Rowan Hooper: Your latest book is . What is this world?
Naomi Klein: The mirror world is the term I use to describe the land of conspiracies, and the alt-right, and the wellness right. It’s sometimes described as a diagonal political alliance between the new-age left and the conservative right that really consolidated in the covid years.
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My book starts from the little detail that I have a doppelgänger, somebody who I have been confused and conflated with for over a decade now: another non-fiction writer named Naomi, Naomi Wolf, a prominent liberal feminist who wrote a book called The Beauty Myth that had a big influence on me when I was an undergraduate.
She is one of those people who has crossed over to the right from the left and is a major disseminator of medical misinformation, which took off during the pandemic. She’s the white rabbit leading me down the rabbit hole, but the book is about the rabbit hole. The mirror world is a world where Naomis have gone wild.
There’s been a historical fascination with doubles, with doppelgängers, hasn’t there?
We’ve always been interested in twins because they challenge the singularity of the self. And at this late stage in the capitalist story, we put so much onto the self and we expect so much from the self and we do so much to perfect and optimise ourselves because we feel precarious and insecure within a system that doesn’t ever offer us much of a net by way of social safety, jobs or pensions. We want so much from ourselves. And so the idea that there might be another self out there, another you who the world is confusing for you – it creates a particular kind of instability.
Otto Rank, who was a student of [Sigmund] Freud, wrote that the fascination with the double was a way of dealing with fears of mortality. And it’s striking that he wrote that at the start of the first world war. During times of war, and in the midst of a climate crisis, we turn to the figure of the double and to the mirror world to give expression to our deepest fears of vertigo and instability.
It feels like belief in a mirror world of hoaxes and misinformation is much more widespread these days. Why?
As humans, we become very destabilised when something happens for which we do not have a story. The attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11 was like that. We heard: “9/11 changes everything”; “That’s pre-9/11 thinking.” It was a true rupture. The financial crisis of 2008 was like that. And covid-19 was certainly like that. Conspiracies surge in those moments because we are looking for a story. But covid-19 was different. It was a monetisable disaster. You can build your platform very quickly if you claim to have the cure, or if you claim to know that Bill Gates actually wanted to inject you with a tracking device.
Do these people really believe all this stuff or are they just constructing the conspiracies in order to make money and gain some power?
I don’t know whether they believe it. I think an effective grifter does believe what they’re saying in the moment. But it’s also a very profitable thing to believe. So who knows?
I call them conspiracy influencers because there really isn’t a theory. The theory moves around depending on where you’re going to get the traction. One minute they are railing against masks because covid-19 is just a cold, and the next minute, covid-19 is a bioweapon. People turn to these influencers because they are trying to make sense of the world.
And that’s where things get complicated, because they are tapping into a real feeling that something isn’t right. Conspiracy culture gets the facts wrong, but the feeling is right.
We live in a time of huge wealth creation, a time when we will probably see our first trillionaire soon. And yet everything that supports people’s well-being seems to be eroding. There’s a feeling that the system is rigged.
Conspiracy culture takes the sense that the system is rigged against you and says, well, it’s just those five people over there. It’s Bill Gates, and Klaus Schwab from the World Economic Forum and maybe some lizard people.
And even though conspiracy culture claims to be taking on the powerful, it is actually a great gift to the biggest winners in this economy because it detracts attention from any kind of a systemic analysis of why we have these perennial and deepening inequalities and injustices in our society.
How do we tackle this?
We need to find real solutions to the underlying inequalities and the sense that the system is broken. It makes me think about the Brexit slogan “Britain is broken.” In Canada, we have a conservative politician [Pierre Poilievre] who’s running on a platform [of] “Canada is broken.” He doesn’t plan on fixing it, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t tapping into something real. People are paying their taxes, cost of living is getting higher and higher, our healthcare system is being eroded.
When people are feeling stressed and burdened, then these charlatan figures tap into the feeling then redirect it towards the immigrant, towards the unhoused, to the most vulnerable. They set themselves up as taking on the powerful, but then it ends up just offering the pleasure of being slightly better off than somebody else. If there aren’t real solutions on offer, people will settle for blaming a scapegoat.
You end up somewhere remarkably calm at the end of Doppelganger, given the rabbit holes you’ve gone down. What are you doing next?
I hope it’s something calm?
Well, I am hoping to have a summer vacation. I’m hoping to have a calm summer, but I doubt the world’s going to get much calmer.
Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo, This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine and , which has just won the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. She is also professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia in Canada
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