Media Spotlight: The Shock Doctrine By Naomi Klein
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International best-selling author and prolific journalist Naomi Klein first shot to fame nine years ago with the publication of her book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which analysed the growing tide of anger being directed toward the big multinational corporations.
Klein has continued this theme with The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, but offers up a much more persuading and complex argument than the simple principle that big corporates are just plain evil.
The premise of the book is that a powerful and wealthy few, including economists, governments and company boards, have consistently seized upon the opportunities of war, natural disasters, and terrorist attacks to engineer change.
While populations are reeling from the shock, laws and deals are pushed through that inevitably weaken the masses. The idea is that countries and regions are so immobilised by shock they do not act to safeguard their interests.
Klein argues that what eventually happens as a result of this capitalist push is mass privatisation, with companies free to do what they like, while wealth remains in the hands of an influential minority.
The theory behind the book goes like this: in the 1950s a US psychiatrist called Ewen Cameron sought to curry favour with the CIA by investigating the power of electric shock theory.
Building on work by an academic rival Cameron believed fervently that the behaviour of mental health patients could be corrected by the use of intensive electro-shock treatment and potent drug cocktails. He aimed to prove that patients could be shocked so much that their senses would be in disarray, they would regress back to a childlike state and end up a ‘blank slate’ upon which doctors could write afresh.
At the same time the University of Chicago’s economics department was leading a charge to revolutionise the economy and ‘free’ the market of supposed restraints such as government intervention, state-funded healthcare, and corporate responsibility.
This was spearheaded by Milton Friedman, dubbed by the press on his death in 2006 as “the last great lion of free market economics.” Friedman believed this principle of ‘shock and awe’ could be applied to economics, using times of crisis to rewrite economies.
Klein charts how these dual principles have been brought to bear in the last 50 years. From the transfer of New Orleans’ public schools, hospitals and housing to private ownership in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to Shell and BP’s monopoly on oil in Iraq while the country was in the grip of civil war, to the Falklands War, the list of crises which have given way to privatisation and corporate rule is both endless and unnerving.
The Shock Doctrine is undoubtedly a heavy read, but a worthy one nonetheless. Klein’s arguments are compelling, comprehensive and researched so thoroughly that every other line has been referenced and facts and quotes attributed.
What is perhaps most interesting is that the flaws in this system of lying in wait for disaster are beginning to emerge.
By its very nature, the effects of shock eventually wear off. People don’t want to start afresh in the wake of disaster, but rebuild. This offers some hope even if, as Klein sums up, the public is only “building a resistance – for when the next shock hits.”
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