Diving into the Mirror World

A review of Naomi Klein's Doppelgänger

I’m grateful for Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger, as I was for her earlier works, particularly The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything. I want to share my initial responses to her current book, which is long and thorough. It deserves careful consideration. 

The central conceit of her new book is her virtual relationship with author Naomi Wolf, for whom she is often confused and who functions as a kind of distorted mirror. Their early works covered some overlapping terrain. Similarities in their names, ethnic background, public personas, youthful success (Wolf with The Beauty Myth; Klein with No Logo), and their avowed feminism led to an ongoing tendency for journalists and social media commentators to mix them up. During the Covid lockdown, this confusion between the famous feminist Jewish writer Naomis became, in itself, a humorous Internet meme.

As Klein takes great pains to articulate, however, the differences between them are significant. Klein is a Leftist, widely thought of as a serious intellectual and highly respected as a journalist who worked closely with Bernie Sanders on his 2016 presidential campaign. Wolf was a liberal once, but she has drifted toward the QANON Alt Right, her relationship to facts and evidence becoming woozier over the years. Since the pandemic, Wolf has become a full-on Covid denier and anti-vaxxer. She appeared frequently on Tucker Carlson and is a persistent presence on Steve Bannon’s War Room, spouting unproven conspiracy theories (such as the idea of the vaccine “shedding” nanoparticles that could negatively impact the health of un-vaxxed people, or proposing that the vaccines in themselves were part of a New World Order depopulation plan) and fighting against temporary public health requirements such as mandating masks in schools and restaurants. 

Klein is one of those few, important contemporary authors who function, for many of us who lean to the Left, as a reliable moral compass. In her work, she navigates and maps out huge landscapes of power and capital, laying bare economic and social relations, showing how ideas get formed and then weaponized to support and reinforce particular agendas. She has the tenacity to go deep and go long. 

In The Shock Doctrine, for example, Klein revealed how and why a particular approach to economics, that of Milton Friedman and his Chicago School cronies, idealizing “free markets” unshackled from government restraint or excessive taxation, became dominant in the Thatcher/Reagan era. As part of this approach, even horrific military disasters as well as environmental catastrophes were seized upon as opportunities to deregulate and privatize. Other mainstream writers who serve a similar centering function for Leftists and progressives today are Bill McKibben, George Monbiot, Rebecca Solnit, and Arundhati Roy.

Reading Doppelganger, I felt challenged to consider my own recent efforts as a thinker, to reflect on where I may have drifted away from my own moral compass, without realizing it. In our time, this happens very easily. For instance, I have felt, at different points, a strong pull of attraction toward conspiracy theories – or what Klein calls, usefully, “conspiracy culture.” I can sense a solipsistic murkiness associated with this attraction. She makes the point that conspiracy thinking can function, in itself, as a kind of distorted mirror or doppelgänger that obscures a more systemically valid, rigorous, political and economic analysis. 

Of course, I do not agree with Klein on everything. Like most Leftists, she still seems trapped in the reductive materialist worldview, while making an occasional nod toward Buddhist and nondual approaches. In fact, as a “non-materialist” or occultist who drank ayahuasca many times, when I consider how conspiracies may operate, I tend to think certain schemes are orchestrated from a subtler, less dense, or “supersensible” dimension of reality. There are, I find, other beings or levels of consciousness. Different traditions give these beings different names, such as djinn, Devas, Asuras, or what Paul in the New Testament referred to as “powers and principalities.” In his work, the Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner described many astral beings that seek to twist human development toward their own purposes. For me, it is not a question of becoming a doctrinaire Steinerian or Sufi, but of learning how to hold a more capacious map of reality that, perhaps, allows for new possibility. 

I believe this more occult interpretation can be layered over the more traditional scientific view without invalidating either approach, via analytic idealist philosophy, which understands the universe as, ultimately, a projection of a unified, instinctive field of consciousness. As I have sought to explore and tease out in essays here, I tend to believe that any future social movement or Leftist project, to be effective instead of performative, will have to embrace these deeper dimensions of the Psyche while also performing a rigorous critique of power and economic systems woven into a full-spectrum alternative (I tried to offer one model in my 2016 book How Soon Is Now, a touch point for our upcoming seminar, Building Our Regenerative Future). More on this later. 

I also find Klein too trusting when it comes to the medical orthodoxy, although that is a huge wormhole I don’t feel like entering again. I still find it bizarre that most of the mainstream materialist Left embraced the mRNA vaccines without reservation, although it was an untested technology that powerful interests were intent on deploying as a future profit center, and which the public vehemently refused until this emergency. This seemed a textbook case of “disaster Capitalism” that should have rung all of Klein’s alarm bells, but didn’t. At this point, it seems quite obvious that Covid was a Frankenstein product of  “gain of function” experiments which provide a sneaky way for the military to keep studying and developing bioweapons without breaking the Geneva Convention. I find the subject more complex and turbulent than she wants to admit. 

I suppose, in a sense, my critique of Klein’s thinking is that it is constrained by a somewhat limited construct of reason and rationality which, to her credit, she is pushing against in this book, recognizing this has become a constraint. In past essays, I have borrowed a metaphor from the somewhat extreme French theorist Georges Bataille, who, in his essay Rotten Sun, explored the limits of Enlightenment reason, which was associated with the illuminating clarity that streams from our local star. This association between light and reason is challenged when you try to look at the Sun directly, as Van Gogh did: You burn out your eyes and go insane. 

It is as if Reason has its opposite – an aporia, something horrible – at its center. As techno-rationalism advances rapidly via AI, this sense that pure rationality leads to something inhuman, annihilating, becomes ever-more palpable. 

Of course, Klein is not some extreme rationalist in any reductive, technological sense. But, lacking an esoteric viewpoint, she perhaps maintains too much faith in reason alone, even as her reason extends to encompass different ideas from indigenous scholars, and so on. For instance, she quotes the brilliant Afro-American thinker bell hooks who suggests maintaining a distance from claiming any particular identity, to avoid engaging “in the either/or dualistic thinking that is the central ideological component of all systems of domination in Western society.”

A central theme of the book is how recent developments in media technology, meshed with the imperatives of Neoliberal Capitalism, impel us incessantly to make individualistic and self-centered choices — to see ourselves as brands and then force us to protect, extend, and sometimes distort these eerie entities that become virtual doppelgängers of ourselves.