Naomi Klein: The shock doctrine is a philosophy that has guided decision making at the highest levels of government in the United States and in many other countries. It’s a philosophy for people whose political agenda is so unpopular, they can’t impose it under normal circumstances. There has to be some sort of shock, or body blow, to a society—a war, a terrorist attack, a natural disaster—that makes people lose their footing, lose their orientation. In the aftermath of that shock, you can push through a political program that you couldn’t otherwise. That’s the central tenet of the shock doctrine, which I also call “disaster capitalism.”
Milton Friedman, the late free-market economic guru, articulated the shock doctrine better than anybody. He wrote in the early 1980s, “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” He was talking about his own ideas, the radical free-market ideological campaign based at the University of Chicago’s economics department, a campaign that could not advance under normal circumstances. He knew that first-hand: Nixon was very sympathetic to Friedman’s ideas but found that if he tried to turn them into policy, he couldn’t hold on to power in an electoral democracy. It was after that experience that Friedman came up with crisis as his solution. He was referring to economic crisis, but in the book I look at a wide range of traumas that can serve this “softening up” purpose for imposing free-market policies.
I examine three different kinds of shock: first, major cataclysmic events, like wars and terrorist attacks, that throw people into a state of total disorientation. This softens them up for the second shock, also known as shock therapy—the free-market economic policies pushed through all at once, as a sort of extreme country makeover. We saw it in Chile in the 1970s, Bolivia in the 1980s, Russia in the 1990s. The third form of shock is the literal shock of the torture chamber. I argue that torture is strongly linked to economic shock therapy, because it is when people reject free-market “reforms” that states often turn to torturing individuals, and also to terrorizing whole societies. I became interested in how these three shocks reinforce each other when I was in Iraq covering the occupation. First came the “shock and awe” attack. Then, under Paul Bremer, Iraq went from a country strangled by sanctions to just absolute Wild West capitalism. That was the second shock. But Iraqis didn’t respond the way it had been scripted. They started organizing and protesting and resisting. And when the resistance emerged, we saw the third shock, which is the body shock, the torture chamber. More here.