Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

The world is spiraling out of control, they will tell themselves. Surely my kids deserve a competitive edge. Or as Bill McKibben said to me recently, “Instead of figuring out how to have a world where everyone can thrive, they want their kids to thrive in a world that is falling apart.”

Calm is not a replacement for righteous rage or fury at injustice, both of which are powerful drivers for necessary change. But calm is the precondition for focus, for the capacity to prioritize. If shock induced a loss of identity, then calm is the condition under which we return to ourselves.

conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right—the feeling of living in a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden. The word for the system driving those feelings starts with c, but if no one ever taught you how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Big Macs and playing by the rules to get the life you deserve, then it’s easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy.

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.

culture, language, science, and economy are no protection against genocide—all it takes is sufficient military force wielded by a power willing to denounce your culture as savage and declare you brutes. That is the story of colonial violence the world over. Casting people as unattached to land—because they practice a different form of agriculture, because they move with the seasons, whatever story served the end goal—has always been a precursor to genocide. Jews were declared “rootless” before they were slaughtered, much as colonial powers had declared Indigenous peoples nomadic and therefore uncivilized as a prelude to stealing their land on pain of annihilation on every continent on the planet.

It’s all so Freudian. The fear that it will happen to them stems from an implicit admission that they did it to others. As though the Black, Brown and Indigenous downtrodden are just as hateful as they are and are going to turn around and do to them what they did to us.

“It’s re-traumatization, not remembering. There is a difference.” When she said it, I knew it was true. Remembering puts the shattered pieces of our selves back together again (re-member-ing); it is a quest for wholeness. At its best, it allows us to be changed and transmuted by grief and loss. But

re-traumatization is about freezing us in a shattered state; it’s a regime of ritualistic reenactments designed to keep the losses as fresh and painful as possible.

Contradictions like these don’t fit comfortably within the usual binaries of anti-imperialism (colonizer/colonized) or the binaries of identity politics (white/racialized)—but if Israel-Palestine teaches us anything, it might be that binary thinking will never get us beyond partitioned selves, or partitioned nations. None of this is intended as an apologia for Israeli settler colonialism. Rather, it is an attempt, as the British scholar Jacqueline Rose put it regarding her book The Question of Zion, to “go into the mindset of Zionism without blocking the exit.”

If the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

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).

we are all trapped inside economic and social structures that encourage us to obsessively perfect our minuscule selves even as we know, if only on a subconscious level, that we are in the very last years when it might still be possible to avert an existential planetary crisis.

We are here not just to make sure we as individuals survive, but to make sure that life survives; not to chase clout, but to chase life.

“We can be hard and critical on structures, but soft on people,” says the civil rights scholar john a. powell. That is the opposite of the discourse that dominates today, the one that is so very hard on people and far too soft on structures. The shift to confronting and reimagining structures requires something else: a recognition that this work is not something we can do on our own, as individuals, with a charity donation or an equity and diversity training, or a performance of virtue on social media.

when individual renters or debtors or workers can’t pay the bills, it’s a crisis for them and their families. When groups of renters or debtors or workers refuse to pay the bills, or decide to jointly withhold their labor, it’s a crisis for their creditors, their landlords, and their bosses. This is the power of collective organizing: it expands the sense of the possible by expanding the possible “we.” It persuades participants that, contrary to what they have been told, their pain is not the result of a failure of character or insufficient hard work. Rather, it is the consequence of economic and social systems precisely designed to produce cruel outcomes, systems that can be changed only if people drop the shame and unite toward a shared goal.

A Struggle Between Care and Uncare The question I am left with is not the one I hear so frequently about her: How did a person like that turn into a person like this? But: What kind of system is most likely to light up the best parts of all of us—and sustain the fire beyond a protest, or a summer uprising, or a presidential campaign? “I believe the starting point for building a more caring society,” writes Sally Weintrobe, a psychoanalyst who specializes in the climate crisis, “is never forgetting that care and uncare are inherent parts of us all, and that each seeks expression and dominance over the other.” In other words, we (not just those evil others) are all in a perpetual struggle with our that-and-thisness. The trouble is, we live in a society that encourages and rewards the uncaring parts of ourselves, while making it hard to care for others outside our immediate family (and often within it) in any sustained way. So, Weintrobe, argues, if we want more people to make better choices—not to shop for useless stuff as a source of solace, not to spread disinformation for clicks and clout, not to see other people’s vulnerability and need as a threat to our own interests—we need better structures and systems. Personally, and to no one’s surprise, I think the jury is in on capitalism: it lights up our most uncaring, competitive parts and is failing us on every front that matters. What we need are systems that light up our better selves, the parts of ourselves that want to l...

We are told that the way things are is the only way they can be, because every other model has supposedly already been tried, and all have failed. But these ideas about different ways of being and thinking and living did not all fail; rather, many of them fell, crushed by political violence and racial terror. Being crushed is not the same as failing, because what was crushed can be revived, reimagined anew.

“when I think of the land as my mother or if I think of it as a familial relationship, I don’t hate my mother because she’s sick, or because she’s been abused. I don’t stop visiting her because she’s been in an abusive relationship and she has scars and bruises. If anything, you need to intensify that relationship.”

Simpson’s formulation calls on us to reckon with the sickened and impaired state of our world, but not to use that as an excuse to walk away in search of perfection. On the contrary, when we are surrounded by need, we are called upon to become better caretakers.

We are all, in some way, damaged by this world, soon to be damaged by it, and/or causing damage. Like everything else we project onto the other, injury and disability will not stay “over there”; they will eventually come for us—our bodies, our families, our beloved places. If we fail to build infrastructures of care, the cruelties and derangements of the Covid era will be only the barest glimpse of the barbarism to come.