I’m increasingly deliberate about the physical books I buy to add to my library these days. My bookstore browsing always involves me checking what’s available at the library before making a final purchase. And I make a final purchase more often than not! Just less impulsively. Bookstores function as an important randomizing factor in a world with algorithm-based recommendations. The human element is key.
A recent trip to The English Book Shop in Stockholm—which also reminded me that I had put Sister Outsider on my TBR—brought Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine back to my attention. I’d seen it countless times in friends’ libraries, and Klein as a journalist was already familiar to me, but for whatever reason this was the moment where I decided to actually read one of her books. And as luck would have it, it was available in English from the Stockholm library.
The Shock Doctrine is a comprehensive look at the spread of Milton Friedman’s free market philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century. I could list all of the case studies Klein takes up, but it would get long, fast. Suffice it to say that she draws on examples from all over the world. Her main thrust, however, is showing its most recent (at the time) application in the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq.
The distinctive element of Klein’s approach (compared to, say, The Jakarta Method) is her use of metaphor to frame her research: in this case, the gruesome techniques used by Donald Ewen Cameron in the Montreal experiments. The connection Klein repeatedly makes is that massive disaster (either man-made or natural) visited on an entire population is, if not the only, then the easiest or most direct way to traumatize a country enough to sneak in wildly unpopular changes—the ones she happened to focus on here with economic ones rooted in the Chicago school. Much like Cameron used electroshock therapy and other techniques in an attempt to turn his patients into blank slates upon which he thought he could rebuild them into healthy people, Klein argues, the US used the shock of these disasters to turn entire countries into blank slates upon which to build new highly privatized ultrafree market economies specifically to benefit the ultra wealthy (usually but not always located in the US). In other words, “disaster capitalism.”
She’s received criticism for this choice of metaphorical framing device, which isn’t entirely unwarranted I suppose, but personally I think the metaphor is an apt one. It allows Klein to highlight the common factors of a large number of disparate tragedies and make sense of the bigger picture and it’s also not entirely unrelated, considering how those electroshock techniques were often applied in the campaigns of violence Klein describes throughout the book. Fractal violence.
My only lingering thought, since this was published in 2007, is whether or not Klein’s attempt at optimism in the final chapter ended up being warranted. In what I assume was a deliberate choice in order to leave readers with a sense of hope for the future, she closes with developments in South America she feels will help create “shock-proof” countries and economies and lead to more just and equitable outcomes. This was a chapter written before Bolsonaro or Milei rose to power, obviously. Since there doesn’t appear to be an updated edition, for the moment I’ll just have to hunt down subsequent interviews and op-eds.
