Photograph Nathaniel St. Clair
In times of crisis — the current coronavirus pandemic, for instance — these sorts of calls for cooperation become the drumbeat of our daily lives. And most all of us march to that drumbeat because we understand that we do need to cooperate and help each other when crises crash down upon us.
Unfortunately, no drumbeat ever gets everybody marching in sync. In every society, some self-absorbed people will think first and always only of themselves. But these self-absorbed few, in relatively equal societies, pose no great problem. They just don’t have the means to mess things up.
In more unequal societies, we have a different story. In deeply unequal societies, nations where wealth and power have concentrated intensely, a few people do have the means to undercut the common good. These wealthy few can exploit the vulnerabilities of societies in crisis to make themselves even wealthier.
Back in 2007, Naomi Klein explored this phenomenon brilliantly in her landmark book The Shock Doctrine. Klein showed how corporate elites worldwide have repeatedly and brutally used “the public’s disorientation following a collective shock — wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters — to push through radical pro-corporate measures.”
The 2008 financial collapse would vividly illustrate the dynamics Klein so powerfully described. The Wall Street giants whose reckless and even criminal behavior ushered in that crisis ended up, after the dust settled, even bigger and more powerful than before the crisis began.
Klein sees those same “shock doctrine” dynamics now resurfacing in the coronavirus crisis.
“We are seeing,” she noted earlier this week, “this very predictable process that we see in the midst of every economic crisis, which is extreme corporate opportunism,” a “dusting off” of the corporate and Wall Street wish list on everything from cutting and privatizing Social Security — by undermining its current payroll tax revenue stream — to enriching the fossil fuel industry.