Maximize your potential to maximize your potential: The un-disenchantable lightness of business-culture spirituality

Comment published on New York Times blog in response to opinion essay by Nellie Bowles, “Jack Dorsey is Gwyneth Paltrow for Silicon Valley,” May 2, 2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/fashion/jack-dorsey-influencer.html#commentsContainer&permid=100291708:100291708):

Funny story. “Now we need to optimize for cognitive performance and intellectual labor,” says one spokesman of the Silicon Valley's guru culture. This is the "New Age" in essence: Engage in a mental discipline (also known as "spirituality") in order to enhance your potentiality as a resource. Potentiality for what? For self-realization.

As the quote suggests, it is particularly mental labor and "creativity" that are being sold such opportunities for personal development. For today even employees must be like entrepreneurs, assuming capital's risks. Realizing yourself is realizing your potentialities. For, by this logic, any project or task. In other words, your labor power. Money and markets make all labor power both abstract as a potentiality and generic as anything whatever. "Just do it!" -- never mind what it is.

In fact, this robs the self of real autonomy and creativity.

The principle of this ethics is happiness through success. It has no moral qualities, not being essentially concerned with the likely consequences of actions on others. It is just you and God, or better, you and the company. Your obligation in this scheme is to generate wealth through, as in sports, generic excellence. This self-obsessed ethics also has no politics, which is replaced by management.

This is not new in America; it is a form of our secular Protestantism. The claims to maximize the self's power are an obscurantism in the sole name of profit.