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Shock Doctrine, the OODA Loop, and the Cognitive Paralysis of a Nation
There’s a reason everything feels like chaos right now. It’s not an accident—it’s a strategy.
What Trump and his enablers are doing is straight out of the Shock Doctrine playbook: create relentless crises, overload people’s capacity to process events, and then exploit the confusion to consolidate power. The goal? Keep the public in a reactive, disoriented state—so exhausted that they stop resisting.
In military and police strategy, we talk about the OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act). It’s how people process and respond to fast-moving situations. If you can disrupt an opponent’s OODA Loop—by overwhelming them with uncertainty, false information, or sheer unpredictability—you gain control. They hesitate, freeze, and become incapable of effective action.
As a cognitive scientist, I see the exact same thing happening at a societal level. This kind of sustained chaos hijacks our mental bandwidth, creating a state similar to learned helplessness—except instead of giving up after repeated failure, people stop resisting because they don’t even know where to begin. Every day brings a new scandal, a new outrage, a new existential crisis. The brain’s natural response? Shut down.
Here’s the key: once people stop believing their actions matter, the game is lost. That’s the whole point.
So what do we do?
- Recognize the strategy. Naming the tactic strips it of its power.
- Refuse to be reactionary. If we let them control our attention, they control the battlefield.
- Prioritize, focus, and act with intent. We can’t fight everything at once, but we can choose our battles wisely.
- Support real accountability. Don’t just follow the outrage cycle—demand consequences where they matter.
This is not about politics. It’s about psychological warfare. And the moment we see it for what it is, we stop playing their game.
Let’s break the loop.
#ShockDoctrine #CognitiveWarfare #OODA #ResistDisorientation
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