Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Hey, small businesses. Sentara Health Plans has a team dedicated to answering your questions, leaving time for other business thoughts like... How did an action figure get stuck in the air vents? Or... What is the ideal human-to-goat ratio for my yoga class?
Knowing your health plan questions are answered, you can now focus on your other business needs. Sentara Health Plans, a dedicated team for your small business. Sentara Health Plans is a trade name of Sentara Health Plans, Sentara Health Insurance Company, Sentara Behavioral Health Services Incorporated, and Sentara Health Administration Incorporated. Exclusion terms and conditions apply. Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick.
For 20-some years, Naomi Klein has been a leading thinker on the left. She's especially known for the idea of disaster capitalism, an analysis that says that the forces of big business will exploit any severe disruption to take over more space in our lives. A few years back, Naomi Klein appeared at the New Yorker Festival, and she was interviewed by staff writer Gia Tolentino. And Gia's friends texted her, "'Good luck with Naomi Wolf.'" Hmm. Hmm.
Naomi Wolf was also a prominent writer on the left at the time, and apparently this confusion between the two Naomis happened quite often on social media and elsewhere. Now, this seems pretty unsurprising and relatively harmless, and it was at first. But that case of mistaken identity, particularly online, and the way it's gotten weird as Naomi Wolf has moved rightward and taken up various conspiracy theories, is the subject of Naomi Klein's new book.
It's a fascinating book, and it's called Doppelganger. And the other day, Naomi Klein sat down to talk once again with Gia Tolentino. Here's Gia. When I first read the galley of Naomi Klein's new book, Doppelganger, I was kind of instantly dying to talk to her about it. I have been a fan and...
I've read all of her work and this book seemed different. It starts in a stranger place. It addresses a stranger reality. So this book takes as its premise the doppelganger situation that Naomi Klein finds herself in. The book starts with the double Naomi situation, but it doesn't stay there.
It takes that as a jumping off point to the world of conspiracy, conspiracy profiteering, of surveillance capitalism, of various other forms of political doppelgangers and strange mirrors that we find in history and that especially we find in this extremely dizzying contemporary moment that we live in right now. The doppelganger confusion with Naomi Wolf had started a long time ago, right? You were both...
like big idea female writers on the left, you know, you both, you know, you go through a list of categorical similarities in the book, which extend to your partners sharing the same first name. But a couple of decades ago, she started writing about
Her writing took a bit of a conspiratorial turn and your arguments could seem plausibly interchangeable to a person who was very distracted, right? Or maybe casually anti-Semitic or, you know, all of these things that you talk about in the book. I had this particular experience in the pandemic because when I went online,
I had like on some days, you know, hundreds or even thousands of people talking about a not me, talking about somebody else who was being sort of chronically mistaken for me, who was another Naomi writer, Naomi Wolf. And it became, you know, there were a lot of genuine cases of identity confusion and this partly had to do with the fact that during COVID, Wolf became
a kind of industrial scale disseminator of medical misinformation. So she was all over the place before she was deplatformed, uh, you know, on, on social media. And then she was all over other places, um,
Like Fox News and Steve Bannon's show. And like, why is Naomi Klein saying that, you know, vaccine apps are a fascist coup? It also became for a time one of left Twitter's favorite jokes. And I had a period of real vertigo. Right. I mean, you there's we should mention that great tweet with the rhyme that if the Naomi be Klein, you're doing just fine. If the Naomi be Wolf, you're doing just fine.
It's like, oh, baby, woof, or something like that. But you, so you begin the book with this situation, this particular situation you find yourself in. And then you, you know, you're slowly broadening it out chapter by chapter to this moment in politics and strange right-left alignments and the kind of marionette way the left and the right relate to each other and all.
various forms of conspiratorial thinking. But you know that it makes things even weirder that Naomi Wolf herself seemed like a doppelganger of, she herself seemed like a doppelganger of the self that you had known as a, self you had read as a college feminist, right? And that in itself captures something that's a real feature of this time where so many people who have been radicalized one way or another are
as you say, we all know someone who feels like they are a doppelganger of themselves. It kind of does feel like a distinct feature of today where so many of our worldviews are organized by the sort of algorithmically escalating internet that, you know, within six months of going down any particular rabbit hole in the internet, there's, let's say, like some normie
Yeah.
When we're looking at avatars, right? When we aren't rooting our relationships actually in any kind of embodied experience. And that's, you know, I think I try in the books that I've written to be a bit of a kind of map maker of the political moment. Right.
And I think the reason why I was excited about the literary technique of using my own doppelganger, and I want to stress that this book is not about my doppelganger. It really is. It's using her as a case study for those people who have changed, but it's also using the figure of the doppelganger to understand the
the uncanniness of our political moment. And Freud described the uncanny as that species of frightening that changes what was once familiar to something unfamiliar, right? It's that weirdness of like, I think I know what this is, but it's not what I think, right? Mm-hmm.
People used to be very distressed by wax figures. Now we have a whole doppelganger world, right? A world of wax figures. So I think there are ways in which political movements feel like doppelgangers of themselves. Bill McKibben wrote a book about a decade ago called Earth, but he added an extra...
A in it. And basically, he was making the argument that climate change creates a doppelganger of the planet in the sense that this is not the planet we grew up in, right? And we are experiencing uncanny weather, right? So it's a deep, deep, deep uncanniness. And the figure of the doppelganger
interestingly, historically, often emerges during moments of collective vertigo. So the first piece of theoretical writing about doppelgangers was in the first year of the First World War, 1914, written by Otto Rank, who was a student of Freud's, who was trying to make sense of why there were doppelgangers all over the place in the culture, including in film, like early films, like The Student of Prague. And
And he argued that doppelgangers stood in for what we can't look at in ourselves, right? And repressed desires, what we're afraid of, what we want most, what we fear ourselves to be most, right? And then, you know, the Holocaust and the Second World War and the rise of Nazism becomes another moment where artists turn to the figure of the doppelganger because it's...
Because reality is so very hard to look at. I think about Charlie Chaplin's film, The Great Dictator, and
He made it in 1940, and he casts himself as both the persecuted Jewish barber and the Hitler-like dictator, and they trade places. And the Jewish barber, dressed as Hitler, gives one of the greatest anti-fascist speeches of all time. So I think doppelgangers can be useful, I guess is what I'm saying, to wrap our minds around Hitler.
very difficult things to look at. And I think we are in one of those moments. Right. We were talking about the weather being so uncanny, right? And we look around, we wake up every day into this denatured, strange earth. And then, you know, one thing that you say is that
conspiracy gets the facts wrong, but it gets the feelings right. And, you know, then there's this kind of ambient conspiracy that the sun has somehow been replaced, right? That the sun looks different. The sun isn't yellow like it was in my childhood. This is something that... Have you seen this kind of discourse crop up online? You're way more online than I am. I have not seen... Like, I know the Biden is played by an actor in a mask. I know a lot of them, but I don't know that one. But yeah, there are more and more...
you know, semi-playful, but the instinct towards them is very telling. There are these semi-playful theories that various celebrities have been, you know, this is the iteration of the Charlie Chaplin movie. Like, we're now at the point where it's just Wikipedia articles about the conspiracy theory that Avril Lavigne was replaced by an actress, you know, decades ago. We're actually making a thread of these. There's so many of them. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's going on with Britney, even with Kanye right now. And it's...
And yeah, this is another doppelganger moment, but you speak really...
into the climate change denial. You know, I've gone to the conferences where all the climate change deniers converge and trade theories. And it's very clear that they are fleeing from the science of climate change or just refusing to accept it and throwing whatever they can at the wall because the implications of the science are too challenging to the worldview that they hold, right? I mean, it's overwhelmingly like a very right
anti-government, you know, pro-deregulation subculture. And so if climate change is real, we and I have talked about this, it means we need to do all of those things. So rather than confront those hard things, you just deny the reality. And I think that that impulse has now generalized to basically everything, including Avril Lavigne. Right, right, right, right.
That's Naomi Klein speaking with the New Yorker's Gia Tolentino. We'll continue in a moment.
I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
You bring up in this book the way that this other form of mirroring and kind of inverse relationship where once some issue became important to the far right, like the minimal but real cases of adverse effects from the COVID vaccine, right? For example, the left had a way of automatically dismissing, in some cases, even just the inquiry about it. And there were all of these ways that you write about that the kind of tortured people
balancing relationship between the left and the right. Like you had for so long urged your readers to be suspicious of moments of crisis being taken advantage of by those in power. And many on the far right during COVID began to understand COVID as exactly that, but just with
Things that weren't true, such as the fact that the government was tracking us all with microparticles and, you know, vaccine passports, you know, likening vaccine passports to yellow stars in Europe. And then as you write during COVID and you write that you yourself had begun to worry that, you know,
that those of us on the left had in fact been too complacent about what did happen during COVID, which was consolidation of power to the wealthy and corporate profiteering and billionaires doubling their fortunes and, you know, vaccine apartheid, that there were kind of real, I don't want to say conspiracies, but there were real examples of profiteering and power concentration that had somehow fallen by the wayside.
Well, yes. And what worried me was hearing Steve Bannon take issues that I knew to be very powerful, traditionally left-wing issues that had been kind of left unattended, that were not being deployed as much, where it was sort of like, we all just need to kind of lie. Like if they are anti-vax,
And anti-mask, then we just need to be the people saying, get vaccinated and wear your mask and not make too big a deal about all the other things that our governments could have done, like lift the patents on those vaccines, like make sure that every classroom had proper air filters.
that classrooms were smaller, that we had more teachers, that we had more nurses, that they had PPE, you know, bans on pandemic profiteering. And we were not ambitious in calling that out. You know, obviously there are exceptions, but I believe we dangerously ceded political territory. So when I would hear Bannon, you know,
doing like cosplaying Chomsky or, you know, my own politics. It's not that I think he believes it. It's that he is a strategist and his political move that he has used to great effect is
is looking at the people and the issues that the Democratic Party has abandoned, who feel betrayed, who feel unrepresented. You know, he identified that this was fertile political territory to bring a portion of the traditional Democratic base over to the MAGA right.
And now he is doing the same things. You know, it used to be like the kind of forgotten every man. Now it's the angry every mom. And that is who my doppelganger represents to him, right? It's sort of frazzled COVID moms who feel like mocked.
Right.
the left and the center left that were not being used effectively, where we had become too timid, too silent, too afraid of seeming like them, right? That is something we can do about. There are ways that we can take those issues back, but we have to get over this fear of sounding too much like Bannon because he sounds like it's, we're worried about that because he's sounding more like us and he doesn't really mean it. They're doing it because it works politically and it's a route to power.
There's this other thread running through the book that I loved. You write about Daisy Hilliard's formulation of the shadow self, that you and I are sitting here talking about.
Well, kind of. There are pictures of little pictures of us are sitting on the screen talking to each other, but we're talking. But there are other versions of ourselves that are, as she writes, in the sky causing storms and in the ocean nudging whales towards the beach. Right. That there that as we who are Western consumers think.
you know, have these lives that there are shadow versions of ourselves. There are doppelgangers of ourselves in rare earth mines, you know, alongside 14 year old laborers who are being poisoned, right? That, and that we, that life asks us to,
The narrative of success and a good life and even just everyday mental functioning perhaps asks people to suppress the reality of those shadow selves and those doppelgangers. But they are with us and they're sort of growing. Our sense of them is becoming unavoidable that because of the reality of climate change, because of the reality of, you know, all of these accelerating systems, they're
They're not going to be shadow cells for long. We are going to have to confront the flip side of the economic systems that fuel our lives. And I think, well, I think it is the work of our lives to try to look. So it isn't just that.
It's hard to look at things that are hard. Um, it's also that we are implicated in those hard things, right? We are not apart from them. And that's what she, I think, articulates really beautifully with this idea that we have two bodies, the body that is sitting here in this chair, you know, the body that is going to go for a walk with my dog later, um, and my kid, um,
And then there's the body that is hovering over whose tax dollars fund drone warfare, who is implicated in oil wars, who is implicated in plastic in the ocean and all of that. Like that is not other people. That is me. That is us. Right.
that is the hardest thing to look at, right? Like we're implicated in those storms that are hitting us. We're implicated in the histories that's coming at us. And we're implicated in the exploitation of those workers in the clothes that we wear. And oh my God, that's hard. Like, is it any wonder that people are finding ways to look away? And the argument I make about conspiracy culture and what's going on with my doppelganger and Steve Bannon is they are creating these
fake scandals that are actually an amazing way to not look at the real scandals. But I guess the flip side of that, and because a doppelganger book, I dove deep into doppelganger novels and short stories and films. And I think I can say with certainty that pretty much all the storylines start with you thinking you're confronting your doppelganger and ending up confronting yourself. Yeah.
So I would just say to those of us who might feel a little bit smug about, oh, those ridiculous people who are choosing to take a flight into fantasy conspiracy theories instead of doing the hard work of looking at reality. I mean, I went to Barbie, did you? Right. I mean, there are different ways of fleeing from reality. Thank you for writing this book. I just loved every bit of it. And I'm so glad we got to talk today. Yeah.
I am so glad, too. There's no one I'd rather discuss this with. It's such a pleasure. Naomi Klein's new book is called Doppelganger, and you can find a longer version of her conversation with staff writer Gia Tolentino at NewYorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for listening to the program today. See you next time.
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbess of Tune Arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Brita Green, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Ngofen Mputubwele.
with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Harrison Keithline, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandra Decker. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.