Disaster Capitalism and the Shock Doctrine- Present at Penn State?

[erikca]

So for my culture aspects of media class, our final paper asked us to provide a solution for a problem that we have discussed this semester. The problem that I have picked is disaster capitalism, the shock doctrine, and the drinking culture at Penn State. In essence, the problem is that the government will take advantage of situations which shock the population in order to pass through policies that are unpopular and would otherwise not be able to pass. However, because the people are all shocked and struck by fear because of the situation, the policies pass through and in many cases deal with money. An example of this is September 11th. The whole nation was under shock and fear of the terrorists that the government capitalized upon both the fear and the sense of nationalism that swept the country in order to push through the Iraq War. Now, as we all know, Penn State is has a huge drinking culture, and there have been times in which this drinking culture has created unfortunate tragedies on the Penn State campus. The sense of fear, grief, and shock that is created by these tragedies, otherwise known as the shock doctrine, is then taken advantage of by the government to pass policies that most likely make money or that are unpopular at any other time. For example, this past semester, a situation occurred on Penn State's campus where a freshman boy died from alcohol-related injuries. His body was found on Penn State's campus two days after he went missing, which shocked and put the whole campus into a state of grief. For a few weeks after, all frats did not have alcohol related socials because of the grief and also the guilt that someone had died due to supplying an underage boy alcohol. Just days after the body was found, the Borough of State College attempted to pass a new ordinance in the town that would punish "rowdy party throwers" (by police discretion) up to $1000 in fines and 90 days in jail. The borough council President, Elizabeth Goreham, stated that she believed with the recent death of the student, the ordinance had a great chance of being passed. The city council attempted to use the shock that people experienced from the death in order to pass the ordinance (which was also not very detailed and has great consequence on those it is used against). It was also an exploitation on the family and on the student population. The problem that I think allows disaster capitalism and the shock doctrine to occur is the ignorance of people to these ideas.

I came up with two solutions on how to solve the problem present specifically at Penn State. The first is to eliminate drinking from the Penn State culture. However, this is rather idealistic and somewhat impossible to address, so I chose my second solution. In order to overcome ignorance, people must be informed. By using knowledge of what these concepts are, hopefully people can realize when they are being taken advantage of and be active against it. Although a small step, I feel that by writing in this blog, I am hopefully informing at least a few people of the concepts of disaster capitalism and the shock doctrine so that next time any type of catastrophe occurs, people will be able to recognize disaster capitalism occurring and not allow themselves to be taken advantage of. If only a few people are informed, that is still less ignorance in the world and maybe those few people will be able to further educate others on the concept (kind of like a "Pay It Forward" idea, only with knowledge). Hopefully I was able to explain myself well enough and someone learned something. If anyone is further interested in the idea of government (and corporations) taking advantage of catastrophic situations, check out Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" (I have a copy if anyone wants to borrow).

Thanks again for reading and if there are any comments/questions, hopefully I can somewhat help out.