Neo-liberal subjectivities and the emergence of spiritual entrepreneurship: An analysis of spiritual development programs in contemporary Romania

Introduction: alternative spiritualities and the transformation of the Romanian post-communist religious field

The financial crisis of 2008–2009 had a long-lasting and deep impact on the economies from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and has generated turbulent societal transformations, particularly in those countries where industrial production was export-oriented and depended on the fluxes of global market demands (Ban, 2016; Dăianu, 2018; Bohle and Greskovits, 2007). Romania was particularly affected by the economic depression and became a country where radical structural reforms were experimented with, in order to generate macro-economic stability (Ban, 2016; Trif, 2013; Dăianu et al., 2014),This was achieved through painful economic reforms that entailed dramatic de-regulations of labor markets and the institutionalization of new industrial relations that could attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), which was deemed crucial for re-launching the economy. In this process Romania became one of the most neo-liberal countries from the region with a newly reformed corporate governance that had one of the worst capital-labor arrangements that encouraged trans-national capital to move their production facilities to the periphery of European Union where cheap and accessible workforce was available (Bohle and Greskovits, 2012).

This article focuses on the formation of neo-liberal subjectivities that are being embedded in a variety of personal and spiritual development programs which have become increasingly popular in Romania after the financial crisis. By analyzing the vast economic transformations that took place in CEE, I show that one way of dealing with the significant de-regulation of the labor market, flexibility and emphasis on employability was the experimentation with alternative spiritualities and the proliferation of a wide spectrum of spiritual workshops that offer the Romanian middle class new tools of self-development.

The article draws on a two year extensive research carried out by a team of sociologists and anthropologists that analyzed the wide popularization of alternative spiritualities in post-socialist Romania. The research focused on two major cities from Romania: Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca both of them being important economic centers that have registered in the last decade significant economic growth and development in the industrial and tertiary services sectors. The data collected within the research project was primarily qualitative. We interviewed approximately 80 people that were involved in the field of alternative spiritualities either as active participants or as experienced facilitators. The interviews attempted to capture the most popular forms of alternative spiritualities and explore the way they are appropriated in every-day life by the persons involved in this emerging field. The research focused as well on the spaces and modes of transmission of these spiritualities and mapped out the main positions taken within the religious field, the delineations, main narratives and practices that substantiated the new spiritual ontologies. Three such modes of transmission were important for this research project. First of all, the workshops of spiritual development which act as an important hub where these new spiritual ideas are experimented with and where actual training programs are implemented. Participant observations allowed us to understanding better the variety of programs of spiritual development and analyze the way these practices and ideas are appropriated, the underlying social dynamics and the mechanisms of religious acculturation. Secondly, we analyzed the blogs and virtual spaces that play an significant role in spreading the new spiritual development programs not only in terms of popularization of these practices, but also in terms of facilitating forms of continuous (spiritual) learning. We employed a thematic content analysis of hundreds of blog entries, alongside audio and video lectures that act as an important means of religious socialization of a segment of the Romanian middle class that took interest in the last decade in these new technologies of spiritual self-development. Thirdly, the research focused on book production and Romanian publishing houses that are specializing in catering to people interested in personal and spiritual development programs and alternative spiritualities. For this part of the research we selected native Romanian authors that are starting to affirm themselves in this field and for whom the publishing of a book certifies to the wider audience a field of competence and an area of expertise, but we took into consideration also translated authors, especially those that have become best-sellers in Romania or who are being extensively quoted or referred to by local spiritual teachers, trainers and facilitators that promote personal and spiritual development programs.

One example of such spiritual development program, among innumerable others, which we investigated during our fieldwork, was a workshop that focused on sacred femininities, organized by an important spiritual urban hub from a Romanian metropolitan area that acts as a socializing platform and educational facilitator for people interested in meaningful self-development. The event was attended by almost 200 women, all dressed in corporate suits, with complex lifestyles and well educated that wanted to explore spiritual emancipation and learn how to navigate as empowered women the complex world of today:

This is how you become both powerful and feminine. A power that is not force, but comes from within you. Because you are in a genuine contact with who you are. And you know how to reach you, without losing this contact. All this practical things come forth instinctively, organically, in the moment you allocate time for you, without preoccupying your mind, without forcing yourself. When you are at [. . .] the multi-national company, when you are on the road, between children and work, you can stop with your car for five minutes. [. . .] In the moment you do this, your breathing helps you somehow to shut down your body and to restore yourself, allows your feminine energy to circulate throughout the day and reinvigorate itself, and this gives you vitality. (Spiritual development trainer, public lecture)

Workshops like this are part of a wider cultural transformation that post-socialist Romania is undergoing. Particularly in the past decade there has been an explosion of alternative forms of spiritualities ranging from different types of Yoga to Reiki, Bowen techniques, Theta Healing, Holotropic breathing, Familial constellations, Cranial-sacral therapy, etc. that increasingly spread within popular urban culture. Hundreds of new Romanian books are published each year on spiritual wellbeing, mindfulness and inner healing, new blogs are launched together with podcasts, newspapers and TV programs that promote personal and spiritual development as an important component of every-day life (Simionca, 2016; Palaga, 2016; Tobias, 2016; Trifan, 2015). But what is more indicative of these changes is the fact that these alternative spiritualities are not only a growing part of popular urban culture, but have been institutionalized within certain professional fields in Romania such as psychology and management. The spiritual turn within these professions are not marginal and exotic experiments, but constitute significant paradigmatic shifts that are backed up by local academic expertise, professional associations and other knowledge production centers (Gog, 2016).

Romania is one of the most religious countries in the European Union, religious socialization ranks very high, church-state relations are strong, there are high rates of religious participation and religious practices especially in rural areas and various religious groups are political active and very influential in setting up the public agenda (Stan and Turcescu, 2007; Pickel and Sammet, 2012). The emerging field of alternative spiritualities produces a distinctive break with the traditional forms of religions that have been active in Romania: Eastern Christianity, Catholicism, Protestantism and a wide spectrum of Evangelical movements (Gog, 2016), and institutionalizes new modes of imagining religious subjectivities, promotes radical forms of religious individualism, produces new technologies of religious socialization that are more mobile and dynamic, engages the spiritual subject with new cultural ontologies and temporal structures and opens up believers to a more cosmopolite and non-dogmatic religious perspective.

But the most distinctive feature of the field of alternative spiritualities in comparison with the traditional religious field is the emphasis set on spiritual entrepreneurialism. Within the various programs of spiritual development there is a strong attention given to cultivating a new type of subjectivity that is constituted as an individualizing and autonomous unit centered on spiritual virtues such as individual creativity, flexibility, self-reliance and self-development. It socializes a self for which the creative and entrepreneurial use of its own inner resources becomes the most valuable asset of spiritual self-development and well-being. The strong emphasis set on spiritual entrepreneurialism makes the field of alternative spiritualities one of the most radical vectors of generating popular cultural legitimation of the contemporary neo-liberal transformations that have been prevalent in CEE countries, to which only limited attention has been given by the religious studies scholarship from this region.

In order to understand this radical spiritual turn within the Romanian religious landscape and the proliferation of programs of spiritual development which focus on producing an entrepreneurial subjectivity, we need to turn our attention to the vast economic transformations that took place in this country after the financial crisis and analyze the impact the de-regulation of the labor market and the creation of a competitive environment had on the lives of workers. The next section explores these transformations and traces back the distinct capitalist regimes that have emerged in CEE to radical neo-liberal reforms, analyzes the way the new industrial relations have been shaped by dramatic labor reforms and looks at how capital-labor relations have been rearranged. Only an understanding of the structural changes of the CEE labor markets and capitalist regimes will enable us to understand the vast proliferation of personal and spiritual development programs and socialization of a neo-liberal subjectivity that is attuned to an economic environment centered on competitivity, creative work and enhanced productivity.

Labor market de-regulation and the shaping of new industrial relations at the margins of Europe

The ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach has dedicated in the past years considerable attention to the Central Eastern European (CEE) region and its transition from a state-planned economy to the integration into the European Single Market (Lane et al., 2007; Jäger and Springler, 2015; Hall and Thelen, 2009). By comparatively analyzing industrial relations, corporate governance, market relations, welfare policies and state-crafting, these studies have tried to understand the relatively successful (in comparison to the Latin American countries) insertion of CEE post-socialist economies into the capitalist world-market (Bohle, 2006). Nevertheless, certain different trajectories are discernible within the wider CEE region when the degree of marketization and cost transfer policies are taken into consideration. Bohle and Greskovits (2012) point out that the former communist countries have developed in the past two decades three general types of capitalisms: neo-corporatist capitalism that advanced a balanced relationship between capital and work by developing an inclusive economic strategy based on compensating with generous welfare provisions and subsidies schemes the costs of the marketization of national economies; embedded neoliberalism pursued a more market-oriented capitalism but aimed at compensating vital domestic industries and vulnerable social groups; and radical neo-liberalism that implemented profound structural reforms and economic policies meant to institute a non-regulated market coupled with austerity measurements that could ensure a rapid transition to capitalism (Bohle and Greskovits, 2012: 29–32). These different post-socialist capitalist regimes are due to a variety of factors including communist legacies, existing economic and human resources, geo-political relations, but most of all to specific political dynamics that have configured different typologies of state programs and agendas (Ban, 2014; Bohle and Greskovits, 2012).

Romania alongside Bulgaria and the Baltic countries stood out as a cluster of countries that implemented the most radical neo-liberal market reforms and in terms of industrial policies, foreign investment and capital-labor relations developed national economies that resemble semi-peripheries situated at the margins of the wider capitalist global economy (Bohle and Greskovits, 2012: 44–48). In comparison to this, the Visegrad countries (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic) managed to adopt a much faster pace of economic and social transformations and achieved a better insertion in the global market economy by developing complex industries and coherent political strategies that led to macro-economic stability. This was even more the case with Slovenia that implemented protectionist measures, carefully developed its national industries and buffered the transition costs through generous welfare provisions and so achieved a level of corporatism similar to that of the Western European countries. Both the Visegrad countries and Slovenia became during the post-communist transition semi-core economies (Bohle and Greskovits, 2012: 44).

Comparing the countries of Central and Eastern Europe through the ‘varieties of capitalism’ paradigm enables a better understanding of the social transformations and specific economic rationalities that have structured the Romanian society in the past two decades. This comparative approach enables us to see how Romania gradually became a dependent capitalist economy (Ban, 2016) that generated specific post-socialist institutional mechanisms in order to allow for a rapid integration into the world market economy. An important aspect of the transformation of Romania, along other Central and Eastern European countries, into dependent market economies was the implementation of asymmetrical policies that eroded the welfare state and social protection mechanisms and created an economic environment that was favorable to foreign investments.

An important aspect dependent capitalist economies is related to labor reforms in order to facilitate capital investors access to a lucrative labor market which is essential for the reduction of production costs; an attractive labor market is also instrumental for national governments located at the periphery of the European Single Market in order to attract foreign investments, which becomes an important condition for economic growth. The radical reform of the labor market was one of the most important hallmarks of the Romanian economy during the last two decades and had a significant impact on its economic position within the wider Central and Eastern European region.

Romania’s hallmark response to this growing economic depression was a thorough reform of the labor market in order to attract bigger investments in its national economy. With the support from the European Union (Ban 2016; Trif, 2016), Romania implemented policies pertaining to the deregulation of the labor market in order to make it more competitive on a global scale and attractive for FDI. The flexibilization of the labor market was considered a necessary requirement imposed by the EU institutions and IMF for borrowing money necessary to bypass the financial crisis (Trif, 2016: 4).The deregulation of the labor market meant first of all a new Labor Code (2011) and a new Social Dialogue Law (2011) which restricted dramatically the bargaining power of unions and set up new industrial relations that enabled private enterprises to engage in far more advantageous business conditions with the national workforce.

The new laws redefined the member threshold required for a union to engage in negotiations with management and it made it extremely difficult to create union confederations that could fight at the national level for the protection of workers’ rights (Adăscăliței and Guga, 2015; Stoiciu, 2016a, 2016b; Trif, 2013). If before the crisis Romania had a progressive Labor Code that protected the rights of workers through collective and sectorial agreements which established the mandatory framework for negotiating company-level agreements, after the financial crisis the new legislative changes shifted the locus of social dialogue from a centralized space of interaction (where unions could cooperate and impose national agreements) to a local setting. By devolving the capital-labor negotiations to individual companies, in which unions could hardly be active (due to the new legal provisions), most unions from Romania lost a great deal of membership: the unionization rate dropped from 70% before the integration in EU to 40% after the adoption of the new Labor Law (Chivu et al., 2013: 12). Company level agreements dropped from over 7,500 in 2008 to around 4200 in 2012 (Delteil and Kirov, 2016: 201). A more dramatic decrease was recorded in terms of collective agreements: if before 2011 98% of the working populations was covered by such a collective agreements, after the adoption of the new Labor Code this fell to 36% (Trif, 2016: 6). Labor conflicts decreased from 116 in 2008 to 35 in 2011 and similarly the number of workers participating in such protests decreased from 204.8 to 55.6 (thousands) (Chivu et al., 2013: 35, 77).

A novel change was related to the introduction of flexible short-term contracts in place of indeterminate term contracts that gave employees a greater leverage over workers: the renewal of their contracts depended on their productivity and on the profitability of the new chains of production. This meant a greater insecurity for workers as the employers had legal rights to dispose easily of their employees by not renewing their contracts. The new provisions also included the possibility to reduce the number of weekly working hours and decrease wages and to unilaterally determine the quantity and type of work performed by an employee without the consent of the union (Trif, 2016). The new laws allowed as well for a considerable lengthening of the trial period of workers and this led to a growing proportion of atypical work contracts and generated precarious employment (Chivu et al., 2013). These measures gave rise to a more flexible labor market in which workers were structurally forced to adapt to the economic requirements of managers and had to cope with the pressure of easy dismissal in case productivity levels dropped or investments were not returning considerable profit rates.

The transition from a planned economy to a competitive-capitalist one had a dramatic impact in the last decade on the Romanian labor force. Rising unemployment due to several waves of de-industrialization, massive migration to Western Europe as means of escaping poverty, deregulation of the labor market in order to make it more flexible and competitive, weakening of unions and the creation of structural hierarchical spaces that allowed for more freedom of capital mobility (easy termination of work contracts) and risk-reduction of investments (rise of short term employment which could be renewed only if the new lines of production were successful on the European market) – all this led to structural pressure on workers to adapt to a new precarious and competitive environment. The capacity to be creative, flexible and adaptive to new economic situations and to be more self-disposed and individually efficient in the context of de-unionization and rise of ever increasing complex devices of productivity assessments, became a structural requirement of the post-communist Romanian work environment.

It is in this context that we have to situate the boom of alternative spiritualities and spiritual development programs and the vast proliferation of alternative spiritualities that took place during the last decade in Romania. The incorporation of these spiritualities in various professional fields constitutes an internal adaptation mechanism to the vast transformations of labor markets at the periphery of European Union. By this I don’t imply a causality dependency between economic transformations and religious cultures, but a habitus affinity between the genuine spiritual concerns of human beings and increasingly competitive work environment. The spiritual cultivation of new forms of subjectivities centered on entrepreneurialism of the inner self, productivity, employability and a meaningful relation to one’s job became an important element of professional development. The field of alternative spiritualities produced new cultural cosmologies that creatively engaged with the dynamic transformations of every-day life and generated new religious practices of the self and innovative religious technologies of self-development that became especially attractive for segments of the urban educated strata that was losing interest in traditional forms of institutionalized religions (Gog, 2016).

Spiritual entrepreneurialism and the religious socialization of neo-liberal subjectivities

In the past decade neo-liberalism has been an important topic of research within the field of religious studies and it has acted as both an epistemological and historical background of understanding various social, cultural and economic processes associated with religion (Gauthier, 2016; King and Carrette, 2004). Limited attention has been given to the way these economic transformations are shaping a distinctive neo-liberal subjectivity and how capitalism is sustained by new forms of cultural and social legitimations. Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) call this the new spirit of capitalism and analyze the way the dynamic organizational changes and management strategies of capitalist enterprises have been transformed in the past century in France and supplemented with new forms of moral justifications. More recently, Chandler and Reid (2016) have made this the topic of a ground-breaking study on how these changes are reflected in the socialization of a distinctive type of self, entitled: ‘The neo-liberal subject: Resilience, adaptation and vulnerability’. Their research allows for a more flexible approach to the issue of subject formation than the classic post-Foucauldian one, that is centered on bio-political governmentality which produce through specific technologies of self a sense of interiority that is pre-determined and pre-structured by the prevailing regimes of power (Rose, 1998). Chandler and Reid emphasize the way neo-liberalism involves not only a macro economic and political change, but as well a new creative understanding at the level of subject that seeks to empower the self and instill in it a new ethics of authenticity and agency. They emphasize the specificities of the neo-liberal subjectification and the novelties brought forth by neo-liberalism in comparison to the liberal modes of government:

The knowledge capacities and capabilities necessary for the neo-liberal subject are very different from those of the traditional or classical liberal subject. The capabilities and capacities required are those that enable the subject to actively embrace and adapt to change rather than resist it. In this case, a liberal education in the arts and sciences is held to be of less value than a capacity to adapt efficiently and effectively through greater self-awareness and emotional reflectivity. [. . .] Whereas liberal frameworks of governmentality focused upon how governments might regulate and control specific levers of the economy – inflation levels, unemployment rates, interest rates, and such – under neo-liberal approaches, the governance of economic processes is displaced by the enabling of societal processes, particularly of knowledge and communication, facilitating the adaptive capacities of individuals, enabling them to make better or more efficient lifestyle choices. (Chandler and Reid, 2016: 76–77, my emphasis).

In line with Dardot and Lavall (2013) analysis that emphasizes the processes contributing to ‘manufacturing the neo-liberal subject’, Chandler and Reid approach allows for a more culturalist understanding of how the process of justification of capitalism functions and the role this plays in disseminating every-day legitimations of neo-liberal reforms. Neo-liberal subjectivities are not simply generated by capitalist enterprises or by bio-political governmentality structures, they are appropriated and developed by individuals who strive to make sense and adapt to contemporary economic transformations that rely autonomy, resilience and self-reliance.

My research depicts processes that are becoming increasingly popular in other parts of the world. Emma Bell and Scott Taylor (2003) analyze the way work-place spirituality fulfil the role of pastoral care in capitalist organizations in UK. Similarly Dennis LoRusso (2017) analyzes the emergence of a neo-liberal ethic and spirituality in American corporate culture with a significant impact in managerial practices. Limited attention has been given in contemporary literature to how neo-liberal subjectivities are developed in post-communist settings.

In the case of post-socialist Romania the majority of people involved in the field of alternative spiritualities and almost all the clients that take part in personal and spiritual development programs (some of them quite expensive) are part of the middle class, that are highly educated and cosmopolitan and are active in important professional sectors (economists, doctors, lawyers, teachers, creative workers, service specialists, sales, IT-personnel, engineers, experts, consultants, etc.). Engaging with the field of alternative spiritualities is a very complex endeavor and the spiritual techniques and practices that are acquired by participants in these workshops cannot be dismissed as magic superstition: the field generates complex scientific legitimation of these practices, are supported by professional associations and academic networks, produces thorough reflexivity with serious philosophical questions about self, society and the nature of an authentic life and creates socialization devices that shape subjectivities in long term.

In this section I would like to argue that the idea of a spiritualized creative subject, a subject that is self-disposed and dissolves society in favor of an individualistic and pro-active practice of the self, a subject that religiously affirms the world and seeks to render it entrepreneurial meaningful, constitutes an important vector for socializing a neo-liberals subjectivity. One specific feature that appears in many of the spiritual development programs is that of entrepreneurialism. God himself is portrayed as the Great Entrepreneur in whose liking spiritual subjects have to develop themselves as creative and self-developing individual beings that foster a pro-active attitude towards life.

The particles have become ‘the matter’ and manifest universe, and the waves have taken the ‘shape’ of Laws and principles that govern the Creation. So, on one side, we have the ‘product’ and, on the other, ‘the management'. [. . .] At one point, because he wanted to extend his ‘business’, God took (to be read, created) collaborators. A kind of employees, contractors, customers. An entire Celestial hierarchy was created, a Divine Organizational Matrix. (Regăsește-ți Strălucirea, 2013)

Some authors identify the main object of faith, be this Divinity, Source of Life, Power, Presence (all the other important ontological concepts that appear within the field of alternative spiritualities) as being in their very essence either entrepreneurial or manifestations of prosperity and abundance in the life of those that understand and accept their spiritual grounding. This cultivation of a spiritualized understanding of God compels the participants in spiritual development programs to actualize divine entrepreneurialism in their own life: ‘Therefore, after the Creator’s own image, we all have an entrepreneurial nature. It would be wise to realize this aspect and act accordingly’ (Regăsește-ți Strălucirea, 2013). By entrepreneurialism these authors refer not only to a professional activity that is a vital component of all forms of managerial leadership, but also to a specific way of relating to one’s spiritual self that encourages a subjectification process which opens up the individual to a transformative process centered on the ethical appropriation of an ontological entrepreneurialism. By ‘ontological entrepreneurialism’ I mean the religious perspective that states that the active principle of creating and sustaining the reality is in its very essence entrepreneurial. God is seen as an Entrepreneur and because of this ethics is shaped according to the same standard: the spiritual subject learns to develop an entrepreneurial attitude towards one’s own self and regard the inner resources as the most valuable assets which can be put to use in both personal and professional life: ‘When each of us start to become again the Entrepreneurs of our own lives, we reconnect with an aspect of our Being which is primordial, and you will see that everything becomes a game’ (Regăsește-ți Strălucirea, 2013).

An important aspect of this new form of spiritualized entrepreneurialism is independence and autonomy in terms of emotional, decisional and financial aspects. Autonomy generates responsibility towards oneself and toward the relationships in which one is engaged and brings forth genuine care for the results of one’s work. Entrepreneurialism is presented sometimes in various spiritual development programs as a necessary component of becoming a mature person and this fosters a narrative aimed at stimulating the continuous awareness of the spiritual subject to cultivate self-growth. In contrast to the position of the waged-laborer which is assimilated with that of an immature child, the entrepreneur is presented in these programs of spiritual development as an autonomous and self-providing person. This implies most of all financial autonomy: the employee only receives a standard wage and does not care how the money is created and actually made, whereas the (spiritualized) entrepreneur thrives on engaging passionately with multiple structures of opportunities in search of various sources of income; it also implies freedom – freedom to choose with whom to interact: clients, suppliers, employees, whereas the employee has only the possibility to function within an institutionalized hierarchy; and last it implies decisional autonomy – the spiritualized subject understands that they must be an responsible self-reliant person and actively avoids the situations in which others decide in their place. This process of taking absolute charge of one’s own life is the desiderata of spiritual growth and is presented as the path to becoming a mature and fulfilled human being.

It is in this context that the concept of ‘spiritual entrepreneurialism’ can be best contrasted with the classic spirit of entrepreneurialism: ‘The spiritual entrepreneur is the person who accepted and incorporated his spiritual nature in everything that he thinks, does, has and creates a business whose products, processes, relationships and perspectives represent him’ (Regăsește-ți Strălucirea, 2014). Spiritual entrepreneurialism means to infuse with a spiritual perspective all economic processes and re-enchant capitalism in an unprecedented manner in Romania. It also means to spiritualize work and economic relations, but the device through which this is achieved enables a far greater impact than just the economic sphere of life.

The discovery of this spiritual interiority as a locus of spiritual experience is made possible by the promotion of radical individualism and the devaluation of religious communities through the programs of spiritual development (Gog, 2016). Whereas the traditional religious field places great emphasis on religious community and spiritual kinship among believers, within the personal development programs we see the formation of radical proactive subject that relies only on their own self and is made capable of generating their own wellbeing through spiritual practices. The inner self becomes the most important resource that the spiritual subject has at its disposal because it enables the individual and unmediated spiritual procedures through which it can act on their own self. Instances of this argument can be often encountered among motivational speakers that have professional training in business and have acted previously in management positions (HR mostly) who offer such services to workers engaged in the corporate environment. Similar arguments and teachings are prevalent in (spiritual) psychology and in the many psychotherapy programs offered to the professionals that want to explore spirituality as a way into inner healing that can lead to a prosperous and abundant life.

The spiritual subjects are made aware that they have at their disposal the required spiritual techniques to generate inner healing and well-being: this can be activated by the believer through complex but accessible forms of Neuro-Linguistic-Programming and are directly linked with success and productivity. Bankrupt relationships, material misery, professional failures are all due to the absence of an adequate spiritualized inward subjectivity: ‘In reality, happiness feeds success, and not the other way around. Therefore, success is the result of the state we are in. You can’t have long term achievements if you feel bad’ (Theta Healing NP, 2016b). It is this inward subjective wellbeing that is considered to be a prerequisite of productivity. The decision to affirm a subject that finds within their own self the required resources to live a happy and meaningful life within the boundaries of an authentic present leads to productivity and abundance:

The effects of well-being over results are indisputable: sales rise with 37%, chances to get a promotion rise with 40%, productivity rises with 31%, happy people are 10 times as engaged in the workplace, they live longer, get higher marks, weakened symptoms when they are sick and, in general, happy people behave nicely with others (Theta Healing NP, 2016b).

The main reason this productivity is not felt as a burden is because of the way the idea of work is reframed within the field of alternative spiritualities and made to represent something that is part of a meaningful and exuberant life. Work is not an external duty that humans impose on themselves in order to secure their material reproduction, but an important component of their ethic of authenticity that gives them joy and meaningfulness:

You can spot successful people in a crowd: they are the ones who have sparks in their eyes and when you ask them about work and life they recount every detail with dearness! Successful people are those that are happy when it is Thursday, not when it’s weekend! I see success in the shoe-maker who tells me that he’s been doing the same work for 45 years – and he is happy about it, in the doctor who tells me jokes when he inserts a cannula, in the cleaning lady who convinces me that my desk looks better tidy, even though it gives her more work to do, in my mother who decided to become a homemaker to support her family. Success (and automatically happiness!) comes from I WANT, not from I MUST! (Copii Curcubeu, 2013).

Another important feature of the wider field of alternative spiritualities that allows for proximity with a neo-liberal subjectivity is the idea of self-responsibilization of the spiritual subject. Defining well-being as something within the reach - and entirely dependent on one-self, and making the subject the authoritative instance of authentic self-fulfillment sets an immense burden on making the individual accountable for what goes wrong in their life. Self-subjectification means not only well-being, abundance and productivity, but also accountability. For example a mistake that has to be avoided by spiritual persons, of which the field of alternative spirituality constantly warns about, is that of avoiding to assume responsibility for your own life. The non-spiritual person ‘[..] put the blame on society, government, country, city, economy, politicians, partner, children, etc. for your own failures, because you don’t see what you’re doing wrong or what you don’t know and you can’t learn if mistakes don’t exist’ (Theta Healing NP, 2016a).

All these transformations of the subject come with the explicit promise that this will produce prosperity here on earth: ‘it can amplify your abilities and even help you discover what career to choose in life, and it can delete beliefs, fears and negative programs that keep you blocked and restrained from developing your unlimited potential’ (Theta Healing NP, 2015). It also has direct impact on the way money is perceived. The idea of a healthy relationship with money appears very often in these alternative spiritualities. This usually implies a harsh critique of traditional religions for considering money an evil and for portraying living a prosperous rich life as something sinful. Drawing money to oneself, having access to plentiful resources and knowing how to use them in order to realize one’s dreams represents an important component of the wider alternative spiritualities and constitutes an explicit promise of many spiritual development programs. ‘Many of our financial drawbacks are caused by the wrong way in which we think and act, Theta Healing knows how to clarify these barriers and drawbacks. You’ll learn how to have a healthier relationship with money and with successful people. You’ll understand the true definition of abundance and you’ll see how the flux of money will re-enter your life’ (Theta Healing NP, 2015).

By emphasizing the proximity with a governmentality that relies on specific techniques of the self that generate an autonomous, self-sufficient and creative subjectivity, I do not imply that behind these transformations there are networks of capitalist agents that produce ideologies meant to reify social reality which increase exploitation of work through the concealing of the mechanisms of surplus-extraction. These transformations are rather produced and re-produced by actors active in these economic sectors as coping mechanisms and as imperatives of self-transformations in order to fit into the ever expanding economic narratives of capitalism and its constitutive spirit. Although there are instances of socialization of employees through compulsory participation in personal development programs or creative expression workshops, the vast majority of programs and seminars are organized outside companies and are paid entirely by participants.

Within the wider Romanian religious field the imagination and socialization of a new type of spiritual subjectivity constitutes an absolute novelty. By qualifying this new subjectivity as neo-liberal, I have in mind the specific adjustments operated by the alternative spiritualities field in order to couple the transformation of the self with the recent economic changes taking place in those sectors that are most connected to global capitalism or to cosmopolite contemporary culture. Neo-liberal spiritual subjectivity can analytically be distinguished from traditional religiosities at two levels. First, at the level of the specific positions it takes toward capitalist transformations: it promotes openly entrepreneurial values and argues for the entrepreneurialization of all spheres of life, it links inner transformations (wellbeing, mindfulness and spiritual fulfillment) with external requirements toward productivity, it promotes the cultivation of flexibility, creativity and responsibility and seeks actively to deactivate the religious negative attitude towards money by promoting prosperity, abundance and material comfort as external signs of spiritual healing. And second, at the level of how it socializes the spiritual subject: as a self that is disposed entirely on its own inner resources, a self that is both the agent and the object of spiritual quest, a self completely embedded in an ontology of presence that cultivates spiritual self-gratification over a religious community and an ethics of self-authenticity over the moral requirement to politically transform society. Neo-liberal spirituality understood along these two registers represents the emergence and popularization of a new and radical form of subjectivity that has no precedent in the Romanian religious landscape.

Conclusions: the spiritual re-enchantment of capitalism in post-socialist settings

The field of alternative spiritualities in contemporary Romania is very dynamic and has produced a great variety of political ontologies, transformative requirements and cultural imaginaries. It is important to avoid any form of essentialization of this diversified and heterogeneous field and to prevent reducing it either to a bio-political effect of the governmentalization procedures so intimate to the post-foucauldian critique or to the false forms of consciousness reifying the capitalist relations of production as emphasized by neo-Marxist critical theories. Within this burgeoning field there are strong streams of anti-capitalist spiritualities that are very critical of consumerism, the hyper-commodification of social reality, the competitive individualism that erodes communities, the growing class-difference and the immanentization of everyday life. There is a flourishing critique among the practitioners of alternative spiritualities of the contemporary corporate world of work and a strong emphasis is set on ecological alternatives to capitalism. In some circles there are attempts to organize alternative communities and make these spiritualities an integral component of non-consumerist lifestyles and emancipatory social projects.

Nevertheless the field of alternative religions has produced as well in the past decades significant streams of alternative spiritualities that are embedded in the capitalist transformations and have generated significant instances of socializing neo-liberal subjectivities. Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) have emphasized the capacity of capitalism to internalize criticism and re-adjust its structural relations, rearrange production processes and reform the justification narratives by creating a new ‘spirit of capitalism’ that is capable of producing encompassing legitimation for the new economic regimes. By analyzing the systemic changes in managerial discourses and practices, they have emphasized the flexibility of capitalism and its creative ability to appropriate both social and artistic critiques through the re-imagination of new ‘cities’ in which the crisis and critical narratives of previous forms of capitalism are incorporated. I argue that the emergence of neo-liberal spiritualities constitutes such an appropriation and that the fusion of spiritualities with capitalism leads to a new mode of understanding of capitalist organizations.

The religious and spiritual critique of capitalism has been appropriated by the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ and incorporated in its intimate mode of functioning and has produced a new justification regime. This critique draws on both the idea of just a society (social critique) and a new form of authenticity (artistic critique) that departs from the commodification of ‘authentic’ goods and services produced for mass consumption that characterized the second spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 439). In terms of realizing a more just society the spiritual appropriation of the critique imagines a radical democratic-atomistic society in which all individuals are endowed with autonomy, creativity and have at their disposal the necessary (inner) spiritual resources to live a meaningful and abundant life. This justification regime overlaps as well with the post-socialist political critique of hegemonic communism that planned bureaucratically all aspects of life and abolished individual freedom and worth. It also recognizes the worker as the true value-creator of goods and services and as the creative source of productive labor. The spiritual critique attempts to abolishes the capital-work divide by emphasizing that entrepreneurialism is a divine quality that everyone can (democratically) reproduce and socializes the spiritual subjects to develop a managerial attitude towards the limited external resources and the wealth of internal resources and so, to pro-actively engage with the complexities of life and work.

In terms of realizing an authentic lifestyle, along the artistic critique that has accompanied all previous capitalist formations, the alternative spiritualities produces a radical criticism of eschatological religious escapism, of commodified exotic cultural consumption and of all form of magical esotericism and engages with the inner-self as the genuine site of fulfillment and authentic well-being. The realism of the inner self and the ontology of presence that brings the self to it-self and generates reflexivity of its own existential position in life constitutes a promise of self-fulfillment which is predicated upon the individual subject as the site and the agent of liberation. In doing this it attempts to embody the great emancipation claim of the artistic critique and to institute the inner self as the autonomous and sufficient source of an radical authentic existence.

The fact that this spiritualized form of capitalism that emerges at the periphery of European Union constitutes an internal criticism of earlier forms of capitalist accumulation and incorporates reformist critiques in order to make it more just and inclusive, cannot be denied. But criticism can be appropriated also in order to make way for new forms of domination and oppression and generate a new mode of capitalist accumulation that encapsulates workers and extracts the surplus value in a more subtle and insidious ways (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 425). The idea of a self-reliant and autonomous subject that relies only on itself and its inner spiritual resources constitutes an important requirement of the neo-liberal mode of governance that dissolves society and communitarian ties in favor of individual responsibility and duty of self-development. The ethics of self-authenticity and the spiritual transformation of the self as an absolute interiority where all problems are generated and where everything can be solved, can lead, and it most cases it does lead, to a de-politicization of every-day life and of the current economic inequalities and social injustices. By turning the attention to the spiritual interiority and subjective entrepreneurialism, the material externalities of capitalism are made invisible. The programs of personal and spiritual development that emerged in Romania after the financial crisis are indicative of the wider neo-liberal economic transformations and re-arrangements of work relations, managerial governance and new spirit of capitalism.