The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
- May 21, 2017
- 2 min read
★★★★☆
As often seems to be the case when a book makes a deep and lasting impression on me, I find it difficult to adequately capture its impact in words. My first attempt was more than a week ago, and resulted in nothing but a dozen aborted first lines. So, I moved on to something completely different—William Faulkner’s Sanctuary—and did my best to keep my thoughts about Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism from rolling around my head. I thought perhaps it had worked, but as you can tell with this rambling, stalling introduction, I’m clearly still trying to figure out if this attempt is going to fare better than the last.
The Shock Doctrine brings two books to mind: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. First, Orwell: Steeped as it was in the real-world geopolitics of the early 20th Century, Nineteen Eighty-Four was fiction that read more as non-fiction. In contrast, though deeply researched and thoroughly cited, The Shock Doctrine was filled with an endless parade of tales so fantastical and unbelievable I thought I must have been reading pure fiction. Second, The Coming Plague: Laurie Garrett’s look into fifty years of deadly diseases and viruses scared the shit out of me when I read it in 1994. While both it and The Shock Doctrine conclude with chapters emphasizing that all is not doomed, that there are yet ways for us to save ourselves from total annihilation, the net takeaway is that we are largely screwed. In the end, if corporations and plutocrats don’t manage it, the viruses will.
The downside to Klein’s book, if there is one, is this: there’s simply too much. In reporting on one economy after another—from Latin and South America to Eastern Europe, Russia, Sri Lanka, South Africa, New Orleans, and Iraq—which, in the wake of cataclysmic events, were remade entirely in the interests of foreign corporations, the resulting effect wasn’t so much rage as numbness. As the hits kept coming, it was simply impossible to sustain the anger I felt over the course of the first half of the book. By the end, having acclimated to the trauma, I was both desensitized and exhausted. But, just as it took the first victims of Milton Friedman’s free market revolution decades to emerge from the fog before they began to remake their economies in ways that put people, not corporations, first, so too will I recover and find new ways to absorb and apply Naomi Klein’s powerful narrative.
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