Am I Actually Who I Think I Am?

Naomi Klein walks into a bathroom and overhears women condemning her for spreading conspiracy theories as one of the loudest voices in far-right media. The women, like others, ask “What’s happened to Naomi Klein? I used to like her.” Klein says nothing to the women—she’s heard it before, and she knows they’re not talking about her. They’ve confused her with the other Naomi, her doppelganger, Naomi Wolf.

This is the start of Klein’s compelling book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, which tells the story of the two Naomis and brilliantly unravels the many ways we have arguably become a broken society.

Klein and Wolf once shared the same political territory, critiquing how capitalism and the politicians it supports have sucked the meaning, energy, and money from our lives. Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism argues that those in power often exploit even our darkest moments—Hurricane Katrina, the invasion of Iraq—to derail democratic norms and increase profits. Her No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies argues that, in a corporate culture, we’re encouraged to express our individualism by creating personal brands that make us all alike, broke, and hollow.

Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women makes much the same argument—that corporations are getting rich exploiting women’s insecurities. Buy this makeup and you’ll look confident. Wear these shoes and you’ll evoke power.

The two Naomis comfortably coexisted in the same sphere, often being confused with one another, but both headed in the same direction.

An Out-of-Body Experience

But when Wolf became a voice of the anti-vax, anti-mask movement during COVID-19, Klein began to take notice. Wolf was using the same message she and Klein had once shared but was skewing it to reach far different conclusions.

Klein saw the government and pharmaceutical companies reacting responsibly to help citizens survive COVID-19 through security measures and vaccines. Wolf saw these same entities as the enemy, defying our individual freedoms by forcing us to mask and invading our bodies with vaccines. The feminist position advocating bodily autonomy was turned on its heels in defiance of vaccines. Klein began to feel she was living a parody. “It was an out-of-body experience,” she writes.

Klein likened this experience to having a doppelganger—a shadow self—and as she shows, doppelgangers are seldom good news. They are our evil twins, representing our dark side. And they have unique power against us. (Doppelgänger is a German word meaning “double walker.”)

A Mirror World

For a time, Klein didn't know how to respond, because Wolf could use any evidence Klein provided to make conclusions that served her own contrary position. She planned an essay criticizing Bill Gates for taking a position during the pandemic that she felt robbed the needy of essential vaccines, but stopped herself because she realized Wolf could use this same argument to tie Gates to those she felt were denying us our freedoms, a distortion of Klein’s position.

In her book, Klein takes this premise, expands it, and then peels it back, layer by layer by layer, to show that what has happened to her has happened to our entire country. The meanings of words have been turned upside down. Choice, once used to define a woman’s right to make her own health decisions, now is used to argue against masks. Politicians charge their opponents with immoral and unethical acts they themselves are committing, and their words are echoed enough that they take on their own reality. What are we to believe?

Klein asks: “Am I who I think I am or am I who others perceive me to be?”

Klein covers this mirror world through multiple iterations, including political protests, racism, eugenics, conspiracies, and political ideologies. She offers an intriguing analysis of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict written before the current war. The two sides are doppelgangers, she says—the same yet totally different. Which is the evil twin? Both and neither.

This is a deeply researched and eye-opening view of our broken culture and how we got here. Klein concludes with a call to action rather than a reliance on words, and advises us to remain calm. Calm, she says, can be a strong weapon, which is one of the most heartening perspectives I have read in years. Klein writes clearly (and calmly), with wit and humor, sharing a riveting story that encourages those of us badly in need of a guide to the way out of our current chaos.

Copyright Patricia Prijatel 2024