How shocking events can spark positive change Naomi Klein
There’s a question I’ve been
puzzling over and writing about
for pretty much all of my adult life.
Why do some large-scale crises
jolt us awake and inspire us
to change and evolve
while others might jolt us a bit,
but then it’s back to sleep?
Now, the kind of shocks
I’m talking about are big –
a cataclysmic market crash,
rising fascism,
an industrial accident
that poisons on a massive scale.
Now, events like this
can act like a collective alarm bell.
Suddenly, we see a threat,
we get organized.
We discover strength and resolve
that was previously unimaginable.
It’s as if we’re no longer
walking, but leaping.
Except, our collective alarm
seems to be busted.
Faced with a crisis,
we often fall apart, regress
and that becomes a window
for antidemocratic forces
to push societies backwards,
to become more unequal and more unstable.
Ten years ago, I wrote
about this backwards process
and I called it the “Shock Doctrine.”
So what determines which road
we navigate through crisis?
Whether we grow up fast
and find those strengths
or whether we get knocked back.
And I’d say this is
a pressing question these days.
Because things are
pretty shocking out there.
Record-breaking storms, drowning cities,
record-breaking fires
threatening to devour them,
thousands of migrants
disappearing beneath the waves.
And openly supremacist movements rising,
in many of our countries
there are torches in the streets.
And now there’s no shortage
of people who are sounding the alarm.
But as a society,
I don’t think we can honestly say
that we’re responding
with anything like the urgency
that these overlapping crises
demand from us.
And yet, we know from history
that it is possible for crisis
to catalyze a kind of evolutionary leap.
And one of the most striking examples
of this progressive power of crisis
is the Great Crash of 1929.
There was the shock
of the sudden market collapse
followed by all of the aftershocks,
the millions who lost everything
thrown onto breadlines.
And this was taken by many as a message
that the system itself was broken.
And many people listened
and they leapt into action.
In the United States and elsewhere,
governments began to weave a safety net
so that the next time there was a crash
there would be programs
like social security to catch people.
There were huge job-creating
public investments
in housing, electrification and transit.
And there was a wave
of aggressive regulation
to reign in the banks.
Now, these reforms were far from perfect.
In the US, African American workers,
immigrants and women
were largely excluded.
But the Depression period,
along with the transformation
of allied nations and economies
during the World War II effort,
show us that it is possible
for complex societies
to rapidly transform themselves
in the face of a collective threat.
Now, when we tell this story
of the 1929 Crash,
that’s usually the formula
that it follows –
that there was a shock
and it induced a wake-up call
and that produced a leap to a safer place.
Now, if that’s really what it took,
then why isn’t it working anymore?
Why do today’s non-stop shocks –
why don’t they spur us into action?
Why don’t they produce leaps?
Especially when it comes
to climate change.
So I want to talk to you today
about what I think is a much more
complete recipe for deep transformation
catalyzed by shocking events.
And I’m going to focus
on two key ingredients
that usually get left out
of the history books.
One has to do with imagination,
the other with organization.
Because it’s in the interplay
between the two
where revolutionary power lies.
So let’s start with imagination.
The victories of the New Deal
didn’t happen just because suddenly
everybody understood
the brutalities of laissez-faire.
This was a time, let’s remember,
of tremendous ideological ferment,
when many different ideas
about how to organize societies
did battle with one another
in the public square.
A time when humanity dared to dream big
about different kinds of futures,
many of them organized
along radically egalitarian lines.
Now, not all of these ideas were good
but this was an era
of explosive imagining.
This meant that the movements
demanding change
knew what they were against –
crushing poverty, widening inequality –
but just as important,
they knew what they were for.
They had their “no”
and they had their “yes,” too.
They also had very different
models of political organization
than we do today.
For decades, social and labor movements
had been building up
their membership bases,
linking their causes together
and increasing their strength.
Which meant that by the time
the Crash happened,
there was already a movement
that was large and broad enough
to, for instance, stage strikes
that didn’t just shut down factories,
but shut down entire cities.
The big policy wins of the New Deal
were actually offered as compromises.
Because the alternative
seemed to be revolution.
So, let’s adjust
that equation from earlier.
A shocking event plus utopian imagination
plus movement muscle,
that’s how we get a real leap.
So how does our present moment measure up?
We are living, once again, at a time
of extraordinary political engagements.
Politics is a mass obsession.
Progressive movements are growing
and resisting with tremendous courage.
And yet, we know from history
that “no” is not enough.
Now, there are some “yeses”
out there that are emerging.
And they’re actually getting
a lot bolder quickly.
Where climate activists
used to talk about changing light bulbs,
now we’re pushing
for 100 percent of our energy
to come from the sun, wind and waves,
and to do it fast.
Movements catalyzed
by police violence against black bodies
are calling for an end
to militarized police, mass incarceration
and even for reparations for slavery.
Students are not just
opposing tuition increases,
but from Chile to Canada to the UK,
they are calling for free tuition
and debt cancellation.
And yet, this still doesn’t add up
to the kind of holistic
and universalist vision
of a different world
than our predecessors had.
So why is that?
Well, very often
we think about political change
in defined compartments these days.
Environment in one box,
inequality in another,
racial and gender justice
in a couple of other boxes,
education over here, health over there.
And within each compartment,
there are thousands upon thousands
of different groups and NGOs,
each competing with one another
for credit, name recognition
and of course, resources.
In other words, we act
a lot like corporate brands.
Now, this is often referred to
as the problem of silos.
Now, silos are understandable.
They carve up our complex world
into manageable chunks.
They help us feel less overwhelmed.
But in the process,
they also train our brains to tune out
when somebody else’s issue comes up
and when somebody else’s issue
needs our help and support.
And they also keep us from seeing
glaring connections between our issues.
So for instance, the people fighting
poverty and inequality
rarely talk about climate change.
Even though we see time and again
that it’s the poorest of people
who are the most vulnerable
to extreme weather.
The climate change people
rarely talk about war and occupation.
Even though we know
that the thirst for fossil fuels
has been a major driver of conflict.
The environmental movement
has gotten better at pointing out
that the nations that are getting
hit hardest by climate change
are populated overwhelmingly
by black and brown people.
But when black lives
are treated as disposable
in prisons, in schools and on the streets,
these connections are too rarely made.
The walls between our silos
also means that our solutions,
when they emerge,
are also disconnected from each other.
So progressives now have this long list
of demands that I was mentioning earlier,
those “yeses.”
But what we’re still missing
is that coherent picture
of the world we’re fighting for.
What it looks like, what it feels like,
and most of all, what its core values are.
And that really matters.
Because when large-scale crises hit us
and we are confronted with the need
to leap somewhere safer,
there isn’t any agreement
on what that place is.
And leaping without a destination
looks a lot like jumping up and down.
(Laughter)
Fortunately, there are all kinds
of conversations and experiments going on
to try to overcome these divisions
that are holding us back.
And I want to finish
by talking about one of them.
A couple of years ago,
a group of us in Canada
decided that we were hitting the limits
of what we could accomplish
in our various silos.
So we locked ourselves
in a room for two days,
and we tried to figure out
what bound us together.
In that room were people
who rarely get face to face.
There were indigenous elders
with hipsters working on transit.
There was the head of Greenpeace
with a union leader
representing oil workers and loggers.
There were faith leaders
and feminist icons and many more.
And we gave ourselves
a pretty ambitious assignment:
agreeing on a short statement
describing the world after we win.
The world after we’ve already
made the transition to a clean economy
and a much fairer society.
In other words,
instead of trying to scare people
about what will happen if we don’t act,
we decided to try to inspire them
with what could happen if we did act.
Sensible people are always telling us
that change needs to come
in small increments.
That politics is the art of the possible
and that we can’t let the perfect
be the enemy of the good.
Well, we rejected all of that.
We wrote a manifesto,
and we called it “The Leap.”
I have to tell you
that agreeing on our common “yes”
across such diversity of experiences
and against a backdrop
of a lot of painful history
was not easy work.
But it was also pretty thrilling.
Because as soon as we gave ourselves
permission to dream,
those threads connecting
much of our work became self-evident.
We realized, for instance,
that the bottomless quest for profits
that is forcing so many people
to work more than 50 hours a week,
without security,
and that is fueling
this epidemic of despair
is the same quest for bottomless
profits and endless growth
that is at the heart
of our ecological crisis
and is destabilizing our planet.
It also became clear what we need to do.
We need to create
a culture of care-taking.
In which no one
and nowhere is thrown away.
In which the inherent value of all people
and every ecosystem is foundational.
So we came up with this people’s platform,
and don’t worry, I’m not going to read
the whole thing to you out loud –
if you’re interested,
you can read it at theleap.org.
But I will give you a taste
of what we came up with.
So we call for that 100 percent
renewable economy in a hurry,
but we went further.
Calls for new kinds of trade deals,
a robust debate
on a guaranteed annual income,
full rights for immigrant workers,
getting corporate money out of politics,
free universal day care,
electoral reform and more.
What we discovered
is that a great many of us
are looking for permission to act
less like brands and more like movements.
Because movements don’t care about credit.
They want good ideas
to spread far and wide.
What I love about The Leap
is that it rejects the idea
that there is this hierarchy of crisis,
and it doesn’t ask anyone
to prioritize one struggle over another
or wait their turn.
And though it was birthed in Canada,
we’ve discovered that it travels well.
Since we launched, The Leap
has been picked up around the world
with similar platforms,
being written from Nunavut to Australia,
to Norway to the UK and the US,
where it’s gaining a lot of traction
in cities like Los Angeles,
where it’s being localized.
And also in rural communities
that are traditionally very conservative,
but where politics is failing
the vast majority of people.
Here’s what I’ve learned from studying
shocks and disasters for two decades.
Crises test us.
We either fall apart or we grow up fast.
Finding new reserves of strength
and capacity that we never knew we had.
The shocking events
that fill us with dread today
can transform us, and they can
transform the world for the better.
But first we need to picture the world
that we’re fighting for.
And we have to dream it up together.
Right now, every alarm in our house
is going off simultaneously.
It’s time to listen.
It’s time to leap.
Thank you.
(Applause)