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鈥檚 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 doppelg盲nger, 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 been a historical fascination with doubles, with doppelg盲ngers, hasn鈥檛 there?
We鈥檝e 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鈥檛 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 鈥� 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鈥檚 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: 鈥�9/11 changes everything鈥�; 鈥淭hat鈥檚 pre-9/11 thinking.鈥� 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鈥檛 know whether they believe it. I think an effective grifter does believe what they鈥檙e saying in the moment. But it鈥檚 also a very profitable thing to believe. So who knows?
I call them conspiracy influencers because there really isn鈥檛 a theory. The theory moves around depending on where you鈥檙e 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鈥檚 where things get complicated, because they are tapping into a real feeling that something isn鈥檛 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鈥檚 well-being seems to be eroding. There鈥檚 a feeling that the system is rigged.
Conspiracy culture takes the sense that the system is rigged against you and says, well, it鈥檚 just those five people over there. It鈥檚 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 鈥淏ritain is broken.鈥� In Canada, we have a conservative politician [Pierre Poilievre] who鈥檚 running on a platform [of] 鈥淐anada is broken.鈥� He doesn鈥檛 plan on fixing it, but that doesn鈥檛 mean he isn鈥檛 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鈥檛 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鈥檝e gone down. What are you doing next?
I hope it鈥檚 something calm?
Well, I am hoping to have a summer vacation. I鈥檓 hoping to have a calm summer, but I doubt the world鈥檚 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鈥檚 Prize for聽Non-Fiction. She is also professor of climate justice at the University of聽British Columbia in Canada
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