The Shock Doctrine
Matt Linseman

The Shock Doctrine describes the concept of “disaster capitalism” where the “the powers that be” exploit the current social and economic systems in place to gain an advantage over the general population and in turn achieve their ultimate goal of generating any type of profit or power possible. Naomi Klein’s book describes how free market policies have come to dictate the world with the help of disaster manipulation, torturous exercises and shock of all kinds implemented upon countries as well as individuals themselves for profit and power gain.

Naomi Klein dissects this theory in her book by illustrating countless unfortunate events that have happened across the globe such as revolutions, terrorist attacks, market meltdowns, wars and natural disasters and how “disaster capitalism” is implemented behind the scenes while these events take place. “Friedman defines these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting ‘market opportunities’ or ‘disaster capitalism.’”(p6) It’s interesting because critics have been known to label Klein as a kind of conspiracist due to the nature and tone of her writing, though she does backup her arguments. She also follows the actions of a man named Milton Friedman throughout her book; she describes him as “a grand guru of the movement for unrestricted capitalism and for writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hypermobile global economy.”(p5)

The “implementers,” as I call them, are the ones that commit this exploitation and some types of executioners of this shock doctrine include: the bankers applying economic shock on their country’s economic sector, the scientists applying electric shock on their experimental patients and governments and leaders applying free market policies on their societies for their own benefit. These implementers violently destroy and silently alter the environment in which they exist for their own personal gain to make profit or obtain power by any means. This could be either through the acquisition of power, economic supremacy, human control or any other type of authority that they can even pull off. The implementers of the shock doctrine ultimately seek a blank slate on which to instigate their free market ideals, which usually requires the destruction of the existing economic and social order through several stages of shock and awe. As Klein puts it, “The history of the contemporary free market, better understood as the rise of corporatism, was written in shocks.”(p22)

Klein introduces Milton Friedman and his Chicago school of economics and refers to them as “free market evangelists” at points. She states that Friedman is no visitor to the political community because for more than three decades Friedman and his numerous supporters had been constantly improving this technique called “disaster capitalism.” He explains the many systems that he puts in place to achieve his ultimate goal of a free market, just some of which include: the reduction of government size, privatization of large portions of the public sector, and public spending cuts. “A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor, and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. The majority of the population is left outside the bubble leading to aggressive surveillance, mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture of all sorts.”(p18)

Klein also describes the resemblances between the economic shock doctrine and the physical electric shock therapy that began to be applied in the 1960’s and how certain techniques are applied by practitioners in both situations for the same reasons. She goes through the history of Ewen Cameron, an influential psychiatrist of the time, and explains his various exercises and procedures that he attempted to implement. Some experiments were successful and some were not as they included “distorting and regressing patients' original personalities,” which he was generally successful in doing, but his goal was to “develop ‘better’ personalities in place of them” and that was the part Cameron was not very successful in achieving. He tried several different techniques to degenerate personalities some of which included: keeping patients asleep in seclusion for days even weeks, delivering huge doses of electroshock and feeding experimental drug concoctions to patients. The effects encompassed pre-verbal and even infantile states “Patients had gone to Cameron seeking relief from minor psychiatric ailments, but had been used, without their knowledge or permission, as human guinea pigs.”(p34)