Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Rage Against the Mirror World


While reading Doppelgänger I felt increasingly compelled to contrast it with Dylan Thomas’s most famous poem:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The rage in these first three verses of the poem is a result of old age and, in Philip Larkin’s words, ‘the only end of age’. They are addressed to Thomas’s dying father. But the poem to some extent has become a more generalised cultural admonition. Defiance, resistance, self-actualisation, the ‘I did it my way’ heroism of the lost cause seems to be what they represent now. Thomas’s sentiments are stirring, an encouragement to assert oneself definitively at a time of crisis. Indeed not just at the hour of death but by implication throughout one’s life as a mark of one’s principled daring.

But it is just this rigid form of idealism that Naomi Klein is questioning in Doppelgänger. Instead of raging against the stupidity, venality, and danger to public life of her bête noire, Naomi Wolf, with whom she has been confused incessantly for at least fifteen years, Klein has written an essay worthy of Marcus Aurelius about how to be in the world. As she explains:

“… what drove me to write this book, sticking with it against all good judgment, is that the more I looked at her [Wolf] —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… helped me better see the dangerous systems and dynamics we are all trapped inside.”

Klein, therefore, doesn’t rage about the words, ideas and programmes promoted by Wolf and her right wing collaborators like Steve Bannon and innumerable other conspiracy-mongers. Rather she succumbs to them in a way that reveals to her (and the reader) the reasons why they are so popular. She finds she can disapprove without rage and therefore understand the motivations, if not of the other Klein, of the folk who fall into the rabbit hole of rejection of reality.

But as Klein says there is an even more important consequence for suspension of her own incipient rage: a transformative self-understanding of her own motivations and their origins in her personal experience. None of us, including Klein, wake up one morning and decide to identify and challenge the hidden presumptions and tenets of our existence. We need a reason to disengage from conflict (political, intellectual, or emotional) and its rage, some sort of crisis (which might indeed be death for some of us). For her it was the isolation precipitated by Covid, doubled by her recent family relocation to a relatively remote part of British Columbia.

Perhaps Klein’s most significant self-revelation is what she calls her (and that of many others) Mirror World. In narrow terms this is the ‘environment’ of the internet, its social apps and its constant flow of opinion, reputation, surmise, self-promotion and intentional mis-direction. This is a world of personal branding which is impossible to avoid except by participating in even more intense branding. Among other things Klein recognises that any attempt to establish a public distinction between herself and the other Naomi implies giving the Mirror World yet more power in her own life.

Klein’s description of the Mirror World reminded me of the philosopher Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror Nature which makes the more generalised case. In it Rorty pointed out that it is not the technology of perception like the internet that is the principle impediment to understanding ourselves or others. Rather it is our use of language itself as a reflection of reality which inhibits our ability to comprehend the situation we find ourselves in, to communicate with those who would claim to be engaged with a similar situation, and to make effective judgements about what to do about any differences. The medium may be the message but it is not about anything but itself. And this has been so long before modern technology made it obvious. This is the actual “dangerous systems and dynamics we are all trapped inside.”As Klein puts it, channeling Rorty:

“Artificial intelligence is, after all, a mirroring and mimicry machine: we feed in the cumulative words, ideas, and images that our species has managed to amass (and digitize) over its history and these programs mirror back to us something that feels uncannily lifelike. A golem world.”

We are all trapped in this golem world to the extent we confuse it with what actually exists outside the words we use. This is the world which deserves our rage, not the others who are similarly trapped within it. According to Klein such well-directed rage is the only way to sustain the light of human development, the dying of which is itself death.

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