Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

Performing and partitioning and projecting are the individual steps that make up the dance of avoidance. What is being avoided? I think it’s our true doppelganger. What Daisy Hildyard calls our “second body,” the one enmeshed with wars and whales, the one benefiting from the genocides of the past and adding our little drops of poison to the great die-offs of the future. The second body that perpetually mines the Shadow Lands for its comforts and conveniences. We avoid because we do not want to be bodies like that. We do not want our bodies to participate in mass extinction. We do not want our bodies to be wrapped in garments made by other bodies that are degraded, abused, and worked to exhaustion. We do not want to ingest foods marred by memories of human and nonhuman suffering. We do not want the lands we live on to be stolen and haunted. We do not want the children we love to live in a world that is less alive, less wonderous, more frightening. How could we? It is all so unbearable. No wonder we work so hard to look away. No wonder we erect those walls, literal and psychological. No wonder we would rather gaze at our reflections, or get lost in our avatars, than confront our shadows.