By I listened to this book while on a bus to New York City (at least until Spotify informed me I ran out of free audiobook listening hours, which was interesting since I literally pay that service $10 a month, but I digress). Fortunately I was able to finish it using the services of the good old-fashioned library.
About the Book
Title: Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
Author: Naomi Klein
Published: 2023
Genre: memoir, politics, nonfiction
My Rating: 5/5 stars
The Premise
Synopsis (from Goodreads):
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self―a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against?Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?
My Thoughts
Doppelganger tackles a wide variety of topics– it is an ambitious book, and I wasn’t sure where it was going for a while. Klein uses the motif of the doppelganger, the double, to expand upon several concepts relevant to our society. The literal doppelganger for Klein is another journalist named Naomi– Naomi Wolfe, who believe it or not I did not know existed. (So if it’s any consolation, Naomi Klein, you were the only journalist Naomi that I was personally aware of!).
Unlike Klein, who is a leftist journalist who writes about corporate misuse of power, Wolfe has in recent years become a public conspiracy theorist and general right wing nutjob, both qualities which made being mistaken for Wolfe very embarrassing.
Klein uses the doppleganger motif to make several extremely well-explained points about our current society, such as:
1) the misplaced anger of conspiracy theorists
Their grievances, in many cases, are shared amongst many, but the people they blame– the “deep state”, the demonic democrats, and, the perennial scapegoats, Jewish people– are entirely the wrong targets. They are so close to getting it, to realizing that there is a “conspiracy” under foot, a conspiracy to consolidate power and wealth, at the expense of the people and the planet, but the conspiracy is planned and executed by those with the true power in society. Not minorities, not the Jews, but large corporations, shadowy oligarchs, and the general interests of capital.
(This realization, incidentally, was what drew me out from under the spell of capitalism– the realization that money is power in our system, and the age-old adage to “follow the money” is how the source of real power can be located. “Wait”, I thought at an age that was honestly embarassingly late, as I finally extricated myself from the YouTube feed full of Ben Shapiro and “reacting to woke TikToks” videos that had lobotomized my younger self, “all of this stuff is a nonissue isn’t it… all of these people are funded by Big Oil… it’s all a distraction.” And so began my transformation into the commie hippie I am today.)
“In the Mirror World, conspiracy theories detract attention from the billionaires who fund the networks of misinformation and away from the economic policies—deregulation, privatization, austerity—that have stratified wealth so cataclysmically in the neoliberal era. They rile up anger about the Davos elites, at Big Tech and Big Pharma—but the rage never seems to reach those targets. Instead it gets diverted into culture wars about anti-racist education, all-gender bathrooms, and Great Replacement panic directed at Black people, nonwhite immigrants, and Jews. Meanwhile, the billionaires who bankroll the whole charade are safe in the knowledge that the fury coursing through our culture isn’t coming for them.”
In “the mirror world”, as Klein calls it, this analysis is not even approached. No, it’s not capitalism–that would require these people to examine the system their sense of the world is built on, and that’s too hard to do. Instead, it has to be the communists, the Jews, or the satanist cabal of politicians. They’re so close to getting it, until they go off the deep end into unfounded conspiracy theories.
– the “diagonalist” alliance between alternative health gurus and the far-right
This alliance has made itself felt particularly around the topic of COVID, and how the sentiment of allowing the pandemic to run its course with no consideration for those with weakened immune systems holds parallels to eugenics
– the commercialization of everything personal, coinciding with the birth of the “influencer”
In a late-stage capitalist society where citizens are more digitally connected than ever before, we have witnessed the emergence of influencer culture and the drive to create a personal brand for yourself on social media.
– the ways in which we turn a blind eye to the “shadow world”
There is a sinister flip side to western capitalism–the exploitation of workers and the global south, the suffering of animals in factory farms, and the destruction of the only planet we call home. While we live our comfortable lives, it is easy to remain ignorant to these realities–whether this ignorance is willful or not. But we cannot remain so. We have an ethical responsibility not to.
Though the book covers an astounding amount of territory and cultural, political and economic commentary, it manages to end on a note of hope, of optimism for humanity’s ability to shake off the blinders and create a better world. I can only hope we can take up the mantel.
“Our role here on earth is not simply to maximize the advantage in our lives. It’s to maximize (protect, regenerate) all of life. 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.
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