Could a unified theory of modern life really be this simple/scary? (quick vid)

http://www.naomiklein.org/main

by NSX2 • 18 years ago

7 39 18 years ago

This is a the site of an author of a book. I am in no way affiliated with this site, the author or the publisher of the book. I have not read the book, it was just recommended to me and I came across the link when I Googled it.

On the left side you'll notice an embedded YouTube video; it is about 6 minutes. I've watched it and although it is, to say the least, a bit propoganda-ish, at the same time something about the proposed thesis intuitively struck me as neatly explaining the mess that we've all collectively experienced over the last few decades in general and the last 7 years or so in particular.

It's almost like I sensed the thesis proposed, but I couldn't quite figure out how to quite express it.

Again, I haven't read the book yet, and so I hold no particular opinion on it either way, but if the book is anything like what I imagine it based on the YouTube video, at the very least it would be one of the more original things I've read in a while (I tend to read a lot).

I'd be interested on anybody's feedback if you care to invest 5-6 minutes to watch the video.

NSX216• 18 years ago

This is the site of an author of a book. I am in no way affiliated with this site, the author or the publisher of the book. I have not read the book, it was just recommended to me and I came across the link when I Googled it.

It's almost like I sensed the thesis proposed, but I couldn't quite figure out how to quite express it.

I'd be interested on anybody's feedback if you care to invest 5-6 minutes to watch the video.

DavidBlack• 18 years ago

I've just watched the video.

Naomi Klein (the author) is a respected and thoughtful academic. Her previous book ('No Logo') was well received around the world.

The ideas she presents here are obviously true:

Governments and corporations are colluding to exploit the poor and powerless by profiteering from disaters (natural or man made).

They get away with it by doing it at moments of national or global crisis, when the voting public has been shocked into momentary helplesness by disasters such as 9/11 or the recent tsunami in Southeast Asia.

NSX216• 18 years ago

It seems you've read the book, then?

I could be wrong, but from what you're saying / what I saw on the video there's a strong implication, I'm wondering - if you read the book, is it actually stated, inferred, hinted, ignored, etc.:

In other words, if it benefits policy-makers/corporations to have a disaster - political, natural, economic, etc. - as a prelude to shoving massive change that would otherwise be unnacceptable in nature or scope while people are too busy recovering from disaster, well, does that mean then that policy-makers/corporations would have a strong incentive to actually invest in the creation of the disasters?

In other words, since businesses are based on plans and plans are based on predictability, why wait for "nature to take her course?" when you could "push the hand" to setup disasters to get the scenario that would most likely benefit your company's particular "market solution"?

yters• 18 years ago

They do this in Michael Crichton's "State of Fear."

davidw5• 18 years ago

I'm pulling the emergency "send it back to reddit" handle on this story/thread!

NSX216• 18 years ago

You know, for a guy whose post-history seems like a random sampling of Yahoo News and Economist articles, most of which have nothing to do with anything interesting, you're a bit snobby. If I had the power to "pull the emergency send it back to reddit" handle on your stories, well, your submissions would be reduced by 80%.

joe24pack• 18 years ago

Anyone remember how quickly the gargantuan "Patriot Act" suddenly appeared just after the September 11th attacks? I know it sounds very tinfoil hat-ish, but I figure the "Patriot Act" was written long before those attacks that supposedly precipitated it.

NSX216• 18 years ago

Good point. A few years back I was keeping track of this site that kept track of all the "executive orders" that were being signed post 9.11.

The first half year later they had a thorough analysis of each executive order.

Soon so many executive orders, each more disturbing than the last, were being signed that they gave up analyzing them completley and just had quick summaries.

Then soon they couldn't keep up and just listed them with links to info obtained by freedom of information orders.

In 2004, they were "executive ordering" at the rate of about 30,000 new pieces of "emergency legislation" per year and the site just shut down, unable to keep up.

NOW YOU JUST KNOW that dude from Texas isn't penning 30,000 pieces of legislation per year. Heck - with all the vacationing, it's a wonder he even gets to sign it all.

Seems like you're right - all these things were prepared way in advance, just waiting for an opportunity.

klein_waffle2• 18 years ago

It's not tinfoil-hatish at all! People in Washington would be very bad at their jobs if they waited for a favorable opportunity before writing up policies and laws. You never know, tomorrow there might be a presidential sex scandal and you can get your proposal funded in exchange for your steadfast support.

The fact that the Patriot Act was drafted quickly proves that there is a security establishment, waiting to pounce on opportunity. It doesn't prove that 9-11 was somehow caused by such a group.

asdflkj3• 18 years ago

This is an ad hominem attack on the free market. "It wasn't born in freedom and democracy", therefore it must be bad. She makes the laughable assumption that the majority of people know what's good for them. 2004 election proves otherwise.

NSX216• 18 years ago

Ad hominem attack? How is it an ad hominem attack? An ad hominem attack means you can't argue with the thesis so you personally attack the person putting forth the thesis in attempt to discredit the logic of the arguement by attacking the credibility of the person making it.

"It wasn't born in freedom and democracy, therefore it must be bad."

That's nowhere near an ad hominem. And basica logic would tend to indicate that if there are 2 sets of mutually exclusive, bad and good value conditions, "not good set" would tend to leave "bad set" as the only remaining possibility.

Also when you say, "She makes the laughable assumption thta the majority of people know what's good for them", you kind of tend to implicitly agree with her thesis. It's almost like you're suggesting that everybody is an idiot, therefore everyone needs a big-brother type group making problems and then exploiting the resulting panic to shove solutions down everyone's throat because left to their own devices, people don't know any better.

asdflkj3• 18 years ago

Her main thesis is that free market capitalism is bad. She doesn't try to disprove that free market capitalism is good. Instead, she attacks the character of famous proponents of it, by suggesting that they forced their will upon the unwilling populace. That's ad hominem.

I neither agree nor disagree with her about this last part, because I don't know enough about it. But I give her the benefit of the doubt.

The only way her argument could be not an ad hominem is if there was a causal link between the merit of the idea she is attacking and the populace's willingness to accept it. All I was trying to say is that there is no such link. I am not offering any solutions; just pointing out bad logic.

Tichy6• 18 years ago

Bullshit!

Of course politicians use certain tools to control the emotion of the people (start a war, raise the price of beer, whatever), but that has nothing to do with free markets. The movie just mixes together totally unrelated things and claims a connection - in that way actually doing the same thing it proposes: showing shocking pictures to make people believe anything.

So who is Naomi Klein, a Super-Communist? I haven't read her books, and now I guess I never will.

andreyf• 18 years ago

but that has nothing to do with free markets

The connection they make is that Milton Friedman was the one making the (for the authors) convenient connection between shock and change. The "crisis - real or perceived" quote sounds pretty condemning.

You are right to point out that this is not an argument against his economic policies (which are assumed to be bad), but against how he suggested they be implemented.

Tichy6• 18 years ago

I don't know much about Milton Friedman, but I can't imagine his main suggestion was to push things into a crisis to bring about change. You don't become one of the most economists with such a thesis.

Rather, I suspect that the quote was taken out of context or blown out of proportion. You can find something weird to quote from anyone. I am sure you could find a quote by Paul Graham and work it into that video to replace the Miltion Friedman quote, for example.

NSX216• 18 years ago

I'm not sure I understand; you start off with "Bullshit!" and then go on to say, basically, "Of course what is implied in this theory happens all the time."

I don't think she is "attacking free markets" ... free markets suggest a democratic adaption of free market solutions. I think she's basically saying, in one way or another, that recent economic developments/failed developments are anything BUT free market developments; they are, as presented here, things that would never actually work in a free market society but rather have been shoved down everyone's throats while they were too busy trying to survive a disaster to actually participate in a free market.

So I don't see it as an attack on the free market system as much as a suggestion that much of what is heralded as free market solutions are anything but - rather they are force-fed solutions imposed undemocratically by a small cross-section of society which stands to benefit from whatever "solution" they offer to a crisis.

In other words, I think she's saying that most "free market" cheerleaders don't really seem to believe in free markets themselves and instead seem to believe that a small, centrally-organized group should centrally manage market systems (ie, communism) by exploiting people's weakness, fear, trauma, insecurities after a disaster.

"The movie just mixes togetehr totally unrelated things and claims a connection."

Not really. It proposes a hypothesis based on a verifiable doctrine proposed by a very influential person and then looks at the last few decades of history and tries to see if it can fit that hypothesis, which it seems to do very well, then it suggests that this doctrine is, in effect, an unspoken aspect of modern life.

To the extent that it can PREDICT economic phenomena, then that connection is very real.

I for one think the next time there is a natural disaster like a tsunami or something, people suffering the most will most likely be ignored while governments and corporations will rush to make development deals for luxury high rises, hotels, shopping malls, casinos, etc with no opposition from people too busy trying to survive to put up opposition.

"So who is Naomi Klein, a Super-Communist?"

It's funny you say that when all she's basically saying is that most people in the public eye cheerleading capitalism are actually behaving more like communists themselves ...

Tichy6• 18 years ago

"Not really. It proposes a hypothesis based on a verifiable doctrine proposed by a very influential person and then looks at the last few decades of history and tries to see if it can fit that hypothesis, which it seems to do very well, then it suggests that this doctrine is, in effect, an unspoken aspect of modern life."

You saw all that in a five minute video? I didn't see much science in it. 90% was just showing pictures of torture videos or war bombings. If you think that amounts to verifying a hypothesis, I don't know what else to say (where is the example of societies that didn't change without a crisis?). It is exactly what I hate about that kind of videos: they exploit a weakness of the mind to connect unrelated things, to make you believe that connections exists where they don't. TV and videos are doing that all the time, but the case here was one of the more extreme ones.

As I said, of course politicians and power people are playing their game, and exploiting psychology is surely a part of it. I just don't see any connection to free markets, that is what I take issue with.

mercurio• 18 years ago

No.

Excedrin• 18 years ago

The style of this video reminded me of Adam Curtis' The Century Of The Self and The Trap - What Happened to our Dream of Freedom perhaps with a little Michael Moore sensationalism mixed in, but I'm not sure if that's enough of a reason to buy and read the book.

klein_waffle2• 18 years ago

I think the analogy to torture is a little bit stretched but there's nothing controversial about the underlying facts.

1) there is a consensus among the global business elite, and some of the government elite, about how things ought to be run: Western-style democracy with the flow of goods and capital as unrestricted as possible.

1b) Partially this is self-interest, and partially it's a belief in a near-Randian libertarianism that has become dogma in the American right, despite it never having been really tried. (Because they can't get their agenda implemented in stable democracies). In this philosophy, government is a parasite that first feeds off of, and then strangles, the true activity of free people: business.

2) But almost no country believes in doctrinaire free markets, especially poor ones struggling to develop a mixed economy.

3) When great crises arise, these government and business elites are needed to funnel money and talent. They use the opportunity to advance their agenda.

3b) In certain cases, they don't mind making crises, and will even make them worse, in the belief that the world will then reorder itself to the state they deem to be natural and good, where markets rule.

The extreme version of this is Iraq, where planners seemed less concerned about providing stability than free markets.

An even more insidious form: see the documentary "Our Brand is Crisis". You will see American consultants considered to be left-wing, like James Carville, manipulating a crisis in a Third World country to elect a leader whose faith in the market is not shared by the public.

This is all caused by people who are good and nice and believe they are helping the countries involved. No conspiracy theory required.

Could a unified theory of modern life really be this simple/scary? (quick vid)

Related Stories