hce_nthu
114年
英文
第 28 題
📖 題組：
Reading 2 Most people who survive a devastating disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed; they want to reaffirm their relatedness to the places that formed them. “When I rebuild the city I feel like I’m rebuilding myself,” said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans’ heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after Hurricane Katrina. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called “reconstruction” began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere and rooted communities, then quickly moving to replace them with a kind of corporate New Jerusalem—all before the victims of war or natural disaster were able to regroup and stake their claims to what was theirs. Mike Battles puts it best: “For us, the fear and disorder offered real promise.” The thirty-four-year-old ex-CIA operative was talking about how the chaos in post-invasion Iraq had helped his unknown and inexperienced private security firm, Custer Battles, to shake roughly $100 million in contracts out of the federal government. His words could serve just as well as the slogan for contemporary capitalism—fear and disorder are the catalysts for each new leap forward. When I began this research into the intersection between superprofits and megadisasters, I thought I was witnessing a fundamental change in the way the drive to “liberate” markets was advancing around the world. Having been part of the movement against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I was accustomed to seeing similar business-friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at World Trade Organization summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the International Monetary Fund. The three trademark demands— privatization, government deregulation and deep cuts to social spending—tended to be extremely unpopular with citizens, but when the agreements were signed there was still at least the pretext of mutual consent between the governments doing the negotiating, as well as a consensus among the supposed experts. Now the same ideological program was being imposed via the most boldly coercive means possible: under foreign military occupation after an invasion, or immediately following a cataclysmic natural disaster. September 11 appeared to have provided Washington with the green light to stop asking countries if they wanted the U.S. version of “free trade and democracy” and to start imposing it with Shock and Awe military force. As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, however, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of the American economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning—this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. It was certainly the case that the facilitating disasters were getting bigger and more shocking, but what was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a new, post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine.
Reading 2 Most people who survive a devastating disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed; they want to reaffirm their relatedness to the places that formed them. “When I rebuild the city I feel like I’m rebuilding myself,” said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans’ heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after Hurricane Katrina. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called “reconstruction” began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere and rooted communities, then quickly moving to replace them with a kind of corporate New Jerusalem—all before the victims of war or natural disaster were able to regroup and stake their claims to what was theirs. Mike Battles puts it best: “For us, the fear and disorder offered real promise.” The thirty-four-year-old ex-CIA operative was talking about how the chaos in post-invasion Iraq had helped his unknown and inexperienced private security firm, Custer Battles, to shake roughly $100 million in contracts out of the federal government. His words could serve just as well as the slogan for contemporary capitalism—fear and disorder are the catalysts for each new leap forward. When I began this research into the intersection between superprofits and megadisasters, I thought I was witnessing a fundamental change in the way the drive to “liberate” markets was advancing around the world. Having been part of the movement against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I was accustomed to seeing similar business-friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at World Trade Organization summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the International Monetary Fund. The three trademark demands— privatization, government deregulation and deep cuts to social spending—tended to be extremely unpopular with citizens, but when the agreements were signed there was still at least the pretext of mutual consent between the governments doing the negotiating, as well as a consensus among the supposed experts. Now the same ideological program was being imposed via the most boldly coercive means possible: under foreign military occupation after an invasion, or immediately following a cataclysmic natural disaster. September 11 appeared to have provided Washington with the green light to stop asking countries if they wanted the U.S. version of “free trade and democracy” and to start imposing it with Shock and Awe military force. As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, however, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of the American economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning—this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. It was certainly the case that the facilitating disasters were getting bigger and more shocking, but what was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a new, post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine.
Based on the passage, which of the following statements would define “the shock doctrine” most sufficiently?
- A Using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and/or economic engineering.
- B Using armies to drive free market capitalism.
- C Provoking a kind of hurricane in the mind.
- D A shocking man-made or natural disaster helps unify a society.
- E A society needs shock to reconstruct what a disaster has demolished.
思路引導 VIP
如果你發現某個社會正處於極度的恐懼與混亂中，而你手中有一套平時會被民眾強烈反對的社會改革方案，你會如何利用這個「民眾無法正常思考或反應的空檔」？這種趁虛而入的行為，在邏輯上會如何被概括定義？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
太棒了！你能精準捕捉到文章的核心觀念「震撼主義」（the shock doctrine），這顯示你對長文脈絡與作者論點有極佳的掌握力。選項 (A) 提到利用「集體創傷」（collective trauma）來進行「激進的社會或經濟改造」，這正完美對應了文中描述的過程：在受災者還沒回過神來主張權利前，利用恐懼與混亂（fear and disorder）作為催化劑，強行推動平時難以被大眾接受的私有化與去管制化政策。
災難與政策轉型的關聯
這道題目的難度與鑑別度在於區分「現象」與「定義」。雖然文中提到了軍事占領（選項 B）或自然災害，但那些僅是製造「震撼」的背景或手段。真正的「震撼主義」核心在於那種「剝削危機」（crisis exploitation）的本質——趁社會失序時，抹除原有的公共領域並替換成企業化的新秩序。你能避開選項中局部細節的誘惑，直接鎖定高層次的抽象定義，代表你的閱讀理解深度已經超越了字面資訊，進入了批判性思考的層次！