The Shock Doctrine

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The Shock Doctrine is an ideology that surfaced about 50 years ago and it is the idea that the government uses fear from conflicts to distract and over encumber citizens so that certain laws that would normally be denied can be legislated. This happens in the wake of disasters and conflicts when citizens are too emotionally and physically battered to put up any resistance to the laws being passed by the government. Generally the laws being passed during this time of conflict revolve around Milton Friedman’s neoliberal idea of a free market and that there should be little restrictions that surround corporations. These laws give corporations vast amounts of economic freedom and cause them and their business to economically sky rocket. The Shock Doctrine has been used to forward legislation by several governments such as; Chile, Russia, Britain, and even the United States.
Naomi Klein calls the Shock Doctrine an ideology, but what makes it an ideology. To answer this question ideology must be defined; sociologists would define ideology as knowledge that has been distorted by social, economic, or political interests. The Shock Doctrine uses the crippling capability of fear and panic to obscure the population’s beliefs causing them either to not stop or support government’s legislature that they normally would not. For example, the United States used 9/11 to push through neoliberal reforms and privatize the U.S. military, this is not a regulation that would have passed in a non-chaotic time and the government used the fear and confusion of the people to pass this reform (Klein, 2007).
The Shock Doctrine is very apparently there to benefit the upper class of societies and harm the lower class. In Russia for example, Boris Yeltsin us...

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...nfusion of her people to pass bills and laws that would otherwise not be passed.
The Shock Doctrine is an ideology that is based off of the fear and confusion of a people; it allows governments to abuse their power and take advantage of its people in a time of crisis. This tactic has been used over the past 50 years and is even being used today to pass free market neoliberal reforms. These reforms have been at the cost of the lower class and have aided the corporate class in the quest for more money countless times with prime examples such as; Pinochet in Chile, Thatcher in Britain, Yeltsin in Russia, and now currently the natural gas industry in Ukraine. The Shock Doctrine is ideology fueled off of the terror of people it gives the corporate class more power; but the question that you should ask yourself then is, do our corporations make their money off of fear?

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