The Shock Doctrine

The Shock Doctrine a thought-provoking publication on a radical form of capitalism (neo-liberalism) nurtured by Milton Friedman as a significant economic ideology of the 19th century. The shock doctrine highlights a “doctrine” inflicted on the world by some Americans with the motives of absolute privatization, complete deregulation, free trade, and globalization.

As anything too much is disastrous, neo-liberalism confronts natural opposition from the vulnerable who counts the most on the social safety net. This led to horrible violence on both economics and human rights. It is an incident that I just finished The Psychopath Test before reading this book that it helped me to realise the work of psychiatrists in the previous century. Many of them belonged to an army of evils who thought they could brainwash people (who resist the shock doctrine) by blasting them with all kinds of shocks from electric chairs to humiliation to sensory deprivation in hopes of rewriting their brains (as teaching newborn babies). No, they failed because it only made people worse, not better.

The equivalent brainwashing method was used at the economic level in Iraq, Russia, Chile and many more with the hopes of rewriting how the society works. It is called disaster capitalism, where natural disasters and brutal violence were considerably appreciated as roads to a new start. The loop of destruction and reconstruction of the disaster capitalism becomes the breeding ground of a series of private sectors and corporations which earn a significant amount of money on the hardship of others.

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Stories in this book are abhorrent and shameful as it violates every right a human should have. Why this inhumanity happened while democracy was promoted fervently than ever? Understanding reality is a way to fight against it. Government, at the end the day, is an entity run by a few, and our lives might be depending too much on the daily decisions of those. Self-learning, we should watch them out. For the first time, I genuinely understood the term “anti-government”.