Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein

November 19, 2007, 4:07 pm
Filed under: Capitalism

In her new book and film, Naomi Klein suggests that the methods of shock treatment used by the CIA to breakdown prisoners in order to gain obedience and compliance can be used on whole societies in order to achieve an aggregated result. Klein’s examples include collective trauma, a war, a coup, a natural disaster, a terrorist attack. Her argument, based on Milton Friedman’s economic shock treatment, is that in times of crisis people tend to listen to leaders who claim to be serving people’s interests when in fact this moment of vulnerability provides a window of opportunity for leaders to introduce, legislate and employ draconian economic policies that would not be accepted otherwise. Klein calls this the Shock Doctrine. Klein argues that capitalist societies were built not in times of freedom and democracy but rather in times of shock.