Bad doppelgänger vibes

When we divide ourselves into "us" and "them," we always lose

I often mix up Parker Posey with Mary-Louise Parker. I’ll say things like, “The West Wing really got good when Parker Posey joined the cast.” Or, “Mary-Louise Parker played one helluva a mean girl in Dazed and Confused.” But of course, I am the one who is dazed and confused here. Mary-Louise Parker was on The West Wing. Parker Posey was in Dazed and Confused. The two actors are different people, with (mostly) different names, and they’ve made their reputations playing different roles. But they give me doppelgänger vibes. In fact, sometimes I conflate both women: Mary-Louise Parker Posey.

I’ve been thinking about doppelgängers a lot lately because I’m reading a book called Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein. As it turns out, social media has a history of confusing the left-wing writer and activist Naomi Klein with Naomi Wolf, a writer who made her bones as a liberal feminist in the 1990s, before decamping to right-wing stardom in these bizzaro times.

I’m familiar with The Shock Doctrine (Klein) and The Beauty Myth (Wolf), but I wouldn’t call myself a devoted reader of either Naomi, which is why I nearly passed on a book I thought was about both of them. But then my friend, Lance, set me straight. “Klein’s book is really good,” Lance texted, before going on to write that Doppelgänger explains more about the weirdness of our times than any other book out there. That was a bold claim, but Lance and I have been trading book recommendations for a while, and we’ve never led each other astray, so I bought the book.

On one level, Doppelgänger is an absurdist memoir. There’s something inherently funny about treating polar opposites as mirror images of each other. That’s why the big joke in the movie Twins—namely that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito are brothers from the same mother—is so damn funny. It’s also why I reply to job recruiters who reach out to offer me high-paid computer engineering jobs. Those recruiters are looking for the other Michael Estrin, the one who is good with computers, but instead they found the Michael Estrin who is good at comedy. To quote Kenny Bania, the hack comedian who serves as a doppelgänger of sorts to Jerry Seinfeld on Seinfeld, “That’s gold, Jerry!”

Speaking of Jerry, depending on the length of my beard, the height of my fro, and the circumference of my belly, I am sometimes confused with the long-dead Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia. I’m not kidding. Here’s a quick anecdote I shared on Facebook in 2016:

A man with a beanie on his head and a tattoo of Spider-Man on his neck can’t believe the line at the Post Office. But he also has trouble believing his eyes.

“Jerry Garcia!” he says to me. “You’re not dead! You’re just getting younger. Can you do something about Phish?”

“People still like Phish?” I ask.

“Yeah, it’s really a problem, Jerry.”

The man explains that he got up “way too early for this shit” and that he smoked “way too much weed.” But he keeps calling me Jerry, and he won’t stop explaining all the comic book remakes since my, um, passing. The gist is that Hollywood has “ruined” this man’s life by “fucking up the Spider-Man timeline,” which apparently, you cannot do “without consequences.”

But back to this Jerry Garcia thing. On one hand, I can’t blame the stranger for joking. These days, my fro is big, my beard is epic, and I'm getting that touch of grey. But the longer we talk, the more I suspect that he’s serious. So I change the subject.

“What do you do?” I ask.

“I’m a poet, just like you!”

I say something about how the poetry business is a tough racket.

“Tell me about it, Jerry. I drive trucks and write rap music to make ends meet.”

I consider a Truckin’ reference, but the poet doubles down.

“Can I get your autograph, Jerry?”

He presents me with pen and paper. I’m inclined to pass, but I don’t want to be rude. What would Jerry do in this situation, I wonder?

My famous, departed, musical doppelgänger would play it cool, I think. So I decide to play it cool too.

I sign my autograph. It reads:

Fuck Phish

Love,

Jerry Garcia

That episode from my life was just a goof, of course. I am not Jerry Garcia, but I remain grateful to the stranger for the funny story. And maybe he’s grateful to me for playing along. Because if he was kidding, we both had fun. And if he was serious, maybe I helped him get through his day—and gave him a souvenir to boot.

But the doppelgänger life isn’t all shits and giggles. Throughout Doppelgänger, Naomi Klein writes a lot about how artists often deploy the mirroring device to explore topics that run the gamut from unsettling psychological territory (most Hitchcock films), our obsession with staying young (The Picture of Dorian Gray), the dangers of fascism (The Great Dictator), and above all, the idea of the “other” (Jordan Peele’s Us).

If Doppelgänger was simply a book about art, I’d say, “that’s cool.” If it was just about the left-wing Naomi being confused with the right-wing Naomi, I’d call the book funny and leave it at that. And if Klein’s point was simply that our politics are incredibly weird and mixed up in this moment, I’d say, “no shit.” But Naomi Klein’s book is about all of things and a lot more.

Doppelgänger is window into our collective selves and the machines we’ve built that so easily and efficiently sort us into groups of “us” and “them.” Typically, these kinds of books play a nifty trick on the reader. The subjects, the people we call them, are easily rendered as others, leaving the reader feeling terrified, superior, smug—or all three at once. But above all, the reader is meant to feel part of the first group, the only group that matters—us.

Klein’s Doppelgänger doesn’t play that trick on its readers. It’s a more introspective assessment of “them” because its focus is on what our need to categorize “them” as them says about us. As Klein argues, a doppelgänger is a sign that something important is being ignored. Basically, we project all of our worst selves onto others, and so doing, we avoid looking at our own complicity. That’s why every doppelgänger story is about confronting the other, but ultimately, every doppelgänger story is really about confronting us.

Reading Klein I couldn’t help but think about my own doppelgängers. I’ve got a few, but the one I want to talk about for a moment is someone I’ll call Eco-Unfriendly Michael. The real Michael, aka me, talks a big game about environmentalism. He votes with the environment top of mind, and urges others to do the same. He recycles. He drives a hybrid car. The real Michael does the things people who care about the environment are supposed to do. But deep down he knows that those things aren’t nearly enough, that his actions amount to a fart in the wind, and worst of all, that he is complicit in the thing he purports to oppose.

That’s where Eco-Unfriendly Michael comes in. He’s my climate doppelgänger, the other, the them, the one I blame for what we’re doing to our planet. Eco-Unfriendly Michael isn’t a climate denier, he doesn’t talk about hoaxes, or cheer for big oil, or even vote for the status quo. Instead, he pays lip-service to saving the planet, preferring to recycle because that is easy, but never once questioning his reluctance to do the hard things like reducing and reusing. Eco-Unfriendly Michael believes what real Michael believes, but he does not act. He shrugs in the face of doom, buries his head in the sand, and figures someone else, somewhere down the line, will fix the mess he helped make.

Facing the truth is hard, maybe the hardest thing humans can do. Maybe that’s why it’s a lot easier for me to point the finger at my doppelgänger, to lay the problem squarely, and solely, at his feet. But doing that isn’t the road addressing the problem, Klein would argue, it’s the road to feeling better about my own complicity.

Maybe that’s why Marc Maron’s joke from End Times Fun about bringing our own bags to the supermarket lands so perfectly for me. I bring my own bags. I know that’s not nearly enough, but instead of doing more, I judge and scold people who don’t bring their bags because it makes me feel smug, which is to say, my smugness masks my complicity. Hearing Maron tell that joke showed me my doppelgänger, but if we’re being honest, the joke showed me who I really am.

Wherever there’s a truth that goes untold, there’s a doppelgänger telling a distorted version of that truth, according to Klein. Politics in the U.S. is a good illustration of that phenomenon. There’s the Red team and the Blue team. Both teams have significant and substantive differences, but increasingly, politics is the uncomplicated practice of enforcing rigid binaries. When new questions arise, our politics demands that we employ a bizzaro world logic: if the Blue team supports it, the Red team opposes it, and vice versa—no questions asked, or tolerated. Inside that bizarro framework, we can always see the problem with “them,” but when it comes to the problem with “us,” we are blind.

Tellingly, one of the few areas of agreement in U.S politics is is the often-repeated, but seldom questioned refrain, “we are divided.” That’s true enough, I guess. But maybe the more honest statement would go something like, “we are dividing ourselves into warring camps.” Some members of each camp even seem to relish in the idea that America is engaged in a second Civil War—a sprawling digital flame war that consumes another piece of our culture each time our cosplaying online doppelgängers fire another rhetorical shot.

Elsewhere in the world the world, scores of other camps are literally at war. Some countries are at war with themselves, and for some reason these are called civil wars, although as many have pointed out, there’s nothing civil about war. Other countries are at war with their neighbors. And still other countries are at war directly, or through proxies, with countries so far away that many of the people on one side would be hard-pressed to locate their enemy on a map. Which brings me to the essential ingredient of every war. That ingredient is the doppelgänger. Without an “us,” there is no “them,” and without each other, there is no conflict.

Any writer will tell you that a story without conflict isn’t much of a story. I suppose that’s one reason why our macro story, what we call history, is overflowing with tales of conflict. War is in our nature, history tells us. But peace almost always follows war. Which means history is also telling us that peace is in our nature too. The thing is, though, it’s not about war and peace. Those states are manifestations of something deeper—namely, the relentless drive to think in terms of “us” and “them.”

That drive to think in terms of “us” and “them” is often described as normal. After all, history is full of “us” and “them” stories because humans are forever dividing ourselves into whatever camps we need to imagine in order to sustain our conflicts. In that way, the word “normal” makes sense. But normal is also a dangerous word here because it tells us that our behavior is justified, or inevitable, or even good. Calling something “normal” is an instruction that tells everyone to get on with the task at hand, without asking where that task will lead us.

So where are we going? The reason why I decided to write about Naomi Klein’s book this week is that she thinks we’re headed to a very bad place, if we don’t stop to question the ways in which we’re sorting ourselves into “us” and “them.” I agree with Klein’s thesis. I am living through a deadly “us” versus “them” moment, and I think you are too.

As I write these words, battles between “us” and “them” are raging everywhere. According to The Council on Foreign Relations, there are 27 active conflicts around the globe. But that number probably underestimates the number of conflicts in the world because war has an absurdly high threshold that ignores a lot of violence that’s just as horrific, but maybe not as noteworthy, for some reason or another.

Simmering just below the surface of all of that violence are the rhetorical fights that divide us too. As far as I know, nobody bothers counting those fights. The rhetorical conflicts we use to divide and conquer ourselves are as omnipresent to us as water is to fish. But if you want to see the water, social media is a good window. The weird ways we’ve networked billions of humans together via social media opened Klein’s eyes when so many people confused her with her doppelgänger. But even if social media hasn’t assigned you a doppelgänger, maybe you can still see what Klein sees.

To be clear, all media has bias, including the odd little comedy newsletter you’re currently reading. But if traditional media’s ability to sort people into camps of “us” and “them” is a helluva drug called cocaine, then social media’s power to do the same thing is a helluva drug called crack. The big difference, I think, is that where traditional media divides people, social media invites people to do their own dirty work. As it turns out, the DIY version is a lot more powerful.

Spend any time at all on social media and you’ll see what I’m talking about. The former schoolmate who fires off their geopolitical hot take like it’s a cruise missile, then demands that anyone who disagrees unfriend them. The family member who always attacks, but never listens. The friend who is quick to point a finger at anyone they deem “problematic.” The coworker who signals their virtues, without seeing that they’re really confessing their sins. The digital carnival barker who repels one group, while calling to another group like a Siren. The spiritual person who is quick to condemn anyone who isn’t living right. The internet mobs that wrap themselves in cloaks of schadenfreude whenever their enemies stumble. The billions of social media users who sort themselves into “us” and “them” with every 👍 and 👎. The person who insists in the humanity of people like them, but in so doing, diminishes the humanity of the people they see as “other.” It’s tempting to think of the people I’m describing here is someone else, as “them.” But if I’m being honest, I’m talking about “us,” which is to say, I am talking about me.

Maybe I see this behavior most clearly when I look at social media because I think of social media as a machine that robs us of our context in order to rob us of our humanity. The sorting process is as simple as a meme, or badge on your avatar. But even a thoughtful social media post accomplishes the same thing, only with more words. Because even if you write an eloquent essay about rejecting the “us” versus “them” concept, the medium is still the message. Or, put another way, even the right words on social media come out wrong because social media is an endless maze of funhouse mirrors that so completely distort everything that the only thing we’re capable of seeing is “us” and “them.”

But it never stops. Not in the digital world, and not in the physical world either. If anything, what happens in one world accelerates the divisions in the other world, and vice versa. Social media is society’s doppelgänger. Or maybe it’s the other way around. But whatever it is, maybe the gulf between the two versions of our world, the place where uncomfortable truths go unspoken, explains why it feels as if we’re living in bizarro times. Our doppelgängers mirror the worst of us, and vice versa. We/they confront each other because it’s easier than confronting the truth. But those confrontations, the ones we manufacture to avoid the hard truths, will just keep going, from flame wars to real wars and back again, until everything and everyone is engulfed in fire.

This is what frightened me most when I read Naomi Klein’s book. We’re getting better and better at this dehumanizing work. Our doppelgängers are winning, and if that isn’t terrifying enough, we’re cheering them on. We are the engine of our destruction. Our ability, on the one hand, to insist on humanity for “us,” but on the other hand, to deny humanity for “them” is what drives us to the darkest places. As Klein writes:

So much of modern history is a story of pools of trauma being spatially moved around the globe like chess pieces made of human misery, with yesterday’s victims enlisted as today’s occupying army. The story we are trapped in is not about a people, or two people, or twins, it’s a story about a logic, the logic, that has been ravaging our world for so very long. 

Part of me is tempted to close this essay by saying something like “give peace a chance.” But that feels trite, and maybe that’s the wrong idea anyway. Because maybe it’s not peace that we need to try, since we’ve tried it nearly as often as we’ve tried war. Maybe we need to try something more radical. Maybe we need to give ourselves, and by extension each other, a chance.

A chance to be seen.

A chance to be understood.

A chance to be human.

Or, if your doppelgänger uses Substack Notes, please Restack this essay so they’ll see it.

Is your doppelgänger subscribed to Situation Normal?

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Stick around and chat!

You know the drill. I’ve got questions, your doppelgänger has answers.

1. This post started out kinda funny, but then it got serious, and then it got dark. How are you doing? How is your doppelgänger doing?

2. I told you about one of my doppelgängers. Can you share a little about one of your doppelgängers? Be brave!

3. What’s your favorite doppelgänger story? It could be a book, a movie, TV show, podcast, anything. Tell me about your favorite doppelgänger story.

4. Do you have a friend you trade book recommendations with? What book are they urging you to read. What book do you think they should read?

5. Jerry Garcia is one of several celebrities I’ve been compared to. Do you have a celebrity doppelgänger? Dish!

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