Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World is a 2023 non-fiction book by Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein. Drawing on her background as a public figure, a leftist activist, a Jewish woman, and a parent, Klein sketches a sweeping portrait of the current state of the world. The book’s title refers primarily to the longstanding and widespread confusion between Klein and fellow author Naomi Wolf. Klein examines this confusion while also using the figure of the doppelganger, or double, to explore the complex relationships between capitalism, leftist activism, conspiracy theories, and various forms of oppression. The book examines the current problems facing humanity and the difficulties involved in solving them. Doppelganger is a New York Times Best Seller.

This guide uses the 2023 e-book edition from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Content Warning: This guide discusses fascist ideology, genocide, medical experimentation, abuse of children with autism, eugenics, antisemitism, racism, anti-gay bias, and enslavement.

Summary

For years, Naomi Klein has been confused with Naomi Wolf, especially online. When Wolf starts promoting conspiracy theories about COVID-19, Klein is often blamed for her words. Klein becomes deeply unsettled by, and obsessed with, the similarities and differences between herself and Wolf, whom she comes to see as her doppelganger. She decides to examine the current state of the world through the lens of the doppelganger, reflecting that in literature, “the doppelganger acts as an unwelcome kind of mirror” (17), revealing truths about the self and the world. 

Klein is first confused with Wolf during the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. Both of them write about the protests, but Klein does so from a leftist perspective, while Wolf takes a liberal approach. Wolf’s writing sometimes involves bizarre claims about conspiracy theories, which damage Klein’s reputation when they are attributed to her. Klein tries to ignore the confusion between herself and Wolf, but it only gets worse, especially during 2020’s COVID-19 lockdowns. Wolf becomes one of the most vocal anti-vaccine advocates. Klein wishes she had a different first name to avoid this confusion. Despite her lifelong commitment to anti-capitalism, she feels the need to protect her name as her personal brand. She realizes that when people interact online, they must do so through digital doppelgangers that alter how they are perceived. 

Wolf, once a notable feminist writer, makes the shift to conspiracy theories in the wake of a career-destroying event: One of her books is revealed, live on air, to have been based on a misunderstanding of terminology that undermined her entire argument. No longer considered trustworthy in mainstream liberal discourse, Wolf teams up with far-right political strategist Steve Bannon to build a new audience. She argues that vaccine-tracking apps will usher in a new era of surveillance that will enslave the world’s population. While her facts are incorrect, she is tapping into people’s genuine fears about the power and ubiquity of surveillance capitalism, making her audience feel like they can resist that surveillance by refusing to get vaccinated. This practice of getting the facts wrong but the emotions right is the basis of the conspiracy-minded framework Klein refers to as the “Mirror World.”

While it is common for those on the far right to promote COVID-19 conspiracy theories, they have found unlikely allies among those involved in New Age movements who are skeptical of conventional medical advice. Klein calls this alliance “diagonalism”; diagonalists populate the Mirror World. They often take language used by leftists to describe real issues and alter it to dilute its meaning; “fake news,” “triggered,” and “othering” are just a few examples. Drawing on a term from Philip Roth’s doppelganger novel Operation Shylock, Klein refers to this twisting of language as “pipikism,” which is the process of turning the serious into the ridiculous. In their haste to distance themselves from the right’s pipikism and conspiratorial thinking, Klein worries that liberals and leftists were perhaps too quick to accept mediocre government responses to COVID-19 instead of demanding better workplace protections and systemic change. The same problem has plagued activism in other areas, including climate change.

Diagonalists’ ideology is based on fascist and eugenicist notions of bodily purity and superiority. They promote the idea that some people deserve to die from COVID-19 because they are weak or burdensome. As the parent of a child with autism, Klein has seen this ideology play out in frightening ways. Such ideas are not new: Many people with disabilities, including children with autism, were murdered under the Nazi regime before and during World War II. A better alternative would be a society where children’s diversity is supported and uplifted instead of categorized and pathologized. When people are conditioned to see each other as less than human, it becomes easier for fascist ideas to take hold. Those who have relative material wealth know that their lives are possible because of the profound suffering of those who labor to produce the goods that they use, but they choose not to see these people as real, complex individuals because doing so would produce painful cognitive dissonance.

Klein explores some of the worst horrors of human history—the colonization of the Americas, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the Holocaust—by examining their impact on the present. Since she and Wolf are both Jewish, Klein chooses to examine their respective feelings on Israel and Palestine. In earlier decades, although both Naomis acknowledged the horrors of the Holocaust and the historical circumstances under which Israel was created, they both opposed Israel’s violence against Palestinians. As Wolf entered Bannon’s orbit, she stopped discussing Palestine, though Klein did not. Klein sees the construction of racial, ethnic, and religious identities as a kind of doppelganger politics: People are reduced to “ethnic doubles” that occupy particular political spaces instead of interconnected individuals capable of solidarity. 

Many facets of the modern world, including contemporary nation states, global surveillance capitalism, colonialism, and the causes of climate change, seem ubiquitous and unchanging, but all of them can be changed by human action. Klein suggests that everyone learn from the discomforts of doppelganger politics to see and acknowledge uncomfortable truths. Instead of isolation and defensiveness, solidarity and connection offer the best hope for the future.