The Shock Doctrine (ENGLISH) - FULL DOCUMENTARY : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

The speaker discusses the state of shock as a disorientation from losing one's narrative, emphasizing how history can provide orientation during crises. Historical context is used to set the stage for discussing past and recent upheavals.

The narrative begins in 1951 at a secret meeting in Montreal, leading to experiments on sensory deprivation at McGill University. These experiments highlighted the effects of monotony and deprivation on critical thinking, unsuspectingly opening doors to weaponizing such methods.

Dr. Ewen Cameron's work at McGill extended these experiments by using patients without consent in extreme forms of mental regression methods, resembling prison-like settings. These unethical practices influenced CIA interrogation techniques for inducing compliance through psychological shock.

Simultaneous to Cameron's experiments, Milton Friedman was advocating for economic shock therapy, a concept of transforming societies with radical free-market policies, later connected with the U.S. government's economic maneuvers, emphasizing the role of crises in instigating change.

Friedman's opposition to the New Deal by Roosevelt highlighted a long-standing ideological battle between government-regulated economies versus free-market capitalism, which played out globally as countries adopted or resisted these radical economic policies.

The story transitions to Chile, where Friedman’s disciples applied economic shock therapies under Pinochet’s regime, seen as a test bed for extreme neoliberal policies enforced through military dictatorship, exposing stark contradictions between promised freedoms and harsh realities.

The Chilean narrative illustrates the brutal economic transformations labeled as successful reforms while linked directly to severe human rights abuses, illustrating the darker side of implementing such economic visions often requiring authoritarian enforcement to maintain control.

As the Chilean model spread, similar patterns emerged in Argentina under military juntas, where economic experiments demanded social reengineering that often resorted to enforced disappearances, reflecting the recurring theme of using authoritarianism to implement radical economic changes.

These South American experiences exposed the fallacy of equating free-market reforms with freedom, as military dictatorships were used to silence opposition to the severe economic disparities these policies created, contradicting the claimed benefits of neoliberalism.

This section explores how domestic U.S. policies briefly contradicted free-market reforms, notably under Nixon who, despite ties to economic advisors from Chicago School, used temporary Keynesian measures to stabilize the economy, an anomaly in the broader neoliberal agenda.

Thatcher and Reagan embraced radical neoliberalism, wholeheartedly applying free-market doctrines which resulted in significant disparities of wealth, leading to widespread public discontent despite efforts to portray these policies as routes to freedom and prosperity.

Shock Doctrine analysis reveals the dependency of neoliberal policies on inducing crises to enact radical economic transformations. This period marks a significant shift as Thatcher and Reagan set precedents with implications observed worldwide, facilitating the spread of these policies.

Post-Cold War, neoliberal globalization accelerated, marked by dramatic economic reforms across Eastern Europe, often under duress. The ideology promised prosperity but overwhelmingly revealed itself as a vehicle for wealth concentration and systemic exploitation.

Russian reforms led by Yeltsin echoed past neoliberal implementations, marred by severe economic disruptions and social inequalities, characterizing the period of shock therapy as a chaotic, highly unequal transformation driven by external ideological pressures.