Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World is an exuberant, polymathic effort, in which Klein develops several new political heuristics that pack the punch we’ve come to expect from the originator of “disaster capitalism.” Reading it is like getting walloped by a novel political theory virus— or a potent vaccine for the times. It’s also a Dante-esque spiral down through our endless circles of historical and cultural hell.
Klein’s core subject is the “Mirror World” we now battle in: a place where our digital avatars occlude our bodies, where morbid fantasies blot out fact-checked histories, where the fool’s gold of influencers outshines the daily work of researchers. It’s a place where antimaskers steal the “I can’t breathe” cry of George Floyd, and antivax influencers pretend they are being led to the gas chambers. It’s a place where selfish demagogues appropriate and mimic the poetry of social justice, but only for a select few. It’s where MAGA movement architect Steve Bannon LARPs as a therapist for the common man.
Doppelganger has landed like a Rosetta Stone for divining the incoherent politics of the figures we’ve covered all these years—and the cultural and moral vacuums they fill. But most surprisingly—and we think our listenership will be grateful for this—this rich memoir of demoralization and self-evaluation also offers a deep undercurrent of persistent hope.
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Show Notes
Doppelganger
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Hello everyone, it's Matthew here with a Conspirituality Brief.
Today I'm very happy to be reviewing Naomi Klein's outstanding new book, Doppelganger, A Trip into the Mirror World.
It drops this coming week on September 12th, and on our Thursday episode, that would be the 14th, we'll be discussing the book briefly and then rolling an interview I recorded with Klein in August.
Now, I say review, but this is a long-form podcast, so this will be a little longer and a little more formless than you'll find in print.
And I'll conclude with a coda that wanders into some personal context and local colour.
It's a story about how Klein and I share some geographical and intellectual history here in Toronto, and how through my wayward, culty journey, I've lived in a bit of a mirror world in relation to Klein's journalism.
So, I'll let you know when that's coming so you can bail at that point if you like.
So, here we go.
Starting with the basics.
Doppelganger is an exuberant, polymathic effort in which Klein develops several new political heuristics that all pack the punch that we've come to expect from powerful ideas like disaster capitalism.
Reading it, honestly, is like getting walloped by a novel political theory virus.
Or maybe it's a very strong vaccine for the times.
It's also a Dante-esque spiral down through our endless circles of historical and cultural hell, and it's a memoir of demoralization, self-evaluation, and persistent hope.
Now, if this sounds potentially too ambitious or verging on the grandiose, that's a fair suspicion in this age of galaxy-brained pundits who want to write that book about everything.
And I think that in less humble hands, and I'm also going to say less feminist hands, a project like this could feel like a vanity vehicle for an author's unbearably brilliant mind.
But that doesn't happen here, because throughout Doppelganger, Klein's intersectional discipline, which, despite many flights of fancy, she never abandons, is to serve the values of economic, racial, and climate justice.
And she does it by always citing her sources and elevating the voices of the marginalized.
At a storytelling level, Doppelganger is about navigating what Klein calls the mirror world, a place where those values and those voices are silenced or appropriated, where our digital avatars occlude our bodies, where morbid fantasies blot out fact-checked histories, where the fool's gold of influencers outshines the daily bread of researchers.
It's a place where anti-maskers steal the I-can't-breathe cry of George Floyd and anti-vax influencers pretend they are being led to the gas chambers.
It's a place where real memories and shitpost memes of the Holocaust become public property, the trash of trolls, and also a carte blanche pass for whatever right-wingers in Israel want to do.
It's a place where selfish demagogues appropriate and mimic the poetry of social justice, but only for a select few.
It's where MAGA movement architect Steve Bannon larps as a therapist for the common man.
And above all, it's a place where emotions run hot as facts run dry, and where solidarity is smashed by acrimony.
Klein's description of the mirror world feels really familiar to us here on this podcast.
So her book is like a Rosetta Stone for translating the incoherent politics of the figures we've followed for years.
People like Dr. Christiane Northrup, the grandmotherly advocate for women's health who also fantasizes about murdering doctors who vaccinate children.
Or Mickey Willis, who went from campaign videographer for Bernie Sanders to the proprietor of the Plandemic series.
Or the New Age non-dualism of Charles Eisenstein, who has been enlisted by RFK Jr.
as communications director for his campaign.
Together, they are committed to, quote, healing the divide, unquote, while they openly plan to blacklist COVID researchers and the medical journals that publish them.
In the mirror world we know, legit disinformation researchers are now being sued by Elon Musk and will likely be hauled before congressional committees and interrogated as purveyors of state propaganda.
In the mirror world we know, evangelicals hide their church crimes behind flimsy anti-trafficking campaigns.
And trans people seeking basic human rights are painted as perverted authoritarians seeking to colonize the minds of all normies.
Now Derek, Julian and I were primed to recognize this version of the mirror world through our shared background as gig workers in the yoga and wellness spaces where charisma is conflated with competence, the word community often signals cult, and where pseudoscientific promises outshine the humble, powerful, but also flawed gifts of public health.
We've seen the wildest role confusions in our time.
White social justice advocates promoting Hindu nationalism and dodgy experts in yoga therapy reigniting satanic panic themes.
But Klein's pathway to the mirror world was much more intense, involuntary, and goofy.
Because for more than a decade, she has been crudely and at times hilariously confused with Naomi Wolf, the once-respected feminist critic turned chronic conspiracy theorist and right-wing shill.
You should check out her Twitter today, because if it's like the day I'm recording this, she might be posting about how the COVID vaccines are actually an abortion drug forcing women to miscarry.
There isn't any melted idea out there that Wolf hasn't boosted over the last few years.
So how did a significant portion of the online commentariat manage to blur these Naomi's together?
Maybe it's the age.
Maybe it's race, both writers being Jewish women, seeming to share some political heritage and overlaps.
Maybe it's a branding issue.
Or maybe it's a generalized stereotype that people construct of public intellectuals who do the work of cultural criticism.
However the merger happened, the resulting destabilization of Klein's public persona allowed Klein the private person to go on an extended sabbatical to seek out how her work and identity could be so easily distorted.
Now I want to digress briefly here and mention that this sabbatical emerged from some kind of, I can only call it a mitzvah that ultimately allowed for some kind of integration and insight.
Somehow Klein recognized that a virtual puppet of herself was out there in the world getting confused with another virtual presence and being opined about, fretted over, and attacked.
And I think everyone with a social media account has experienced this to some extent.
The soul seems to leave the body.
Now, in my own online terrors, I have often had the impression that the flesh part of me is helplessly watching a virtual part of me trapped in some bizarro MMA octagon being beaten senseless by a mob.
And I don't know how it happened, but at some point I realized that these sequences were like dreams, and that the beaten virtual self could actually melt back into my body.
Now, in our interview, Klein told me that she's not advocating for ego death on the pathway to reckoning with our bizarre mirror world.
But I think her basic starting point in Doppelganger gestures at a kind of spiritual realization that allowed her to access a more stable and grounded self.
Now that's not her language, but I think it's reasonable given the scope of the problem she's pointing to, which is nothing less than the culture at large trying to remember how to be real.
Okay, enough digression.
Klein goes on a secret sabbatical, but she doesn't go alone.
She goes prepared with a stack of books and movies about doubling, from Freud to Otto Rank to Charlie Chaplin's The Dictator to Philip Roth's novel Operation Shylock.
And she's also armed with this will to self-examination that I'm talking about, flagging it early on in the book in an introduction that's called Off-Brand Me.
She writes, In stories about doubles, twins, and imposters, it is often the case that the doppelganger acts as an unwelcome kind of mirror, showing the protagonist a vain and venal version of themselves.
It will not give too much away to say that, while watching my doppelganger, I have felt that unwelcome wince of recognition more than once.
Yet, what drove me to write this book, sticking with it against all good judgment, is that the more I looked at her, her disastrous choices and the cruel ways she was often treated by others, the more I came to feel as if I were seeing not only undesirable parts of myself, but a magnification of many undesirable aspects of our shared culture as well.
The ambient and all-pervasive hunger for ever more fleeting relevance?
The disposability with which we treat people who mess up?
The trivialization of words and displacements of responsibility and much else?
In the end, looking at her helped me see myself more clearly, but it also, oddly, helped me better see the dangerous systems and dynamics we are all trapped inside.
Now, in our interview, Klein describes following Wolf's exploits as if Wolf were the White Rabbit, and she also used another metaphor, that Wolf and the other doppelgangers in the book serve as a kind of camera obscura for peering at the hyperobject of our flaming world.
And in the end, Klein doesn't get to interview her white rabbit, despite several requests, so she's left to speculate, albeit at a very high level, at how the lauded writer of the beauty myth became such an unhinged but effective tool of the right.
And this is an important question when we consider these figures, these Roman candles of confusion.
How did they get there?
Klein offers two clues as to how Wolfe the persona, if not the person, imploded.
There's an incident that recalls themes from Klein's book, Shock Doctrine, although they are microcosmed into the snow globe of academia.
This is the moment in 2019 where Wolfe is being interviewed about her scholarship on the BBC.
She's got a new book out, and the subject is the criminalization of homosexuality in Victorian England.
But the interviewer exposes that Wolfe read a key phrase in the primary materials incorrectly, leading her to misreport that gay men were being regularly executed for sodomy.
And that misreading and its exposure torpedoed her entire project.
And within five gut-wrenching minutes, several decades of Woolf's credibility as a scholar and leftist is completely smashed, live, on air.
Her publisher withdrew the forthcoming book, and Woolf was suddenly intellectually and politically homeless.
It wasn't a cancellation, although Woolf eventually spun it that way, partially by accurately clocking the cruel glee that liberals and progressives took at her expense.
And of course, she nurtured an enormous persecution complex.
But altogether, the shock left her raw and open and available for right-wing pundits like Steve Bannon to swoop in and platform her as an exile from the left-leaning academic orthodoxy.
But Klein also identifies a more systemic weakness in Woolf's writing that, in retrospect, left her vulnerable to this rightward drift.
She shows that in books like The Beauty Myth, Woolf's feminism was always very white, very second wave and individualistic, not at all interested in class analysis.
Her feminism was about resisting misogyny, but only to the extent that misogyny prevented women like her from achieving success in patriarchal capitalism.
Woolf was foreshadowing the lean-in vibe and all of its insipid self-regard.
And I want to underline this for a moment, because through this and many other examples, Klein repeatedly points to an exit strategy for mirror world seductions, should we have the opportunity and courage to take advantage of it.
Having an intersectional education in the material analysis of power and capital, paired with a long view of how our current orders of power came to be, including our places within them, these tools should protect our idealism and analytical frameworks from becoming incoherent and self-serving.
Kline ultimately suggests that Woolf never really did her homework before becoming an intellectual brand.
She didn't do the mirror work.
Now, once Wolf is audience-captured by Steve Bannon, becoming a regular correspondent on his War Room podcast, which Klein admits to listening to obsessively even while doing yoga late into the evening, it soon becomes clear that together they are manifesting an unconscious parody of Klein's own arguments from Shock Doctrine.
They competently argue that the disruptions of COVID are being cynically weaponized by corporate interests intent on seizing larger swaths of economic and social control.
They point out the profiteering of the tech barons.
And they are not wrong in the archetypal sense, but they are absolutely wrong about what the solutions could possibly be.
And whereas the final section of Klein's Shock Doctrine profiles community movements that successfully resist disaster capitalism, Bannon has nothing to offer their disillusioned followers beyond cryptocurrency and survivalist supplements.
So, Klein's dilemma has suddenly doubled.
Wolf seems to have purloined her identity unintentionally, but then is also manifesting a toxic mimic of her life's work.
And this leads Klein into a meditation on how easily her own leftist analysis can elide into paranoid conspiracism by painting a world of abstract, malevolent forces seemingly intent on ratcheting up levels of exploitation at every turn.
How, despite the care with which we may describe the dysfunction of systems, any discourse of disillusionment can always be cheapened by those who want to use criticism to break things instead of build them, and who want to seek out individuals to blame as they hoard their individual pieces of satisfaction.
Some of Klein's best analytical work in this book is in how she fleshes out the logic driving these strange alliances between people like Wolff and Bannon and between folks we covered in our book who combine the cultural liberalism of wellness with a cruel libertarian politics.
And the thing about Klein is that she doesn't just do armchair work on this.
There's a really telling passage in which she recounts helping her partner's political campaign in their rural British Columbia town.
He was running for the left-leaning NDP, New Democratic Party, and their door-to-door experience was quite disturbing.
They spoke with a parade of folks who bore all the outward signs of middle-class, progressive inclination while standing on their tidy porches spewing the most cursed slurry of 4chan conspiracy theories.
How does this happen?
The most popular explanation for organic farmers and yoga teachers becoming bedfellows with right-wing extremists is some version of horseshoe theory, which argues that as the political right and left move to their maximal points away from each other, the axis they they rest on begins to bend into a horseshoe shape,
eventually making the behaviors of extreme leftists and right-wingers close to touching or indistinguishable.
Now this sounds like reasonable math, but the problem is that it suggests that the basic
values of leftists and right-wingers may not have been originally opposed to each other
or held in good faith.
It assumes also that whoever was plotted on the leftward line to begin with was actually
progressive in values and commitments, and not just like yoga people who shopped at Whole
Foods.
Now I find this to be a common American point of view, perhaps because in the mainstream there is no truly left-leaning party.
Now, in place of horseshoe theory, Klein points to the concept of diagonalism, a term inspired by the name of a queue-adjacent political movement in Germany.
Quote, inspired by the term Querdenken, but taking it beyond Germany, William Callison and Quinn Slobodian, both scholars of European politics, describe these emergent political alliances as diagonalism.
They explain, Born in part from transformations in technology and communication, diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right, while generally arcing toward far-right beliefs, to express ambivalence, if not cynicism, toward parliamentary politics, and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties.
At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy.
Now, by the way, we booked Callison and Slobodian for a panel discussion that will drop in a few weeks.
So, diagonalism is a contrarian protest against the expectation of political coherence.
And as Klein unfolds it, and through that passage as well, I began to understand a little bit better how easy it is for this demographic to welcome or nurture spiritual elements, because it rebels against the conventional in a very adolescent way.
It's looking for some kind of magic, a transcendent third way above and beyond what it pretends to be the illusory polarity of left and right.
And it bears some resemblance to the heavily religious traditionalism of Alexander Dugan and other intellectual heroes for people like Bannon.
Now as ideological incoherence grows amongst diagonalists, so does their allergy to coherent collective action.
And that hyper-individualism pushes the whole lot of them rightwards.
However, they really don't want to cop to that drift.
And that's why Wolf is so important to Bannon as a self-identified progressive or liberal.
Klein explains, quote, The role of these progressives is not to renounce the goals of social justice and embrace a hard-right worldview, which is the journey made by well-known ex-Trotskyists like Irving Kristol in the mid-20th century.
On the contrary, they must continue to identify as proud members of the left or devoted liberals while claiming that it is the movements and tendencies of which they were once part that have betrayed their own ideals, leaving these uniquely courageous individuals politically homeless and in search of new alliances.
These exiles from progressivism package themselves not as defectors, but as loyalists.
It's their former comrades and colleagues, they claim, who are the impostors, the fakes.
And here's a painful part.
Are the stay-the-course leftists railed against by Team Bannon impostors and fakes?
Are they really?
Well, to the extent that we didn't maintain our critique of power during the disaster of COVID, maybe we are.
Klein argues that really looking into the mirror worlds of Bannon or Magga means really taking what the mirror people are saying seriously.
It requires listening to their bizarre protests, filtering out the bits of truth, and interrogating whether we are really hearing them and then responding to them.
And during the interview we'll run next week, she notes that it's one thing to analyze the grift that these people are running, but it might be more important to understand why they have millions of rapt followers who resonate with their pseudo-empathetic populism.
Klein insists that we must understand why they are compelling, if deceptive, on issues traditionally championed by the left.
She calls out those of us who are left of center for losing our critical edge when COVID crashed into 2020 by letting our support for the compromised public health efforts of our governments to be louder than our critiques of flawed systems that are destined, if not designed, to set people against each other.
And in this razor-sharp analysis, Klein locates an origin for our present iteration of the mirror world, in part, in the blatant hypocrisies of the neoliberal age.
Here's a characteristic passage.
Quote, In mapping the contours and happenings of the mirror world, we do need to understand this.
The legacy of generations of messages that pitted members of society against one another does not disappear overnight simply because there is a pandemic.
And yet, strangely enough, when COVID hit, that was precisely the expectation among most centrist politicians, which was itself a form of magical thinking.
With no warning, the message from much of our political and corporate classes changed diametrically.
It turned out we were a society after all, that the young and healthy should make sacrifices for the old and ill, that we should wear masks as an act of solidarity with them if not for ourselves, and that we should all applaud and thank the very people, many of them Black, Many of them women, many of them born in poorer countries, whose lives and labor had been most systematically devalued, discounted, and demeaned before the pandemic.
Those expressions of solidarity were the real vertigo, the real upside-down world, since they bore no resemblance to the ways capitalism had taught us to unsee and neglect one another for so very long.
Looking back now, it seems entirely unsurprising that a subset of the population said, fuck you, we won't mask or jab or stay home to protect people we have already chosen not to see.
It also makes perfect sense that the vaccines being free worked against them for many people, especially in the United States, a country that treats health care as a profit center, and where many have come to equate good medicine with gold-plated private insurance plans.
as Kevin Newman, a 31-year-old real estate agent in Arkansas, reasoned,
if COVID was really serious, we'd have to pay for the vaccine. Everything else is expensive,
so why are they giving it out for free? It's suspicious.
Now, Klein's revelations here would be enough for any single book, but her structural critique
doesn't pause on how liberal democracies faced COVID.
From there, she goes global and deep historical in search of some roots for this hypocrisy and self-deception.
And this stream rolls towards a peak in a courageous passage called The Nazi in the Mirror, in which she faces down the incipient neo-fascism of today's geopolitical landscape, arguing that we all need to do mirror work in relation to the very foundations of what most of us take to be normal.
And her line of attack here traces back to the omega point of modern terror and the crucible of her Jewish upbringing and education, the Holocaust.
On the surface level, her doorway into this discussion opens through how this never-again event was trivialized by COVID contrarians who posed as genocide victims by comparing basic pandemic mitigations to industrial murder.
Klein's deeper point, however, is that by pulling this LARP, they unconsciously exposed a zone of persistent guilt and shame that is yet to be looked at, let alone resolved.
Now in this same lane, I covered Canadian diagonalists like Susan Stanfield and Stephanie Sibio.
Klein covers Sibio as well in the book.
As part of the Million Moms Instagram brand, they printed t-shirts with yellow stars of David on them and the word COVID COST emblazoned across the chest in Hebraic lettering.
They also sold orange t-shirts that compared vaccinating children to stealing them away to residential schools.
The orange t-shirt being the solidarity symbol for those who are trying to remember the horrors of residential schooling.
And I was aware of the cultural vampirism at play, but Klein brought it into nauseating focus.
She shows that in the Canadian context, Holocaust survivor pretendianism erupted at the very same moment that Indigenous communities across Canada were starting to produce forensic evidence of the mass graves of children on the grounds of former residential schools.
Those initial images of the earth pointed to what their cultural memories have held for generations, that the modern Canadian state is built on genocide.
Now, when centrist and center-left media boiled over with reports of mass graves, the mirror world stole that fire, and its people centered themselves, made themselves the victims and survivors of state oppression via public health.
And of course this was absurd and craven.
But unfortunately, Klein argues, most left-leaning people didn't take the opportunity to really connect the dots that the mirror-worlders were scatter-shooting across the barn door.
If we are failing to identify and push back against fascist elements in our body politic, Klein argues, it might be because we think we're somehow beyond it all, that it's all in the past and not in the earth beneath our feet, that settlers are not here because of vast historical injustices.
So Klein takes the whole left-of-center demographic to the woodshed for the presumption that somehow the Nazis' fascist genocide was a one-time tear in the fabric of Western dignity.
She highlights the solid historical research that shows how closely Hitler mirrored the anti-indigenous policies of America in its westward expansion.
But then she goes farther still and gets more personal, directing her exploration of this hypocrisy towards the nerve center of her leftist Jewish heritage and its entanglement with the terrible paradoxes of the modern state of Israel.
And I have to say that I winced through this part several times because I can feel how hot the blowback might be.
Klein shows that after the Holocaust, the Zionism of trauma and survival turned the language of never again into the implicit belief of never before.
Which allowed the modern state of Israel and its allies to carve out a very complex path and cover over many colonial and oppressive policies under the pageantry of liberal democracy and the need for security.
For Klein, this failure of self-examination began with recognizing the paralyzing effects of her early education, which consisted in part of a recitation of Holocaust horrors without relief.
She writes, quote, I am struck that we never actually grieved, nor were we invited to seize our anger and turn it into an instrument for solidarity.
Many years later, my friend Cecily Saraski, then one of the leaders of Jewish Voice for Peace, observed of these kinds of educational methods, it's re-traumatization, not remembering.
There's a difference.
When she said it, I knew it was true.
Remembering puts the shattered pieces of ourselves back together again.
Remembering.
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.
Now at the risk of appropriating this analysis, I think that it can be generalized and kept in the back pocket of anyone who works in the justice sphere where there are any number of group dynamics that get stalled on the ritualization of pain and who best can articulate it.
I've been in Facebook groups for the survivors of yoga and Buddhism cults where the solidarity, community building, and resource sharing is scuttled by turf wars over how crimes are described, and how punishments are fantasized, and what kinds of aggressive behavior towards group members and outsiders should be tolerated.
So I know this scene.
I've participated blindly in it.
And Klein's argument here is absolutely centered on Holocaust experience and studies, but I find it broadly instructive, especially in an age where social media inhibits the development of solidarity by gamifying the storytelling of heroism.
Okay, so that's really only a brief recitation of Klein's discoveries and themes in this book, but for me personally, the meticulous analysis is not ultimately the most important part of Doppelganger, because after all, even shock doctrine has been twisted and mimicked.
What will be impossible for Naomi Wolf, Steve Bannon, Mickey Willis, Jordan Peterson, and Christopher Rufo to mimic, however, will be the very soul of leftist discourse, namely, its ability to introspect, to self-criticize, to get unbearably honest about its own inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and cruelties.
The most important part of this book will be impossible for them to mimic, and that's the sheer exuberance of Klein's writing.
I had to pause numerous times in my reading to ask, how is she managing this?
How are so many diverse threads being woven at once without snares or tangles?
How is it not breaking my brain to read this?
And I think it comes down to a zoom-in, zoom-out rhythm that she managed to find between the personal and the cultural, between analysis and absurdism, between the fact-checked and the speculative.
It's a very dense book with a lot of breathing space in it nonetheless.
And because of this, it's very approachable, and it has a conversational style that can shift angles without losing perspective.
And that breathing space gives the reader time to question, to cross-reference, to evaluate, learn, and meditate.
And ideologues just can't write like this.
When they go on and on about freedom, they do it from within the most boring, stylistic straitjackets.
If they try to aggregate large amounts of data, they end up gishgalloping as opposed to synthesizing.
They can't afford to give readers space to make their own connections.
They have a deal to close.
Their product is coercion, and coercion requires claustrophobia.
And I think that sometimes people wind up agreeing with Bannon and Rufo and Peterson because they feel if they didn't, they would be punished, or wouldn't be allowed to turn the podcast off.
And also, they just aren't funny, and despite her subject matter, Klein can be really funny.
But it's not just the rhythm.
There are also economical stanzas of near-poetry scattered throughout the book that you just won't find in the heterodox commentariat.
Listen to this, quote, "...the form of doppelganger that increasingly preoccupies me is this, the fascist clown state that is the ever-present twin of liberal Western democracies, perpetually threatening to engulf us in its fires of selective belonging and ferocious despising."
And that immediately conjures the image of Jordan Peterson in his Batman vomit suit yelling frantically into his webcam.
Or consider this passage, where we can see that as Klein can hold all of the political doubling, she can also hold the infinite personal and cultural doubling, in which social media becomes a factory for spitting out personae that dance like marionettes to the music of audience capture.
She writes about the, quote, wavy-haired mom-fluencers turning child-rearing into a series of airy tableaux of sponsored organic content.
These influencers gaze at us through the camera's lens with so much heart-bursting love that it's easy to forget that what they are actually looking at is their own faces on their phones, their digital doubles, as they coach us all to reach for our own best selves, our body doubles, in the never-ending house of mirrors.
In other words, we are seduced and distracted away from the reality of our interconnected lives through a narcissistic parody of connection.
We come to believe, or half-believe, that we are loved by people who perform a radiant care while the reality is that they're merely self-soothing in the light of our attention.
But meanwhile, the need to actually look at herself pushes Klein to turn her lens inward upon her record of knowledge production and on the left as a whole to scour for blind spots and all of the places we lose touch with or are pried loose from our values in the times it matters most.
Places where we opt to comply with power and authority rather than challenge and reform it.
Opportunities for solidarity that we lose because we're too disgusted with conspiracy theorists,
or distrustful of each other, where we would rather dismiss than engage,
where we favor irony over empathy, where we get lost in the discourse and neglect getting on with a work of care.
Ultimately, Klein suggests, there would be no distorted mirror world if the so-called real world,
including all of us in it, was not so deranged, blinded, self-centered,
smugly heading towards social and ecological ruin.
Without these priors, it would have nothing to reflect.
So for me, the greater part of this book is not Klein's description of the mirror world, but her memoir of doing the mirror work that it takes to break free of it.
And I won't spoil the key details here, but I will say that after long and hard contemplation, Clyde begins to see how her own contrarianism, passion, and vulnerability to echo-chambering mirror those same qualities in her nemesis.
So this introspective aspect has given me a real shake, professionally and personally.
In the professional sphere, it's shone a light on the weak points of my work on this podcast.
Because as a left-wing commentator during COVID, it helps me see how I did not do a very good job at walking the line between criticizing populist responses to institutional failure and criticizing the institutions themselves.
I didn't turn to my yoga, wellness, and even my anti-vax and MAGA and QAnon neighbours and say clearly enough, hey, you're right about some very big things.
The perverse incentives of modern pharmaceuticals, the insane inequalities of globalization, and the utter lack of accountability enjoyed by the wealthy.
You're right, and I share those values with you.
Now let's take a look together at what the healthiest responses to those realizations might be.
And because I didn't do enough of that, I contributed to the polarization and zero-sum game of the mirror world.
So, I'm going to pull back and reassess, and that's a real gift.
However, on a deeper level, this book pried, unintentionally, into my own history to show me my own path through the mirror world, which rolled out on a parallel track to Klein's.
So, as I promised in the beginning, this is where I'll end the formal review part of Klein's latest book and roll the tape back by around 30 years to consider some of its origins, not only in her earlier writing, but in the urban and intellectual space we once shared here in Toronto.
So here's where my colleague Derek can stick in some nice transition music.
Derek, help us out.
Okay, Klein is 18 months older than me.
I have memories, albeit dim, of when we were both at U of T.
We weren't in any classes together, but I knew she was a journalist for the Varsity Student Newspaper.
She'd organize events and lectures for visiting thinkers at the U of T Student Union building, I think that's where it was, on Spadina Avenue.
So I kind of remember her doing an in-person version of what she's been doing in print for about two decades now, curating and hosting conversations about the most progressive ideas out there.
And everyone seemed to know her.
And I remember that most people really looked up to her.
Now I was just as leftist as she was, but more of a dropout, more of an introvert, maybe more depressive.
I was a writer as well, but in fiction.
And I didn't know her personally, and I don't honestly know if I would have approached her for friendship or to hang out.
She seemed to have an extroverted optimism that I personally tended to feel a little shy or ashamed around back then.
She seemed clear about how bleak the world was, but equally clear that there was something to be done about it, and that she had workable ideas.
So, I vibed with the part about the bleak world, but the second and third parts about responding to it never really resonated with me.
The problems seemed too vast.
Accordingly, my own activism, marching, protests, these things stalled out pretty quick, and I turned to writing gothy, absurdist novels to make sense of things.
But Klein stayed the course.
She really tried to make sense of things.
So, despite many similarities in our milieus and political values, we wound up in very different places.
And there are countless factors, of course, going on.
One was educational.
I didn't have much feminism on board.
I wasn't reading postcolonial theory.
I wasn't seeking out people and thinkers who didn't look like me.
But Klein was.
And I'm sure those things put coalition building on her map when I had no idea what that might have been.
And maybe religion played a role as well.
Now as I've noted, there are very rich and complex descriptions throughout Doppelganger about Klein growing up amongst the Jewish leftists of Montreal and soaking in a kind of Talmudic history of justice-seeking, pragmatism, resistance, and survival.
For me, growing up Catholic didn't offer anything like that intellectual food.
I mean, it could have, if I'd been exposed to liberation theology, but that just wasn't on the table in the parishes that I went to.
And despite my school teacher parents being committed union people and NDP supporters, the moral universe I absorbed from the Church was not about what we must do to change things in recognition of our limitations.
It wasn't about the spirit of solidarity.
It was about whether I could recognize the divine will in the world around me.
Or how perfect it was that Jesus had reconciled all things in his singular heroism.
And how the church liturgy expressed some ultimate achievement of victory and peace.
And these were obviously lies that did not encourage me to develop patience, respect for uncertain processes, resilience in the face of loss, or the need for real solidarity and community.
And maybe this too is a hidden source of generalized antisemitism that, for millennia, Jews have been surrounded by evangelists and proselytizers who believe they have all the answers.
And I think it galls them to see a community where all of the answers are incomplete, where practice transcends dogma, and where the will of God is up for constant debate, and where people can express devotion through the bonds of pragmatism and jokes.
So Klein and those she learned from kept doing their real-world thing.
Describing real world battles we should all be fighting.
And I floated towards a sector of the mirror world that pretended to evaluate the real world from some more enlightened viewpoint.
I wandered into years of spiritual seeking.
Buddhism.
A Course in Miracles.
Yoga.
But I kept contact with the real world in part by reading Klein's books and the books of others.
And that reading helped me keep one foot in a reality where things really mattered.
And it also let me know that someone was still watching what was happening to the culture very closely.
And the funny thing is that at certain points I felt that she was watching people like me very closely.
So her book No Logo came out in 1999 and its opening pages described the eerie landscape I became very familiar with and I was kind of trapped within.
In the opening pages, Klein described moving into an old warehouse in Spadina's former fashion district, converted into retail spaces and lofts by the clothing tycoon who had shipped his labor operations overseas.
Klein wrote about being aware of the labor movement history of the neighborhood, how even Emma Goldman had lived there once, and how Marxist-inspired unions had fought hard against the robber barons.
But in the mid-1990s, all of that was scrambled.
Because global trade agreements had emptied that space, and spaces like it, of material work and, it seemed, historical meaning.
So, here's a signature descriptive flash from Klein.
So far my landlord, who made his fortune manufacturing and selling London Fog overcoats, has stubbornly refused to sell off our building as condominiums with exceptionally high ceilings.
He'll relent eventually, but for now he still has a handful of garment tenants left whose businesses are too small to move to Asia or Central America and who for whatever reason are unwilling to follow the industry trend towards home workers paid by the piece.
The rest of the building is rented out to yoga instructors, documentary film producers, graphic designers, and writers and artists with live-work spaces.
The schmata guys still selling coats in the office next door look terribly dismayed when they see the Marilyn Manson clones stomping down the hall in chains and thigh-high leather boots to the communal washroom clutching tubes of toothpaste.
But what can they do?
We are all stuck together here for now, caught between the harsh realities of economic globalization and the all-enduring rock video aesthetic.
So, what's wild is that one of those yoga instructors Klein mentions had opened a studio in that building and eventually, after several moves, that studio went on to become the hub of the Toronto yoga scene.
It's the place that Sting visited whenever he was in town.
Over time, the empty and inscrutable nature of all of this weird culture of non-work really laid bare one of Klein's core ideas for me, that the Global North was in complete reliance upon a shadow world of offshore labor and dodgy financial pyramids.
Now, those of us with enough money, whether it was from privilege or fake credit, we had access to these empty spaces, formerly sites of work and maybe even union drives, but we had nothing to manufacture but our aspirational selves.
And as for that studio owner, get this, he would fly to India almost every year to train with his guru, Pattabhi Joyce.
So put a pin in that name.
And that ashram shared the same economy as factories that made yoga clothes for pennies on the dollar for export back to Canada.
So Klein's neighbor was like this perfect postmodern mirror world citizen presenting a bohemian affect while being a carbon expensive global consumer.
Importing a supposedly ancient practice reconstructed by a very dodgy guy educated within a Hindu nationalist milieu, now selling his wares to urban liberals who needed to de-stress as the gig work hamster wheel sped up.
So over the years, Klein's very brief mention of that yoga teacher loomed larger and larger for me, because I saw a bit of myself in it.
I too was one of those guys who started to let my political morality become as fluid as my son's salutation.
I began to content myself with the thought that it was enough to feel progressive.
I didn't have to act on it, did I?
Given that acting on it obviously wasn't going to help?
And in the fading possibility that I could be part of a coherent community, I sank deeper into the mirror world of cults, where every in-real-life event that Klein and other reality-based people investigated and formed a moral response to and organized around became symbolic, part of the mythic backdrop of a journey that had narrowed down to the self-project.
Goaded by groups that told me that terrorist attacks and financial collapses alike were all projections of my own confused mind.
A shadow of my former self would still identify as leftist.
But this fatal disengagement put me in a world which was not functionally different from the quickly warming up Petri dishes of neo-fascism, where the core social agreement is, there is no political solution.
And that gives me pause.
Because the mirror world of yoga and wellness I entered in my flight from reality did not look or feel like the garish, zero-sum dungeon of Steve Bannon.
It was pastel in hue.
It smelled like sandalwood.
It traded on the affect of altruism rather than its responsibilities.
It fantasized about universal peace while eschewing the mundane work of democracy.
But as we saw during the pandemic, these distortions and unconscious hypocrisies are parallel to much more radical drives.
Many, many of the prominent yoga teachers who were above me on the professional ladder ten years ago got red-pilled on anti-vax propaganda or moral panickery as they defended their small Potemkin kingdoms of self-assured bliss.
That could have happened to me.
But anyhow, it took a lot of years.
Therapy, becoming a father, learning how to be a better partner, working on my defensiveness, reading good books, asking for help, getting editors, and now three years of working with Derek and Julian in a super intense and responsible way.
I got back on track, I think.
And ironically, one of the key moments in which my world synced back up with the non-mirror world that Klein stayed in, I think, was when I hung up my yoga shorts to write a book about what was really going on in the industry.
So remember that yoga teacher in her building, his guru, who he burned all that carbon to visit every year.
Potabi Joyce, this guy was a serial sex assaulter and I investigated his crimes and I wound up digging into the hypocrisy of that whole social constellation in kind of the same way that Klein had dug into 20 years before the hypocrisy of the political and economic world that has let cults proliferate and flourish.
So I'm adding this coda to the end on the bet that this book will be personally resonant for some progressives and leftists in ways that Klein doesn't address directly.
I'm talking about people who found themselves straying away from their values during the 90s and the early 2000s, during this time of intensifying consumerism, weakening social bonds, escalating exploitation, and the normalization of neoliberal empire.
And this is all before Facebook fires up.
And I'm also not suggesting that Naomi Klein is some kind of pole star for everyone who falls by the wayside.
That's far too much to lay on her.
And besides, she's just one node in a vast network of moral activists, the majority of whom are less visible or marginalized.
I'm telling the story because I find it mysterious that one can be disillusioned, deracinated, and disenchanted for very long periods of time, and yet the real world doesn't go away.
It can't.
Its demands and possibilities can always be located, along with friends who can see them with you.
As with a cult or an abusive relationship, you can disappear into a mirror world, but you can also come back to reality.
Every day you will eat bread and that will give you the opportunity to ask, who made this for me?
What were they paid for it?
What is their life like?
So during my interview with Klein, she kept hitting on one particular point, that she hopes people on the left can more clearly remember and stand by their convictions and values, and not default or retreat to irony and mockery, no matter how many losses we rack up.
She argues that the consequences of not remembering and acting is simple and guaranteed.
That the grifters and demagogues slide into the vacuum and fulfill all unmet needs.
She suggests that however we have wandered into bubbles of self-help or self-soothing, Understandably demoralized by losses and waylaid by new economies of distraction, we still know what is right and fair and just, and that if we pay attention, the realities of COVID and climate can only sharpen that memory and ardor.
We find that we still know how to find and make real friends.
To touch grass.
To organize things.
To take care of elders and kids.
We find that the mirror world can blot out the real world for a time, but it cannot destroy it.
Thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality Podcast.
