Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein – a mirror of society and of the soul
“It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous.”
To put it simply, Naomi Klein’s 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction winning book Doppelganger struck me in ways I had never expected. Growing up, the pub around the corner was the beating heart of our family. The Ball was where my grandparents drank for half a century, where my mother worked until it closed 4 months ago, and where I lived for a year of my life. The regulars became like family – each of them invited into our home at Christmas, New Year’s, and on birthdays. As a child, this sense of community was heartening, but as I got old enough to sit around the same table as them with a drink in my hand, it became frightening. To hear of the ‘wokeness’ that ruined this country, the immigrants that had stolen it from us, and to be told in in earnest that “you can’t say anything these days”, which always happens to finish off a rant in which they say exactly what they want. But it would be damaging to generalize these conversations as unchecked prejudice, because the truth is that this often kicked off The Ball’s favorite activity besides drinking and jeering at Sky TV – debating. In many ways, Doppelganger reminded me of the political dichotomy in The Ball, a place where I had heard all manner of thoughts echoed, rational or not. Uncle Tom, “ Uncle ” Dave, my cousin Ember (aptly nicknamed Germaine Greer), who's verbose arguments often rendered the conversation as held hostage under her control, and many others who I happily exchanged an eyeroll with when the debates began. The onslaught of Facebook sourced misinformation that was used as proof against me in these tired debates has led to my longstanding conclusion that conspiracy will always be treated as fact if the outrage is global enough. Doppelganger confronts this notion in an introspective, detailed and incredibly nuanced way.
The throughline of Doppelganger is Klein’s discussion of her ‘double’, the woman she refers to as “other Naomi”, namely, the feminist author turned conspiracy theorist, Naomi Wolf. Their physical likeness - (at complete odds with their political philosophies) - had been an occasional point of confusion before the Coronavirus outbreak but it was greatly exacerbated by Wolf’s growing online presence as a staunch anti-vaxxer. The publicity “other Naomi” garnered from her misinformed rants began to reflect onto Klein, who was misrecognized as “a person who does many extreme things that cause strangers to chastise me or thank me or express their pity for me”. Despite the two Naomi’s having antithetical ideologies – Klein is respected as left thinker, who has written a several of well-known critiques of corporate globalization and capitalism ( No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything ), the confusion persisted, fueled by the backlash Wolf received on social media and the consistent platform she was given by Republicans. Klein’s isolation during lockdown (moving from New Jersey to the remote Sunshine coast in British Columbia) led her to confront this confusion, claiming in the opening lines: “it was never my intention to write this book. I did not have time. No one asked me to. And several people strongly cautioned me against it”. But like many others during lockdown, Klein’s venture down the rabbit hole of political extremism and misinformation became inevitable, as she devoted a “master’s degree’s worth of hours” to both distinguish herself from her doppelganger and to understand what this “other Naomi” could reveal about herself and the political landscape of society.
Understanding Naomi Wolf is far deeper than it would first appear, why else would Klein’s musings span 348 pages? As an incredibly left leaning person myself, it’s easy to look at a figure such as Wolf and dismiss her, and all her claims, as foolish, to see her as little more than a right- wing zealot who manipulates public fears to peddle maddening narratives about the Government using the vaccine as a tracking device, that Covid was all a ruse to trap society into one never ending Orwellian nightmare. To me, Wolf is as frighteningly paranoid as most of conservative America, quick to holler ‘fake news’ at any statistic or fact in front of them, without room for debate – after all, I had no idea who she was, or who she used to be . Klein’s exploration of Wolf’s early career left me shocked: I was baffled to learn that she had received an Ivy League education, that she was a major feminist voice during the third wave feminism of the 90’s who championed the liberation of women from patriarchal beauty standards and sexual freedoms. The Beauty Myth , Wolf’s most championed work, contained thoughtful observations on how women's appearances were weaponized against us, to keep us obedient to established patriarchal systems. This was the same woman who recently endorsed Donald Trump as “eloquent, articulate, thoughtful, [and] very funny”? I found my confusion began to overlap with Klein’s, as she struggled against Wolf’s descent into QAnon skepticism and how that loomed over her career, I saw many threads of my own life unfolding alongside hers, and how quickly intellect can unravel in the face of outrage.
Covid upended society in 2020, forcing a global lockdown as the virus posed a significant threat as easily transferable and deadly. The isolation faced by many, alongside the tumultuous political landscape in both the UK and US, lead to a cesspool of harmful misinformation being spread, with Wolf as one of the biggest instigators, tweeting that “mRNA is not actually a vaccine but a software platform. I actually work with developers who create software so l understand how dangerous it is to have a tech in one's body that can receive 'uploads'.”. Wolf’s conspiracies surrounding the vaccine resemble science-fiction, and as these kinds of assertions were wrongly attributed to Klein – it inspired a wave of tweets such as: “I can’t believe I used to respect Naomi Klein. WTF has happened to her??”. This disillusionment entertained me as much as it frightened me because in reality, it’s not so difficult to believe that Klein could have fallen off the deep end as so many have. Wolf was not always a right-wing conspiracy theorist, what makes Klein so different? In Klein’s own words “we are both Naomis with a skepticism of elite power. We even have some of the same targets”. Both access the same information, see the same things materialize, but it is what they gauge from the fallout that makes them so different. Wolf builds her world around outrage, the pursuit of some corrupt hidden truth that will vindicate her perspective of public health and her support of conservative reactionism, including her support of the insurrection on January 6th. Klein, however, urges to “resist the tin-pot tyrants who will tell you the world is now a blank sheet for them to write their violent stories upon”, and to instead create a society “more reliable, more worthy of our trust, more able to survive the coming shocks”. Historically, the doppelganger concept has been used to reveal the hidden parts of the soul, our ugly desires or suffocated wants, and Klein and Wolf practically act as mirrors of their own ideologies, with a shared sense of anger that manifests as binary opposites, perhaps the oversimplified idea of good versus evil or perhaps as a cautionary tale.
Klein’s Doppelganger is a thoughtful examination of the psychological tribulations that come to light when we recognize ourselves in something that we vehemently oppose. For Klein, her criticisms of conservative America were personified by Wolf, as her fears surrounding the political and social consequences of the Coronavirus began the materialize in her “doubles” beliefs. However, despite their physical likeness, and vaguely similar career trajectories, Klein recognizes that her beliefs cannot be shaken by her ‘mirrored’ self, a self which acts as the Hyde to her Jekyll. This conclusion led me back to that table in The Ball, sitting with my head bowed as my mother, a pragmatic woman in most respects, dismissed Covid as if it was a fallacy – rebuking the lockdowns and restrictions as ‘unnecessary’, sneering at any statistic shown to her. Recognizing yourself as somebody that can be so opposed against your beliefs is the cycle that we’re constantly fighting against. The simple yet expected idea that psychical likeness correlates with mutual understanding, a notion that Doppelganger cleverly resists. In a way, there's a dead ringer for all of us we will probably never know. The same name, the same face, everything we believe to be so unique has already belonged to somebody else. Klein’s intricate discussions of her mirrored self are strikingly introspective and earnest because it confronts what most people are afraid of, their identity. I found myself thinking back on Doppelganger weeks after I’d read it, and even now it still lingers in the back of my mind, not simply because of Klein’s eloquent and thoughtful writing, or the book’s alluring premise but because it refuses to take the easy way out. Klein doesn’t just investigate Wolf’s identity; she contemplates what it might reveal (or rather confirm) about her own beliefs. This idea can be summarized by Klein’s reassurance of her dog’s reflection: “that's you’ I tell Smoke in my most reassuring voice, but she always forgets. And this is the catch-22 of confronting your doppelganger: bark all you want, but you inevitably end up confronting yourself”.