Shock as Doctrine as Propaganda

The Shock Doctrine is a fascinating short from Children of Men's Alfonso Cuaron and Naomi Klein. Fascinating because of the way it attempts to draw a serious of clear lines between therapy and torture, between psychiatric theory and military practice, between shocks to the individual and shocks to the society, and between economic policy and geo-political history. That's a lot to take on and there are a lot of ideas in there with which I am very sympathetic. As Baudrillard was once able to write about prisons and Disneyland as hyper-real simulations of modern society as a whole, now Klien and Cuaron can argue that Guantanamo and water-boarding exist to hide the fact that we as a society are all being shocked and manipulated into child-like compliance.

The film is full of pretty compelling stuff, aided by the voice-overs and the Banksy style animations, but I think it goes too far when it tries to lay the blame for all of modern history at the feet of Milton Friedman. An economist. You can disagree with his theories. You can disagree with his policy recommendations. But do you really want to grant him so much power that he becomes some sort of cult-overlord, secretly pulling the strings of the last 50 years? C'mon.

It's at this point that you realize that the black helicopters are circling and this thing is either knowingly loopy and paranoid in the old Illuminatus! style or it is just plain intellectually dishonest in is attempt to undermine the notion of free markets. What we have here is a very slippery, very appealing kind of propaganda. It's very cool in a Che Guevara t-shirt sort of way, but its propaganda nevertheless.

The other thing that bothers me about the film is that in its rush to lay the blame for all the world's problems at the feet of conservatism, militarism, and capitalism through the network of these theories and practices, it inadvertently validates them. For all the things in the movie to be true, you must have an unquestioning faith in the effectiveness of both the theory and the practice. The notion of a shock and stress must be real, torture has to work, and the masses must be easy to manipulate. But in fact, shock treatment was a pretty questionable therapy, torture is more a playground for sadists than a productive means of gathering information, and far from the mass hysteria implied in post-9/11 America, its been the people who have been way ahead of the press and the politicians in their skepticism and clear thinking.

It doesn't require a grand, unifying conspiracy theory to explain human behavior. A basic everyday awareness of greed, meanness and idealism ought to be enough. So it seems to me that the last thing you want to do is imply that Friedman's economic policies married to neo-Conservatism actually works. Instead, you need to show how these activities are ultimately dysfunctional, self-defeating, and self-destructive. You have to show that what seems all-powerful and hegemonic in the short-term is doomed, like Ozymandius, in the long term. The hegemons have feet of clay, and eventually they will run out of the wealth and social capital as surely as they will run out of bullets and oil.

[Via: Ectoplasmosis]