Klein was inspired to write this book by the unnerving experience of being repeatedly confused with Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth. Both women are authors of a certain age who have written "thinky" books, both women are Jewish, both are named Naomi.
Klein, of course, is best known for her books No Logo and Shock Doctrine. She is also Canadian leftist 'royalty', being the daughter of feminist icon filmmaker Bonnie Sherr Klein, sister of author and former think-tank director Seth Klein, and wife of progressive NDP activist Avi Lewis (who is himself the grandson of former NDP leader David Lewis and son of NDP icon Stephen Lewis).
Naomi Wolf, on the other hand, has taken a turn since her feminist days. As a popular meme goes "If your Naomi be Klein, you're doing just fine. If your Naomi be Wolf... oh buddy. Oof." Wolf has gone full conspiracy-theorist anti-vax MAGA.
Klein is at no risk of following in Wolf's footsteps, which is one reason why she became somewhat obsessed with the path taken by her shadow-self, her doppelganger. How had this once feminist become a regular on Steve Bannon's radio program? What prompted Wolf to start ranting about 'freedom' when faced with vaccine requirements? Why had Wolf transformed from an advisor to the Clinton administration to a MAGA hanger-on?
I think that Doppelganger is strongest when it addresses this specific issue. Why did Wolf and a whole swath of others move towards health conspiracy theories? Q-Anon? MAGA politics?
Two factors in particular struck me.
The first is that at the core of most of these conspiratorial beliefs is a fear rooted in reality. For example, during the pandemic one of the anti-vax talking points was that the vaccines were a tool of Big Pharma, being rolled out to maximize profits. Leaving aside their "arguments" about the vaccine's dangers, Big Pharma is in fact fucked. We need look no further than the contemptible Martin Shkrelli (2015's most punchable man), who raised the price of a critical antiparasitic drug from $13.50 to $750.00 a pill. And during the pandemic, as Klein points out, we could have cancelled patents on the COVID-19 vaccines and rolled out a global low cost vaccination program to protect lives around the world while simultaneously reducing the virus' ability to mutate. Instead we protected corporate profits.
Anti-vax anger at Big Pharma is not wrong.
Similarly, Wolf amongst others railed against vaccine passport apps as being an intolerably oppressive Big Brother tracking tool designed to first track everyone and then imprison them. The riposte of the sane was something like "Just wait until they find out about cell phones." Klein's response: "They know about cell phones." In other words, smirk all you like but we all carry an unparalleled surveillance device in our pockets. We're just mostly being surveilled by unchecked corporations who can and do do anything they like with our data. (The "mostly" is because of course we've all decided to politely ignore Edward Snowden's revelations about the reality of unrestricted government data capture.)
Anti-vax anger at surveillance is not wrong either.
In both of these cases (and in so many more), the problem is not that conspiracy theorists are afraid and angry at things that are happening in society. The problem is that they direct their fear and anger towards invented targets, twisted mirrors of the real causes, because their invented targets are easier to understand, easy to demonize, and are less threatening to oppose than the real forces that are causing danger or real harm.
The second point that really struck me about Klein's description of the attraction of the shadow world is that the shadow world of conspiracies is very welcoming. When Naomi Wolf first wanted to say something on Bannon's program, she was eagerly accepted into the fold. "Look, this feminist and former Democrat wants to talk to us about <insert mild conspiracy theory here>." Wolf was listened to instead of challenged and received lots of validation (and new social media followers), and step by step she went deeper and deeper into MAGA world. Similarly, Klein notes that callers to Bannon's phone-ins are treated gently, encouraged and supported in whatever they choose to talk about, and generally welcomed with open arms.
Contrast this experience to Wolf being publicly humiliated by an interviewer who discovered errors in her 2019 book Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love. (The errors were profound and real: Klein points out that Wolf has never been a meticulous researcher, but I think her publisher also has a lot to answer for.) Contrast also the stereotypical world of the left, where the People's Front of Judea will fight to the death the heresies of the Judean People's Front (in preference to effectively opposing the Romans of course). Or to to take a personal example, look at Doppelganger itself, which has an entire chapter pointing out that Hitler's Germany and its final solution was simply a darker doppleganger of Western societies and their "Indian Reservations" and their Boer War concentration camps, and their anti-Semitic laws. (My emotional reaction: in this broken and nasty world we live in, isn't there anything we can celebrate? Not even defeating the actual Nazis?) Or another personal example: a statement on the Wild Bird Trust website about the harm done by white environmentalists by creating a bird sanctuary at Maplewood Flats without the knowledge or consent of the Tsleil-Waututh people -- in a world in which it feels miraculous that Maplewood Flats exists as a natural area at all. (It's a near-impossibility to preserve any natural area seen as having "economic value".)
The 'left' is not a welcoming world. Maybe because reality isn't. Maybe because we really do share a very dark history, and there is much pain for which real amends have never been made (and probably never can be truly made). Maybe because we are collectively too often genuinely powerless, and it is the only the battles against the Judean People's Front that seem winnable.
Klein, like any good activist, ends her book with a call to action. She asks us to work together with real people in the real world, where we can see and feel their totality, and can perhaps learn to work with people we don't 100% agree with.
But as I finished the book all I could think was how much easier it is to shitpost than it is to understand or act. And that every one of us is vulnerable to the temptation to seek simple answers to complex problems.
No comments:
Post a Comment