...it became clear that the War on Terror, Iraq, and New Orleans, far from aberrations, were the continuation and culmination of thirty-five years of the “shock doctrine”: the exploitation of crisis to “erase and remake the world” in the image of the capitalists’ dreams. The underlying metaphor is that of torture, of the shock treatment developed by Ewan Cameron in the 1950s, which would later form the basis for the CIA’s interrogation manuals. Cameron sought to “depattern” his patients with electroshock, to turn them into blank slates so they could be “reprogrammed” or “cured.” Klein argues that the disaster capitalists have sought to do the same — only to entire societies. snip
...Klein shows how neoliberal economics has come to dominate societies, not through a peaceful battle of ideas, but in each case, through a string of shocks: the first is a collective trauma—a coup, war, hyperinflation, or natural disaster — that leaves the public disoriented and demobilized. The second is a program of economic shock therapy–privatization, deregulation, and deep cuts in social spending–pushed through all at once before people can recover. The third is the shock applied in the secret prisons and in the streets to those who dare to resist.
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