“They say when you meet someone who looks just like you, you die.”
p.Wish, The Doppleganger
“No one makes themselves; we all make and unmake one another.”
Naomi Klein, Doppelganger
Going through Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, something I snagged from the library purely because of the subtitle “A Trip into the Mirror World,” I was opened up to a completely different (comforting?) way to look at the world. Like so many books hitting the shelves nowadays, this one was rooted firmly in the pandemic years when we were a population spending far too much time online, dividing ourselves, and finding every instance of “the other.”
Naomi spends a lot of time opening up the book spilling out references to the doppelganger as the subtle evil that weaves its way through our culture and history. Classically, the doppelganger – from the German for double-walker – is the phenomena of someone who looks like you even though there is no biological connection. When you see this person, bad luck is on the way. Call it a twin-stranger, the evil twin, the ghost of the living person. Literature is, well, littered with instances of this weirdness – it never ends well.
Yet, as Klein posits, we’re amongst it every single day. The idea of the Mirror World – how can people who are so like us be so….out there? After struggling to keep her persona from getting sucked into the ultra-right side of the internet, Klein goes on a bit of a journey to uncover why the other side is so full of conspiracy. How can they be so comfortable in being so wrong, even when they full-well know their wrongness?
Two different worlds. Two different countries.
Or, as I like to say:
“No one is happy unless they have something to be mad at.”
There is always going to be The Other. Early Psychoanalysts know it as the shadow, the internal self, the thing that we rarely confront as it often means dealing with our shame. We reject the other because it is there, but it is so not what we want to be. Yet we get obsessed with it. What you resist, persists.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung