Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

Uncanny, a feeling Sigmund Freud described as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”—but is suddenly alien.

While there were always skeptics—her rival Camille Paglia dismissed Wolf as a “Seventeen magazine level of thinker”—critiques of her work rarely reached beyond women’s studies departments. And by the end of the decade, Wolf was considered such an authority on all things womanly that during the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore, the Democratic Party nominee, hired her to coach him on how to appeal to female voters. Her widely reported advice was that Gore had to get out from under Bill Clinton’s shadow and transform himself from a “beta male” to an “alpha male”—in part by wearing earth-toned suits to warm up his robotic affect. Wolf denied providing fashion advice, but the reports still sparked a torrent of mockery, including from Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, who wrote that “Ms. Wolf is the moral equivalent of an Armani T-shirt, because Mr. Gore has obscenely overpaid for something basic.”

I felt like shrunken Alice telling the Caterpillar, “I’m not myself, you see … being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.”

Though originally released in 1940, Chaplin’s message felt as relevant as ever: When faced with a double threatening to engulf you and your world (or an army of them), distance offers no protection. Far better to radically upend the table and become, in some sense, their impersonator, their shadow.

Establishing a democratic, noncorporate media—through public broadcasting and community access to the airwaves—was once a core progressive demand. Though there are civil liberties groups that still stand up against corporate censorship, as well as civil rights groups that fight for net neutrality, progressives today have not, for the most part, made fighting for a democratic and accountable information sphere a cornerstone of their political agenda. On the contrary, many happily cheered corporate deplatformings—until the same dynamics came for them. The spread of lies and conspiracies online is now so rampant that it threatens public health and, quite possibly, the survival of representative democracy. The solution to this informational crisis, however, is not to look to tech oligarchs to disappear people we don’t like; it’s to get serious about demanding an information commons that can be counted upon as a basic civic right. The tech writer and theorist Ben Tarnoff, in his book Internet for the People, argues that this is an achievable goal but it must begin with a process of “deprivatization”—putting the tools that have become our public square into the public’s hands, under democratic control. “To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized,” Tarnoff writes, adding, “What is at stake is nothing less than the possibility of democracy—a possibility that an internet organized by the profit motive precludes.”

The result is a troubling dynamic—one that sits at the heart of our doppelganger culture. Rather than being defined by consistently applied principles—about the right to a democratically controlled public square, say, and to trustworthy information and privacy—we have two warring political camps defining themselves in opposition to whatever the other is saying and doing at any given time. No, these camps are not morally equivalent, but the more people like Wolf and Bannon focus on very real fears of Big Tech—its power to unilaterally remove speech, to abscond with our data, to make digital doubles of us—the more liberals seem to shrug and sneer and treat the whole package of worries like crazy-people stuff. Once an issue is touched by “them,” it seems to become oddly untouchable by almost everyone else. And what mainstream liberals ignore and neglect, this emerging alliance lavishes with attention.

The economic incentives for this kind of online content go a long way toward explaining the breed of public figure who seems to have turned into a different kind of person during that first Covid year—more manic; angrier; more willing to burn bridges, to make outlandish claims, and to share unreliable and poorly sourced information if it was likely to be carried by a strong current in the digital ocean. I could make a list, but I’m sure you are making your own in your head right now: “I used to really trust [X]. What has happened to them? It’s as if they had an alter ego and they have succumbed to it completely.” Addiction is likely the most relevant lens for understanding these jarring personality transformations. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic of doppelganger literature, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Henry Jekyll turns back and forth into the murderous Edward Hyde when he drinks a mysterious serum; but over time, the serum stops working and the original Dr. Jekyll gets lost completely. When I look at the behavior over the past few years of several people I once knew and whose company and work I once enjoyed, it’s obvious that they are swilling a dopamine-releasing serum that has turned them, perhaps permanently, into digital-age versions of Mr. Hyde. I feel certain that my doppelganger is familiar with this particular cautionary tale because of yet another uncanny detail I came across on this journey: in 1995, her father, Leonard Wolf, published T...

To return to an earlier theme, corporate branding offers some useful tools for understanding the dynamic. Under trademark law, a brand that is not actively being used can be deemed dormant and thus fair game for another party to usurp. I started to feel that what had been happening to me, with Other Naomi, has happened to the left much more broadly—with Bannon and Vance and Meloni and others. Issues that we had once championed had gone dormant in a great many spaces. And now they were being usurped, taken over by their twisted doubles in the Mirror World. If the arrival of one’s doppelganger is a message that something needs attending to, it feels like this flashing message is something to which a great many of us need to attend.

But it’s not a great secret that plenty of people routinely go too far, turning minor language infractions into major crimes, while adopting a discourse that is so complex and jargon-laden that people outside university settings often find it off-putting—or straight-up absurd. (“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.”)

Moreover, when entire categories of people are reduced to their race and gender, and labeled “privileged,” there is little room to confront the myriad ways that working-class white men and women are abused under our predatory capitalist order, with left-wing movements losing many opportunities for alliances that would make us stronger and more powerful. All of this is highly unstrategic, because whichever groups and individuals we kick to the curb, the Mirror World is there, waiting to catch them, praise their courage, and offer a sympathetic ear.

“A wonderful plague” is how King James of England described pandemics in the 1620 Charter of New England. “Almighty God, in his great goodness and bounty towards us,” had sent it “among the savages.” In 1634, John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, described the diseases that tore through the native Algonquian-speaking peoples in similar terms: “But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them: So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place.”

In 1707, the former Carolina governor John Archdale also cast mass death as heaven-sent, writing of “the Indians” that it “pleased Almighty God to send unusual Sicknesses amongst them, as the Smallpox, etc., to lessen their Numbers; so that the English, in Comparison to the Spaniard, have but little Indian Blood to answer for.” This was not true—there was plenty of blood to answer for, and disease was only one of many killers in these waves of genocide. But the idea that pandemics are carrying out the work of a greater power—whether that power is imagined as God or as nature—is integral to the origin myth of the modern world.

Like the fascist/New Age alliance, all of this is playing out on a kind of historical loop. Whenever one group has chosen to allow terrible violence to be inflicted on another group, there have been stories and logics that provided the permission for the beneficiaries of the violence either to actively (even gleefully) participate or to actively look away. Stories that said things like this: The people being sacrificed/enslaved/imprisoned/colonized/left to die so that others can live comfortably are not the same level of human. They are other/substandard/lesser/darker/more animal/diseased/criminal/lazy/uncivilized. These logics have been resurgent on the right for years now, evident in the presence of protofascist and authoritarian leaders in Brazil, India, Hungary, the Philippines, Russia, and Turkey, among others. But what we were seeing on the campaign trail was that these logics were spreading, diagonally, from authoritarian conservatives through to parts of the green and New Age left, following well-worn neural pathways with long and sinister histories. The thread that connects them is simple and stark. It’s a comfort with culling.

Dr. Michelle Cohen, a family physician and assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Queen’s University, has tracked the often insidious role of pseudoscientific women’s wellness influencers in the Covid era. While recognizing the real failures of her profession, she argues that these influencers are exploiting “medicine’s sexism to create a new and gendered market for snake oil”—instead of trying to fix the system, they profit from its abandonments. “The wellness industry isn’t pushing for more and better science into women’s health—it wants instead to create a secondary pathway for women’s issues outside of the mainstream. The subtler risk is that wellness will continue to evolve along a gendered path, disproportionately exposing women to the harms of quackery.”

This is a marked shift from the early days of the feminist health movement in the 1970s, which was, in its low-key way, anti-capitalist, focused on efforts like boycotting Nestlé because the company marketed powdered infant formula to poor mothers in the Global South. Feminist health, back then, was a movement fighting for changes at the collective and institutional level—like birthing centers inside hospitals, and certification of midwives and doulas, and access to safe abortions, and building research institutions focused on long-ignored aspects of women’s health. It was also about the right to go on paid parental leave and the right to breastfeed without being criminalized. Having grown up inside this movement, thanks to my father’s research and my mother’s advocacy, I can attest that nothing about it was glamorous. Midwives and doulas got paid (not very much); family doctors got paid more, but still far less than obstetricians; copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves helped fund the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, but nobody was getting rich.

Dr. Rupa Marya, for instance, has been highly critical of Covid conspiracy theorists, calling anti-science attitudes “a leading cause of death in the U.S.” But she also sees plenty that needs fixing in the medical status quo, which is why, along with Raj Patel, she coauthored Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Justice. She and Patel acknowledge that the wellness gurus are absolutely right when they say we live in a culture that makes people sick as a matter of course—but rather than presenting individual peak wellness as the high-priced solution, they advocate for “deep medicine”: structural changes that would detoxify our world and make healthy choices accessible to all.

There may have been deeper ideological reasons for opposing the vaccines as well. If the U.S. efforts to control Covid through free vaccination and wage-replacement programs had been more successful, that would have demonstrated that the federal government, when it sets its mind to something, can still provide timely, universal, and humane care to the entire population. But that raises some questions: If they can do it for Covid-19, why stop there?

It’s clear from these comments that, at least for these trainers, if you aren’t as peak fit as they are, you don’t have a right to have opinions on any aspect of health—and you definitely don’t have a right to ask anything health-related of them. The core Covid-era public health message—that we all needed to undergo some individual inconveniences for the sake of our collective health—enjoyed majority support. Yet it simply could not be reconciled with 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.

Enough incidents like this over the years have led me to conclude that the line between unsupported conspiracy claims and reliable investigative research is neither as firm nor as stable as many of us would like to believe. It’s clear that some people consume investigative journalism, fact-based analysis, and fact-free conspiracy interchangeably, drawing their own connections and mixing and matching between the three.

In the torrent of disconnected facts that make up our “feeds,” the role of the researcher-analyst is plain: to try to create some sense, some ordering of events, maps of power. The most meaningful response in my writing life came from the loveliest of literary mapmakers, John Berger, when I sent him The Shock Doctrine in galleys. Many people have said they found the book enraging, but his response was very different. He wrote that, for him, the book “provokes and instills a calm.” When people and societies enter into a state of shock, they lose their identities and their footing, he observed. “Hence, calm is a form of resistance.”

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. Berger helped me to see that the search for calm is why I write: to tame the chaos in my surroundings, in my own mind, and—I hope—in the minds of my readers as well.

the goal should never be to put readers into a state of shock. It should be to pull them out of it.

my various differences with Wolf, this is the one that matters most to me, because I believe it to be at the heart of why she and so many others have come so unmoored. I am a leftist focused on capital’s ravaging of our bodies, our democratic structures, and the living systems that support our collective existence. Wolf is a liberal who never had a critique of capital; she simply wanted women like her to be free from bias and discrimination in the system so that they could rise as individuals. “I believe in equipping women so that they’re not disempowered in the market economy,” she told The Guardian’s Katharine Viner many years ago.

For the purposes of this map, we can call them the Shadow Lands. They are the mangled and dense understory of our supposedly frictionless global economy. Decades of wringing out every possible efficiency means that each link in the chain—the mines and industrial farms where raw materials are extracted; the factories and slaughterhouses that turn those inputs into parts and finished products; the trains and ships that carry them across continents and oceans; the warehouses that sort and store them to be ready at the click of a cursor; the trucks and cars that deliver them when the click arrives; the mountains of waste and poisoned waterways where the detritus from each stage ends up; the glimmering playgrounds where the ultrarich enjoy their spoils—carries a distinct yet numbingly familiar story of depredation.

“Conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct: suspicion.” But suspicion directed at the wrong target is a very dangerous thing.

The novelist Daisy Hildyard writes about the way we are entangled in these Shadow Lands as a form of doppelganging. In her 2017 book, The Second Body, she describes the human condition as one of having two bodies: the one we live in consciously—satiating our hunger, commuting to work, working out at the gym, making babies—and a shadow self that props up and supports those actions by traversing studiously denied parallel worlds on our behalf, extracting and manufacturing the resources and goods that make it all possible. She writes: You are stuck in your body right here, but in a technical way you could be said to be in India and Iraq, you are in the sky causing storms, and you are in the sea herding whales towards the beach. You probably don’t feel your body in those places: it is as if you have two distinct bodies. You have an individual body in which you exist, eat, sleep and go about your day-to-day life. 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. In Hildyard’s conception, our complicity in wars fought with our tax dollars to protect the oil and gas that likely warms our homes, cooks our food, and propels our vehicles, and in turn fuels extinction, is not separate from us; it’s an extension of our physical beings. “This second body,” she writes, “is your own literal and physical biological existence— it is a version of you.” A less visible dimension of our embodied ...

The great German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote shortly before his death in 1940, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

Two decades later, the equally brilliant novelist, essayist, and playwright James Baldwin wrote, “It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less. But the barrier between oneself and one’s knowledge of oneself is high indeed. There are so many things one would rather not know!”

In the relatively wealthy parts of this planet, these parallel Shadow Lands are our personal and planetary subconscious, and they haunt us. The ghosts of the past, present, and future, all racing toward us at once. We sense that the barriers that separate these worlds cannot hold for much longer. That, even for the most resourced among us, the curtain hiding the suffering and the ugliness is badly frayed. That just as societies can flip into their monstrous doppelgangers, so can the earth—from habitable to uninhabitable. That, as the Amazonian rain forest incinerates and Antarctica’s ice cliffs heave into the sea, this process has already begun.

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

Here in so-called British Columbia (a province whose very name is a humiliating colonial mash-up of the British Crown and Christopher Columbus), it seemed as if the buried worlds upon which our settler state was built were rushing to the surface.

“Nations themselves are narrations,” Edward Said wrote in Culture and Imperialism. Our narration wasn’t holding. That spring and early summer was like a national excavation, digging deeper than ever before in my lifetime. Interestingly, I experienced it as the opposite of vertigo. In place of the ephemera and boosterism of national mythmaking and official histories, a solid idea seemed to be forming about where we live and how this land came to be available to settlers like me—and what it might take to finally be good guests and neighbors, without all the denial required of lives built on not-seeing and not-knowing. “An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought,” James Baldwin wrote. However, “to accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.”

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Norman Retasket, a survivor of the Kamloops school, observed, “If I told the same story three years ago,” about what happened at the school, it would have been seen as “fiction.” Now his stories are believed. “The story hasn’t changed,” he said. “The listener has changed.”

One person who felt changed by what he was learning was Mike Otto, a white trucker, small-business owner, and father who lives a couple of hours down Highway 97 from those first graves. Otto found himself imagining what Indigenous families must have been going through all these years, the ones who never knew what happened to “those little ones that had gone missing.” Witnessing the pain of his Indigenous neighbors, Otto decided he needed to do something to show that non-Indigenous Canadians like him stood in solidarity with their efforts to seek justice from the government, the court system, and the church. The pandemic was still raging, and the community where the graves were found had made it clear that they did not want crowds of strangers traipsing through their territory. Otto had an idea for something powerful that would respect the community’s need for physical distance: a trucker convoy, one that would pass in front of the burial grounds, make some offerings, then leave. He called it the We Stand in Solidarity Convoy. Otto posted invitations to various trucker Facebook groups and reached out to influential people in the industry. His goal was for the convoy to grow to 215 trucks; in the end, closer to 400 trucks joined up, along with many motorcycles and cars. Drivers decorated their vehicles with messages of love, hung orange shirts on their grilles, and waved EVERY CHILD MATTERS flags. The convoy was met with cheers all along the way, and in some cases whole town...

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network reported that virtually every group it monitors was playing a leadership role, including a network that seeks to carve out a new country called Diagolon, which would run from Alaska, through the Canadian prairies and Alberta, and all the way to Florida. According to the Anti-Hate Network, “Diagolon is increasingly becoming a militia network. Their goals are ultimately fascist: to use violence to take power and strip rights away from people who do not meet their purity tests based on ideology, race, and gender … Their motto is ‘gun or rope.’”

Several leading Black intellectuals saw the parallels with great clarity at the time. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The World and Africa, published soon after the end of the Second World War, wrote, “There was no Nazi atrocity—concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood—which Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.”

In Discourse on Colonialism, the Martinican author and politician Aimé Césaire charged that Europeans tolerated “Nazism before it was inflicted on them.” Until these methods came home to European soil, “they absolved it … shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.” Hitler’s crime for the Allies, Césaire believed, was that he did to Jews and Slavs what “until then had been reserved exclusively for” the nonwhite colonized in foreign lands. But seen from the perspective of the Caribbean, it was all one long, continuous, snaking story.

After Kristallnacht in 1938, for instance, a delegation from the Australian Aborigines League wrote a protest letter condemning “the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi Government of Germany” and, in a little-known historical chapter, hand-delivered it to the German consulate in Melbourne (the consulate refused to accept it). This was well before Western governments were willing to confront Hitler; yet these Indigenous leaders, who were still fighting for basic rights of their own, clearly saw the gravity of the threat.

Tucker Carlson invented this play. Over the centuries, anti-Jewish conspiracy has played a very specific purpose for elite power: it acts as a buffer, a shock absorber. Before popular rage could reach the kings, queens, tsars, and old landed money, the conspiracies absorbed it, directing anger to the middle managers—to the court Jew, to the scheming Jew, possibly with horns hidden under his skullcap. To Shylock.

Rosa Luxemburg, years earlier, had sparred with the Bund and advocated a universalism unbound by her Jewish identity. “What do you want with this theme of the ‘special suffering of the Jews’?” a friend asked in 1917. She replied, “I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the black people in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch … I have no special place in my heart for the [Jewish] ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” Those lines led her detractors to claim that she minimized Jewish suffering at a time of great hardship. I prefer to see her reaching, however idealistically, for a vision of human solidarity that transcended identity and national borders.

Many years later, my friend Cecilie Surasky, then one of the leaders of Jewish Voice for Peace, observed of these kinds of educational methods: “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. Our education did not ask us to probe the parts of ourselves that might be capable of inflicting great harm on others, and to figure out how to resist them. It asked us to be as outraged and indignant at what happened to our ancestors as if it had happened to us—and to stay in that state.

So many forms of doubling are ways of not looking at death/trouble. And death feels awfully close these days—as close as a fentanyl-laced pill, a heat dome, a hate crime, an intake of virally loaded breath. Much closer for some than for others, as usual—but not far enough, I suspect, for anyone’s comfort. So how do we stop averting our gaze? How do we face our second bodies and our mortal bodies in a sustained way, rather than throwing up partitions, performances, and projections to hide from them? What would it take to stop running? To know—really know—what we already know?

That is what I see when I look at François Brunelle’s doppelganger art project, I’m Not a Look-Alike!, with its photographs of hundreds of pairs of people who have been confused with each other. The most captivating aspect of the work is not that the pairs look so much alike but that they seem the opposite of horrified about that revelation.

“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.

Something else changes, too: when our actions begin to integrate with our beliefs, when we are doing some of the work that we know needs to be done, we have less need for the various doubles our culture offers up disguised as a good life. The allure of disappearing into our digital avatars wanes—whether Bannon’s idea of Ajax embodying himself in real life or the various glowing influencers performing themselves into the ether. As Marx said of religion, doubles are our opiates; we have less need for them when there is less pain and dissonance to escape.

If there is one thing I admire about the diagonalists and other denizens of the Mirror World, it’s that they still believe in the idea of changing reality, an ambition that I fear too many on this side of the glass have lost. We shouldn’t make up facts like they do, but we should stop treating a great many human-made systems—like monarchies and supreme courts and borders and billionaires—as immutable and unchangeable. Because everything some humans created can be changed by other humans. And if our present systems threaten life to its very core, and they do, then they must be changed.

I couldn’t relate to this shoulder-pad person she had become, a woman who seemed to want so much of the wrong kind of power.