I’ve just started reading Naomi Klein’s new(ish) book, The Shock Doctrine, and I came across this quote on page 7:
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.
There’s a lot to be thought through here, but the basic insight makes a lot of sense to me. What’s interesting is that the quote’s from arch-neoliberal Milton Friedman, in his book Capitalism and Friedman (published almost half a century ago).
I guess my reaction to it is perhaps similar to that of Stephen Duncombe when he read of that Bush advisor’s quote about acting and creating reality.
On the subject of quotes I like, a friend who knows activists in Uganda sent me this one from a community association there:
When people know their rights they become a bit difficult to manage.
I should probably mention the source of the image. It’s called Shock and Awe 1 and 2, it’s by a artist called Anne Swannell and I came across it after typing “shock and awe” into the search engine.
[...] thinking about Dave’s post on shock and awe, I stumbled over this quote which merits a post of its own. It’s from Jack Common, a working [...]
[...] is a Keynesianism but not one based on social provision. As Naomi Klein reminds us it is just such shocks as we are going through that are used to change the normally [...]