Mindfulness has become a household word. Time magazine’s cover of a youthful blond woman peacefully blissing out anchors the feature story, ‘Mindful Revolution.’ From endorsements by celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Goldie Hawn, to monks, neuroscientists, and meditation coaches rubbing shoulders with CEOs at the World Economic Forum in Davos, it is clear that mindfulness has gone mainstream.

But is the mindfulness boom really a revolution? If it is, what exactly has been overturned or radically transformed to garner such grand status?

Wall Street and corporations are still conducting business as usual, special interests and political corruption goes unchallenged, public schools are still suffering from massive underfunding and neglect, the concentration of wealth and inequality has reached record levels, mass incarceration and prison overcrowding has become the new social plague, indiscriminate shooting of Blacks by police and the demonizing of the poor remains commonplace, America’s militaristic imperialism continues to spread, and the impending disasters of global warming are already rearing their ugly heads.

To consider only the corporate sector: with over $300 billion in losses due to stress-related absences, and nearly $550 billion in losses due to a lack of “employee engagement,” it is unsurprising why it has jumped on the mindfulness bandwagon. Such losses in production and efficiency threaten the logic of profit-making. For capitalism to survive, as Nicole Ashoff points out in “The New Prophets of Capital,” “people must willingly participate in and reproduce its structures and norms,” and in times of crisis, “capitalism must draw upon cultural ideas that exist outside of the circuits of profit-making.” Mindfulness is one such new cultural idea serving this purpose.

However, those celebrating the mindfulness boom have avoided any serious consideration of why stress is so pervasive in corporations and society. According to New York Times business reporter David Gelles, author of “Mindful Work,” “Stress isn’t something imposed on us. It’s something we impose on ourselves.” The New York Times recently featured an exposÃ© on the toxic, sociopathic work culture at Amazon. A former employee was quoted as saying that he saw nearly everyone he worked with cry at their desk. Would Gelles offer his advice with a straight face to these employees of Amazon, telling them that they have imposed stress on themselves, that they could have chosen not to cry?

For Gelles, the causes of stress are located inside our heads, from our own lack of emotional self-regulation, from our habitual patterns of thinking—and if fMRI images are revealing the neural correlates of stress, then surely our misery must be self-created. We only have ourselves – our own mindlessness – to blame. This is not to deny that experiences of stress and misery are partly due to our habitual reactivity, but Gelles goes too far. His victim-blaming philosophy echoes the corporate mindfulness ethos: shift the burden and locus of psychological stress and structural insecurities onto the individual employee, frame stress as a personal problem, and then offer mindfulness as the panacea. Critical psychologist David Smail referred to this philosophy as “magical voluntarism,” because it blames individuals for their own stress, ignoring the social and economic conditions which may have contributed to it.

A recent Stanford-Harvard study, however, tells a different story. A meta-analysis of 228 studies showed that employee stress is not self-imposed nor due to a lack of mindfulness. On the contrary, major workplace stressors were associated with a lack of health insurance, threats of constant layoffs and job insecurity, lack of discretion and autonomy in decision-making, long work hours, low organizational justice, and unrealistic job demands. Yet, individualized mindfulness programs pay virtually no attention to how stress is shaped by a complex set of interacting power relations, networks of interests, and explanatory narratives. Carl Cederstrom and Andre Spicer argue in “The Wellness Syndrome” that the mindfulness movement exemplifies an ideological shift, which turns an obsessive focus on wellness and happiness into a moral imperative. This “biomorality” urges the individual to find responsibility via the “right” life choices—whether through exercise, food, or meditation—to optimize the self.

Buddhist teachings about awakening to the reality of impermanence “as it is” become inverted in corporate mindfulness. Instead of cultivating awareness of the contingencies of present reality that cause suffering, and thereby developing the capacity to intervene in those conditions of suffering, corporate mindfulness goes no further than encouraging individuals to manage stress so as to optimize performance within existing conditions of precarity—which, curiously, are portrayed as inevitable even as they demand flexibility from individuals. As Gelles said in his interview for the Atlantic: “We live in a capitalist economy, and mindfulness can’t change that.” But doesn’t this underscore what Bhikkhu Bodhi, an outspoken Western Buddhist monk, has warned: “absent a sharp social critique, Buddhist practices could easily be used to justify and stabilize the status quo, becoming a reinforcement of consumer capitalism”?

Proponents like Jeremy Hunter, however, assure us that mindfulness can act as a “disruptive technology,” reforming even the most dysfunctional companies into kinder, more compassionate and sustainable organizations. Corporate mindfulness teachers who claim that individualized mindfulness programs are subversive often evoke a ‘Trojan horse’ metaphor. They speculate that over time, leaders, managers and employees trained in mindfulness may wake up and effect major transformations in corporate policies and practices. Going by their claim, Goldman Sachs, Monsanto and General Mills, companies that have publicized their successful corporate mindfulness programs, will soon become the poster children for socially and ecologically responsible corporations. But there is no empirical evidence to support these claims: it remains a speculative hypothesis.

In the absence of evidence for the Trojan horse hypothesis for corporate mindfulness, there is an alternative hypothesis: Corporate Quietism. This hypothesis suggests that offering mindfulness to individuals in corporations will, at best, offer stress relief or create what Kevin Healy has described as “integrity bubbles” for select individuals, while systemic corporate dysfunction continue unabated.

Consider, for example, board member of Goldman Sachs William George’s claim: “The main business case for mindfulness is that if you’re more focused on the job, you’ll become a better leader.” George suggested that mindfulness practice could help executives and staff “behave less aggressively.” “Certainly,” he said, “the financial community could use some of that.”

What might we make, then, of the incident where a 21-year-old Bank of America Merrill Lynch intern died of an epileptic seizure after working 72 hours straight? In the wake of the incident, Goldman Sachs announced new rules to cap the intern workday at 17 hours. Where was mindful leadership prior to the introduction of the new rules? And with the implementation of the workday cap—17 hours—are we witnessing mindful leadership? Who or what is really benefiting from a reduction in stress and aggressiveness within the financial community, as it proudly declares its embracing of mindfulness? Was it the intern’s own fault that he died? Was the stress he faced self-imposed? Was his tragic death a consequence of failing to work mindfully?

The fact is both are hypotheses. On the one hand, the Trojan horse hypothesis predicts that corporate mindfulness programs will encourage whistle-blowing, wise decision-making, more humane work environments, ethical behavior, greater organizational citizenship behaviors, and transformational culture change leading to greater social and environmental responsibility. And on the other hand, the Corporate Quietism hypothesis posits that corporate mindfulness programs will provide privatized glimpses of stress reduction and focused attention, with no significant application of collective attention to systemic conditions of stress and anxiety.

The jury is still out. It remains an open question whether training individuals in mindfulness will transform corporations and society, or whether it merely amounts to employee pacification and a form of passive nihilism. As Norm Farb notes, “While the idea of mindfulness as a beneficent Trojan horse may appear far-fetched, it seems equally plausible as accounts where mindfulness leads employees to spiral into complacency and subjugation.” This open question of what mindfulness may or may not lead to is really the rub of the matter, which asks that all parties invested in mindfulness collectively inquire into the multifarious forces of altruism andexploitation that might impact on the as-yet-unactualized potentials and dangers of contemporary mindfulness.

When socially engaged Buddhist critics raise concerns about the systemic problems that circumscribe the mindfulness trend, we are doing so in recognition of the openness of the radical potentials and real dangers of mindfulness, rather than a dogmatic defense of traditionalist approaches to mindfulness over contemporary ones, or a wholesale dismissal of their therapeutic value. Yet, in response to these concerns, advocates of secular mindfulness repeatedly beg the question, sidestepping the issue at hand by deflecting Buddhist criticisms with the very open question that demands collective engagement in the first place. To highlight some salient quotes (italics added) from prominent commentators:

“Leaders touched by mindfulness may find innovations to solve real problems and help make a better life.Who knows what a leader—in workplaces from Ford Motor Company to the Los Angeles Fire Department—might do for the greater good with the aid of a little mindfulfulness?” —Barry Boyce “Mindfulness can be a great boon….widespread meditation practice could make a real difference to the problems of our age. But while some people may be drawn to practice through the scientific promise of betterment, they may end up finding that once they’ve got started, the path is far more interesting than that.” — Ed Halliwell “And then there’s the possibility that enhanced awareness may result in a disconnect between personal and organizational values. If that happens, of course, an employee might simply leave to find a better fit. On the other hand, if an organization can work creatively with the questions that increased personal awareness can churn up, that could be a great asset.” —Jeremy Hunter “I think what it [mindfulness] can do, hopefully, is give individuals, influencers of organizations, and maybeeven companies themselves the perspective that’s needed to make decisions and changes, even, that are beneficial, not just to the bottom line but to our emotional, physical, and social well-being.” –David Gelles

These different commentators are effectively saying: who knows? Is this not an act of faith in the face of limited knowledge and unforeseeable change? These are essentially appeals of trust to Buddhist critics to reciprocate in “good faith.” As committed engaged Buddhists, we take very seriously the ever-present potential for change and do not take issue with the question of “who knows?” as such. But precisely because “who knows?” is an open question where its radical potential lies in its openness, that we underscore repeatedly the need to interrogate the dynamics of power shaping contemporary mindfulness—because change for the common good (rather than change simply for individual benefit or personal wellbeing) must come through the disruption of prevailing systems of inequality, exploitation, and injustice.