Because I’ve Read The Shock Doctrine

The Dog Ate My Shock Doctrine

Yes, so The Shock Doctrine was the Because We’ve Read book for September, and here it is mid-May. What’s my excuse? Well, first there was a huge wait list at the library. When I finally got the book in November, I was in the middle of reading something else. By the time I finished that, I barely had time to finish the introduction before Shock Doctrine was due back at the library. My hold came up faster the second time, but the book was so dense, and my brain so resistant to economic theory, that I barely finished three chapters before it was due again.

By then I could tell that it was important for me to finish it, no matter how hard to read. Finally I bought the book on Kindle. It still took nearly six weeks to finish, and then I was so busy I couldn’t write it up until now. But I’m glad I stuck with it, because it was a paradigm-shifting read for me.

The Shock Doctrine Lens

Remember the movie The Usual Suspects? For the whole movie, you are being told a story. Sometimes the pieces of the story don’t quite fit, but you don’t have a better explanation. The speaker seems authentic and informed, and has a ready answer to any doubts raised. Only at the very end does one small piece of information, and suddenly, like a new lens slotted into place on a camera, everything comes into focus. The speaker was lying. Your initial instincts were right. Suddenly you have a new explanation and all the facts fit perfectly.

That’s what reading The Shock Doctrine was like for me.

Everything You Know is a Lie

I’ve always avoided economics because I could never wrap my brain around it. No matter how many times things were explained to me, they never made sense. Just like listening to the nuns in high school, the explanations didn’t seem to match what I saw in the world. But unlike Catholic high school, economics was science, and I couldn’t just disregard it as opinion, especially since I didn’t have an alternate philosophy to replace it with.

It turns out it was more like Catholic school than I realized. In the Shock Doctrine, Klein explained the history of economic theory. There used to be other theories. Over decades a combination of serendipity and politics resulted in the dogmatic ideas of a single academically maligned school of thought (that stood to benefit a few powerful people immensely) gained global dominance. An economic theory known as neo-liberalism or “the Washington Consensus” became the only one, denying people even the vocabulary to argue against it.

Economics is Still Hard

Getting validation that things that sound wrong are wrong – with the historical background and empirical facts to prove it – should be a liberating feeling. But The Shock Doctrine literally made me feel sick. I could only read a few pages at a time before I had to step away and do something else.

I cannot imagine an afterlife that would be any more desirable than a mortal world where people are free to make their own choices without fear of persecution. So reading about the way that cynical businesses have rebranded “Freedom” as “Free markets” was hard to swallow, even if knowledge is power.

Since the fall of Communism, free markets and free people have been packaged as a single ideology that claims to be humanity’s best and only defense against repeating a history filled with mass graves, killing fields and torture chambers. Yet in the Southern Cone, the first place where the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets escaped from the basement workshops of the University of Chicago and was applied in the real world, it did not bring democracy; it was predicated on the overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands and the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people.

The Shock Doctrine, p. 126

It’s About the Profits, Stupid

It’s not actually about the economy, unless you strip the human element from it. Massive profits do not necessarily profit people. I read Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in college, and again a few years ago. Both times, I focused on the aspect of religion, when I should have been looking at the capitalism. When Weber said, “There has always been greed,” I could not understand how that was different from capitalism. If everyone has always been after a buck, what’s so different now? Like a fish, I couldn’t describe the water.

via GIPHY

Well, part of the difference is that capitalism commodifies everything. Human life is irrelevant if it’s cheaper to let them die. Relationships are subject to cost/benefit analysis. Instead of looking after each other, we pay for housesitters, food delivery, even company. If you can’t afford to pay, you don’t deserve it. People have been complaining about that my whole life.

Capitalism vs. Democracy

What they haven’t said is that capitalism and democracy are incompatible. They say just the opposite. Capitalism is democracy, it is freedom. The only alternatives are communism (evil!) or anarchy (certain death!). When I was younger, I considered joining the State Department as a way to travel more. Since that required being willing to live anywhere, I read the Wikipedia articles on literally ever single country in the world (160-something I think at the time). If we opposed communism, why did the US interfere with democratically elected governments that were actually improving situations in their country? Why were those governments so often replaced by US-backed dictatorships in the name of democracy? (Several of these were the subject of my own Amnesty International letter-writing campaigns.)

The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system – whether political, religious or economic – that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling.

The Shock Doctrine, p15

When stated so simply, that sentence elicits a “Well, duh,” response. But I’ve never before seen it stated so simply. As a teen, I read Amnesty International case actions and was completely bemused by the motivations of torturers. Klein digs into the reasons that groups like Amnesty chose to allow those motivations to remain mysterious even while trying to fight against the actions they inspired.

But ignorance is always a handicap. Acknowledging that neoliberal ideas elevating “economic freedom” over human life were at the root of systematic torture around the world in the second half of the 20th century, whatever other messes it might have made, might have saved lives.

Then and Now

Sometimes the book feels dated. Nothing in the book references events later than Bush, Jr.’s presidency. Several pages are dedicated to the machinations Donald Rumsfeld underwent to work around conflict of interest rules. The recused meetings, blind trusts, and deadline extensions described seem almost quaint today. Now the President himself simply ignores the rules without explanation or apology. But then again, nothing has changed except the flagrancy, so the principles and patterns described in the book are every bit as relevant – and perhaps more so – today as they were when the book was published.

What’s Next

Now I’m seven months behind in the Because We’ve Read book club. I’ve had mixed reactions to the choices, but on the whole I have found it genuinely educational. After seven months, it’s tempting to just pick up with the next selection in May. But then I wonder what important ideas I might have missed in the last few months of reading. Whatever I end up doing, I’ll definitely keep reading.

Details

The Shock Doctrine
Naomi Klein
Picador; 1st edition (June 24, 2008)