easily quantified, but still real and valuable?
However, such arguments are hardly rebuttals to the basic assumptions of the author. Because the author takes for granted, for example, that the wellbeing of the employer, by whatever measure chosen by him or her, is the problem of paramount concern, and that the worker – or at least that portion of the substance of the worker’s life, his or her time spent in his employment by his boss – is the only valid measure of any activity by the worker. The worker, in short, is truly a “wage slave”, and except for whatever laws and regulations by which the government has deemed fit to limit him, an employer may do with his worker as he sees fit. Whereas, for the worker, it is “not his to reason why, his but to do or die.”
Lest we accept such an ideology at face value as the natural order of things, it is worth pointing out that, had the original US labor movement, born after the American Civil War, succeeded in its complete program and objectives, the rights of workers would have been founded on the basis of the 13th amendment of the US Constitution, that which prohibits slavery, and therefore would have been taken to be inalienable human rights. As it turned out Instead, however, the judicial branch did uphold the power of government to regulate the conditions and wages of workers against challenges by employers made under the doctrine of the supposed sanctity of “freedom of contract”, but those judges, of both past and present, based their decisions on the Commerce Clause and the power of the federal government to regulate all interstate commerce. Therefore, labor became an article of “commerce”, akin to a box of wigs or a bushel of wheat, as opposed to the substance of the life of a free man or woman.
These are the assumptions and this is the jumping off point for an article such as the one that lately appeared in the New York Times. This is what the radical Italian philosopher and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci meant by “hegemony”: the power to dictate ideological discourse so forcefully that it becomes axiomatic, so that one can write an article such as this based on assumptions – such as the greed of an employer and his absolute right to use his employees to serve that greed as he sees fit – with scarcely a thought that the public might bat an eyelash at them. More likely still, such a thought did not even occur to the author himself.
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