“I think retroactively…People know they’ve been living the Shock Doctrine since 9/11. That that shock…that that blow to the psyche was expertly harnessed by this administration to push through policies that they could not push through otherwise.” -Naomi Klein
I came across an interesting book the other day by Naomi Klein called the Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In her book, she discusses the idea that once a person is placed into a state of shock, or regression, their personal narrative becomes severely disrupted. When this disruption in their personal narrative occurs, they don’t understand the context of the event that put them into shock - and so a gap opens between the event and understanding. It is in this gap that they become highly suseptable to manipulation from outside influences.
Once you understand this about people, you can manufacture a shock or you can just wait until it happens – then take advantage of the situation for your own gain. Events that rock the psyche may or may not be orchestrated, but the doctrine – whether used by individuals or institutions, operates like a ratchet or anaconda. First you scare or find someone who is scared and then you manipulate - usually by operating a father archetype who will address the threat with a protective solution. The more shocks, the more you can fill the archetypal roll and provide solutions that benefit yourself in the name of protecting others. Think of it like psychological mining or mental slavery.
Events resulting from blowback (like 9/11 as reported in the 9/11 Commission Report on page 120) are by their nature particularly shocking. They seem to come out of nowhere because there is no narrative for us in society to place them in context – many struggled with why anyone would want to attack us (including myself) because they never really considered the covert nature and Machiavellian history of the US Government’s involvement abroad. If I’d read Howard Zinn’sA People’s History prior to those events I’m sure I’d have not been as susceptible.
There are likely to be more shocks to come. The 900+ billion dollar bailout might be one. The current/following depression (global) might be another. But something interesting is happening. People seem to be sensitizing to reducing the impact of these kind of tactics. The pattern of shock doctrine has been identified (even if only subconsciously) and I can see this newfound sensitivity all around. I think people are going to react properly poorly once they realize they’ve been taken advantage of in this manner. I am very interested to see how our centralized government opts to implement or leverage shock doctrine in the future…and how our fellow citizens will choose to respond.
Here’s Klein on The Colbert Report for the quick and dirty version:
She references some of the economic mafia tactics that the US Government has historically employed against developing nations. This caused me to recall a number of talks I’d seen by John Perkins – a self described Economic Hitman.
“Basically, what Economic Hit Men are trained to do is to build up the American empire. To create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we’ve been very successful.
“This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.”
“The shock of discovering that most of the power in the world is held by ignorant and greedy people can really bum you out at first; but after you’ve lived with it a few decades, it becomes, like cancer and other plagues, just another problem that we will solve eventually if we keep working at it.” –Robert Anton Wilson
I suppose it might be easy to lose faith and become apathetic when you’re dealing with a system that Klein and Perkins describe. However, in my opinion there is enough chaos inherent in any system to disrupt it. One of the reasons I am so fascinated by subjects like chaos, complexity, and emergence is the vast opportunity for change and growth they imply is possible.
For a quick refresher check out:
Additionally, information that would have take hours, days, and maybe even months to acquire in the past is available to us at our finger tips today. Combine this extraordinary access with the critical thinking that is required to navigate all of the noise in an information system like that and you’ve a recipe for change that is fully charged.
In Steven Johnson’s book: Everything Bad is Good for You he argues that the pop culture we soak in every day has been growing more sophisticated with each passing year, posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper. I find this to be especially true when navigating the internet. If this sharpness gets applied in the right direction, conspiracy becomes more and more difficult until it becomes obviously self-defeating (conspiracy is always self defeating but most conspirators don’t actually realize it). Johnson describes how gamers learn probing:
The player must probe the virtual world (which involves looking around the current environment, clicking on something, or engaging in a certain action.
Based on reflection while probing and afterward, the player must form a hypothesis about what something (a text, object, artifact, event, or action) might mean in a usefully situated way.
The player reprobes the world with that hypothesis in mind, seeing what effect he or she gets.
The player treats this effect as feedback from the world and accepts or rethinks his or her original hypothesis.
Put another way: When gamers interact with these environments, they are learning the basic procedure of the scientific method.
This is occurring billions of times a day and is obviously not just limited to gaming. The internet is fully engaging individuals on a perpetual and exponential basis. The evolution of ideas has entered its phase transition and it is moving faster than any Shock Doctrine can keep up with. New philosphies and world views, new technologies and methods of collaboration and cooperation all contribute to outpacing the old and slower ways of doing things. By participating in this change you’re a part of the fight against the dead idea of control whether you know it or not.
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