The Ideology of Inevitability

&#x{54};}he ideology of inevitability is the shock doctrine’s most powerful intellectual weapon. It operates by converting political questions—which admit of multiple answers and require collective deliberation—into technical questions—which admit of only one correct answer and require only expert implementation. Naomi Klein’s analysis identifies the Chicago School under Milton Friedman as the pioneering architect of this rhetorical strategy: not merely advocating for market reforms but establishing them as the only scientifically valid response to any economic problem, rendering resistance not as political opposition but as economic illiteracy, transforming the absence of an alternative into a claim that there was no alternative. The AI discourse has developed its own ideology of inevitability with remarkable speed: the capabilities are real, therefore the institutional arrangements currently governing the technology’s deployment must also be accepted as given; the disruption is genuine, therefore its distributional consequences must be treated as natural rather than as the contingent