Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

“This is the perennial appeal of doppelgangers in novels and films: the idea that two strangers can be indistinguishable from each other taps into the precariousness at the core of identity—the painful truth that, no matter how deliberately we tend to our personal lives and public personas, the person we think we are is fundamentally vulnerable to forces outside of our control.”

Klein looks at doppelganger media and suggests that its appeal speaks to the precarity of individual identity. Doppelgangers reveal how humans grapple with the definition of the self and the fear they may feel at the idea that their selves are not as fixed or in their control as they think.

“This is what happens when we allow so many of our previously private actions to be enclosed by corporate tech platforms whose founders said they were about connecting us but were always about extracting from us.”

Under Surveillance Capitalism and Nationalism, online identities and activities are constantly monitored and mined for data. Klein argues for a publicly controlled internet so that privacy in online spaces is not exploited for the profit of private tech companies.

“In fact, it makes a certain kind of sick sense that our era of peak personal branding has coincided so precisely with an unprecedented crisis point for our shared home.”

Personal branding has become the priority of many individuals all over the world. This has been encouraged by tech companies and serves to distract and isolate people from the Solidarity, Nuance, and Interconnectedness that is so sorely needed in this time of global crises. Klein also argues that this trend of personal branding has fed into the sense of doubling or split identities, with people crafting an online persona to idealize themselves, and/or to attract attention and status.

“What do we do when important ideas and concepts are being distorted in this way, when absurdity seems to take over, making serious discussion impossible? What do we do when we seem to be surrounded by warped doubles and imposters?”

Klein asserts that the arguments taking place in the Mirror World distort and obfuscate many important discussions, reflecting the theme of Diagonalism and the Mirror World. Klein observes how this twisting makes real discussions almost impossible, rendering people speechless and powerless in the face of rising authoritarian rhetoric and the spread of conspiracy theories.

“The words she was saying were essentially fantasy. But emotionally, to the many people now listening to her, they clearly felt true. And the reason they felt true is that we are indeed living through a revolution in surveillance tech, and state and corporate actors have indeed seized outrageous powers to monitor us, often in collaboration and coordination with one another.”

Many of the arguments that Wolf makes, however absurd and lacking in facts, tap into real fears. This is part of what makes engaging with Diagonalism and the Mirror World so difficult: Their arguments are themselves doppelgangers. The facts are wrong or made up, but they often mirror and reflect real concerns about Surveillance Capitalism and Nationalism, corporate power, and structural inequality. 

“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.”

Klein argues here that the unwillingness of liberals to engage with difficult issues is partly to blame for the way that Wolf and her followers’ rhetoric has been able to flourish. Rather than debating these ideas in a public forum, where the fears at the heart of these issues could be more effectively addressed, the discussions are pushed to the periphery, where they enter echo chambers where people buy into them wholesale.

“If someone like her could be shifting alliances so radically, it seemed worth trying to figure out what was driving that transformation—especially because, by then, it was also clear that quite a few prominent liberals and leftists were making a similar ‘post-left’ lurch to the hard right.”

The phenomenon of previously liberal or leftist people shifting to the far right became common during the COVID-19 pandemic. Klein examines what Diagonalism and the Mirror World means within this broader social context, as she seeks to understand what makes conspiracy theories and far-right rhetoric appealing to those who were previously the opposite politically.

“That is the key message we are meant to take away from diagonalist politics: the very fact that these unlikely alliances are even occurring, that the people involved are willing to unite in common purpose despite their past differences, is meant to serve as proof that their cause is both urgent and necessary.”

Klein argues that Diagonalism and the Mirror World should not be ignored because the “diagonalist” alliances that are forming suggest that something has gone awry in the traditional left-right binary. She argues that the far right uses the presence of former liberals or leftists now joining their ranks as supposed proof that they offer a safe place for uniting for a common cause—a distorted mirror image of the Solidarity, Nuance, and Interconnectedness that Klein wishes to see on the left.

“I have come to think of this army, which relies so heavily on conjecture and clickbait exaggeration, as disaster doppelgangers, since their highly profitable performances serve to distract from the very real scandals that are right before our eyes and urgently need our attention.”

Klein suggests that “disaster doppelgangers” should serve as a warning about the things that are being deliberately hidden or ignored. This passage emphasizes one of Klein’s key argumentative points: that conspiracy theorists tend to play upon legitimate fears and emotions when peddling their unsubstantiated theories.

“And now our critiques of oligarchic rule are being fully absorbed by the hard right and turned into dark doppelgangers of themselves. The structural critiques of capitalism are gone, and in their place are discombobulated conspiracies that somehow frame deregulated capitalism as communism in disguise.”

Klein argues that, among the adherents of Diagonalism and the Mirror World, critiques of capitalist power structures are subverted and aimed at the wrong targets. Where leftist critiques address structural issues of capitalism, people in the Mirror World create scapegoats to blame for global problems, usually deflecting blame from the real perpetrators.

“I couldn’t see how a serious discussion of actual disaster capitalism could avoid getting blended with truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism. Pipikism had thwarted me.”

In the face of twisted and warped Mirror World arguments, Klein finds herself speechless. She is unable to participate in discourse for fear that her words will be subverted and used against her: She uses the term “Pipikism” (See: Index of Terms) to denote the phenomenon of leftist critiques and ideas becoming distorted and made ridiculous in the Mirror World.

“Far from the unlikely bedfellows they first seemed to be, large parts of the modern wellness industry are proving to be all too compatible with far-right notions of natural hierarchies, genetic superiority, and disposable people.”

Klein argues that certain facets of the wellness industry play into fascist ideas. The shared obsession with perfection, purity, and physical ability make them ideologically compatible. She claims that this compatibility was made evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, when wellness and fitness ideas were blended with fascist rhetoric to justify anti-vaccine, anti-mask, and anti-mandate positions.

“When glowing influencers spew fatphobic bile at people daring to ask them to consider their impacts on others, they are tapping into deep supremacist logics about which lives have value and which lives are disposable. When parents refuse to give their children vaccines that have controlled viruses like measles for generations because they are gripped with the terror of having the kind of child that the Nazis declared unworthy of life, they are feeding into these logics, too.”

Klein believes that ideas about superiority and purity help rationalize people’s opinions on issues like vaccination, public health measures, and mask mandates. She argues that both “wellness” influencers and anti-vaccine parents who believe debunked conspiracy theories about vaccines and autism are both united, consciously or unconsciously, by an underlying belief in what is “normal” or desirable and, thus, the idea of some lives being more worthy or “unworthy” than others.

“That, I have always believed, is one of the core reasons for the left to exist: to provide a structural analysis of wealth and power that brings order and rigor to the prevailing (and correct) sense that society is rigged against the majority, and that important truths are being hidden behind pat political rhetoric.”

As a leftist (See: Background), Klein advocates for Solidarity, Nuance, and Interconnectedness. She argues that, while the far right offers conspiracies and individual solutions, the left is (at least ideally) able to offer structural analyses for these problems, as well as structural solutions that help everyone.

“[I]n attempting to understand the ludicrous theories swirling in the Mirror World, we should be very careful not to be so reactive that we end up saying that sadism and depravity do not happen, that only a loony conspiracy theorist would believe something so out-there. Because an economic order that contains inequalities as extreme as ours—in which the vanity rocket ships of billionaires sail over seas of human misery—is its own kind of depravity, and that level of injustice reproduces more depravity as a matter of course.”

Klein warns against dismissing questions about hidden injustices and depravity. While conspiracy theories without basis should be questioned and proven to be false, people should turn their attention to the real injustices in economic and political systems and be clear about the real perpetrators of violence and sadism: capitalist power structures and the billionaire class, which reflects the theme of Surveillance Capitalism and Nationalism.

“If you were a person concerned that Covid marked the dawn of a new age of CCP-inspired mass obedience, surely it would be worth mentioning that the largest protests in the history of the United States happened in the Covid era, with millions of people willing to face clouds of tear gas and streams of pepper spray to exercise their rights to speech, assembly, and dissent.”

Klein argues that Diagonalism and the Mirror World are predicated upon contradictory thinking. She argues here that the presence of mass protests during the COVID-19 era belies the far-right’s insistence that western governments were operating like totalitarian regimes, as dissent and free speech were still being exercised.

“At the heart of Exterminate All the Brutes is the claim that Hitler—the twentieth century’s most despised villain, and rightly so—was not the civilized, democratic West’s evil ‘other,’ but its shadow, its doppelganger.”

Raoul Peck’s documentary Exterminate All the Brutes challenges the assertion that Hitler was a uniquely evil villain without precedent or comparison: Peck positions Hitler as a culmination of centuries of colonial violence and antisemitic beliefs. This passage reflects Klein’s interest in Diagonalism and the Mirror World as embodying issues, fears, and problems that humans are unwilling to confront.

“The insistence on lifting the Holocaust out of history, the failure to recognize these patterns, and the refusal to see where the Nazis fit inside the arc of colonial genocides have all come at a high cost. The countries that defeated Hitler did not have to confront the uncomfortable fact that Hitler had taken pointers and inspiration on race-making and on human containment from them, leaving their innocence not only undisturbed but also significantly strengthened by what was indeed a righteous victory.”

To Klein, one of the major failings of Europe and North America in the aftermath of the Holocaust was their failure to confront antisemitism in their societies and the presence of their own colonial violence within Nazi rhetoric. They maintained their own innocence and positioned the Nazis as a terrible anomaly in European history, neglecting to make their own societies safe places for their Jewish citizens. Klein argues that this situation in turn gave rise to the state of Israel and its oppression of Palestinians.

“This is how prejudice works. The person holding it unconsciously creates a double of every person who is part of the despised group, and that twisted twin looms over all who meet the criteria, always threatening to swallow them up.”

Klein examines how prejudice creates doppelgangers: Rather than seeing a person in a group as a complete individual, a prejudiced person only sees the racial, ethnic, or gendered double that stands in for all people in that hated group. The supposed traits of the double then justify prejudice and the existence of hateful stereotypes.

“If Israel practices doppelganger politics by imitating European nationalisms, it also enacts it in this second way: by projecting all criminality and violence onto the Palestinian other, lest the state’s own foundational crimes be confronted.”

Klein believes that just as the state of Israel was constructed as a double of European nationalism and colonial power, it has created its own doppelganger in Palestine. Rather than seeing Palestinians as complete people, the state of Israel constructs Palestinians as violent, criminal, and deserving of all actions Israel takes against them in the name of national defense. In Klein’s view, this us-and-them rhetoric prevents the establishment of Solidarity, Nuance, and Interconnectedness between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Vertigo invades when the world we thought we knew no longer holds

The world is not holding. The living systems that support all of our lives are sick. Staggering. Trembling. In need of our urgent care.”

Klein sees the many crises confronting the world as evidence that the current systems are not working, especially with the rise of Surveillance Capitalism and Nationalism. She does not despair at this realization, instead arguing that it is still possible to change and fix these systems through collective care.

“Our crises are material and profoundly collective, and so, ultimately, we will be able to bear unbearable realities only if we also work to change them. That means we must take action (Action! Action!) to make the world different from the way it is now.”

Solidarity, Nuance, and Interconnectedness are the vehicles through which Klein sees the possibility of change. Global crises affect everyone, and so will require everyone to take collective action against the systems that enforce violence, inequality, and the exploitation of people and resources.

“The known world is crumbling. That’s okay. It was an edifice stitched together with denial and disavowal, with unseeing and unknowing, with mirrors and shadows. It needed to crash. Now, in the rubble, we can make something more reliable, more worthy of our trust, more able to survive the coming shocks.”

While the changes currently facing the world are daunting, Klein argues that they could also be an opportunity for something better. She argues that, through embracing Solidarity, Nuance, and Interconnectedness, it is possible to address the structural problems of society to create a better system for all.