The Disturbing Dystopia of Born to Flourish, by Richard Davidson and Cortland Dahl.[1]
There are books whose naivety is too sophisticated to be innocent. Born to Flourish, by Richard Davidson and Cortland Dahl, falls into this category. Its overall thesis seems appealing: human beings are born with the capacity to “flourish,” and that flourishing can be cultivated by training skills such as mindfulness, connection, self-understanding, and purpose. None of this, considered in the abstract, is objectionable. Who could be against the possibility of living with greater meaning? The problem begins when these categories are presented as if they could float above history, political economy, imperial violence, ecological devastation, and the material conditions that make contemporary malaise possible.
The book unfolds a repetitive vocabulary: contemplative science, neuroplasticity, ancient wisdom, well-being, flourishing, mental training accessible in time and form to the citizen of today’s fast-paced societies, personal transformation, social impact. It is the characteristic vocabulary of a technified spirituality, suited for institutions, universities, foundations, local governments, corporations, and philanthropic elites. The promise is always the same: if we train the mind, we will change our lives; if we change our inner dispositions, we can transform the world. But what almost always remains out of focus is the decisive question: what kind of world is this that we are invited to inhabit with gratitude, awareness, and purpose?[2]
The book’s conclusion is revealing. Davidson and Dahl envision a prosperous city of one million inhabitants where most people accept flourishing as a quality that can be cultivated through ancient techniques supervised by science and at the service of contemporary technology. Billboards, ads on public transportation, television and radio messages, podcasts, electronic health records, municipal services, healthcare, education, religious communities, businesses, and workplaces would all join a grand collective initiative. A mayor could champion the project and turn his city into a global model. If every citizen devoted a few minutes a day to training their mind, the entire city would be transformed. Flourishing, they say, would be “the talk of the town.”
The scene is spectacular, but also unsettling. What appears in the form of a benevolent utopia looks all too much like a comprehensive program for managing subjectivity. It is not just about meditating, giving thanks, or cultivating mindfulness. It is about imagining an entire city organized around an emotional, cognitive, and moral pedagogy administered through public institutions, digital platforms, healthcare systems, schools, businesses, and local governments. Consciousness thus appears as infrastructure. Well-being becomes public policy. Inner life becomes the object of institutional design.
The book does not seem to notice the ambivalence of this scene. A city covered in messages about flourishing, with digital tools embedded in healthcare platforms, with educators trained in inner skills, with economists measuring savings derived from reductions in suicides, addictions, healthcare costs, or crime, is not simply a more compassionate community. It is also a city in which subjectivity becomes a field of permanent intervention. The question is not merely whether these practices can produce positive effects. They likely do. The question is what gets neutralized when social suffering is systematically translated into deficits of consciousness, connection, purpose, or self-regulation.
Here lies the book’s ideological core. Poverty, loneliness, anxiety, violence, illness, despair, and contemporary disorientation are treated as problems that can be addressed through mental training. But the structures that produce these forms of suffering are barely addressed. Capitalism, war, colonialism, the destruction of community ties, precarious labor, the financialization of life, the militarization of borders, or the complicity of Western democracies with atrocious violence are pushed into the background, if not entirely absent. The mind must learn to flourish in a world that does not radically question itself.
That is why the emphasis on consciousness is ambiguous. Consciousness can be a path to truth when it allows us to see reality more clearly and respond more deeply to concrete suffering. But when it functions as a technology to redirect attention away from the historical and political conditions that produce that suffering, it ceases to be wisdom and becomes ideology: a refined technique for not seeing. At that point, spirituality ceases to be a practice of liberation and transforms into a pedagogy of adaptation.
The book speaks a great deal about the mind, but very little about the world. It speaks a great deal about the present, but almost nothing about history. It speaks a great deal of compassion but avoids looking squarely at the political mediations of cruelty. After hundreds of pages asking us to pay attention to the present moment, there is almost not a single serious word about the violence perpetrated in our name and for our benefit. Gratitude, separated from history and responsibility, becomes abstract, apolitical, and ethically weak.
The problem is not practicing mindfulness. The problem is turning mindfulness into a substitute for justice. The problem is not cultivating gratitude. The problem is giving thanks without asking who pays the price for our comfort. The problem is not talking about flourishing. The problem is imagining that we can flourish without confronting the concrete forms of domination that prevent others from living, breathing, inhabiting, working, caring, migrating, or simply surviving.
Born to Flourish aims to present itself as a synthesis of modern science and ancient wisdom. But its political horizon seems much narrower: a spirituality compatible with dominant institutions, with elite philanthropy, with the language of efficiency, with the reduction of healthcare costs, with emotional productivity, and with the gentle governance of behavior. It is no coincidence that the book concludes by envisioning entire cities reorganized under the banner of flourishing. That image encapsulates both its promise and its limitation: a society that is more serene, more regulated, more connected, more efficient, but not necessarily more just.
What we need is not to abandon consciousness, but to rescue it from this captivity. A truly compassionate consciousness cannot be limited to improving our inner relationship with experience. It must open us up to the real suffering of others and to the structures that produce it. It must make us less adaptable to injustice, not more functional within it. It must disrupt the moral comfort of spiritual niceties and return us to the fundamental question: what are we willing to see, to say, and to transform?
Because looking inward may be necessary. But when the world is on fire, looking inward so as not to look outward is not wisdom. It is a form of complicity.
[1] Davidson, R. J., & Dahl, C. (2026). Born to flourish: How new science and ancient wisdom reveal a simple path to thriving. Simon & Schuster.
[2] Let us imagine that the exhortation to inhabit the world with gratitude, awareness, and purpose is not addressed to the citizen of a privileged North Atlantic society, but to an inhabitant of the Global South; to a Palestinian person, for instance, standing before the destruction of their world and the almost complete indifference of those who could stop it. The test is simple: if this language can remain intact before such a scene, then its problem lies not only in what it affirms, but in what it allows to remain unsaid. Consciousness, at that point, may operate as a conventionally acceptable form of cognitive blocking for citizens of privileged societies: a way of shielding themselves from the reality of injustice and horror, or of producing what Stanley Cohen called a “state of denial.” See Cohen, S. (2000). States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Polity Press.