McMindfulness and a side of meritocracy

David Forbes’s description of McMindfulness is insightful (How capitalism captured the mindfulness industry, 16 April), but I suggest there is an even more insidious method “for subduing employee unrest, promoting a tacit acceptance of the status quo and … keeping attention focused on institutional goals” that both predates it, has far greater reach and may even have been its midwife: the use of a single word, challenge.

Frequently used to persuade others to accept unpalatable change, financial constraint or disastrous policy, its ubiquity is more than just a verbal trend. Challenging is now the default term used for any social, industrial, political, economic, interpersonal or psychological difficulty. Along with its companion buzzword “resilience”, whatever is now deemed challenging either denies or disguises the existence of problems (note how rarely the word difficulty now appears in public discourse) by relocating them in those who must accept or resolve them – thus enabling the powerful (be they corporations, government or public institutions) to misrepresent their activities, hide their incompetence and redirect culpability for their failures.

In fact, I challenge you to find this ordinary word used, any more, in its ordinary sense to mean contest, provoke, dare or oppose; it has instead been sterilised, redirected and aimed at neutralising dissent while simultaneously claiming to “empower” – a neat trick indeed.
Paul McGilchrist
Colchester, Essex

• Frances Ryan is right to be concerned about rising child poverty but she is wrong to suggest that it is “destroying the myth that Britain is a meritocracy” (Opinion, 18 April). The real and dangerous myth is that meritocracy leads to a reduction in inequality. The transition from a class-based society to a meritocratic one may result in a temporary increase in social mobility but, as Roy Hattersley pointed out nearly 20 years ago (Opinion, 24 June 2001), without redistribution, “meritocracy only offers shifting patterns of inequality”. Moreover, it risks leading us to a dystopian future of ever-rising inequality, as those with the greatest biological, environmental and economic advantages pass those benefits on to their offspring, while those at the bottom pass on their disadvantages, and so ad infinitum.
Robert Saunders
Balcombe, West Sussex

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