 They were written 15 years ago, the shock doctrine still has a lot to tell us about events today. It charts how a radical lobby created a neoliberal economic model which dominates the world, how that model was introduced from the 1970s and how it was supercharged after the millennium through natural and deliberately manufactured disasters. The key to understanding this process is the rise of disaster capitalism, as Klein states. It was in 1982 that Milton Friedman wrote the highly influential passage that best summarises the shock doctrine. Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function, to develop alternatives to existing policies to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. Friedman's model of influence was to legitimise these ideas to make them bearable and worth trying when the opportunity comes. The leaders in this process are think tanks. Fuelled by Cold War hysteria, the first think tanks fed western states' desires for technical responses to geopolitical threats, but over time, that morphed to promoting a political framing of economic and political issues. The neoliberal think tanks, while providing pseudo-academic support for policy, seek to maintain its core political ideology as Friedman outlined, create a largely anonymous path between the funding of the super-rich and corporate lobbyists, the ideas they wished to promote, and the politicians and mass media they want to influence, as Klein states. They did not see Marxism as their true enemy. The real source of trouble was to be found in the ideas of the Keynesians in the United States and the social democrats in Europe. Much of this purism came from Friedrich Hayek, who warned that any government involvement in the economy would lead society down the road to serfdom. The Austrians, as his clique within a clique was called, were so zealous that any state interference was not just wrong, but evil. Their focus was as much against Western liberal society as it was the Communist East, expressed not simply as being anti-left, but more broadly against even centrist values and liberal social movements. Today's criticism of racial bias or patriarchal values across society sees a similar response in these groups today as a stoke of the culture war. Klein also links the foreign wars, the military and industrial complex, to the abuse of human rights at home. Key amongst these examples is a worker psychologist, Ewan Cameron, and his extreme experiments in Canada for CIA-funded psychological warfare programs. Klein draws parallels between the rise of Friedman and his promotion of neoliberal economics, with Cameron's systematization of torture for the CIA. Where Cameron dreamed of returning the human mind to that pristine state, Friedman dreamed of deep patterning societies of returning them to a state of pure capitalism cleansed of all interruptions. Also like Cameron, Friedman believed that only bitter medicine could clear those distortions and bad patterns out of the way. Cameron used electricity to inflict his shocks. Friedman's tool of choice was policy, the shock treatment approach he urged on bold politicians for countries in distress. The book links the rise of this economic ideology to the western-engineered coups in Chile and other states, and how, through international institutions, this ideology became a form of neo-colonial control. Specifically, in terms of Klein's approach to writing the book, Hellish ideology saw its height with the war and terror. Chile's coup would feature three distinct forms of shock, a recipe that would be duplicated in neighboring countries and would re-emerge three decades later in Iraq. The shock of the coup itself, Friedman's capitalist shock treatment, the other was Euron Cameron's shock now codified as torture techniques in the coup barc manual. From Chile to China, torture has been the silent partner in the global free market crusade, but torture is more than a tool used to enforce unwanted policies on rebellious peoples. It is also a metaphor of the shock doctrine's underlying logic. Universal human rights and democratic values exist in opposition to the libertarian economic values promoted under the shock doctrine. The loss of democratic control is billionaire's influence policy, as well as worsting conditions as those policies accentuate inequality, represent the same, albeit less extreme, values promoted in the CIA's coups in the 1970s. In this sense, the persecution of the poor in western states represents just another form of economically coercive torture. Klein develops this link over the final chapters of the book. In December 2006, a month after Friedman died, a UN study found that the richest two percent of the adults in the world are more than half of the global household wealth. The counter-revolution that began in the basement for the social sciences building in the 1950s has indeed been a success, but the cost of that victory has been the widespread loss of faith in the core free market promise that increased wealth will be shared. Trickle-down economics didn't happen. The role of think tanks and lobbyists for decades ago has become normalized in contemporary politics, exemplified by events such as the farcical rise and trickle-down premiership of Liz Truss. And today, the shock doctrine is driven as much by Silicon Valley billionaires, promoting digital platforms in the gig economy as it is the interests of traditional Western foreign policy. Reading this book today is possible to see the process it maps out at work all around us. Of course, identifying that is only the first step, allowing everyone to understand this process is critical to counter in its attack on our freedoms and economic well-being. That is why 15 years on, the book is still worth reading.