Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

She is a liberal who reverentially references the founding fathers, fetishizes a highly individualistic version of “liberty,” and wrote an entire book addressed to a “young patriot.” I am a third-generation leftist who believes freedom is won collectively and gets itchy around flags.

This is why The Matrix and its sequels have proved such enduring metaphorical landscapes for understanding the digital age: it’s not just the red pills and blue pills. In The Matrix, humans, living their lives in synthetic pods, are mere food for machines. Many of us suspect that we, too, have become machine food. And, in a way, we have.

When editors and journalists steer clear of important topics for fear that their audiences can’t cope with complex truths, it doesn’t throttle conspiracies—it fuels them.

Many of us lead dangerously sedentary lives; our work demands it. Chances are that moving our bodies in whatever free time we have will make us healthier and feel better.

Multiple peer-reviewed studies show that children born to older parents are more likely to be diagnosed with autism.

In the neoliberal era that began in the 1970s and has not yet ended, every hardship and every difficulty—from poverty to student debt to home eviction to drug addiction—has been pathologized as a personal failing. Every success, meanwhile, is lauded as proof of the relative superiority of the supposedly self-made.

Leon’s analysis of the Nazis’ use of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories feels particularly relevant to our historical moment. He describes how Hitler harnessed the economic suffering of the lower and middle classes—impoverished by the First World War, pounded by the sanctions afterward, then hit with the Great Depression—and directed that discontent at a chimera the Nazis called “Jewish capitalism.”

Leon also explained how the Nazi Party, having witnessed the successful workers’ revolution in Russia, and seeing communism gaining political power in Germany, set out to deliberately weaken the importance of class in the minds of German workers. This was done by replacing class solidarity with racial solidarity, supplanting the common interests shared by all workers with the pleasures and rewards that flowed from belonging to the Aryan race, a bond that claimed to unite the poorest Christian workers with the wealthiest industrialists. But because workers and owners actually have starkly different interests under capitalism, that maneuver required a shadow, an evil twin. “Just as it is necessary to cast the different classes [of Aryans] into one single race,” Leon wrote, “so is it also necessary that this ‘race’ have only a single enemy: ‘the international Jew.’ The myth of race is necessarily accompanied by its ‘negative’—the antirace, the Jew.” This was a highly incisive analysis of the dialectical relationship between race and class within a white supremacist regime—Leon was arguing that class solidarity between workers, across ethnic lines, was the primary competition and threat to the Nazi project.

Zionism’s offer after its ideological competitors were drastically weakened was simple: rather than trying to defeat anti-Semitism by getting at its roots, we will hold a gun to its head and force it into submission.

Just as the Old Jews were trapped in a fraternal battle with European Christians, cast as devils onto which all evil was projected, so the New Jews required their own anti-self: the Palestinian, a locus of perpetual threat inside Israel and on its borders.

When Palestine was partitioned in 1947, a move with overwhelming Arab opposition, and Israel declared statehood the next year, the first Arab-Israeli war was locked in. These were the years that Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe: roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled, hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed, and thousands were killed, with many of the horrifying truths about these atrocities finally escaping Israel’s own Shadow Lands in recent years.

Engaging with the form of Zionism that created the state of Israel in 1948 means accepting that a people, just like a person, can be victim and victimizer at the same time; that they can be both traumatized and traumatizer.

It’s the scramble for separateness that is richly rewarded and encouraged in our zero-sum economy, while the urge to act in solidarity and mutual aid with others is discounted and disappeared, when not being actively punished.

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?

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 look outward at a world in crisis and join the work of repair. Systems that make it easier, in ways big and small, for care to win the battle over uncare.