Naomi Klein's book gives the film its argument: free-market economics gets forced onto societies not through persuasion but through disaster, when people are too shocked, frightened, or displaced to resist. The film traces the idea back to economist Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, then follows it into practice, starting with the CIA-backed coup that put Pinochet in power in Chile in 1973 and the mass privatization that followed under military rule. It moves through Thatcher's Britain, the shock therapy imposed on Russia and Poland after the Soviet collapse, and the Bush administration's use of September 11th to launch war in Iraq alongside a wholesale privatization of reconstruction contracts. Archival news footage, interviews, and Klein's own narration link these episodes as instances of one pattern rather than separate stories. Hurricane Katrina appears as the domestic version, with New Orleans schools and housing rebuilt on free-market lines while residents were still displaced. The film's case rests on this claim: crisis is not an obstacle to this kind of economic restructuring, it is the method.