The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was a leading scholar and advocate in the field of macroeconomics. Friedman’s theories of what are sometimes referred to as neoliberal economics have been highly influential historically and in the present day. Friedman advocated for unfettered, “ultra laissez-faire” free markets with few or no restrictions, regulations, taxes, or tariffs (50). Friedman grew up in an upper-middle-class immigrant Jewish family in New Jersey and attended Rutgers, where Klein is now a professor. He went on to earn an MA in economics from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Columbia University. 

Friedman cited the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and his work The Road to Serfdom (1944) as an important influence on his thinking. In 1946, Friedman joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Economics Department, where he taught for 30 years. For this reason, his economic doctrine is referred to in the text and elsewhere as “Chicago School economics.” In 1976, Friedman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in neoliberal economics. He offered consultation to world leaders, including US presidents, on their national economic policies and is a key architect of the “shock doctrine.”

Throughout The Shock Doctrine, Klein is critical of Friedman’s economic theories and derisive of the man himself. She characterizes him as a kind of religious leader, describing him as “an ambitious and charismatic man on a mission to fundamentally revolutionize his profession” (50). She emphasizes the cult of personality around Friedman, noting that his supporters venerated him. She quotes one of Friedman’s influential proponents, Donald Rumsfeld, who describes Friedman and his colleagues as “a cluster of geniuses” at whose feet he felt “privileged” to study (132). 

Friedman was unashamed of courting controversy and working with violent autocrats and dictators around the world. When pressed, for example, about his collaboration with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, he insisted that he had only begun to work with Pinochet after the worst of the violence of his regime had ended, even though this was factually untrue. He remained steadfast in his beliefs until his death; as Klein notes, his last policy proposal was that the public schools in New Orleans should be privatized in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Dr. Donald Ewan Cameron (1901-1967) was a Scottish-born psychiatrist. He served as the president of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association. Cameron earned his medical degree from the University of Glasgow and studied at the psychiatric hospital at the University of Zurich. He earned his psychiatry degree from Albany Medical College in 1938. In 1943, Cameron became the founding director of the Allan Memorial Institute at the University of McGill in Montréal, Quebec. The Allan Memorial Institute both treated patients and conducted scientific research into psychiatric conditions.

As director of the Institute, Cameron had a lot of latitude in his experiments and treatment of patients. Cameron was particularly interested in the possibility that he could “wipe clean” a subject’s mind and then rebuild it. Cameron recognized that electroshock treatments would cause memory loss. He would administer repeated electroshock treatments to “reset” a subject’s brain. He would then keep the subject in a sedated, liminal state using large doses of drugs. While in this state, he would play tape recorded messages he believed the patients would absorb through osmosis. 

In the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA became interested in Cameron’s experiments, in the context of their research into psychological control and psychological torture techniques as part of MKUltra and related operations. The CIA provided funding for Cameron’s research and used his findings to inform their development of psychological operations, including the torture techniques outlined in the operation manual Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation (1963). These include sensory deprivation, isolation, administration of electroshocks, stress positions, and more.

In 1980, Cameron’s former patients began to come forward to the press about the conditions they had been forced to endure. In The Shock Doctrine, Klein interviews one such former patient, Gail Kastner, who recounts the ongoing physical and psychological problems she faces as a result of her treatment by Cameron. Cameron never faced consequences for his actions; he died of a heart attack in 1967.