On the surface, Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 may not have much in common, but they've each been the inspiration for a slew of consipiracy theories. Despite the fact that both were attacks on America, many people believe that the events were instigated by the US government itself (in the case of Hurricane Katrina, people believe government officials exploded the levees themselves). The conspiracy theorists find no other way to explain the Bush administration's lightning-fast economic response to both crises.

Despite their far-fetchedness, these theories have had yet to provoke a compelling rebuttal - until now. Activist, political journalist and filmmaker Naomi Klein has spent four years in disaster zones - from Iraq to Argentina - during which time she formulated what she calls "the shock doctrine." In it she argues that the public disorientation following shocking events like Katrina and 9/11 enable governments to impose policies on vulnerable populations that would normally be shunned.

Klein's foray into the quiet rise of disaster capitalism has scared the pants off the academic world but it has some ardent fans. The book so impressed Spanish filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron that he decided to illustrate her theory in a short film. The director of 'Children of Men' coralled his regular team of collaborators - including director and son Juan - to animate Klein's ideas. The film will premiere in Canada at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7 (it can also be seen on AOL below).

We spoke to Klein about both the book and the film while she was on her way to the airport. And though she may sound like a bubble-gum smacking cheerleader, this particular cheerleader might actually be able to save the world.

What triggered the creation of the shock doctrine 50 years ago?

Chile was the first laboratory for the shock doctrine. This was in the aftermath of the coup that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende. The coup took place, interestingly, on September 11, 1973. That was the coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power. This was a notorious dictatorship - notorious for its brutality - but there was another element to the dictatorship, which was it was a laboratory for the radical brand of capitalism that Milton Friedman and Friedrich Von Haek at the University of Chicago had been theorizing about previously.

The University of Chicago had almost a cult-like atmosphere with the idea that if markets were left completely alone and were allowed to govern every aspect of life, then you would have the freest and most equitable society possible. But up until Chile this was just a theory, this was just mathematical modelling in the basement of the social sciences building at the University of Chicago. It wasn't until Pinochet's coup that graduates of that program were able to practice their ideas in the real world.

That's because the US government had paid for a group of Chilean students to come to the University of Chicago on scholarship - paid for by the taxpayers - to study under Milton Friedman and his colleagues.

They'd really been trained as ideological warriors to take on the left-wing economists that were gaining power in Latin America. These graduates were known as "The Chicago Boys" and after studying this radical brand of consumer economics they returned to their home countries and on the night of the coup this group of Chicago Boys were busily copying a document that was called The Brick. This was the economic program that Pinochet would later enforce; it was everything from privatising social security to charter schools to a flat tax. It was the sort-of wish list that Milton Friedman had indoctrinated them to believe was the best way to organise a society.

In the book I talk about three different forms of shock: the first is the shocked countries of a major disaster; the second is economic shock therapy, which is the rapid-fire economic transformations of a country - a sort of extreme country makeover; and the third happens often when countries resist the economic shock therapy and that's the shock of the torture chamber, the shock of the police baton.

In Chile you had these three forms of shock, you had the shock of the coup to overthrow the Allende government, then you had rapid-fire economic shock therapy, as it was called by the Chicago Boys at the time and Milton Friedman, and then you had this whole system enforced through state terror through Pinochet's torture chambers.

Why does this method work in completely different environments - why is it universal?

Well I think it is a fairly crude but effective means of control. The idea of exploiting moments of shock - which is what I mean by the shock doctrine - is this very human reality that after we have experienced a cataclysmic event, a sort of body-blow to our country, whether it be a terrorist attack like September 11 or a war that makes us very afraid or an economic meltdown or a natural disaster, we lose our footing. There is a gap between an event and our understand of that event; it's difficult for the human mind to process change on that scale. Also, just on a physical level, in the aftermath of disaster we are obviously focussed on the day-to-day concerns of taking care of our family, making sure that everybody is OK, mourning the dead. These are moments where it's very difficult to engage as citizens in broader policy battles. It's really just opportunism to take advantage of that dislocation to push through policies that would be impossible under normal circumstances.

Do you think that you were in the position of shock sensitivity after September 11 but made the effort to jog yourself out of it?

Yeah, I think that after September 11 there was a very concerted effort by the Bush administration and people in a lot of the think tanks who do a lot of the messaging for the Bush administration to take advantage of the

Alfonso Cuaron, director of 'Children of Men,' fell in love with Klein's book and decided to make a short film to supplement it. (Getty)

disorientation that was a natural response to an event that shocked us - to that gap between event and information that explains that event.

Good leaders, respectful leaders, would try to help people get oriented and fill that gap of information with facts. What the Bush administration did was tell people that history was starting fresh. That everything we thought we knew before September 11 no longer applied. And we started to hear these stranger phrases like "pre-9/11 thinking". That was a strategy of - rather than helping us get oriented - deepening our disorientation, cutting us off from our past. It was in that state where we were intensely vulnerable and when we look to leaders almost as paternal figures, we gave up a lot of our rights.

So much of the power in the United States was concentrated in the executive branch, you saw the normalisation of torture and you also saw radical outsourcing of power. Not only was power concentrated in the hands of the few in the government, then that few turned around and outsourced that power to private contractors. This is a radical change in the way a country is run because it limits a level of democratic accountability.

So are you one of those people who believes September 11 was staged by the US government to create an atmosphere to which the shock doctrine could be applied?

I think people believe the conspiracies because they see how expertly these crises are exploited. The reason why they're expertly exploited is because the shock doctrine is the unofficial philosophy of power at the highest reaches of the US government and governments around the world. It is well understood that moments of crisis are the best possible moments for pushing through radical economic change.

The reason why the Bush administration acted so quickly is because they were so well versed in the shock doctrine. When people saw how expertly it was exploited they came to the conclusion that they must have been behind the disaster. I'm offering another explanation, which isn't a conspiracy theory, which is saying they are ready for every crisis because they are believers in the shock doctrine.

The ideas are ready. We saw that after Hurricane Katrina when the heritage foundation hosted a meeting less than two weeks after the levees broke and came up with 32 free market solutions for Hurricane Katrina. Those free market solutions were everything from transforming the New Orleans school system from a public system to a charter system to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.

I don't think that was a conspiracy, I just think there is an acute awareness that these ideas are so unpopular that crisis is the only possible moment that the ideology can have these leaps forward.

How did you get involved with Alfonso Cuaron to make the short film based on your book?

Alfonso's office got in touch with me when he was making 'Children of Men,' they produced a short documentary to go with the film when they released it on DVD. They interviewed some of the writers whose ideas played some small role in shaping the vision of the future that they portrayed in 'Children of Men.' I did one of those interviews, so when the book ['Shock Doctrine'] was finished I decided to send it to Alfonso to ask him for a quote for the jacket. He read the book and decided he wanted to do more than give me a quote.

He really wants to help these ideas get out there. He's tremendously committed and put together his team who he's worked with on 'Children of Men' and 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' - composers, animators, set designers, his son, Jonas Cuaron, who is a young filmmaker - and they made the film for free. We had a small budget and the whole budget went into clearing archival footage so that we could show some of the key moments where the shock doctrine has been applied - the Tianannman Square massacre, Boris Yeltsin's fire bombing of the Russian Parliament, Pinochet's coup and the shock and awe attack on Iraq.

There's only so much a book can do, there's only so much the written word can do, and these ideas are so visual, they're so physical, that we really wanted to show it.

Do you think this book and Cuaron's movie will help to change people's response to shock?

I think that it's a form of disaster preparedness. I do think it can have an impact. I certainly think that my research into the mechanics of how our states of shock are exploited has made me more shock resistant. I hope that reading the book will do that for other people as well. If I didn't believe it, I wouldn't have bothered.

The Shock Doctrine, directed by Juan Cuaron