Manufactured Crisis

Never let a good crisis go to waste. And if there isn't one, make one.

A manufactured crisis is an emergency — real, exaggerated, or entirely invented — used to push through policies that would face serious opposition under normal circumstances. The logic is that urgency bypasses scrutiny. When people are scared, they accept things they'd normally question. When the house is on fire, nobody argues about the water bill.

This pattern shows up reliably throughout modern history. An economic shock is used to justify privatising public services overnight. A security threat is used to pass surveillance legislation that was already drafted and waiting in a drawer. A budget "emergency" is used to cut programmes that certain interests always wanted gone. The crisis provides the cover. The policy was ready long before the crisis arrived.

The hardest part is that some crises are genuine. Real emergencies do happen, and they do require urgent responses. The question isn't whether the crisis is real — it's whether the proposed response actually addresses it, or whether the crisis is being used as a delivery vehicle for something unrelated. When the solution to a crisis conveniently matches what someone wanted to do anyway, that's worth noticing.

Panic is a poor state for making decisions. Anyone who insists you must decide right now is usually more interested in the decision than in you.

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References

• Naomi Klein — The Shock Doctrine (2007)
• Adam Curtis — HyperNormalisation (2016)