Doppelganger by Naomi Klein***

Reading Dates: 23 June 2024–02 October 2024

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World was an excellent read in many different ways: It is candid, personal, yet far reaching in its thinking, covering everything around us today – capitalism, the far right, the yoga world I am part of, the Israel-Palestine conflict … with a pinch of my favourite Freudian uncanny manifestation: the double.

Klein is clear and meticulous and her main idea around diagonalism is, I think, very astute. But I did not like the details in this book and found the first half very tedious (I am not so interested in American politics although I know how relevant they are and how much impact they have in the UK).

I found that I wanted to highlight a lot of passages in Doppelganger, and not only to help the discussion in our book group. I think the pithy quotes and insights speak for themselves. Even if I only gave it 3 stars (I would have been a more ruthless editor), I think Klein is magnificent at writing books about new ideas which are always hard and messy.

A state of shock is what happens to us—individually or as a society—when we experience a sudden and unprecedented event for which we do not yet have an adequate explanation. At its essence, a shock is the gap that opens up between event and existing narratives to explain that event.

 

A Spanish word for existential anxiety and deep gloom, zozobra also evokes generalized wobbliness: “a mode of being that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which one of those to depend on”—absurdity and gravity, danger and safety, death and life. Uranga writes, “In this to and fro the soul suffers, it feels torn and wounded.”

 

When reality starts doubling, refracting off itself, it often means that something important is being ignored or denied—a part of ourselves and our world we do not want to see—and that further danger awaits if the warning is not heeded.

 

Operation Shylock: “It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous,”

 

our world has changed, but, like a collective case of jet lag, most of us are still attuned to the rhythms and habits of the place left behind.

 

It appeared that Wolf did not want to tear down elite power structures—she wanted to enter them.

 

There is a certain inherent humiliation in getting repeatedly confused with someone else, confirming, as it does, one’s own interchangeability and/or forgettableness.

 

Doppelgangers are not the only way we can lose control over ourselves, of course. The carefully constructed self can be undone in any number of ways and in an instant—by a disabling accident, by a psychotic break, or, these days, by a hacked account or a deep fake.

 

This is what happens when we allow so many of our previously private actions to be enclosed by corporate tech platforms whose founders said they were about connecting us but were always about extracting from us. The process of enclosure, of carrying out our activities within these private platforms, changes us, including how we relate to one another and the underlying purpose of those relations.

 

As any marketing expert will tell you, a brand is a promise—of consistency and dependability.

 

Good brands are immune to fundamental transformation.

 

Good branding is an exercise in discipline and repetition. It means knowing exactly where you are headed all the time—which is essentially in concentric circles.

 

when people lose the ability to imagine the perspectives of others, or as she put it in her essay “Truth and Politics,” “making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent.” In that state of literal thoughtlessness (i.e., an absence of thoughts of one’s own), totalitarianism takes hold. Put differently, we should not fear having voices in our heads—we should fear their absence.

 

hooks believed fiercely in the power of naming systems—her recurring phrase, in defining what we are up against, was “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

 

abusing such terms is dangerous: it drains them of their intended meaning, their legibility, and their power.

 

Like so much else in our culture, from abusive labor practices to climate breakdown, the burden of pandemic response was shifted from the collective to the individual, all in the name of getting back to business as usual:

 

a human doppelganger: a person whom the world confuses with you but who is not actually you and yet can impact your life in profound ways.

 

At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.

 

I could offer a kind of equation for leftists and liberals crossing over to the authoritarian right that goes something like: Narcissism(Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right-wing meltdown.

 

… the values of the attention economy, which have trained so many of us to measure our worth using crude, volume-based matrixes. How many followers? How many likes? Retweets? Shares? Views? Did it trend? These do not measure whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, but simply how much volume, how much traffic,

 

It’s not the vaccine that has done this; it’s the stress and the speed and the screens and the anxieties that are all by-products of capitalism in its necro-techno phase.

 

their “question everything” led to many of us not questioning enough.

 

capital, a system that must enclose all aspects of life inside the market in order to mine them as new profit centers …

 

Speak in the vernacular,” the radical historian Mike Davis once pleaded with young organizers. “The moral urgency of change acquires its greatest grandeur when expressed in shared language.”

 

This, once again, is the opposite of what happens on large parts of the left. When we have differences, we tend to focus on them obsessively, finding as many opportunities as possible to break apart. Important disagreements need to be hashed out, and many conflicts that arise in progressive spaces are over behaviors that, when unchallenged, make those spaces unwelcoming or dangerous for the people they target.

 

In Operation Shylock, Roth mines the tension between the profound human desire for uniqueness and the equally powerful craving to see one’s self reflected in another person’s being.

 

not only our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces but also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor’s offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails. It was a grim, AI-enabled vision of a touchless society that would employ far fewer teachers, doctors, and drivers. It would accept no cash, and have skeletal mass transit and far less live art.

 

The effect of this constantly expanding sphere of pipikism is that it’s not just more difficult to talk about real examples of disaster profiteering or the need for a Green New Deal. Gradually, it has come to feel as if every idea of any import, every word that might express the magnitude of our moment, has been boobytrapped before it can even be uttered.

 

And from there we were all primed to dive headlong into the sea of social media non sequiturs, the scroll that scrambles the narrative structures of argument and story in favor of a never-ending thought confetti of “this” and “this” and “this” and “look over there.”

 

This was something else: a poisonous compound enmeshed with powerful notions of natural living, bodily strength, fitness, purity, and divinity—alongside their opposites: unnaturalness, bodily weakness, slothfulness, contamination, and damnation.

 

But that is to confuse the far left—which is where the socialists and revolutionaries reside—with the far-out, which is where the wellness and New Age spiritualists hang out.

 

the wellness industry’s own overarching message: that individuals must take charge over their own bodies as their primary sites of influence, control, and competitive edge. And that those who don’t exercise that control deserve what they get. Neoliberalism of the body, in distilled form.

 

The more difficult truth, though, is that this is a doppelganger story, and doppelganger stories are never only about them; they are always also about us. The literature is unequivocal. Jean Paul, the German writer credited with coining the term Doppelgänger in his three-volume 1796–97 novel Siebenkäs, defined it as meaning “Leute, die sich selber sehen” (people who see themselves).

 

the pervasive structural unwellness from which the hyperwell and insistently perfect are so clearly fleeing. The unwellness that is all around.

 

Responsible investigators follow a set of shared standards: double- and triple-source, verify leaked documents, cite peer-reviewed studies, come clean about uncertainties, share sections of text with recognized experts to make sure technical terms and research methods are correctly understood, have fact-checkers comb through it all prepublication, then hand it all over to a libel lawyer …

 

Yes, when our governments abandoned their Covid policies, we lapsed back to the crisis called “normal”—but for a time, we glimpsed another world, another kind of collective flip.

 

As Gilroy-Ware puts it, “Conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct: suspicion.”

 

You also have a second body which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales … a body which is not so solid as the other one, but much larger.

 

“Apocalypse,” in its original Greek, means an uncovering, a disclosing, a revelation.

 

Denial is so much easier than looking inward, or backward, or forward; so much easier than change. But denial needs narratives, cover stories, and that is what conspiracy culture is providing.

 

Hitler was not merely the enemy of the United States and the United Kingdom—he was their shadow, their twin, their twisted doppelganger:

 

Try to be the kind of people whose daily lives do not require the annihilation of other lives and other ways of life.

 

capitalism is a system guided by internal logics that require dispossession and exploitation

 

This is the playbook used by Trump and the other pseudo-populist strongmen the world over: throw some minor economic concessions to the base (or at least claim to do so), unleash the dogs of race and gender-based hatreds, and preside over a rapid upward transfer of wealth, alongside an authoritarian concentration of power.

 

The self as perfected brand, the self as digital avatar, the self as data mine, the self as idealized body, the self as racist and anti-Semitic projection, the child as mirror of the self, the self as eternal victim. These doubles share one thing in common: all are ways of not seeing. Not seeing ourselves clearly (because we are so busy performing an idealized version of ourselves), not seeing one another clearly (because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others), and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly (because we have partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision).

This recalls the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch’s description of observing something beautiful—whether a bird or a painting—as “an occasion for ‘unselfing.’”

 

as John Berger taught me long ago, “calm is a form of resistance.”

 

Change requires collaboration and coalition, even (especially) uncomfortable coalition.