Happy Halloween

Everybody's Talking

I have spent the past couple of days in the downtown core. One of the more interesting aspects of being downtown is the large number of people one sees talking to themselves. It can be quite a challenge trying to figure out if the person who is walking down the street holding a conversation with an invisible friend is suffering from mental illness or just on a hands-free cell phone.

It's A Secret

I am reading a book by John Lawrence Reynolds called Shadow People -- Inside History's Most Notorious Secret Societies. It is an examination of a variety of so-called secret societies and their place in history.

The organizations profiled are a very diverse lot. There are the usual suspects: the Knights Templar, the Free Masons, and the Illuminati. There are the criminal: Chinese triads, the mafia, and the yakuza. There are the religious: the Gnostics, the Druids, Kabbalah, and Wicca. There are also secret societies of current notoriety: the Priory of Sion and the Skull and Bones. What all of these organizations have in common is that they are reputed to have great influence and people speculate about their secrets.

Of course, my secret society is not profiled, but that is because it is so secret that nobody knows about it but me. I can only hope things stay that way, or else I will be forced to come up with a detailed pseudo-history involving the Crusades, 1st Century Christianity, at least one royal family, and possibly ancient Egypt and quite frankly I don't have the time for that right now.

Book Review: The Shock Doctrine

We live in a world that loves conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories were critical to the success of Fox's The X-Files that dominated the television scene back in the 1990s. Conspiracy theories were a critical element of the blockbuster novel The DaVinci Code. Conspiracy theories are at the heart of many accounts of the mysterious events that occurred at Roswell, New Mexico. Detective Munch's belief in conspiracy theories is a recurring element of the Law and Order character's personality. And a conspiracy theory of monumental proportions is at the heart of Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Conspiracy theories are often discounted as products of overactive imaginations and that, it seems, is the response that some critics in the "serious" business press seem to have taken when reviewing Klein's book. Having just finished the book, though, I think she may be onto something -- and it ain't pretty.

The Shock Doctrine details case after case of situations where governments took advantage of natural and man-made disasters to manipulate the kinds of whole scale economic changes advocated by Milton Friedman and the so-called "Chicago School" of economics. The changes included privatizing state-owned enterprises, reducing controls on capital, reducing wages and eliminating protection for workers, and vastly increasing the ranks of the unemployed. Although Friedman and friends argued that these kinds of economic transformations would lead to a "trickle-down" of wealth as the efficiency of the market took over from the inefficiency of controlled economies, the reality is a world where the Haves have more and the Have Nots have less.

On the whole, I find Klein's arguments that neo-liberal politicians have taken advantage of disasters to further their political and economic agenda to be convincing. I am less comfortable with Klein's assertion that the gross violation of human rights such as torture, institutionalized murder, and "disappearing" regime critics are directly related to the Chicago School's economic theory. Having said that, there is no doubt that the violations which Klein chronicles did occur after attempts to radically restructure the economies of countries as diverse as Chile, Argentina, China, and Iraq.

I must confess that at times I found The Shock Doctrine a bit depressing. Happily, the final chapter provides a glimmer of hope. Unlike many conspiracy theories, the villains in Klein's book do not have to prevail in the end.

The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Naomi Klein
Alfred A. Knopf, Toronto, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-676-97800-1

Autumn in Ontario