Shock Doctrine

In her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism published in 2007, Naomi Klein, a Canadian journalist, explores the subject of a free market economy practices at a different angle. Klein explains how governments used the power of shock to advance their agenda, defining this phenomena as shock doctrine.

Klein refers to the radical ideas of Milton Friedman, an American economist and a Nobel Laureate, who once wrote in one of his most influential essays "only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change". Friedman's main idea was to use natural or political disasters as market opportunities in order to achieve major administrative changes.

In the video Naomi Klein created in collaboration with Alfonso Cuaron, Klein draws a parallel between CIA experiments on psychiatric shock therapy, that proved to be partially successful in distorting patients’ original personality, and an economic shock therapy that historically proved to be effective in implementing aggressive free market reforms, applying her shock doctrine to coup in Chile, massacres in China, terrorist attacks in New York and a tsunami in Sri Lanka.