Doctrinaire shlock

This column was first published in Maverick magazine of 1 November 2007, lightly edited and heavily hyperlinked for your convenience. Maverick is an old-fashioned print-media business publication in South Africa that does old-fashioned things like pay writers, so if you’d consider subscribing you’d be doing me (and the magazine) an old-fashioned favour.

The nice thing about idiots and their fellow travellers is how easy they are to spot. A brilliant example is Canadian superstar, Naomi Klein.

Naomi Klein just wrote a shocking new book. It is bound to make her a fortune.

She gained a good measure of fame at age 30 by writing a sort of little red book for the Battle of Seattle anti-globalisation movement. No Logo was a bold, broad tirade against brands and their owners.

Of course, she could only “take aim” at them (in her rather aggressive term) because she could identify them. They are big-brand organisations in the first place, and their reputations make big targets for the likes of Klein. Hers was no denunciation of Maxi’s Mini Meat Market, Randy’s Rural Rod & Reel, or Sam’s Suburban Suburban Sales. She was bullying the “brand bullies”: Nike and McDonalds, Microsoft and Pepsi, companies whose very brand profile give consumers immense power over them.

Her best-selling book you’ll probably recognise from its well-designed multinational brand. It soon featured on t-shirts, coffee mugs and other merchandising. In fact, her high-profile brand is the very reason she is a celebrity and is, in all probability, a little wealthier than most of us.

The Little Gnome (I remember her name by associating it with that of Gnome Chomsky) is either a cynical exploiter of leftist consumers who don’t get the irony of her work, or she doesn’t get the irony herself, which would be both funny and a little sad.

She’s just foisted a new tome upon the world, entitled The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. Many of the usual suspects – actors, film-makers, journalists and celebrity authors – lined up to supply what Klein’s website calls “advance praise”.

“Naomi Klein has written a brilliant, brave and terrifying book,” says anti-Western and anti-capitalist icon, Arundathi Roy. “It’s nothing less than the secret history of what we call the ‘Free Market’,” she adds, labouring – like Klein – under the misconception that free people acting independently are in fact controlled by the same sort of central planning that she and Klein advocate. Of course, to bring such a political system about requires exactly the kind of terror Roy claims Klein delivers by accusing others of terrifying people into submission. Roy is no stranger to such convoluted self-contradiction: with wonderfully Orwellian phrasing, she recently called for “unitary thought against growth of … communalism”.

Since I have no intention whatsoever of reading Klein’s 558 pages of paranoia and misrepresentation, I might never have written about it. But master brand marketer that Ms Klein is – check out the professional branding job on the page promoting the book at naomiklein.org – she released a short eponymous film that summarises the thesis.

In essence, she rehashes a long-standing classic of teenage paranoia: that shocks and disasters are at best exploited, and quite probably orchestrated, by government pigs to cow the citizenry; to turn noble individualists into timid chickens and compliant sheep.

In a seductive inversion, she substitutes free market economics for the dark totalitarianism usual in dystopian fantasy. She does this presumably because she is trying to promote the sort of doctrinaire leftism that tolerates, and even advocates totalitarianism in pursuit of the socialist ideal, and ultimately causes it because theft is the only way to redistribute the just rewards of someone’s work and force is the only way to make people slaves in the service of society.

She argues that crises are excuses for foisting economic freedom on unsuspecting and unwilling people. This is then enforced by a police states that forever encroach on civil liberties. If this sounds self-contradictory, it is. The thesis that some governments abuse shocks or scares, because it creates the environment in which people become more compliant, more willing to accept authority and expanded state powers, is true. However, the notion that all shocks or scares are so abused does not follow. The idea that even justifiable fears of real threats are actually induced by those who would abuse those fears, is absurd.

Even more preposterous is the notion that governments would want to use the powers they are granted by a fearful populace to expand economic and individual freedom. Most governments, including those run by notional small-government parties such as the Tories in the UK or the Republicans in the US, find increasing government spending, augmenting government power and expanding government programmes irresistible. That an evil, manipulative government would use such opportunities to do exactly the opposite – and become less evil and manipulative – makes no sense.

Klein uses shocking images of shock treatment, juxtaposed with images of natural and man-made disasters, to advance the notion that psychiatric methods such as torture and shock therapy that are (or more accurately, were) believed to work on an individual mind, also work on the mass psychology of public consciousness. Worse, they’re deliberately used in this way.

This is not only a simplistic exaggeration, but creates a nasty sort of guilt by association: if you share the economic principles Naomi Klein criticises, then you’re probably one of those depraved people who accept the notion that the docility produced by shock therapy, or the compliance produced by electric shock torture, are not only acceptable, but desirable.

She bolsters her theory about the usefulness of shocks by perverting a quotation from Milton Friedman, the intellectual giant of the Chicago school of economics. He said: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Of course, Friedman wasn’t advocating “shock therapy”, as Klein would have us believe. The crises Friedman referred to weren’t just the shocks Klein recounts: the Iraq War, 9/11, the Asian tsunami, or hurricane Katrina. Suggesting he meant to refer to natural disasters, terror attacks or wars as desirable means to achieve economic ends, as the subtitle of her book implies (and as opposed to means to achieve desirable economic ends, perhaps), is disingenuous and I dare say rather vindictive. Friedman is no longer in a position to defend himself, having passed away in 2006 at the age of 94.

Friedman merely observed that people turn to new economic ideas, good or bad, only if existing economic ideas prove to be inadequate. People are naturally conservative and risk-averse: they prefer the status quo, unless the status quo becomes intolerable. That is just as true for free market economics as it is for Keynesian interventionism, which only became politically palatable when cast as a “New Deal” by Franklin D Roosevelt after the crisis of the Great Depression.

Klein’s film technique has been described as resembling Michael Moore without the humour. It is just as misleading about the widespread economic benefits that free markets have achieved for people everywhere, rich and poor, regardless of culture, creed or circumstances. It just as casually glorifies socialism, glossing over the poverty, misery and death that it has caused during the 20th century. But Moore can make even his opponents laugh at times, whereas Klein just drags you into her depressing, pessimistic, paranoiac world view.

She leaves you with that slightly nauseous feeling you get when you’ve just seen a good man maligned, and when you know you’ve just been the target of a patronising attempt to deceive. This merely accentuates the annoyance that her target market, suckers who are rich enough to indulge in the fashionable piety of self-deluding guilt complexes, will give her brand a lustre it doesn’t deserve.