Archive for March 24th, 2008
The Shock Doctrine film short
“Only a crisis, real or perceived, produces real change” stated Milton Friedman, economist and vanguard of the free market and indeed the free market has prospered through human suffering. Friedman is a classic Conservative who believed that if one suffered, tough, one was dealt a poor lot, it is not upto society to fix the situation. According to Naomi Klein and Alfonso Cuaron there is hope for the disenfranchised even during the rule of the free market.
Hope is knowledge and communication (the basis of Enlightenment ideals – classical Liberalism) – “to resist shock is to know what is happening to you and why”. I’ve tried to believe this for a long time, but when I read of what is happening in our world and to consider the parallels of how it has happened before even within my liftime (and I’m not old), it’s difficult to believe in information as shock resistance. And hell, I’m a firm believer in informationalism, but one must have some level of entitlement, whether by birth, geographic location, migration, or availability of information. To say that information is resistance, assumes a great deal and only one that is entitled would be so careless to make that declaration. Perhaps the liberal revolution has lost to a powerful deity, one that was always with us, human nature – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride… the engines of Western civilization.